Without remorse - Tom Clancy [147]
'And who's this one?' Ryan asked.
'Would you believe, Bandanna?' the uniformed officer answered. He was an experienced patrol officer, white, thirty-two years old. 'Deals smack. Well, not anymore.'
The eyes were still open, which was not terribly common in murder victims, but this one's death had been a surprise, and a very traumatic one at that, despite which the body was amazingly tidy. There was a three-quarter-inch entrance wound with a jet-black ring around it like a donut, perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness. That was from powder, and the diameter of the hole was unmistakably that of a 12-gauge shotgun. Beyond the skin was just a hole, like into an empty box. All of the internal organs had either been immolated or simply pulled down by gravity. It was the first time in his life that Emmet Ryan had ever looked into a dead body this way, as though it were not a body at all, but a mannequin.
'Cause of death,' the coroner observed with early-morning irony, 'is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we'll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,' the man added, shaking his head.
'An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.'
'Jesus, he didn't even cough up any blood,' Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep - except for the wide and lifeless eyes.
'No diaphragm,' the ME explained, pointing to the entrance hole. 'That's between here and the heart. We'll probably find that the whole respiratory system is wiped out, too. You know, I've never seen anything this clean in my life.' And the man had been working this job for sixteen years. 'We need lots of pictures. This one will find its way into a textbook.'
'How experienced was he?' Ryan asked the uniformed officer.
'Long enough to know better.'
The detective lieutenant bent down, feeling around the left hip. 'Still has a gun here.'
'Somebody he knew?' Douglas wondered. 'Somebody he let get real close, that's for damned sure.'
'A shotgun's kinda hard to conceal. Hell, even a sawed-off is bulky. No warning at all?' Ryan stepped back for the ME to do his work.
'Hands are clean, no signs of a struggle. Whoever did this got real close without alarming our friend at all.' Douglas paused. 'Goddamn it, a shotgun's noisy. Nobody heard anything?'
'Time of death, call it two or three for now,' the medical examiner estimated, for again there was no rigor.
'Streets are quiet then,' Douglas went on. 'And a shotgun makes a shitload of noise.'
Ryan looked at the pants pockets. No bulge of a money roll, again. He looked around. There were perhaps fifteen people watching from behind the police line. Street entertainment was where you found it, and the interest on their faces was no less clinical and no more involved than that of the medical examiner.
'The Duo maybe?' Ryan asked nobody in particular.
'No, it wasn't,' the ME said at once. 'This was a single-barrel weapon. A double would have made a mark left or right of the entrance wound, and the powder distribution would have been different. Shotgun, this close, you only need one. Anyway, a single-barrel weapon.' '
'Amen,' Douglas agreed. 'Someone is doing the Lord's work. Three pushers down in a couple of days. Might put Mark Charon out of business if this keeps up.'
'Tom,' Ryan said, 'not today.' One more folder, he thought. Another drug-pusher ripoff, done very efficiently