Angle of Attack Read Free

body, too, lay toes down on the packed dirt and the sprouting clumps of grass between the walls. But unlike the drunk, there was no need to see if he was breathing; as Walker had said, a hole that size in his head left no doubt. The hard, blue-green glints of flies moved busily at the ragged edge of the slightly bloody hole with its eruption of gray brain. It was the kind of wound blown by a large-caliber dumdum or a shotgun. Wager keyed the GE radio pack on his belt and called for the lab people and the medical examiner.
    “Looks like he’s still got his wallet.” Axton pointed to the bulge that had worn the rear pocket of the denim trousers pale in a square shape.
    “See if you can reach it,” said Wager. “My arms are too short.”
    Axton braced himself against the painted brick and stretched out to tug the wallet from the tight pocket. It was rubbed shiny and held the curve of the man’s buttocks, and was cold to the touch.
    “Money’s here—twenty-eight bucks.”
    “Who is he?”
    Axton flipped through small plastic windows that had two or three smiling pictures and various cards. In the front panel, he found the driver’s license. Then he looked at Wager and blinked. “Frank Covino.”

Two
    “T HE MEDICAL EXAMINER guesses he was killed in that location sometime Sunday night; apparently, he wasn’t moved after he was shot.” Fred Baird, the lab technician on the day shift, took off his gold-rimmed glasses and blew at something clinging to the lens. He, Wager, and Axton sat around one of three desks in the small cubicle that was the single office for all the homicide detectives. They were supposed to have moved to a new police and justice building a year ago; but the date had shifted more often than a politician’s word, and all three crews were still jammed into the same space. Each of the desks had a glass top. Under them were lists of telephone numbers, codes for quick reference, names and addresses that meant something to one of the three people who shared the desk; on top of this one were spread the color photographs taken that morning by Baird. They still held a slightly acid odor, and their shiny finish was tacky under Wager’s thumb. “One shot was fired,” Baird went on. “At close range; probably a contact wound because it’s smoothly marginated and has a lot of powder residue as well as localized discoloration of the skeletal muscle. The intake of carbon monoxide causes that,” he explained. “The area of penetration is centered approximately nine millimeters behind the point of the chin and five millimeters to the left of a mid-sagittal line. The path of penetration angles upward into the brain at approximately sixty degrees from a transverse plane to emerge at the top of the right parietal, effecting subtotal decapitation with an orifice of approximately six to ten centimeters.”
    “Good God,” said Max. “That rolls trippingly off the tongue.”
    “Baird, why can’t you just tell us what the hell happened?”
    The lab tech glanced with surprise from Axton to Wager. “I did! That’s the medical description.”
    “Then why don’t you give us the civilian description, Fred?”
    In the short silence, a twang of country-and-Western radio music rose above the steady clatter of office machines and police frequencies from the busy Records Section down the hall. “It won’t be very goddamned scientific that way,” Baird said with disgust.
    “But it may be a hell of a lot clearer,” answered Max.
    Baird shrugged and put his glasses back on and blinked once or twice as if seeing the two detectives for the first time. “If that’s what you want. Say this pencil’s the path of the round.” He held the yellow shaft just under the left side of his chin. “It entered here and took off the back of his tongue and soft palate …” He lowered the pencil. “That’s part of the roof of your mouth.”
    “Come on, come on,” said Wager.
    “It went through the opening behind the