Some weeks before, a building that housed one of the city’s best music studios had been broken into; many valuable instruments and pieces of equipment had been stolen, and damage had been done. Jóhann had carried out the fingerprint examination, acquiring some exemplar prints from the staff and all the musicians who had been there recently. One set of prints in particular had attracted his attention; their owner was a guitar player, so his fingertips were unusually calloused. He had also been left-handed, and the fingerprints on the stamp frame at Birkihlíd matched those of a left-handed guitar player. Though he had taken the man’s fingerprints himself, he did not recall his face well, but he did remember the prints, and these were the same.
Now he needed to find the paperwork for the burglary and hope that those prints were still on file; privacy rights required that prints taken from innocent people during the course of a criminal investigation be destroyed as soon as the investigation was completed, but there was sometimes a bit of a delay in the process. Even if the prints had been destroyed, it would be easy enough to find the man and get some new prints. But that, Jóhann thought, would be for someone else to worry about.
Jóhann checked his notes on the shoe print that he had taken in the garden, wondering if it could possibly belong to the same man as the fingerprints on the frame. It seemed unlikely; the guitar player had not been a very large man as he could remember, but even so, the footprint they found was very small.
He was reasonably pleased with the results of his day’s work, which had established that two people had arrived at the house in the hours around the time of death—the person with the small footprint, and the left-handed guitarist. Whether these visits had anything to do with the death was another matter, and again not for him to investigate.
“That was disgusting,” Marteinn exclaimed, entering the lab and handing Jóhann a clear plastic bag containing a bloody bullet. He was short of breath from his run up the stairs to the fourth floor, a common practice of his—part of his training regimen, he claimed.
Jóhann opened the bag to examine its content. “What was disgusting?”
“The autopsy.”
“You didn’t stand over them while they were cutting?”
“Yes, wasn’t I supposed to?”
“No, not necessarily,” Jóhann said, smiling. “I always wait outside.” Moistening a cloth with denatured alcohol, he tipped the bullet from the bag onto the cloth and wiped the blood away.
“Can you find out what sort of a gun was used?”
“I’ll try,” said Jóhann, “but I’m no firearms expert. At college they told us if you are going to be any good at ballistics, you have to be crazy about guns; you can’t learn it from a book. I’ve only ever fired a gun in the lab, so my knowledge of this stuff is limited.”
He measured the diameter of the bullet with calipers.
“9.6 or 9.7 millimeters,” he said, getting up and going to the corner where Halli was working on his drawing. Jóhann put a hand on his shoulder and the boy looked up.
“Halli! We need to calculate,” Jóhann said in a loud, clear voice.
Halli looked up and smiled broadly. “Calculate, yes, I like calculating. Absolutely.”
He happily followed Jóhann to the workbench.
“First, we’ll convert to inches. What is 97 divided by 254?” Jóhann asked in a loud tone, and making sure to look Halli straight in the eye.
“What is 97 divided by 254?” Halli repeated, closing his eyes and bobbing his head up and down.
Jóhann took out a slide rule and moved the slide back and forth.
“Why do you speak so loudly to him?” Marteinn whispered.
“He’s hard of hearing,” Jóhann replied.
“I know; 97 divided by 254 is 0.3819. Absolutely,” Halli said.
Jóhann had also completed his calculations. “That’s right, 97 divided by 254 is approximately 0.38 inches, or .38 caliber.”
“That narrows the field,” Jóhann explained, turning to Marteinn. “That’s the way ballistics investigations usually work, through elimination, but if we wanted to rely on this sort of thing in court, I would send the stuff to a lab abroad for confirmation.”
He then got a small pair of scales along with a box of small weights down from a shelf; on one of its trays he placed the bullet, on the other a ten-gram weight. The side with the bullet swung down, so he kept adding one-gram weights until the scales balanced.
“Thirteen grams,” he said, looking at Halli, who had been waiting patiently. “How many grains is that? Thirteen times 15.4.”