Free Scene of the Crime by Anne Wingate Page A

autopsy should, depending on the jurisdiction, turn the slug over to the investigating officer or directly over to the lab.
    What Would Happen in Your Jurisdiction?
    How do you know what would happen in your jurisdiction?
    Ask the crime-scene technician. You may need to ask a public relations officer to introduce you to the crime-scene technician, but chances are the public relations officer himself or herself does not possess the crime-scene information you need.
    While you're about it, find out whether your jurisdiction has a coroner only, a medical examiner only, or a coroner and a medical examiner. If it has a coroner, find out what his/her qualifications are. Many coroners are no more than funeral directors. You can do a lot in fiction with an incompetent coroner.
    Things get more complicated if the shooting took place outside, or if (as sometimes happens) the slug went through a wall and exited outdoors. That's when it sometimes takes a careful search, using metal detectors if possible, to locate the slug. In that case, triangula-tion is especially important, as a line drawn from the final location of the slug through the hole in the wall can usually be extended to locate the exact spot from which the weapon was fired and, often, the height of the person who fired it as well.
    Once that has been determined, experts can, if necessary, determine from what positions the muzzle flash should have been visible and from what places the report should have been audible. Although in real life this is rarely useful, in fiction it may be possible to locate a potential witness, or impeach a lying one, based on what has been determined from these tests. (I spent the better part of two years off and on trying to get a lead on a shooting that occurred in an alley, despite the fact that I was in the alley when the killing took place and didn't know about it until it was reported.)
    Oh, you want to know more about that one? Well, it was this way. We—my husband and I—were in a mortgage company that backed onto the alley, arranging for a home loan. The back door of the mortgage company was open, and all three of us—my husband and I, as well as the agent we were talking with—heard the shot. We all got up, rushed back to the door, looked out into the alley, saw no sign whatever of any trouble, decided we had heard a backfire, and went back to the discussion in progress. I found out an hour later that the owner of a somewhat disreputable pawnshop, which was located in the alley and which sold musical instruments and repaired shoes on the side, had been shot to death—almost certainly by the shot we all heard.
    Despite a lengthy and careful crime-scene investigation and a painstaking job of investigation by detectives, no suspect was ever developed. I have a few hunches of my own, as do the others who worked on the case, but none of them ended up proving anything.
    How Far Can You Shoot?
    Be aware, both in real life and in fiction, that a weapon may be able to fire farther than the person can see. Even a little .22 long rifle bullet (despite its name, it's as often used in pistols as in rifles) may travel as far as a mile, so that a person "popping cans" on a back fence in even a sparsely populated area may kill a person inside a house two blocks away. In November 1991, while I was working on this book, two young men got themselves into serious trouble on the Wasatch Front in Utah by setting up a firing range in their above-ground basement. When they began shooting at their targets with their .22s, their bullets passed out their wall and into the wall of the adjacent house, doing considerable damage. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt, and the firing range was quickly discontinued.
    In fiction as in real life, this carrying power means that the search for a slug—or the search for the place from which a weapon was fired, if it is known where the slug wound up—may occupy quite a large area.
    Collecting and Using the Brass
    In the