Rita, The Computer Forensics Tech

That was interesting. Three men who would have known how to make a rifle cartridge had been off the set on the day of the murder. I don't believe in coincidences.

I looked him right in the eyes and frowned.

"You do realize that lying to a police officer in the investigation of a murder could result in you being charged with felony obstruction, don't you?"

He tried to talk his way out of it.

"Well, it wasn't really a lie. Their weapons were checked. I just didn't do the checking. I did make sure it was me who gave them the powder charges though."

"By powder charges, to you mean for just the rifles, or did you give them powder charges for their revolvers too?"

I could feel his leg shaking his desk by then.

"Well...the rifles yes. I tried to give them powder charges for their revolvers too, but they said it was against their rules to fire handguns during a re-enactment."

He looked up at me then.

"Is that what happened...one of them shot him with a revolver?"

I said was I was still investigating that, but that I had some other questions for him.

"Those three men you said called in sick on the day of the murder, I'll need their names and where they're staying. I also need to know where you were and what you were doing between the time the camera's started rolling and when they stopped."

The armorer looked at his watch.

"Well, my guys came back to work today. They're in our trailer making up charges for the shoot on Friday, but it's almost time for lunch. You can probably catch them in the cafeteria tent in about ten minutes.

"As for me, I was sitting next to the director from the time he started the cameras until that ambulance came racing off the field. You can check with him and he'll verify that."

I was able to connect with the three men who worked for the armorer, but they didn't have much to add. According to all three, they'd just stayed in their hotel rooms that morning. When I asked if there was anyone who could verify that, two of them started to chuckle. The third, an older man, was frowning when he answered me.

"Detective, call your own goddamned department and they'll verify it. These two fucking assholes damned near got all three of us arrested. They called some fucking escort service and had a woman sent to my room at seven that morning. She was really pissed off when I told her I hadn't called her. Started yelling and screaming at me that I owed her two hundred bucks. That was enough to get the desk clerk to come see what happened.

"When he showed up, the woman started yelling at him too, so he called the cops. They got the woman to leave and then told all three of us if they got another call, they'd take us downtown and charge us with disturbing the peace."

I said I'd check that out and then asked if they knew of anyone who might have a gripe with the Production Company. All three said anybody with a problem would take it up with their union representative instead of doing anything themselves.

The director walked into the tent at about that time, so I sat down with him while he ate. I asked him if there had been any problems on the set that might have made someone mad. He shook his head.

"This crew is one of the best in the business. They do get upset sometimes, but they always let the union rep handle it. Union grievances are pretty common because they'll get paid a little to settle it, but it's just little stuff. The last one was one of the grips complained that his frenchfries were soggy. Before that, it was a gay guy complaining that we didn't have enough gay guys in the crew."

I asked him if anyone had been fired recently. He thought for a couple seconds and then nodded.

"As a matter of fact, yes. The assistant production manager fired his secretary a couple days after we got here. I don't know the whole story, but the rumor is he was fucking the secretary and his wife found out about it. As far as I know, the girl flew back to LA the next day."

While I was there, I walked out to the roped off area on the set where Mr. Anderson's body had been found and looked around.

The site was probably pretty typical of a small Civil War battleground. The field wasn't really all that big and on both sides were stands of trees. It looked to me like from where Mr. Anderson fell down to the trees on the Confederate side was less than a football field away. A shooter could have easily hidden in those trees and shot Mr. Anderson. With all the noise of the other shooting and the cannons, nobody would have heard the shot. I wondered if Rita could give me a location so I drove back to the station.

I took all my disks back to the computer forensics lab and asked Don if I could borrow Rita again. He grinned.

"Business or personal? It's only fair to warn you that a few of the uniforms have tried, but she seems to not be all that interested in men. I don't know if she likes girls or not, but if she does, it's a damned waste."

I told Don what I was trying to do and he walked me over to Rita's desk and told her to put everything else she was working on aside and do whatever she could to help me. When he walked away, Rita frowned.

"This must be something really important. Don's never said anything like that before. We always take things on a first come, first served basis."

I said there was a lot of pressure on the department to solve this case as quickly as possible because the Governor of Tennessee was involved. She grinned then.

"OK, whatcha need me for?"

What followed was about three hours of me standing there and being amazed that one woman could do more to solve my case than I could ever hope to. She found the disk with an almost overhead view of the field and then found the frame where Mr. Anderson fell. She backed up a few frames until he was standing and then turned to look at me.

"Do we know the path of the bullet?"

I nodded and showed her the drawing from the coroner's report. She used her mouse to draw a line on Mr. Anderson from the approximate entry point of the bullet to the place on his back where the bullet stopped, then extended that line into the trees.

"OK, that's probably about as close as I can get it. How far away do you think the shooter was?"

"Jerry said probably between a hundred and a hundred and fifty yards."

Rita used her mouse to draw a circle from Mr. Anderson to a point on the line a hundred yards from him, and then and then drew another circle at a hundred and fifty yards. She pointed at the screen with her mouse then.

"At a hundred yards, there's no cover for a shooter. The trees don't start until..."

Rita drew another circle, this time from Mr. Anderson to the first tree close to the line.

"It's about a hundred and ten yards to the first tree, maybe ten more to this little group of trees and bushes. A man could probably hide behind that group of trees and bushes."

I asked Rita if she could print that picture with the lines so I could go back to the field and find that set of trees. She grinned.

"The metadata can record the GPS coordinates for the camera location, but for some reason it wasn't done. If I can find where that camera was, I can get you to within maybe ten feet of where the shooter might have been."

I didn't know where Camera Six was, so I told Rita I'd have to drive out to the set, find that location, and then call her. She smiled that sensuous smile then.

"Don said I was to do anything I could to help you. Why don't I take my GPS unit and laptop and come with you? If I'm there, it'll save us some time."

It was two in the afternoon when I pulled up to security at the set. They knew me by now, so they didn't ask me for my ID. While he was checking Rita's, the security guard said the director was in the screening trailer looking at the dailys, and that's where we found him.

When he saw Rita, he smiled.

"Sweetheart, you should be in movies. I could arrange a screen test for you when we get done here if you're interested."

Well, it was like someone had flipped Rita's switch from soft and sexy to hard and bitchy. She glared at the director when she answered.

"My name is Rita Bailey, Miss Bailey to you. I came out here with Detective Mason to work, not to hear some lame come-on you've probably used a thousand times. The only thing more I want to hear come out of your mouth is the location of Camera Six on the day the man was killed on your set. I think that's a little more important then trying to schmooze me enough you can get your probably little dick in me."

The director swallowed hard and then said, "It's on a boom truck and it's still where it was that day. I'll have to show you."

When we got to the boom truck, Rita pulled a GPS unit from her backpack, then sat down on the fender of the machine. She touched a couple buttons on the GPS unit and then looked at the screen.

"OK, now I know where the video was shot. Now, let's see where your victim fell. I'm going to change my shoes first, though. I thought we'd probably be walking so I brought my walking shoes."

I figured Rita was going to pull a pair of running shoes out of her backpack. Instead, she pulled out a pair of ankle high leather hiking boots with cleated soles. She slipped off her low heels, pulled a pair of socks from the boots, then sat down on the fender and pulled them on. After she put on the boots and tied the laces, she stuffed her heels into her backpack, picked up the GPS unit and said she was ready.

When we got to the roped off area, Rita looked at her GPS unit again, then pulled a laptop out of her backpack and asked me to hold it. After it booted, she tapped some keys and then showed me the screen.

"I loaded the frame from your video along with my line. I just have to put in these coordinates and we'll know where to go."

Rita tapped some more keys and then smiled and pointed at the trees.

"OK, we need to walk that way."

As we walked, Rita kept watching her GPS. When we came to a tree, she said, "OK, this is the tree on the line I drew. Doesn't look like there's much to hide behind though. If he was here, he'd have been caught by one of the cameras. We need to go farther."

There was a short patch of open ground and then the clump of trees I'd seen on the video. I stopped Rita before she could walk any closer.

"Let me walk around and see if I see anything. If I do, I'll call the crime lab and have them send a couple techs out to find any evidence that might be here."

I couldn't see anything in that clump of trees that looked like a person had been there, so I walked back to Rita.

"There's nothing here that looks unusual."

Rita grinned.

"Yes, there is. See that gap in the leaves on this bush? I looked while you were on the other side. The branches have been cut to make a hole in the bush. See how the pieces are laying on the ground in front of the bush? That's where he left them after he made the hole."

I looked but I wasn't convinced.

"How do you know it wasn't just some animal that broke off the branches?"

Rita stepped to that bush and picked up a twig with wilted leaves and showed it to me. The end was cut through cleanly.

"I don't know of any animals that carry knives, do you?"

It took half an hour before two techs from the crime lab showed up. I'd told them where we were, so they drove their SUV across the field and then unloaded their cases. One took pictures while the other gathered up some of the cut twigs and put them into an evidence bag. Then they got down on their hands and knees and started moving slowly into the clump of brush and trees.

A few minutes later, Christy yelled, "I found a cartridge case...no, make that two."

When Christy came out, she was holding two brass cartridge cases in her gloved hand.

"They're from a.44 magnum, and they haven't been here long. They're still bright and shiny so they might have fingerprints or DNA. There's also a place where the ground has been disturbed like somebody was sitting there. I'll take some pictures, but they won't show much other than that somebody was here."

While Christy and Joe took pictures and then roped of the area with evidence tape, I asked Rita how she knew what to look for. She just smiled that smile again.

"I was what they used to call a change baby. Mama and Daddy hadn't been able to have kids and Mama thought she was old enough they didn't have to use anything. I sort of surprised them, but they were happy.

"Since Daddy didn't have a boy to raise, he taught me what he'd have taught a boy. I was prowling around in the woods with him from the time I was about four so I learned a lot about things most girls never learn. I caught my first fish when I was five, and I got my first deer when I was twelve.

"I knew that branches don't just fall off trees and bushes by themselves, so when I saw the white ends of the cut branches, I knew something had to do that. Since they were cut and not chewed or broken, that meant it had to be a person."

I turned back then and looked at the roped off area where Mr. Anderson had fallen.

"Rita, if you've hunted deer, could you make a shot like this?"

She nodded.

"If I had my two-seventy with a scope, I could. With a forty-four magnum pistol, never in a million years."

"Well, what if I said the shooter used a rifle? Jerry said he found a rifle chambered for that cartridge."

"Well, maybe I could, but it would be tough. Big bullets like that lose speed pretty fast and they drop like a rock. I'd have to spend some time on a range first."

She paused then for a second.

"Well, maybe it wouldn't be quite as hard as I think. We're on higher ground here, so I wouldn't have to hold quite as high."

I hadn't even thought about the shooter's elevation and neither had Jerry other than he might have been on a horse, but things were starting to make sense. If the shooter was higher up than my victim, the bullet would be dropping at the same rate, but the angle of the wound would be just like Harry had found during his autopsy.

I looked at Rita.

"Can that GPS unit tell you the elevation as well as the coordinates?"

She nodded.

"Yes, but Google Earth can do it better."

When we got back to Rita's desk, she pulled up Google Earth and entered the coordinates of the clump of trees and brush and labeled it as "hide". Then she entered the coordinates of the location where Mr. Anderson was standing when he was shot and labeled it "victim". After drawing a path between them, she clicked a couple more keys and an elevation graph appeared at the bottom of the screen. Rita moved the mouse back and forth a couple times and then said the clump of trees and brush was about thirty feet higher than the field.

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I took that information to Jerry's lab and asked him if he could calculate the entry angle for the bullet if it was fired from thirty feet above the victim. He said, "Sure".

A couple minutes later he smiled.

"The bullet would have entered your victim at about sixteen degrees from horizontal. That's just a guess because it would depend upon a lot of other things, but I'd say more than ten and less than twenty."

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After two days, I finally had some hard facts I could work with. I knew the shooter wasn't part of the cast or crew that was on the set at the time of the murder. I also knew with a high probability how Mr. Edwards was killed and where the killer was when he killed Mr. Edwards.

What I didn't know was who or why. The who might be solved if Christy could get prints or DNA from the two cartridge cases. The why was still the question and I had several motives to check out. One was obviously the life insurance. A second was the other contractor who lost a job to Mr. Anderson, and there were the two carpenters he'd fired. Mrs. Anderson had left me a phone message their names and addresses.

I spent the rest of the day tracking down and talking with the contractor and the two carpenters. I caught up with the contractor on a job site and he told me he'd done what Mr. Anderson's wife said he had, but then said he'd never kill anyone over a business deal because he was still doing very well even without the house he'd lost to Mr. Anderson.

"I had four other projects going up and if I'd gotten that house, I'd have had to hire some subs to get everything done on time and that would have hurt my profits on the job. Yes, I was pissed that I lost that job, but it didn't hurt me financially. Even if it had, I wouldn't have done anything about it. It happens, that's all. I you can't accept that you lost a bid and go on to the next, you can't be a successful contractor."

I tended toward believing him because he was completely at ease. I didn't cross him off my list, but he moved to the bottom.

A call to the local chapter of the carpenter's union told me my two carpenters were working on a new house on the other side of Nashville. One of the carpenters laughed when I asked him about being fired for being drunk on the job.

"That's what we wanted to happen. See, Willie and me - Willie's my brother - Willie and me signed a contract with Mr. Anderson for the job we were working on. He always made people sign a contract to work on one of his jobs so they couldn't leave if something better came up. We signed his contract and then this job came up and it paid more. The only way out of our contract was to get our asses fired, so we drank half a beer and then showed up on the site and acting like we was drunk. Mr. Anderson don't tolerate no drinkin' on the job, so he done what we figured he'd do. He fired both of us. Now, we're making ten percent more than we did with him."

The last thing to check on was the insurance, so I called the insurance company that held the policy on Mr. Anderson. After I explained who I was and what I needed to know, the girl said she'd transfer me to the agent.

The agent asked me who I was and what I wanted and when I told him, he said he'd get the file. I listened to crappy music for about two minutes until he came back on the line.

"Yes, we have that policy. Mrs. Anderson is listed as the only beneficiary. She called this morning to ask what she had to do to receive the money. We're just waiting on the determination of what caused his death and that's what I told her."

I said the coroner had already issued his report so the insurance company could get it at any time. He said they already had that report, but were waiting because of the double indemnity clause.

"The double indemnity clause kicks in if the death was an accident or a murder, but not if the beneficiary was involved in Mr. Anderson's death, in this case, his wife. We're waiting on a final police report that either exonerates her or proves she was involved. I explained all that to her, and she seemed to understand. All she asked was for me to call her as soon as I knew one way or the other.

"I've known Mr. Anderson and his wife for years, so I doubt she's responsible in any way, but rules are rules."

That was my last motive and it had pretty much been blown to shreds. I'd investigated murders committed for insurance money before and the killer almost always is pounding on the door of the insurance company and wanting the check before the body is even buried.

I was trying to figure out how to trap either the contractor or Mrs. Anderson into admitting they'd killed Mr. Anderson or had him killed when Rita called me.

"Mack, can you come down to my desk. I want to run something by you."

When I got there, she was looking at the frame of the movie that she'd drawn the bullet path on.

She looked up and then pointed to the screen.

"See anything that looks odd?"

I said I didn't and she frowned.

"I didn't either until Christy found two cartridge cases. I was wondering why your shooter fired two bullets. Then I remembered you asking me if I could make that kind of shot. What I'd have probably done is fired the first shot and I'd have been watching to see where that shot hit so I could adjust my aiming point. Once I knew that, I'd adjust my aiming point and fire a second shot."