Equation for Evil by Philip Caputo

Author:Philip Caputo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Evidence. Witnesses. Clues. Facts.

Cases were made or unmade by small facts.

A thread. A drop of blood. A bullet was smaller than a thumbnail.

The first thing Gabriel did after landing in Sacramento was to drive to the San Joaquin State campus and ask the chief of the university police to find out if Mace Weathers had attended classes on Friday. He kept the true reason for his inquiry to himself and said that he was looking into a ring smuggling steroids out of Mexico to California campuses. Somers’s description of Weathers as a weightlifter had been the inspiration for that cover story. Fiction met fact. It turned out that the campus cops had their eye on Weathers, suspected him of dealing steroids to the football team, but so far hadn’t found any evidence. Thrilled to be called on to assist a special agent, the chief couldn’t have been more cooperative. An hour later, he came through with disappointing news, news that made Gabriel’s elaborate theory fall into pieces, like an ice sculpture struck by a hammer.

He drove back to Sacramento through the Delta lands where the pickers’ straw hats resembled in the distance dull yellow flowers and the mobile irrigators flung streams across the fields, black and green and golden through the eucalyptus on the levees his ancestors had raised out of the mud. Charlie Christian strummed sweet chords on the tapedeck, but only one thought kept running through Gabriel’s head: If not Weathers or Tipton, then who? Who was waiting in the woods? Whose name did Boggs call out? Mace! Victory! Couldn’t have said that. Weathers had been in classes between nine A.M. and one P.M. on Friday. A small fact.

He walked slowly across the Department of Law Enforcement parking lot, like an old man lost in thought or memories, and went inside and climbed a flight of stairs to a corridor walled on one side by windows, the windows looking out on a courtyard where file clerks, fingerprint analysts, ballistics experts, biochemists, and arson specialists ate lunch under a pollen-hazed sky. He glanced at them, still thinking, if not Weathers or Tipton, then who? Maybe there wasn’t anyone. Or . . . yes, or. There was one other possibility, but he didn’t want to think about it and all the difficulties it would make for him.

He passed through double doors with round windows like portholes into another corridor that had the look of a passageway, and his mind wandered momentarily to his last ship, an old World War Two Liberty ship converted to a spy vessel for monitoring French A-bomb tests in Eniwetok, where Gabriel had seen the apocalyptic flash, the mushroom cloud spreading its radioactive cap over travel-poster seas and palm-belted atolls. Not many people had seen that sight and lived to tell about it. A sneak preview of the end of the world.

The serology lab was a large room, a zone of mysteries where blood and semen stains were analyzed and DNA chains were made to yield up their secrets.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.