"Okay," she said.
"Okay."
She almost smiled.
They cleared the table. Callie washed the containers. Noah dried them. Small domestic movements that meant more than either of them was willing to name yet.
She left by nine. He walked her to the Jeep and stood in the driveway as she backed out.
He went back inside. The kitchen still smelled like Pad Thai. Callie's coffee mug was in the drying rack beside his.
Ethan came home at ten. Noah heard the front door open and close.
He didn't go speak with him. Not tonight. Tonight he sat in the kitchen and let the silence settle and thought about what Callie had said.
You're not running out of options. You're running out of patience.
She was right. She usually was.
And for the first time in weeks, Noah didn't feel alone in it.
13
The verdict was in.
Callie was standing in the ballistics bay at the State Police forensic facility, a concrete room with fluorescent lights, a water trap at the far end, and a bench mount bolted to a steel table. The room smelled like solvent and copper. The ventilation fan hummed in the ceiling. McKenzie stood beside her with his arms folded.
Aspen's Remington 700 was clamped in the mount. The tech, a woman named Harwell with safety glasses pushed up on her forehead, loaded a single round and looked at them.
"Ready?"
Callie nodded.
The shot was deafening in the enclosed space even through the ear protection. The round punched into the water trap and the tech retrieved it with tongs, setting the deformed slug on a rubber mat under a magnifying lamp.
She pulled up a split screen on the monitor beside the bench. On the left, the recovered round from Maggie Coleman's wall. On the right, the test-fired round from the Remington, still wetfrom the trap. Both images magnified to show the rifling grooves cut into the copper jacket.
"Land-and-groove comparison," Harwell said, adjusting the focus. "The recovered round has six lands and grooves with a right-hand twist. The Remington produces six lands and grooves with a right-hand twist. So far consistent."
Callie leaned in. The grooves looked similar on the surface. Parallel lines scored into metal by the interior of a barrel. She had seen these comparisons before. The devil was in the depth and spacing.
"But look here." Harwell pointed to the screen with a pen. "The width of the lands on the recovered round is point-oh-six-two inches. The Remington produces lands at point-oh-five-seven. That's a significant discrepancy. And the groove depth is different too. The recovered round shows deeper scoring, consistent with a barrel that has more wear or a different manufacturing profile."
She loaded the Tikka T3 next. Same process. The shot echoed through the bay. The slug was retrieved, placed under the lamp, and the image appeared on the split screen beside the Coleman round.
"Even further off," Harwell said. "The Tikka has a different twist rate entirely. One-in-eleven versus one-in-ten on the recovered round. You can see the spacing is wider on the test fire. These aren't close."
Callie stared at the screen. Two sets of grooves that didn't align. Two weapons that hadn't fired the bullets that killed Maggie Coleman and Burt Halvorsen. The science was clean and it wasn't close.
"Neither rifle," she said.
"Neither rifle. Both are definitively excluded."
McKenzie uncrossed his arms. He leaned toward the screen and studied the images for a long moment, then straightened up.
"What about barrel modifications?" he asked. "Aftermarket work. Re-boring. Anything that could change the rifling signature."
"Both weapons show factory-original barrels," Harwell said. "No modifications. No re-crowning. No evidence of any alteration. These are stock rifles, well maintained, fired regularly. But they didn't fire the rounds that killed your victims."
