The Morelville Mysteries: Books 5-8 Collection

Chapter 6 – Bullets and Casings

Chapter 6 – Bullets and Casings

Mel

Tuesday Morning, October 14th, 2014

Gatlinburg, Tennessee

“You’re liking that tub a lot...we have one at home now...our home, remember?”

Dana turned her head toward the bed where I was lounging, watching much of nothing on the TV. “Yes, I know, but at home, I don’t get used and abused quite so much. You work all day at least five days a week.”

I grinned, “You love it; you know it.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point. I have to recover from each round, see, and prepare for the next one.”

“If you insist but, really, it seems like I’m doing most of the heavy lifting.”

“Are you calling me fat now?”

Whoops! “No, no! That’s not what I meant. Not at all.” At her look, I continued, “I just meant that I do most of the, um, work...”

“Is that right Crane? Keep digging!”

“You’re twisting what I’m saying all around.”

“‘Is that right’ was a question.”

“Not the way you said it, it wasn’t.” I grinned wide, hoping to diffuse what I was picking up might not be so funny to her. When her look softened and she cracked a small sliver of a smile, I shifted my legs over the side of the bed and favored her with my most earnest expression, “Dana, honey, you’re not fat at all. You’re beautiful and I’m so blessed to have you in my life.”

“Are you sucking up now?” She was trying to be serious but she couldn’t keep the hint of a laugh out of her voice.

I played along, pretending to be hurt, “You’re so suspicious! No, I’m not sucking up. I was being honest. Now, I’m being honest about something else, I’m starved. We’ve only tried one Smokey Mountain pancake house. There must be forty more of them out there to try.”

Dana sighed, “I’m hungry too but I sure don’t want to drive all the way into Pigeon Forge yet this morning. Let’s look for one in Gatlinburg.”

“I’ll boot up the laptop, you get dressed.”

“Yes ma’am!” Dana snapped off a salute from her reclined position in the tub.

I pulled my laptop from the case and fired it up. While I was doing that, Dana turned off the jets and released the drain on the tub. I watched as she stood carefully on the slick surface still draining of water and reached for her towel on a hook on the wall just behind and to the far end of the Jacuzzi tub, near the bathroom door. She started to rub and pat herself dry but, when she realized I was watching her instead of focusing on my own task, she laughed and turned her back to me. I liked that view too but Windows finally opening caught my attention and I turned my concentration to the screen.

“Now, what the hell!”

Dana’s words were part question and part exclamation. My head shot back up and my eyes found her standing motionless in the middle of the tub, her back still turned to me staring at the wall behind the tub that divided the bedroom and bathroom. “What’s wrong babe?”

“Come here and look at this.” She pointed at the wall.

I stepped over to the edge of the Jacuzzi and leaned toward her. She moved aside slightly but pressed her finger to the wall just below something that was lodged into the thick, glazed pine paneling.

“Is that what I think it is?” She waited for me to respond.

“If you’re thinking it’s a bullet, then yeah, I think so.”

I retrieved my cell phone and the small pocketknife I always carry from the desk where I’d dropped the contents of my pockets the night before. I grabbed a water cup too and, after stepping gingerly into the tub, I took a couple of quick photos and then I carefully pried out the bullet that was lodged completely into the wall and sunk about an eighth of an inch past the otherwise smooth surface. A small caliber, jacketed shell dropped into the cup.

Dana and I both peered intently at the hardly deformed round.

I was shaking with anger again. “Is everybody around here incompetent? First the cleaning crew and now the cops too?”

“Since it’s a jacketed round, it must have passed through Patricia Dunkirk’s neck Mel and ended up in here. That might explain the dusting powder on the nightstand.”

“Or she was shot in here and somebody is covering something up. This looks like a .22 shell. .22s just don’t have that much range; you know that as well as I do.”

Dana nodded.

“Stand there in front of where it was, facing me.” She did as I asked.

Since I was still standing in the tub myself, I sized up what I was looking at from there, looked toward the balcony door, then I peered over the edge of the tub. “Okay, so if Dunkirk was standing in the tub, facing an open balcony door, when the round came through and it hit her in the neck, passed through and lodged in the wall, she was three, maybe four inches taller than you, even standing up here in the tub where you’ve got 2-3 more inches of height. If she were on the balcony or anywhere else in the room in the line of fire when it hit her, with the door open, then she was probably about your height and we have to account for the round coming in at a lower point like from a shorter shooter or from outside.

Dana stepped out of the tub and began getting dressed while I inspected the wall around the point of impact and below. I didn’t find a trace of any sort of blood spatter which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, if this was where Patricia Dunkirk took the fatal shot.

I inspected the woodwork on the wall. This wood is pretty heavily polyurethane coated here to protect it from water damage. That would make it pretty easy to wipe down quickly and, of course, the tub would clean easily too.

“What are you thinking, Mel?”

“Just that, since she was in a swimming suit – which is odd, granted – and wet when she was found and the bullet was here, she had to have died here,” I pointed at the tub as I stepped out of it. “There’s no evidence of blood there of course with all the easy to clean surfaces but, since the body was found on the balcony, there would have been blood transfer in the process of getting her out there.”

“Why aren’t you considering that she really could have died on the balcony after going out there in a swimming suit?”

“I’m just thinking about the caliber of the round...it’s small...the range of such a pistol or rifle and the angle of the shot if the shooter was outside.” I looked at my wife and shook my head.

“What? You’re thinking something Melissa Crane; tell me what it is.”

“It’s really bugging me babe. I want to check the angles. Will you help?”

“I’m curious too. Go for it.”

“Alright then. I’ll go outside. You stand on the balcony to start with out in front of the door and leave it wide open.”

I went downstairs and out the front door, turned and looked up at Dana whose feet were roughly 9 feet above my head.

“We can establish that if the shooter were outside, say a hunter, from anywhere this close the angle is all wrong.” Dana just nodded. I stepped off about 16 feet to the edge of the parking pull off in front of the cabin then crossed the road and the opposite berm, calculating width in my head. “We’re roughly 38 feet right here, at the base of this hill but we’re not close to the angle of trajectory the bullet would have had to take.”

Wheeling around, I started up the knoll. The slope went from gentle to steep pretty quickly leaving the distance still under a total of 25 yards by the time I reached the top. The copse of trees was thirty more yards behind me.

“From right here I have a clear view of you and the angle seems about right if you were a little taller. I simulated holding a rifle then a pistol.”

Dana shot back, “Yes, but a hunter with a clear view wouldn’t have taken the shot.”

“Good point; hang on.” I backed up to the copse of trees and realigned myself with Dana and the door. To take a shot at the right angle, I could still see her very clearly. No hunter, in his or her right mind, would have fired.

“Can you go and stand in the tub?” I yelled.

I stood my ground on the hilltop while she complied. I could see her less clearly now that she was 10-12 yards further distant and in the interior of the room but, unless I backed up to where the knoll dropped off just a little behind me, I could still see that I was shooting straight into a cabin. The angle of trajectory was only right from the edge of the hill or near the front of the clump of trees I was in. No hunter took a shot from anywhere up here!

Using a hunter’s eye, I looked around me. There were no tracks in the dry earth now and, in reality, I was contemplating the events of a month prior. The trees still had the majority of their leaves now full of color but not yet ready to give way. Still, on the unused hillside, deadfall from storms and fall seasons past lay all around, mostly undisturbed, other than where I’d walked myself.

Peering closely at the ground, I began looking for signs of other human traffic and I began edging leaves with my toes around the largest trees in the right sightline and just to either side of them where an ejected shell casing might have landed. I was about to give up when a tiny glint of metal caught my eye. Stepping to it, it was immediately apparent that it was a shell casing and for a small caliber bullet at that.

All around me were only leaves. I chose a large freshly fallen one and edged it under the cartridge. When the case was firmly in the middle of the leaf, I pulled the corners up around it and carried it down the hill with me like that, not touching it.

Dana stared into the cup where the shell casing I’d found now rested beside the bullet we’d dug out of the wall. She shook her head, “They sure could go together.”

“Yeah, but there’s no proving that unless there are matching fingerprints on both. You have to touch them somewhere to load them but that casing has been out in the elements.”

She shifted gears, “So, you could see me in the tub?”

“Yes but it’s not a shot anyone but someone bent on killing Patricia Dunkirk would have taken and, given that it’s a soaking tub, what are the odds of her standing up right there and being framed in that doorway?”

“What are the odds of that door being open? There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ here.”

“True, but it’s still too whacked to be accidental. Either the shooter was in here and intended to kill her or out there and got lucky. The shell casing I found may or may not be...”

Something flashed in my head and I picked up the cup to look at the bullet again.

“What were you saying?”

I didn’t even hear Dana’s question. Tilting my head, I asked her instead, “Have you ever hunted?”

“Noooo, not personally. My dad and my brother Vince do. Why?”

“I’m not familiar with the hunting regs in Tennessee but they’re probably similar to Ohio. You can’t hunt big game with a rifle, only a shotgun. You’d probably want a shotgun anyway to hunt coyote. You can use a .22 caliber rifle in Ohio for small game like birds, rabbits and nuisance animals like groundhogs and coon.”

“Okay, where are you going with this?”

“That’s just it Dana, a seasoned hunter, trying to help thin out the coyote problem wouldn’t be out with a .22, rifle or pistol, and it’s probably completely illegal here, like it is in Ohio, to hunt with full metal jacketed rounds. It’s very dangerous and any licensed hunter would know that. The damn things pass right through stuff!”

Dana shuddered, “What a mess!”

We were both quite for a couple of minutes, thinking, then I got up and went upstairs. She followed.

I turned on all the lights in the room, opened the drapes to the only window and opened the balcony door next to it again. Starting at the balcony, I walked a slow line through the door, around the bed and then over to the tub, looking at the carpeting as I went.

“If Dunkirk was on the balcony when she was shot, someone intended to kill her. The problem with that scenario is, after impact with her, a .22 bullet would have been slowed and the trajectory changed even though it was a jacketed round that passed through.”

“Agreed.”

“If Dunkirk were anywhere in here, with a shooter inside or outside, there’d have been blood spatter.”

“She had to have bled heavily from a neck shot...had to...”

“But there’s no blood anywhere on the carpet. Not around the tub and not on the path to get the body outside. Granted, this could have been cleaned and it’s likely that it was cleaned after she was shot but certainly, it hasn’t been replaced. This carpet isn’t new in the past month or so. It’s been here a while.”