Chris Bohjalian - Before You Know Kindness

The reporters and the women and men with their cameras and bright lights would enter the room from the two main doors near the reception area. When they were settled, she and Spencer and Dominique would enter from the lone door that faced west and opened onto a corridor that led to the suites where the partners toiled. Already in her mind she could hear the humming in the conference room, a buzzing not unlike the burble of conversation you hear in a crowded restaurant or a courtroom before the judge has entered. The mammoth cherry conference table-its veneer always so polished that one time Paige had actually used the reflection it offered to refresh her lipstick-would be gone, as would be the smaller side tables. The sixteen leather swivel chairs with their comfortable armrests would be carted away, too, slid together like shopping carts into smaller meeting rooms at the far end of the firm. They would be replaced by forty folding chairs laid out in four neat rows of ten, and another eighteen along the walls. She was confident that most, if not all, of those seats would be taken and behind them there would be television cameras. In her head she saw three, and one of them was from a cable news network.

And in addition to the newspaper reporters and the curious magazine journalists, there would be a good number of FERAL’s allies. People from organizations with all manner of interesting acronyms, including representatives from PETA and PAWS and IDA, as well as the leaders of antihunting organizations, including the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting (CASH) and People Opposed to Deer Slaughter (PODS). It would be glorious, absolutely glorious.

She was pulled from her reverie by the trill of the receptionist’s voice on the speakerphone. Keenan Barrett had arrived for their eight thirty meeting.

BY QUARTER TO NINE the two of them had finished their coffee and were settled comfortably in her office. Spencer was supposed to join them, but he hadn’t arrived yet. And while they most certainly would not have started without him before the accident-he wouldn’t have stood for such a thing, he would have lit into them both like an acetylene torch if they had-they figured these days they might as well go ahead. This postshooting Spencer was noticeably more serene than the old model. And so they dialed their mountain man in Pennsylvania, Dan Grampbell, and began their scheduled conference call. The subject was basic, and Paige had e-mailed Grampbell on Friday to inform him precisely what they wanted to discuss: Why, in his opinion, had John Seton been unable to extract a cartridge from the chamber of a rifle the ballistics lab insisted worked perfectly?

“Ah, yes, the Adirondack with the reluctant round,” he said, once they had dispatched with the social pleasantries.

“Have you had a chance to give some thought to the question?”

“A bit,” he said, “but without examining the weapon myself I can only speculate.”

“That’s precisely what we’re interested in: your speculation,” Keenan said.

“Well, it was probably the ammunition. That’s what I would surmise if the lab can’t find a flaw in the gun. That is, after all, your only other variable. And so either the cartridge was defective to begin with-a factory defect, maybe-or somehow Mr. Seton damaged it. Damaged the rim. Either way, the extractor couldn’t grasp it to remove it from the chamber.”

“How would someone have damaged the rim of a bullet?” Paige asked, sitting forward in her chair.

“That’s a tough one. For obvious reasons, they don’t damage easily. But I have seen cases where loading and unloading the same round over and over eventually dents the rim. The extractor is biting into the tiny lip on the casing multiple times, and-on rare occasions-ultimately breaks it down. Imagine stripping the head of a screw. It’s not unlike that. What did the lab say about the cartridge?”

“They didn’t say anything.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about guns, Dan,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “That’s why we have you.”

“Well, I’d give them a call. Ring them right up!”

DAN GRAMPBELL was replaced on the speakerphone in her office by Myles McAndrew, the engineer in Maryland who had examined John Seton’s rifle and written the report.

“We didn’t look at the casing because it was gone when we received the firearm,” McAndrew said. “We presumed the owner or the state police in-where was the accident, Vermont?”

“New Hampshire.”

“That’s right, New Hampshire. Thank you. We just assumed that someone in New Hampshire had removed the casing before your paralegal brought the rifle to us.” The man sounded a bit like a public radio newscaster: His voice was calm and even and assured. Unflappable.

“Why would someone do that?”

“Remove the casing? I would only be hypothesizing.”

“Please, Mr. McAndrew,” Keenan said, jumping in. “We seem to be surrounded by people whose opinions we prize enough to pay handsomely for them, yet who seem, at the moment, constitutionally unwilling to offer them. So, please: Hypothesize. Is a spent casing dangerous?”

“No. Of course not.”

“But someone removed it?”

“The rifle was empty when it arrived here in Maryland.”

“Could it have fallen out accidentally?” Paige asked.

“Not easily it couldn’t,” McAndrew said. “The bolt would have to be open-which, as you know, in theory should automatically eject a casing that remains in the chamber. This time, apparently, that didn’t happen. But the bolt has to be open. That’s the first thing. Then, perhaps, if the firearm were cracked solidly against something, it’s conceivable the tremor might dislodge it. But that’s a lot of accident to happen to one gun and one casing.”

“What are you implying?” Keenan asked.

“I’m not implying anything. I am, per your request, Mr. Barrett, offering my opinion because you prize it and are paying the lab what you consider a handsome fee. Remember? My suggestion is that you call the owner. Or the state police. Maybe they can tell you where the casing went.”

She watched as Keenan drew long blue lines with his fountain pen on the pad before him. He was pressing so hard that she could see the nib was slicing through the top sheet of paper.

IT TOOK TIME to find the right people at the state police, but by midmorning she had spoken with a trooper who could review the Seton paperwork at the firearms locker at the barracks, as well as Sergeant Ned Howland.

And, still, there was no Spencer McCullough. He’d actually called while they’d been on the phone with McAndrew and left a message on her voice mail-both she and Keenan thought he’d sounded a tad less somnambulant than usual-saying that he was running late and would have to pass on their meeting. He said he would probably just go straight to his office and catch up with Keenan there.

Howland finally called her back from a cell phone on the road a little before ten thirty, his clipped voice disappearing briefly at first into the black hole that seemed to suck in so many syllables of cell phone conversations in New England. Still, she could hear enough of Howland’s replies to her questions to understand clearly that he was corroborating exactly what that other trooper at the barracks had told them: There had been no casing in John Seton’s gun. Howland said that until he learned the rifle had had a live round jammed in the chamber, he’d simply presumed the casing had been ejected. When he first picked the rifle up off the ground near the trunk of an apple tree at the end of the old woman’s driveway, he thought the bolt had been open.

But he wasn’t absolutely positive about that.

He was, however, confident that the chamber was empty.