Then I turned back to the body and crouched. Using a gloved hand, I lifted the tee. Under a wrinkle in Pecos’s shirt was a gun wound the size of a cigar burn. It varied in color from black in the center to brick red near the edge.
“Shit,” I said. And I rarely curse.
It wasn’t by accident that we’d descended upon this trailer in the dead of night. Freddie Pecos was our confidential informant in a case we’d been chasing for three months in Hambis, Florida, ninety minutes northwest of Miami. We had not heard from the C.I. in forty-eight hours, but someone had paid Freddie a visit.
Did they figure out he’d gone to work for the FBI?
“Single-barrel smooth-bored firearm,” Shooter said.
I squinted back at her silhouette, beyond the ring of light. Shooter wore the same outfit nearly every day: a white sweatshirt and blue jeans. But for tonight’s mission, she’d donned all black.
“You sure?”
Certain wounds are telling in terms of distance, number of shots, and position, and an ME specializing in GSW is often the best judge of those elements. Shooter, however, was an anomaly in many ways. She’d grown up in Alaska, where her father forbade television, replacing it with outdoor activities. He’d taught her to track animals from the age of six and shoot from the age of eight. She’d even been part of an Olympic shooting team before joining the FBI.
“Projectiles follow the path of least resistance,” she said. “The tissues of least resistance, in Freddie’s case.”
It was a lot to surmise so quickly, but Shooter lowered the light so I could see her face. She’d been growing out her bangs, which were a strawberry-blond color. Now she swiped them off her forehead and walked exactly two paces back, measuring distance and angle.
“The perp was here.” She motioned at an area ten feet from Pecos, then moved back toward the victim and took out a pocketknife. Crouching beside me, she picked at the flap of skin that made up the wound. “The shot was taken from an angle, not straight on. When we get him on the table, I think you’ll find his ticker’s in three pieces.”
I looked back at the weapon, laid out beside the pizza box.
“That rifle,” I confirmed.
“A hundred percent.”
I examined the area where Shooter had been standing. In other words, the weapon was fired from straight on, but the trajectory had changed just slightly, even over that small distance, based on the inaccuracy of a rifle with no grooves inside.
Or a killer unused to firearms.
Or both.
Which is why Shooter had guessed that Pecos’s heart, which was northeast of the entry wound, would be pulverized into fragments.
I sniffed at the air. The first stage of human decomposition is called autolysis, which literally translates to “self-digestion.” The body’s cell membranes eat themselves. When Shooter picked at the bullet wound, a sulfuric gas had been released—the kind that had been building up inside Freddie’s abdomen and breaking down his skin.
“Pheff,” I said, standing up.
“I know, right?” Shooter smiled. “I used to date a guy who worked at the morgue. Came home like that every night.” She shrugged. “Eventually he decided it was a dead-end job.”
I looked at Shooter. Most days, it was better to ignore her jokes.
“I’m going to inspect the bedroom,” I said. “Maybe you can take a look at the weapons.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she said, and I moved out of the main area of the trailer.
Shooter and I work for an FBI unit called PAR, which stands for Patterns and Recognition. In addition to being her partner, I lead the group, which contains us and a second team, Richie Brancato and Cassie Pardo. Our job is to identify peculiarities in cases that have stalled or gone cold. To uncover details that others have missed, then hand the case off, either back to the field office that sent it to us—or to a team in Quantico.
When people speak well of us, they call us puzzle-solvers. When they don’t, we are thought of as oddballs. Freaks with a bent toward data. Often, they call us “head cases.”
To be fair to my team, the more negative comments are usually directed at the oddest among us: Me. The team leader. I try to fit in. Adjust my work style and personality. But much of who I am is simply built in. Unchangeable.
Our current investigation began ninety days ago, with an emailfrom the attorney general’s office to Craig Poulton, the director of the FBI. An analyst working for the Florida AG had come forward with an odd finding: 11,600 unemployment claims had been withdrawn in the last year from the same thirty-two ATM machines.
Unemployment in Florida is paid by either check or debit card, which raised a question about population density. Was it possible that 11,600 unemployed people lived close enough to each other to use this few ATM machines?
It was a question that did not seem like a question to me. Everyone knew the answer was no. They just didn’t know what to make of it.
