The Devil Went Down to Austin (24 page)

"The night Clara Doebler died," I said. "You were the reporting officer. You were there."

I told him about Maia and me visiting Faye DoeblerIngram— how she'd treated us to tea and homicide reports.

Lopez looked less than ecstatic.

"I thought I told you, Navarre. You need a report, ask me for it."

"I'm asking. Jimmy was killed at the same spot his mother died. What happened with Clara Doebler?"

He pulled himself up on the ledge of the loading dock. "Five years ago, the Doebler property was a good place for patrol cops to hang out. Before Jimmy built on it, a lot of deputies used it. You could sit there in your car and catch up on paperwork and be within striking distance for most calls in the David Twenty sector. One night I was finishing B shift, pulled in at the Doebler property about 2100. My partner's unit was a few miles south, and he was on the way to rendezvous with me. I was sitting there doing paperwork when I heard a shot from down the hill. First I figured it was nothing—just a hunter, or some kid screwing around—but I called it in, got out to investigate. There was this pickup truck by the water, this woman sitting on the tailgate with her back to me, and she was playing with something, like she was rolling a joint.

She was talking to herself, mumbling.

"I walked up around the side, called to her. She got startled and turned. It was Clara Doebler. She wasn't at her property much, but she'd called patrol a few times—poachers, drunk drivers running down her fence, that kind of stuff. So I knew who she was. She had a pistol next to her on the tailgate, and what she was fiddling with was pen and paper in her lap. She looked at me, kind of frightened, then picked up the gun. I drew my weapon, told her to put it down.

She gave me this kind of dazed look—could've shot me if she wanted, or forced me to shoot her—but instead she put the pistol in her mouth—"

Lopez made his hand into a gun, lowered his thumb. "My partner arrived six minutes later. I was not in good shape. The detectives told me the first shot was Ms. Doebler's test fire—getting up her nerve to do the real thing. When I walked up on her, she'd been writing her suicide note. The letter was to Jimmy. Said, Dearest son, I'm sorry. A few more lines, apologizing, what you could read through the blood."

I stayed quiet for a long minute. "Rough thing to see."

Lopez nodded. "I did my share of counselling."

"The Doebler family—W.B.'s father—covered up the suicide. He had it swept under the rug."

Vic made a popping sound with his lips. "I wasn't in homicide then. No one asked my opinion."

"But that's why Jimmy called you for information," I said. "You were there."

"Yes."

"That's why you want to find Jimmy's murderer so badly."

"Don't put too much stock in that, Navarre. You work patrol, you collect a lot of landmarks. You can't drive down the street anymore and see a row of houses. You see, 'that's where the kid was strangled,' 'that's where the drug deal went down.' Ms.

Doebler's death—it was bad. But it was only one time."

I couldn't tell if he'd really been able to get past the suicide as much as he claimed, but I got the feeling there was something else about it he wasn't telling me—something that still burned in his gut.

"W.B. has a deputy working security for him—guy named Engels. You wouldn't know anything about that."

"Not unusual. Lot of the guys work offhour jobs."

"You don't see a possible conflict of interest?"

Lopez reconstructed his usual smile. Whatever had been there, just below the surface, was submerged.

"Conflict of interest—you mean like a homicide detective doing a PI a favour? Naw, man—that shit never happens in this county. Come on, Navarre. Let's get your sorry ass inside. We've got a bullet to look at."

The window on the crime lab door was covered with fake stickon bullet holes.

Ballistics humour.

The guy who buzzed us in was around fortyfive, wearing jeans and a rumpled blue Tshirt, a laminated ID around his neck. He looked like he hadn't seen a disposable razor in eight weeks—his grizzled hair, beard, eyebrows, moustache, and sideburns all so copious it was impossible to tell where one crop of follicles stopped and the other started. I fancied you could peel one corner and rip the whole hair cover off in a single piece.

He chewed on something underneath the moustache, knit his eyebrows at Lopez.

"Which are you?"

"Vic Lopez, Travis County homicide."

The hairy man looked at me. "Then you're Navarre?"

"Ben Quarles?"

Quarles shook my hand. "Gene Schaeffer at SAPD vouched for you. Said you kept them supplied with some of their more humorous work."

"That Gene," I said. "He's a sucker for knockknock jokes."

Quarles looked at Lopez. "Told me Tres—TRES—I figured a Spanish guy."

Lopez patted my shoulder. "You know, we're trying. We keep feeding him frijoles. So far he ain't turned brown. Now if you don't mind, Ben—?"

Quarles' mouth twitched. "Come on in, gentlemen."

Our host walked as if someone had shot him in both feet. He led us down a narrow corridor, past a couple of offices to a big metal door. He swiped his security card across the lock.

The room inside looked like a Branch Davidian garage sale— pegboard walls hung floor to ceiling with weapons, all tagged, arranged by size from tiny .22s on the left to rocket launchers on the right. In the back corner was an umbrella stand full of swords and tire irons and baseball bats.

Quarles picked a small black and silver handgun off the wall. "Your suspect's Lorcin.

Came in about an hour ago."

My stomach went cold just looking at it. I hated the thing— hated the fact Garrett had been stupid enough to buy it. I wanted it obliterated, melted down, ground into rebar.

Then I looked around the room at the two hundred, maybe three hundred other weapons—each the last stage prop in someone's life. Each had been cleaned, sanitized, impartially crossreferenced with a bright red tag. I was standing in a closetful of endings. Among them, Jimmy Doebler's murder was unremarkable.

Quarles turned to Lopez. "Projectile's in my office. You're saying it was fired from this, right?"

"Our man couldn't rule it out. You going to tell us different?"

Quarles' eyes crinkled. "Haven't testfired yet. You want to come?"

He took the gun and a box of .380 ammo.

We followed him out of the lab, around the parking lot, to a building in back. The test range was a concrete hall with a lead curtained trap at the far end, a paper target holder overhead on a motorized track. At the near end was a folding table with several sets of ear protectors and a staple gun.

I picked up the staple gun. "You testfire a lot of these?"

Quarles handed us the headsets. "Gene Schaeffer also said if you didn't amuse me, I could go ahead and shoot you."

I decided against the peppy comeback.

Lopez and I put on our ear protectors. Quarles didn't fire down range. Instead he loaded the Lorcin and went to a large tin box on the side of the room. It looked like the industrial bait tanks they use to stock lakes—about a twohundredgallon model, with a hollow spout sticking up on one side, high enough so that Quarles had to stand on a stool to put the gun into the opening.

He fired six rounds—each a muffled boom and a flash of light in the tank's spout. He pointed at the floor. Lopez and I collected the ejected casings. Quarles dragged his stool around to the side of the water tank, opened the top, and fished around with a long piece of PVC pipe until he'd speared all the slugs.

"Get me a lobster while you're in there," I said.

I knew the comment amused him because he did not shoot me.

Quarles showed us six little mushrooms of copper and lead. The water had slowed them down so the shapes were almost uniform, the lower ends retaining perfect striations from the gun's barrel.

Lopez said, "They're just lovely. I figure we got about five more minutes before my sergeant gets here and makes us eat them."

We adjourned next door to Ben Quarles' office.

His window looked out on the asphalt parking lot, with a scenic side view of the DPS

loading ramp. The walls were adorned with framed black and white photos of Geronimo and John Dillinger. A John Prine song was playing from the computer's speaker. On the shelf above Quarles' desk was a line of fired bullets, four Larry McMurtry novels, a red roll of evidence tape circled around a Play Doh can.

Quarles picked up a Ziploc evidence bag from his desk, pulled out a slug. "This is the one from your victim's head. They cleaned the cooties off it."

He threw it to me before I could protest. I looked down at it—a little bit of metal, small as a gumdrop. Quarles plucked it back from my palm, then put the slug and a test slug from Garrett's Lorcin under his comparison microscope.

The machine looked like an oldfashioned icecream blender from a malt shop—same size, same turquoise and chrome finish. Quarles peered into the lens, turned some knobs, and said, "Yeah."

"Match?" Lopez asked.

"Come look."

Lopez did, then turned away, his face stony. "Go on, Navarre."

The image in the microscope was the left half of one bullet jutted up against the right half of another. You could turn a knob to move the dividing line, seeing less of one or the other bullet, comparing size, lines, markings. The bullets rotated slowly, and in the microscope light they were beautiful—gold and silver, like a piece of jewellery highlighted in a homeshopping ad.

I was no expert, but even I could see that the ridges—the lands and grooves—were fairly well aligned.

"You've got a rightsix GRC on the projectile that killed your friend," Quarles said.

"That's the pattern of the spin, and the number of lands and grooves. The projectile we just fired from the suspect's Lorcin is compatible. The damage to the projectile is bad enough that Lopez's man is right—I couldn't swear it's the same gun, but it's definitely from a similar .380."

I had expected that. It did not dampen my spirits too badly.

"The casing?" I asked, pushing my luck.

Quarles produced another Ziploc bag from his desk drawer, took out the brass I'd found in the lake. "It's a .380, all right. I put it in the microscope earlier—the crimp marks, where the projectile fits in the casing, line up beautifully. These marks are on the base of the projectile, you understand. Not as mangled as the top."

"Meaning?"

"The casing fits the projectile from the murder."

"A casing in the lake," I said, "maybe a hundred yards from the scene. It was picked up by the killer, dropped in the water during his exit."

Proof. Goddamn, perfect proof that Garrett was innocent. I looked at Lopez for vindication, but Lopez was staring at Quarles, apparently realizing there was more.

"Ain't had the real test yet," Quarles said. "The BOB markings— breech or bolt face—on this here casing. Give me one of the casings we just fired."

Lopez handed one over, and again Quarles adjusted the comparison microscope.

"Royal flush," he told us.

When it was my turn to look, I saw a circle of brass, cratered in the middle. Nothing exciting.

"The firing pin impression can't always tell you much," Quarles said. "They're circular, pretty much featureless, all the same. One thing, though—look at the outer ring. Those score marks. Now look at the other casing."

I saw what he was talking about—tiny breaks in the circle around the crater. They were similar on both casings.

I pulled away from the microscope. "But you said BOB marks all look the same."

"Mostly," Quarles amended. "For the same type of gun. Usually the firing pin strikes the back of a bullet in a Lorcin, you get a pattern of concentric circles that isn't very distinctive. This casing here, though, has some gaps in those circles—three distinctive gaps, maybe from the gun being cleaned improperly, I don't know. The thing is, your suspect's gun leaves the same kind of marks."

My chest turned cold. "Meaning—"

"This is ballistics. You don't usually get one hundred percent. But the chances of two guns making that same BOB pattern on a casing—they're astronomical. Without that casing you found, I couldn't be very certain, if I had to testify in court. But with the casing—well, the projectile fits the casing, and the casing fits the gun. I'd say your suspect's gun just got pinned to that murder about as well as you can pin it. About ninety percent."

Quarles treated us to a coffeestained grin. Then he noticed my expression. "I hope I helped. You ain't looking too happy for somebody just solved a case."

"He's ecstatic," Lopez promised. "You'll do a Drugfire search for matches on the casing?"

"Yeah," Quarles promised. "That'll take a few more days. Christ, Navarre, I thought I was repaying some favours. You look like I just stabbed you in the back."

John Prine started singing about flag decals on Mr. Quarles' computer.

Lopez looked out into the parking lot, where a maroon LeBaron was just pulling in. A large militarytype AfricanAmerican man in a coat and tie was getting out of the LeBaron, glowering.

"Come on, Mr. Navarre," Lopez told me. "Thanks for your time, Quarles."

In the hallway, Lopez said, "There's a back way through the CODIS office. Take it."

"A hundred yards away, Lopez. I showed you where I found the bullet. You know this is wrong."

His eyes were burning. "I know what ninety percent means, Tres. I know what it'll mean to my sergeant, who's about to walk through that door. And Tres—the bad things I said about Miss Lee? Forget them. Your brother is going to need all the help he can get."

At sunset, the top windows of Ruby McBride's dream house glowed orange.

Most of the yachts were out enjoying an evening cruise. The restaurant was nearly empty. The boat jockeys had little to do except smoke cigarettes, recline on their massive forklift, play cards at the lakefront.

I sat in my truck, idling at the bottom of Ruby's private driveway, trying to decide if I really had enough courage to face another human being.