“I still don’t get it. What’s so special about this red dot?”
“I don’t know,” Ruthie admitted. “Maybe it’s just one of those weird ghetto fashion things? I’ll ask the next time I see them. We’ll obviously have to do some more reporting…”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” making a “T” with my hands, the internationally accepted gesture to call for a timeout. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
“That’s the favor. I want you to work with me. I think this could be a really cool story and a great clip for me to have. But you know how things go around here. I’m the intern. They want me to do Good Neighbors, write about car accidents, and leave the heavy lifting to guys like you. But if you and I were to do it together…”
I grinned.
“Well played, young Ginsburg, well played,” I said. “I got a few other things on my plate right now. But as soon as I come up for air, we can work on it. It sounds like a fascinating glimpse into thug culture.”
“Okay. Great.”
Thinking our conversation was over, I began moving my mouse to knock the screen saver off my computer. But Ruthie was still sitting there, looking at me expectantly.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Yeeeessss?”
“I still have, like, half a dozen pregnancy tests in my car. I got them on sale and they can’t be returned. Do you know what I should do with them?”
I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah,” I said. “Give them to Tina.”
* * *
It took an hour to transcribe the tripe I got from the press conference and then mold it into something that would clear the very low hurdle of the All-Slop’s quality standards.
By the time I was done, I had concluded that my first order of business needed to be a visit to Dr. Raul Ibanez, the one man who might be able to enlighten me about my unanswered press conference question. I hoped he would be more talkative than he was the last time I had seen him. Alas, I was out of clever ideas as to how to make that happen.
So, lacking a better plan, I decided to go with a direct assault. I fortified myself with a stop at a local convenience store on my way—and, really, what’s
wrong
with having two MoonPies for lunch?—and was soon parked on the street outside the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. I was going in the front door this time.
I’m often astounded by what you can get away with when you’re a well-dressed white man who moves fast and acts like he knows what he’s doing. As I got out of my car, I reminded myself I had faked my way into tougher places than this. So my plan, quite simply, was to keep walking toward Ibanez’s office until someone stopped me.
Hence, I didn’t pay attention to the security guard at the front desk, and he returned the favor. Then I passed a pair of people in lab coats who didn’t give me a second glance, either. I took a guess that Ibanez’s office would be on the top floor, but I eschewed the elevator—the passengers would have too long to study me—and instead took the emergency stairs, charging up them without hesitation.
And that, conveniently enough, is where I bumped into Dr. Ibanez, standing on the third-floor landing, talking on his cell phone. He wasn’t looking at me any more carefully than anyone else, and I practically had to plow into him to get him to stop.
“Hi, Doctor, nice to see you again,” I said.
The reaction I received assured me Raul Ibanez’s startle reflex was in perfect working order. He even jumped back a little.
“I have to go,” he said into the phone, then stammered, “Did you … how did you get in here?”
“With my legs. No one stopped me.”
“I told you last night I can’t comment.”
“Things have changed since last night.”
“I still can’t … it’s … it’s improper for you to even be here.”
“Doc, just give me a second,” I said. “I’m sorry to ambush you like this, but I really don’t have a choice. If I try to go through proper channels, I’ll get blown off.”
“Well, that’s not my problem. You’re still going to have to—”
I cut him off: “Captain Boswell said at a press conference just now that Fusco killed himself with his service weapon. He didn’t
have
his service weapon, okay?”
“What are—”
“The day before he was killed, Mike Fusco told me he had been placed on administrative leave. His captain made it out like it was some kind of mental health thing. Maybe she just wanted him out of the way so she could investigate him for Kipps’s murder. I don’t know.
“Point is, when he was placed on leave, he was forced to hand in his gun. He told me that, explicitly. So I guess I just want to know: Are you absolutely sure that was his service weapon?”
Ibanez studied me for a moment, and I watched as his posture made the subtle shift from defensive to accepting. Finally he said, “The better question is: Are you absolutely sure he was the one who fired it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, it’s probably good you found me here. This just happens to be where the cell phone reception is best. If you had made it all the way up to my office, I would have had to throw you out. There’s a damn leak in this place somewhere, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone thinking it’s me. So I can’t—”
“No one will ever know we spoke,” I assured him. “Just like no one has figured out—or will figure out—who my last leak was.”
“Okay.” He stopped for another few seconds, then again said, “Okay. I’m only telling you this because the NPD is trying to jam stuff down my throat, just like they did with the Kipps case. They want me to shut the hell up and rule the manner of death suicide—even after I told them what I’m about to tell you. And I just can’t go for that this time. So I need you to take this and made a big stink with it.”
“I’ll do my best,” I promised.
“Okay, to answer your question, it is his gun. We matched the serial numbers and everything. We haven’t test-fired it yet, but I’m sure it’ll match the slugs recovered at the scene, just like I’m sure there won’t be any other prints on it besides his. Whoever did this was being pretty careful. Really careful, in a lot of ways. But not careful enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let’s start with the obvious. The decedent had powder burns around the entrance wound, so we know the gun was fired from close proximity. The gun was discovered on the floor next to him, but that’s not unusual—the gun is actually only found in the victim’s hand in about one out of every four suicides. So this was set up to look like a suicide.”
“But you’re saying it’s not?”
“That’s right. A lot of things happen when a gun goes off. There’s gunshot residue. There are what we call cylinder gap effects from where exploding gas escapes the gun. The recoil of the gun can leave marks on the hand that, in a suicide, don’t go away like they do in a living person. The recoil can also cause injury to the hand, particularly in the webbing. You follow me?”
“So far, yeah.”
“Okay, in this case, did the decedent fire a gun? Yes, it would appear he did. The grip of the gun was clearly imprinted on his palm, as we would expect. There was also gunshot residue on the hand—I’ll get back to that in a second. But I’d bet my house that gun didn’t go off in his hand until he was already dead. The blood was wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you bring a gun up under your chin and fire the trigger at close range,” he said, miming the act with his own hand, “there is going to be blood—kind of like a fine mist—that spatters back onto your hand. How much blood will change based on the caliber of the gun and the tip of bullet used. But my spatter analyst is telling me there’s no blood on Fusco’s hand. None.”
“And no blood means—”
“Wait, there’s more. We got this body early, and I made it our number one priority, so I’ve had people working it all morning. Okay, so no blood. Also, like I said, there’s a problem with the gunshot residue. This is a little more art than science sometimes, but this one was pretty clear. In a suicide you expect to see a certain pattern under the microscope from the swabs you take of the gun hand, particularly on the back of the hand. But in this case, there was a big area on the back of the hand where there was almost no residue at all. And you know what that, along with no blood, tells you?”
“Not … not really.”
Ibanez, who was relating all this with the joy of a scientist who has made a discovery, finished: “It tells you there’s only one possible scenario, or at least only one I can come up with. The perp had watched enough
CSI
to know there needed to be gunshot residue on Fusco’s hand. So first the perp killed Fusco, then he put the murder weapon in Fusco’s hand, wrapped his hand around Fusco’s, then fired the gun a second time.”
Which explains why Lawrence Taylor’s biggest fan heard two gunshots.
“You’d testify to that scenario in a court of law?” I asked.
“Sure would. And I’m sure the defense attorney would try to shred me,” he said, cracking a smile. “But the science is clear. Mike Fusco didn’t kill himself.”
They weren’t supposed to miss.
For the guys in the silver Mercedes, that had been a mistake. A rookie mistake, yes, but a mistake all the same. They weren’t trying to scare the newspaper reporter. They weren’t trying to shoot up the house behind him or the cars in front of him or any of the other numerous targets they hit. They certainly weren’t trying to merely scare him, either.
They had been hired to kill him. Their employer, Red Dot Enterprises, had been quite explicit: if they killed Carter Ross, they’d all be given brand-new guns. But they would only get paid if Ross was dead.
And they missed. Even when they had been tipped off as to exactly where Ross was going to be, they flat-out missed. Fifteen times.
It turns out drive-by shootings are not as easy as the movies make them look. Start with the “drive-by” part: it supposes the car is moving. And without the proper training, shooting someone from a moving vehicle is not easy. Most people have a hard time figuring out how much to lead a wide receiver in a game of touch football, and that’s just for a person running perhaps ten miles an hour. Trying to make the same kind of calculations in a car going thirty for a bullet that will travel faster than the speed of sound is that much trickier.
That was the first degree of difficulty. The second was that they couldn’t risk being identified. Kill some no-good punk drug dealer and most folks in Newark get a quick case of myopia. They figure he had it coming. Kill a newspaper reporter and someone is going to come up with twenty-twenty vision. So the Mercedes guys couldn’t afford to have the window rolled down more than just a crack, which made aiming a matter of guesswork.
The third degree of difficulty was the gun itself. In truth, they didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. Guns weren’t their thing. That was the Red Dot Enterprise guys’ specialty. All the guys in the silver Mercedes knew was that their piece was a bitty little thing, with a snub-nosed barrel—a Saturday Night Special, as the media so derisively referred to that kind of firearm. Even under the best of circumstances, it wasn’t particularly accurate.
Take all those factors and add their general ineptitude with this sort of thing, and it wasn’t hard to understand why they had missed so badly. It would have been something approaching a miracle if they had actually killed him—a hundred to one shot, especially with that popgun.
They knew before they even rounded the corner, as that fifteenth shot was still echoing, that they hadn’t killed him. They hoped the Red Dot Enterprise guys maybe wouldn’t find out, but of course they did; Red Dot seemed to know exactly where this Ross guy was at all times, so it knew quickly that Ross was on the move again.
The Mercedes guys worried that perhaps the Red Dot wouldn’t give them a second chance, that they had blown their one and only opportunity to get those free guns. But their contact at Red Dot had been very understanding.
His only request was that they not botch it the second time.
CHAPTER 7
Having shared his big theory, Raul Ibanez got in a hurry to have me depart. I guess he was worried someone else might step into the stairwell in the endless search for good cell reception. We agreed that if I had any more questions, I would call his secretary and identify myself as Robert Upshur. (An obscure reference to the first and middle names of the greatest reporter in journalism history, but I digress.)
That left me to stumble out back onto the street, into an afternoon that was trying to get sunny without much luck. Not to get all literary, but it was an appropriate metaphor for how my brain was working on this story.
If Fusco didn’t kill himself—and I believed Ibanez’s science more than I believed anything else I heard so far—then someone else did. Brilliant deduction, I know, but I
did
graduate in the top 10 percent of my high school class. Was it the same person who killed Darius Kipps? Or did Fusco kill Kipps and then someone else kill Fusco for revenge? I couldn’t say.
At the very least, I had enough new information that when I presented it to Public Disinformation Officer Hakeem Rogers for comment, it was going to make him feel like he was passing a kidney stone. Because, really, I could only imagine two scenarios here, neither of them particularly flattering for Rogers’s employer: One, Newark’s finest were allowing themselves to be snowed by cunning bad guys—possibly a minister, of all people—who were killing cops and getting away with it simply because the police chief didn’t want to look bad in the media; or, two, Newark’s finest were lying.
I couldn’t imagine why they would want to lie about something like this—other than that they’re cops, so lying to reporters comes rather naturally. But I had a fairly simple test to determine which scenario was true.
It hinged on the phone call Fusco allegedly made to Captain Boswell. If that call actually existed, then Fusco was acting under duress—calling because the cunning bad guys put a gun to his head. If that call didn’t exist, I was going to ask our editorial cartoonist to draw a caricature of Captain Boswell with a nose like Pinocchio.