Free Out of Season by Steven F. Havill Page B

low in the back, just above the pelvis. My guess is that’s where some of the shattering took place. At least two pieces continued on for some distance, stopping where you see them in the X-ray.”
    “And if the aorta was opened up, death would have been instantaneous,” Buscema said flatly.
    “Just about. Seconds at most.” Francis held his thumb and index finger two inches apart. “You’ve got a tear that long. He wouldn’t have had time to do more than take a couple of breaths. That little piece of brass is like a fragment of a razor blade. Just unzips the artery.”
    “He collapses forward, and down the plane goes,” Buscema said. “It fits. Before the passenger has time to realize what’s happening or to lunge for the controls. Bam!”
    “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Eddie, I want you and Abeyta to put this thing together. Be goddam sure nothing gets misplaced. You get all the fragments and make a composite. I want to know what this goddam thing was. If it was a bullet, I want the caliber, manufacture, grain weight, everything. Rifling twist, everything.”
    “Yes, sir,” Mitchell said, and Buscema handed him the plastic bag.
    “It had to come from the ground,” I said. “Do you see any other way?”
    Buscema shook his head. “There’s no other way that makes sense,” he said. “We need to know where the plane was struck. If a high-velocity rifle bullet punched through the aluminum skin, it wouldn’t be deformed or deflected much. But if it hit frame members, or cables, or the frame of the pilot’s seat, it very easily could be.”
    “The entrance hole in the victim’s back was extremely small,” Francis said. “It wasn’t the sort of wound I’d associate with being struck full-on by a high-velocity bullet.”
    “So it was a fragment to begin with,” Buscema said, and Francis nodded.
    “Then we’ve got three big jobs, Mr. Gastner,” the federal agent said. “One, we need to put that airplane back together and find out just what the hell happened. Reconstruct where and how that bullet hit the airframe. It’s a comparatively small plane, but that’s still going to take time. Does the county have a vacant hangar we can use?”
    “We’ll find one.”
    “The second thing is to determine what kind of bullet it was. The Bureau has resources that you don’t, so I wouldn’t waste any time before calling them in on this.”
    “I’ve already done that,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said.
    “Good,” Buscema nodded. “You got the bullet, and we find out where and how it hit the airplane. That leaves just the big one.”
    “Who fired it,” I said.
    “And why,” Estelle added.

C HAPTER E LEVEN
    Saying what we had to do was a hell of a lot easier than doing it. What Vincent Buscema wanted first was a telephone, and while he barked orders to whoever was on the other end, I sent Eddie Mitchell down to the airport to secure a hangar.
    The vacant hangar was the easy part. The Posadas Municipal Airport had enjoyed a spurt of growth and activity back in the early 1970’s, when Consolidated Mining still believed that ore-rich deposits were available under the rugged slopes of Cat Mesa. Those glory days lasted for about a decade.
    Three hangars now stood empty, and Jim Bergin handed over the keys to what he called CMCO-2. The sixty-by-hundred-foot hangar had once housed Consolidated’s Gulf-stream Jet, a couple of executive cars, and the hulks of half a dozen odd pieces of mining equipment that hadn’t made their way to the Consolidated boneyard up on the hill.
    The machinery still remained, but there was plenty of floor space, blow-sand streaked, to lay out the torn pieces and chunks of Phil Camp’s Bonanza.
    As soon as Buscema was off the telephone, he beckoned Estelle and me and we followed him into one of the doctors’ conference rooms. “First things first,” he said and closed the door. “That crash site has to be secured for the night.”
    “We’ll have deputies up there,” I