“Silencer?” Sheriff Dennis says to Kaiser.
Kaiser nods absently. He appears to be pondering some complex question. “Shooting through glass is no simple thing. That difficulty is the only thing that saved Henry’s life. SWAT teams have a special technique for that kind of shot. They use two shooters. The first shoots out the glass, and the second takes out the target. They make the shots so fast that the target doesn’t have time to react to the first shot. Which means the primary shooter—the one making the kill shot—fires even before the hole he will fire through actually exists. To an untrained ear, it might sound like a single shot.”
“Never heard of that,” says a deputy on the periphery of our group.
“But unless we have a pair of police- or military-trained snipers roaming this parish,” I point out, “that’s not what happened.”
“The glass in there looked pretty thin,” Jordan observes.
“When was this hospital built?” asks Kaiser.
“Nineteen sixty-one,” says the hospital administrator.
“No polymers back then,” says Kaiser. “Thin glass to start with, and it would be brittle after all this time. If the shooter fired at a right angle to the glass, the bullet’s deflection would be minimal, even with a small caliber.”
“How small?” asks Sheriff Dennis. “Not a .22, huh?”
“Twenty-two Magnum.” Kaiser takes a plastic pill bottle from his pocket and holds it up. “We dug this round out of the wall a few minutes ago. This is the one that grazed Henry’s skull. The glass probably affected the rotation of the bullet just enough to save his life.”
The FBI agent looks up the hallway. Four of the five people listed in the deputy’s log have arrived for the mini-lineup. (One male aide apparently went off-duty but is on his way back to the hospital.) Caitlin and the deputy quickly agree that these four nurses and aides did in fact enter Henry’s room. What they can’t remember is whether anyone else did.
“Wait a second,” Caitlin says. “When Henry woke up, he told me he’d gotten a visit from somebody. I thought he was hallucinating. He said the guy thanked him for his good work, and then left.”
“Did he mention a name?” Kaiser asks.
“No. He said it was a black guy … about sixty years old. Henry said the man said he was ‘just one of Albert’s boys.’ That’s why I thought he was hallucinating. Oh, and he was supposedly wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.”
“Detroit Tigers?” Kaiser echoes. “Henry was talking like the guy had just been there?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t sure. He said it might have been when Sherry stepped out for something.”
“There was a guy like that stopped by a good while back,” offers the deputy. “When I first came on duty, before lunch.”
“And you didn’t think he was suspicious?” Walker asks in a challenging tone.
The deputy shrugs. “Well … he was black, you know? I figured he was a friend of Henry’s. He sure wasn’t no Double Eagle. But I got his name, boss. It oughta be there on the list.”
Kaiser grabs the list and scans it. At first he says nothing, but then he starts shaking his head, and his mouth shows the hint of a smile.
“What is it?” asks the sheriff.
“Gates Brown,” says Kaiser. “Ever hear that name?”
“Sounds familiar,” says Dennis, cutting his eyes at me. “Who is he?”
Kaiser laughs outright. “Gates Brown was a pinch hitter for the Detroit Tigers in the late sixties and seventies. Batted left-handed but threw right-handed. He won a World Series with the Tigers in 1968. Batted four-fifty.”
“How do you know all that?” asks the deputy, marveling at the FBI agent’s encyclopedic memory.
“I had a radioman from Detroit in my platoon in Vietnam. Black kid. He never stopped talking about Gates Brown. He liked him because Brown had been discovered while playing for a reform school team.”
“Well, what the hell does this mean?” asks Sheriff Dennis, glancing at me every few seconds.
Kaiser looks hard at the frazzled deputy. “Did you ask to see Mr. Brown’s ID, or did you just ask him to sign the book?”
“I looked at his driver’s license.”
“Did the name on the license match the signature?”
The deputy goes red again.
“Goddamn it,” Walker curses.
Kaiser holds up his hand to calm the sheriff. “So—Henry had a visitor who used an assumed name. A man who may have worked for Albert Norris when he was a boy. We’ll have to try to find out what we can about ‘Mr. Brown.’”