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Claire’s normally steady hands shook as she put the fragment into a glassine envelope. Then we both signed the paperwork, and I called the crime lab.
I heard Claire say to the dead man on her table, “Mr. Fong, honey, I know you can’t hear me, but I want to say thank you.”
Claire’s Pathfinder was just outside the ambulance bay. I moved her dry cleaning from the passenger seat and strapped myself in.
“Kind of like in the Manson killings,” I said as we pulled out onto Harriet Street. “Two sets of murders — Tate and LaBianca. Two sets of cops working side by side for weeks before they realized that the same perps did the killings. And now this. Macklin’s crew working Wei Fong’s case, coming up with nothing.”
“Until he died. You’ve got everything?” Claire asked.
“Yep. I do.”
The bullet fragment was resting within my breast pocket. The gun was inside a sealed paper bag between my feet. We took the 280 to Cesar Chavez, and from there went to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the crime lab was housed inside a blue-and-gray concrete building.
Claire parked in a spot under one of the three Phoenix palms standing sentry in the parking lot.
I was out of the car an instant before Claire set the hand brake.
Chapter 135
THE CRIME LAB’S DIRECTOR, Jim Mudge, was waiting inside his office. He greeted us, took the paper bag from me, and then removed Alfred Brinkley’s lethal friend “Bucky.”
We followed Mudge down the hall, second door to the right, and into the indoor range, where he handed the gun to the firearms inspector, who fired the Smith & Wesson Model 10 handgun into a long water-filled chamber. He retrieved the .38 slug and handed it back to me.
“Here you are, Sarge. Good luck with it. Bring that bastard down.”
Mudge escorted Claire and me down to a room at the end of the hallway. It had a horseshoe arrangement of tables and workstations, and a long wall of comparison microscopes.
A young woman greeted us, saying, “I’m Petra. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I handed her the .38 slug from Alfred Brinkley’s gun and the fragment Claire had removed from Mr. Fong’s brain.
I sucked in my breath and mentally crossed my fingers.
Claire and I crowded around the technician as she set each of the rounds on a stage under the microscope.
Petra was smiling when she stepped back and said, “Take a look for yourselves.”
It was clear even to me as I peered through the double eyepieces and compared the two slugs.
The striations, the lands and grooves on the fragment, were a match to the bullet just fired from Alfred Brinkley’s gun.
The fragment was from the sixth shot, which Alfred Brinkley had fired at Claire’s son Willie — and missed.
That same bullet was going to put Alfred Brinkley on trial again.
I turned to Claire but didn’t know whether to slap her a high five or hug her — so I did first one, then the other.
“Got him,” Claire said as we held each other.
Chapter 136
AN HOUR LATER, Rich Conklin and I stood in a gray room full of small tables and chairs at Atascadero. Brinkley entered, looking rosy-cheeked and well-fed.
I thought he might ask me to dance, he looked so glad to see me. “Do you miss me, Lindsay? Because I sure think about the last time I saw you!”
“Don’t bother to sit down, Fred,” I told him. “We’re here to arrest you. We’re charging you with homicide.”
“You’re joking. Kidding me, right?”
