The Third Victim Part 64

"Daniel Avalon gets a weasel factor of fifteen, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, he currently has an alibi."

"What kind of alibi?"

"Important business meeting. Two clients vouching for his time. One possibility is maybe he hired someone to do it, but I don't know. Mr.

Avalon has a hunting cabin in the area, and for the record, the Avalons have five guns registered in their names, though none of them is a .22..".

Luke recited easily: "Smith 8c Wesson .357, a Clock .40, a Beretta 9 mm, and two Mossberg 12,-gauge shotguns."

"Holy s.h.i.t, what are they preparing for?"

"Y2K. The guns were purchased in the fall of '99. Mrs. Avalon probably feared for her china. Or maybe she's afraid of all those clowns in Melissa Avalon's room." Luke shuddered again.

"In other words, we can't count out the Avalons yet," Rainie concluded.

"You'll push harder on it, Luke?"

"First thing tomorrow morning I'm paying a visit to the hunting cabin, then heading back to Portland and seeing if I can't finagle some bank records."

Rainie nodded. Luke planned on spending the rest of the evening guarding Shep's house. He didn't take his friendships lightly.

"That brings us to you, Quincy. Where are we with No Lava and Shep?"

"What?" Luke sat up tensely. He'd been absent during their last discussion, when Shep's actions had been questioned.

"It's okay," Quincy said, raising a calming hand.

"Nothing came of it ' "d.a.m.n right!" Luke spat out.

"According to the school staff," Quincy continued evenly, 'no one saw Shep enter the building before the shooting. Plus, his patrol log puts him at Hank's hardware store a little after one, which Hank confirmed.

At that point, it's questionable whether he had the time to drive to the school and commit murder before one-thirty."

"You examined his patrol log?" Luke was still offended. Quincy ignored him.

"So we can count Shep out. That brings me to the person writing e-mails to Danny from No I did learn a few things there.

One, according to Sandy O'grady, the No Lava address was actually Melissa Avalon's account."

"Melissa Avalon was the one writing Danny e-mails?" Sanders interrupted.

Quincy shook his head.

"I don't think so. Melissa saw Danny every day, so there wouldn't be a

need for her to be sending him lots of mail. Plus, I tried checking AOL's member directory on Thursday to see if I could find a record of a No Lava and nothing came up. This afternoon I followed up with an AOL technician. According to service logs, No Lava was listed in their directory until Monday at six p.m." when the account was canceled and the caller ordered all traces of the member name removed. I'm willing to bet that our shooter made that call at the same time that she was purging the hard drives of the school's computers."

"She?" Luke questioned.

Quincy pursed his lips.

"According to Richard Mann, Danny had implied that his pen pal was female. It's an interesting possibility. I just don't like Mann as the sole source of information. On the other hand, that might explain a few things. We've certainly looked at a lot of suspects without coming up with any strong candidates. Maybe we are looking at the wrong gender. G.o.d knows Danny gravitates more toward women both his mother and Melissa Avalon. In many ways, he'd be more vulnerable to a manipulative female than a male."

"Maybe Mrs. VanderZanden found out what her husband was doing,"

Sanders said slowly, finally understanding Quincy's earlier line of questioning.

"And maybe Angelina finally caught on to her real role in her husband's life," Luke filled in.

"Can't be fun to figure out you're nothing but a place holder for a too-old daughter."

They all turned and stared at Rainie.

"What? Because I got double-X chromosomes I magically know what drives women to kill?"

Luke appeared abashed. Sanders, on the other hand, nodded matter-of-factly.

Rainie rolled her eyes. She said briskly, "Let's bring this all together. Fact one, someone else was involved in the shootings on Tuesday."

Everyone nodded.

"This person is at least five-foot-six, proficient with computers, and also gun savvy."

"And how." Sanders flipped to a gray-colored tab. Gray for guns?

Christ, these state boys had too much time on their hands.

"Got an update on the ballistics info. You'll like this at least, the ballistics department is very pleased with themselves. They want to write this up as a case study. Okay, so the ME identifies one .22-caliber slug with no evidence of rifling but containing a polymer residue. Also found, one .38-caliber casing with faint traces of polymer residue. Finally, also discovered once the crime-scene technicians were told to look for it in the debris bags -three tiny pieces of plastic, which fit together to form a single unit about the size and shape of a pen cap. Anyone, anyone? What do we have?"

"I hate riddles," Rainie said flatly.

But Luke Hayes breathed, with near reverence, "A sabot."

"Nice work, Officer."

"What the h.e.l.l is a sabot doing in a school shooting?" Luke said with a frown.

"What the h.e.l.l is a sabot?" Rainie asked.

Sanders looked at Luke, who did the honors.

"I've heard of them for hunting. Basically you take something like plastic and wrap it around a smaller-caliber slug so it will fit in a larger-caliber gun. Then a big gun can fire smaller bullets with greater velocity and mushrooming capacity. You know, for large-game hunting."

"Oh, Jesus Christ." Rainie looked at them all as if they'd gone mad.

"You mean to tell me that someone is applying techniques for large-game hunting to school grounds?"

"We don't think this has anything to do with hunting techniques,"

Sanders supplied. The ME is the one who first thought of the possibility, and that's because she'd read about it once before in a mob shooting in New Jersey. The other advantage of making a sabot, you see, is that it makes the slug hard to trace. No rifling marks, no matching with a murder weapon. Also, this answers Rainie's question about why only one shot to the forehead hardly a sure kill with a .22.

Well, the slug was fired by a bigger gun, meaning greater velocity, more force. Whoever we're looking for isn't dumb." Rainie turned this over in her mind, trying to see how it was done.

She spared a glance at Quincy, who had a curious look on his face, as if many things were becoming magically clear. She was happy for him.

Personally, between the little scene with George Walker and now this, her temples were pounding and her hand had a tremor she hoped no one would notice.