“Snake eyes,” Fielding said. “Ouch, that must have hurt.”
I found a faint scar from an appendectomy, and another old one on Danny’s left knee that may have come from an accident when he was a child. On his right knee, scars from recent arthroscopic surgery were purple, the muscles in that leg showing minimal atrophy. I collected samples of his fingernails and hair, and at a glance saw nothing indicative of a struggle. I saw no reason to assume he had resisted whomever he had encountered outside the Hill Cafe when he had dropped his bag of leftovers.
“Let’s turn him,” I said.
Fielding held the legs while I gripped my hands under the arms. We got him on his belly and I used a lens and a strong light to examine the back of his head. Long dark hair was tangled with clotted blood and debris, and I palpated the scalp some more.
“I need to shave this here so I can be sure. But it looks like we’ve got a contact gunshot wound behind his right ear. Where are his films?”
“They should be ready.” Fielding looked around.
“We need to reconstruct this.”
“Shit.” He helped me hold together what was a profound stellate wound that looked more like an exit, because it was so huge.
“It’s definitely an entrance,” I said as I used a scalpel blade to carefully shave that area of the scalp. “See, we’ve got a faint muzzle mark up here. Very faint. Right there.”
I traced it with a gloved bloody finger. “This is very destructive. Almost like a rifle.”
“Forty-five?”
“A half-inch hole,” I said almost to myself as I used a ruler. “Yes, that’s definitely consistent with a forty-five.”
I was removing the skull cap in pieces to look at the brain when the autopsy technician appeared and slapped films up on a nearby light box. The bright white shape of the bullet was lodged in the frontal sinus, three inches from the top of the head.
“My God,” I muttered as I stared at it.
“What the hell is that?” Fielding asked as both of us left the table to get closer.
The deformed bullet was big with sharp petals folded back like a claw.
“Hydra-Shok doesn’t do that,” my deputy chief said.
. “No, it does not. This is some kind of special highperformance ammo.”
“Maybe Starfire or Golden Sabre?”
“Like that, yes,” I answered, and I had never seen this ammunition in the morgue.
“But I’m thinking Black Talon because the cartridge case recovered isn’t PMC or Remington. It’s Winchester. And Winchester made Black Talon until it was taken off the market.”
“Winchester makes Silvertip. “This is definitely not Silvertip,” I replied. “You ever seen a Black Talon?”
“Only in magazines.”
“Black-coated, brass-jacketed with a notched hollow point that blossoms like this. See the points.” I showed him on the film. “Unbelievably destructive. It goes through you like a buzz saw. Great for law enforcement but a nightmare if in the wrong hands.”
“Jesus,” Fielding said, amazed. “It looks like a damn octopus.”
I pulled off latex gloves and replaced them with ones made of a tightly woven cloth, for ammunition like Black Talon was dangerous in the ER and the morgue. It was a bigger threat than a needle stick, and I did not know if Danny had hepatitis or AIDS. I did not want to cut myself on the jagged metal that had killed him so his assailant could end up taking two lives instead of one.
Fielding put on a pair of blue Nitrile gloves, which were sturdier than latex, but not good enough.
You can wear those for scribing,” I said. “But that’s
“That bad?”
“Yes,” I said, plugging in the autopsy saw. “You wear those and handle this and you’re going to get cut.”
“This doesn’t seem like a carjacking. This seems like someone who was very serious.”
“Believe me,” I raised my voice above the loud whine of the saw, “it doesn’t get any more serious than this.”
The story told by what lay beneath the scalp only got worse. The bullet had shattered the temporal, occipital, parietal and frontal bones of the skull. In fact, had it not lost its energy fragmenting the thick petrous ridge, the twisted claw would have exited, and we would have lost what was a very important piece of evidence. As for the brain, what the Black Talon had done to it was awful. The explosion of gas and shredding caused by copper and lead had plowed a terrible path through the miraculous matter