The Triggerman Dance

Menden smiled with a certain obvious condescension, then drank off his shot and waved the waitress for another. Weinstein's insides withered a little.

"Do I have that promise?"

"If it's what you need."

"I wouldn't ask if I didn't." At that point, Weinstein glanced at Dumars, and his expression demanded the same of her, a promise. She began to suspect that his bringing her here under "personal time" and their abrupt exit from the office—no sign-out, no destination, no emergency number other than her pager—was a way of keeping her out of the official loop of Bureau intelligence. She looked away from Weinstein with what she hoped was a conditional yes.

"Right now," Joshua continued, "this is what we have that's solid. The bullets were .30/06 caliber, soft-nosed, factory made at Hornady. They did not come from the cartridge shells left at the scene. You heard about those, I assume."

"Two of them."

"Did you know that they had been engraved?"

Menden shook his head.

"One said, 'When in the course of human events—', and the other said, 'it becomes necessary—' The engraving was professional, or by an expert amateur. The script mimicked that of the Declaration of Independence. Each phrase started at the bottom of the shell, and went toward the neck."

Menden frowned and drank from his glass again. "But they weren't fired?"

"Of course not. That would add to our evidence, and they weren't willing to let us do that. God only knows where the gun itself is right now. The bottom of the Pacific, maybe. They took the real casings with them and left behind two shiny brass shells with their little warning on them. Their patriotic . . . signature."

"Their call for revolution."

Weinstein snorted. "They're not revolutionaries. They're agents of the status quo."

"Like you."

The shot arrived and John arranged it in front of him. The waitress studied Joshua as she made change, then walked away.

"I'll ignore that for now, and address it later. We've got more, but not much. The van, alleged to have been used by the shooter, was found ten miles away from the scene, behind a donut shop in Westminster. It had old plates on it, from a wrecking yard, likely—plates that hadn't been used in a decade, since they graced a Volkswagen bug totalled in 1985. Strictly a disposable vehicle. Nobody saw it drive in; nobody saw who picked up the driver and or passengers. There were fingerprints in it and on it, but very few, and those were all partials. We found traces of talc on the wheel and interior door handles, window knobs, shift lever."

"The old latex glove trick."

"Likely. Hair and Fiber back in Quantico got all the samples we collected and worked them hard—nothing interesting, really, nothing that points a finger. We've got corroborative evidence now—things that don't mean much unless we can match them with a suspect. Nothing primary."

"Hair for DNA?"

"You can't get DNA from hair," snapped Weinstein, "only from the tissue that sticks to it. We've got hair. No skin. We've got sixteen different hair samples. A follicle won't convict like a fingerprint or DNA pattern. Old van, plenty of passengers. Two dogs, a parakeet feather and mouse crap down in the floor carpet. The van had four owners before it was stolen from a repair shop. But the repair shop didn't even notice it was gone because it was fixed, left and never paid for. It collected dust out in the yard for two months. We fired down hard on all the people who owned it, all the people who knew the people who owned it, all the people at the shop, you name it."

Joshua Weinstein perused his beer, and forced another sip.

"And?"

"Something gave. I'll get back to that when I need to. Chronology isn't important here. Questions, so far?"

"Why Susan Baum?"

"Left-wing. A Jew. A woman. A world-class afflicter of the comfortable. A brilliant afflicter. She continues to offend a lot of people, right there on the front page of the Orange County Journal, three days a week. Businessmen, Republicans, old-fashioned patriots, churches, hunters, smokers, meat-eaters, drinkers, straights, men, all-boys' Little League teams and boy scouts without gay troop leaders. You know the litany. By some standards, she's the revolutionary. She's also an American citizen exercising her constitutional right to free speech. They tried to kill her for it, and they said as much when they engraved those casings for us."

At this, John Menden looked down at his beer glass and tapped its bottom against the table. "You're sure they weren't after the assistant—Ms. . . uh . . . Harris?"

"We worked that possibility," said Weinstein. "And it yielded nothing."

In the moment of silence that followed, even Weinstein seemed to lose his focus. Dumars saw something remote pass across his expression. The memory of Rebecca, she understood, his fiancee, gliding over his mind as quietly as a cloud across the sun. John Menden's face looked mournful, too.