Walling—is our guy. Anyway, we raised the question and then decided to go with a classification of homicide because of three reasons. One, when we found Bill, his hair was parted the wrong way. For twenty years he’d been coming in the office, his part is on the left. We find him dead and the part’s on the right. That was a little thing but there were two others and they add up. Next was the forensics. We had a guy swab the mouth for GSR so we could make a determination if the gun was in his mouth or held a few inches outside or what. We got the GSR but we also got some gun oil and a third substance that we haven’t been able to identify properly. Until we could explain it I wasn’t comfortable going suicide on this.”
“What can you tell me about the substance?” Thompson asked.
“Some kind of animal-fat extract. There’s pulverized silicon in it, too. It’s in the forensic report that you’ve got in that file, too.”
I thought I saw Thompson glance at Backus and then away, a tacit admission of knowledge.
“You know it?” Grayson asked, seeming to catch the impression.
“Not offhand,” Thompson said. “I’ll get the specifics from the report and have the lab in Quantico run it on the computer. I’ll let you know.”
“What was the third reason?” Backus asked, quickly leaving the subject.
“The third reason came from Jim Beam, Orsulak’s old partner. He’s retired now.”
“That’s his name, Jim Beam?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, the Beamer. He called me up from Tucson after he heard about Bill and asked if we’d recovered the slug. I said sure, we dug it out of the wall behind his head. Then he asked me if it was gold.”
“Gold?” Backus asked. “Real gold?”
“Yes. A golden bullet. I told him no, it was a lead slug like all the others in his clip. Like the one we dug out of the floor, too. We’d figured that the floor shot was the first one, a get-up-the-courage shot. But then Beamer told me it was no suicide, that it was murder.”
“And how did he know this?”
“He and Orsulak went back a lot of years and he knew that Orsulak occasionally . . . hell, there probably isn’t a single cop who hasn’t thought about it at one time or another.”
“Killing himself,” Walling said, a statement, not a question.
“Right. And Jim Beam tells me that one time Orsulak showed him this golden bullet that he got from somewhere, he didn’t know, a mail-order catalog or something. And he says to Beamer, ‘This is my golden parachute. When I can’t take it no more, this one’s for me.’ So what Beam was saying was no golden bullet, no suicide.”
“Did you find the golden bullet?” Walling asked.
“Yeah, we found it. After we talked to Beam we found it. It was in the drawer right next to his bed. Like it was kept nearby in case he ever needed it.”
“So that convinced you.”
“In totality, all three things leaned it way over toward homicide. Murder. But like I said, I wasn’t convinced of anything until you walked in here and told your story. Now I got a hard-on for this Poet the size of—sorry for the offense, Agent Walling.”
“None taken. We all have a hard-on for him. Was there a suicide note?”
“Yes, and that’s the thing that made it so hard for us to call it a homicide. There was a note and damn if it wasn’t in Bill’s writing.”
Walling nodded that what he had just said was no surprise.
“What did the note say?”
“It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was like a poem. It said—well, hold on here. Agent Thomas, let me borrow that file a sec.”
“Thompson,” Thompson said as he handed it over.
“Sorry.”
Grayson looked through some pages until he found what he wanted. He read it out loud.
“ ‘Mountains toppling evermore / Into seas without a shore.’ That was it.”
Walling and Backus looked at me. I opened the book and started paging through the poems.
“I remember the line but I’m not sure where.”
I went to the poems that the Poet had already used and started reading quickly. I found it in “Dream-Land,” the poem used twice before, including the note left on my brother’s windshield.
“I got it,” I said.
I held the book out so Rachel could read the poem. The others crowded around her as well.
“Son of a bitch,” Grayson muttered.
“Can you give us a rundown on how you think it happened?”