students or the superintendent, so they may have come from the perp, or they may have come from anyone else who’d frequented the lighting booth that morning. They had no way of knowing with any certainty if anyone else had visited Gwen while she was setting up the projector, and the trace elements found in the footprints were inconclusive. So Daryl added the results to the Maybe pile. Something was better than nothing.
Next came ballistics. Unsurprisingly, the shell casings matched the ones from Amarillo and Atlanta. If there had been any doubt before that this was the same killer, or at least the same gun, that doubt was eliminated here. Ever since Atlanta, Tom had had Daryl check all available dealers of M107 .50 caliber sniper rifles. It retailed for almost $9,000 and could be purchased from over 9,000 gun shops in forty-three states (seven state legislatures had seen fit to ban it). For those who could afford it, and legally purchase it, the M107 was a popular weapon. The company which manufactured them, Barrett Firearms, boasted that it was their bestselling product.
However, the ability to purchase a sniper rifle did not equal the ability to use a sniper rifle, and this particular sniper, Galileo, was a master sharpshooter. There were no bullet holes in the walls, floor, or ceiling of the auditorium. There were no bullet holes in the stage. There were some bullet holes in the seats, but they were traced back, through blood analysis, to fragments from bullets which had already passed through brain matter. In other words, Galileo had never missed, not once. Yes, there might be thousands of owners of M107s, but how many of them fired with that degree of accuracy?
Now they were wading into Norm’s territory—profiling—so Daryl made a note to discuss the matter with his colleague, placed the ballistics reports aside, and moved on to fingerprints. Going on the assumption that Galileo gained entry into the school as a custodian, as he had at that elementary school in Atlanta and at the aquarium in Amarillo, Daryl wasn’t surprised to discover that fingerprints on file for Amos Rodman, Peralta High School’s recently hired, mysteriously vanished janitor, were nowhere to be found in the lighting booth. Daryl suspected that the fingerprints on file for Amos Rodman would be nowhere to be found anywhere in the school.
“How do you suppose he did it?” asked Dr. Wu.
“Did what?”
“Forged his fingerprints. He did the same in the other cities too, right? I mean, in order to get hired he had to go through a background check. How do you suppose he set it all up?”
Daryl shrugged his shoulders, but knew instinctively that, for a man like Galileo, setting up these false identities couldn’t have been difficult. Thinking about it some more, he realized that he too could probably fake his way through a background check. All one needed, really, was someone with a clean record (and no prints already on file) to volunteer (or better yet, be paid) to go through the motions at the local sheriff’s office. With advances in color printing and ten minutes on Adobe Photoshop, forging the documentation (recommendations, IDs) would be the easiest part of all.
If he wanted to, Daryl could drop everything, disappear off the face of the earth, and become someone else. He considered the option. It wasn’t wholly unattractive. He liked his job, sure, but there were other jobs. And he had never been to New Zealand. New Zealand looked so appealing in the movies. Did they have good WiFi access in New Zealand? Daryl made a mental note to do some research, after the case was over.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“Serology,” replied Dr. Wu.
Ah, yes. Blood.
When combined with the ballistics reports, the blood spatter analyses told the story of Ric and Gwen. They each were facing the door when they were shot. Had Galileo surprised them? Ric wasn’t even on the A/V squad. Why was he even there? Daryl had been on his high school’s A/V squad. Did he ever invite friends into the lighting booth at his high school? Of course not.
Ric and Gwen were facing the door and Galileo shot them each at close range in the forehead. The opening at the back of Ric’s skull matched the spatter on the window, while Gwen’s matched the spatter on the wall. This made sense. She would have been sitting closest to the lighting board. But according to the crime scene photographs, Ric and Gwen had been found on