Murder in the Choir (The Jazz Phillips Mystery Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

director is supposed to do that!” I protested.
    “Yeah, but this ain’t Little Rock,” Dee told me. “Apparently the kid had done it before when things got busy. Several times. Our medical examiner said it was good professional work.”
    “You think the kid was just being helpful?”
    “Yeah. Apparently he got pretty irate after he got done being scared. Claimed his boss taught him what to do. He said the owner was normally there to supervise.” Dee shrugged. “I think he’s telling the truth. From what I could see, the owner’s going to need his own services before long. He’s in his late seventies and not doing very good. Lung cancer.”
    I shook my head. “Too bad he didn’t tell the kid to call the sheriff if someone was shot.” He shrugged. “It didn’t give me much leverage.” He had a point. How do you lean on a guy who’s dying, and probably full of morphine, too? “Like I say, he’s not doing good. Wasn’t playing with a full deck when I talked to him.”
    “Well, what do we have for sure?” I asked.
    “There were three wounds, and the ME thinks he may have been shot three times. One wound was in the neck. The bullet went in here.” He pointed at the right side of his larynx. “It came out the back of his neck and cut the jugular, but didn’t sever the spinal cord. Another one went in through the right eye and came out the brain stem. That’s the one that killed him. The third went in just under his sternum and came out through the hollow by his collar bone.” He touched his left shoulder. “The strange thing is, there was no damage from bullet expansion, not even through the torso. The hole in his skull was a clean circle made by a .22 caliber round. So was the hole through his neck.”
    That surprised me. A lot of people get shot with the .22 long rifle rim fire, and it can be a lethal choice at close range. Muzzle energy from a hot load is greater than the larger .38 S&W pistol shell, but the higher energy means the bullet mushrooms to as much as twice its size and sometimes tumbles. The hollow point version breaks apart, sending a shower of tiny lead slivers to wreak havoc with soft tissue. That slows the slug down quickly, and most often there’s not enough force left to punch through the skull a second time. The bullet normally stays in the body.
    “Military issue?” I asked, talking to myself. The .223 the military uses is a wicked shell that doesn’t make much of a bang, unlike some of the larger calibers. While the civilian version is a hunting shell designed to mushroom on impact and do maximum tissue damage, the military round carries a solid point that doesn’t change shape. Nor does it lack the power to punch through a skull or all the way through the torso.
    “That’s what I wondered,” Dee answered. “Who knows? Maybe we’re looking at a pro. With a silencer and subsonic ammunition, he could have taken Smiley out in a crowd. The way it tunneled through the torso sounds like it might be from a hot load.” His shrug was eloquent. “Or not. It didn’t hit any bones.”
    “I don’t want to go there just yet,” I told him. “Unless there’s evidence there’s a professional involved. There are a lot of hand loaders out there.”
    “That’s the problem,” Dee said. “We don’t have any evidence, and what we have could go a dozen ways to Sunday.We’re working blind.”
    Through all the rough times at the CID, I had never heard him so close to despair.
    “Don’t go there, either!” I said sharply. Dee is nothing short of brilliant in the field and can see things others miss, including me. Yet, there’s a dark side to this gift. When he can’t see his way through to at least one line of investigation, he takes it personally and gets despondent. The same thing happens when he makes his rare mistake. While the problem was much worse before he stopped drinking, Dee is like most alcoholics in recovery. He still suffers from what he calls ocular rectitis.