picked it up and scraped it against the end of the crowbar where
it was matted with blood and hair.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I got this slide all dirty. Very careless of
me.’
He made the exact same error with five more slides.
‘Are we interested in fingerprints?’ he said.
I shook my head. “We’re assuming gloves.’
‘We should check, I think. Contributory negligence is a
serious matter.’
He opened another drawer and peeled a latex glove out of a
box and snapped it on his hand. It made a tiny cloud of talcum
dust. Then he picked the crowbar up and carried it out of the
room.
He came back less than ten minutes later. He still had his glove
on. The crowbar was washed clean. The black paint gleamed. It
looked indistinguishable from new.
‘No prints,’ he said.
He put the crowbar down on his chair and pulled a file drawer
and came out with a plain brown cardboard box. Opened it
up and took out two chalk-white plaster casts. Both were about
six inches long and both had Carbone handwritten in black
ink on the underside. One was a positive, formed by pressing
wet plaster into the wound. The other was a negative, formed
by moulding more plaster over the positive. The negative
showed the shape of the wound the weapon had made,
and therefore the positive showed the shape of the weapon
itself.
The doctor put the positive on the chair next to the crowbar.
Lined them up, parallel. The cast was about six inches long. It
was white and a little pitted from the moulding process but
was otherwise identical to the smooth black iron. Absolutely
identical. Same section, same thickness, same contours.
Then the doctor put the negative on the desk. It was a little
bigger than the positive, and a little messier. It was an exact
replica of the back of Carbone’s shattered head. The doctor
picked up the crowbar. Hefted it in his hand. Lined it up,
speculatively. Brought it down, very slowly, one, for the first
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blow, then two for the second. Then three for the last. He
touched it to the plaster. The third and final wound was the best
defined. It was a clear three-quarter-inch trench in the plaster,
and the crowbar fitted it perfectly.
‘I’ll check the blood and the hair,’ the doctor said. ‘Not that
we don’t already know what the results will be.’
He lifted the crowbar out the plaster and tried it again. It
went in again, precisely, and deep. He lifted it out and balanced
it across his open palms, like he was weighing it. Then he
grasped it by the straighter end and swung it, like a batter
going after a high fastball. He swung it again, harder, a
compact, violent stroke. It looked big in his hands. Big, and a
little heavy for him. A little out of control.
‘Very strong man,’ he said. ‘Vicious swing. Big tall guy,
right-handed, physically very fit. But that describes a lot of
people on this post, I guess.’
‘There was no guy,’ I said. ‘Carbone fell and hit his head.’
The doctor smiled briefly and balanced the bar across his
palms again.
‘It’s handsome, in its way,’ he said. ‘Does that sound strange?’ I knew what he meant. It was a nice piece of steel, and it was
everything it needed to be and nothing it didn’t. Like a Colt
Detective Special, or a K-bar, or a cockroach.
He slid it inside a long steel drawer. The metals scraped one
on the other and then boomed faintly when he let it go and
dropped it the final inch.
‘I’ll keep it here,’ he said. ‘If you like. Safer that way.’
‘OK,’ I said.
He closed the drawer.
‘Are you right-handed?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’
‘Colonel Willard told me you did it,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t
believe him.’
‘Why not?’
‘You were very surprised when you saw who it was. When I
put his .face back on. You had a definite physical reaction.
People can’t fake that sort of thing.’
‘Did you tell Willard that?’
The doctor nodded. ‘He found it inconvenient. But it didn’t