August 1, 11:00 A.M. Wright and Co. Law Offices
Phoenix looked out the window somberly.
He thought, "This escapade will never end. First, I have to to be the defense attorney for a band director accused of murder, and now I am having to figure out how to prove a teenage girl innocent of the same crime! What's worse is that now, there is the drunk kid that caused a near-fatal accident right in front of the courthouse. And now the police is having to untangle the whole mess."
The defense attorney clenched his fists and groaned. He thought about the last time he had a case go smoothly and not have a million twists, turns, and surprise happenings. Furthermore, he was going to have to prove that teenage girls weren't capable of committing homicide, let alone firing a high caliber gun into someone's head.
He thought about ballistic testings the police carried out upon the murder weapon and how he proved in Bethany's trial that the rifle left on scene to mislead investigators and did not contribute to the crime itself. Phoenix almost felt like testing the effects of guns himself to see if the evidence matched up.
That was when he remembered something; a few years ago, in response to the murder of his mentor, Mia Fey, Phoenix had purchased a pistol. It only had bullets of .22 caliber, but he figured it would work as a self-defense measure in case someone tried to strike him down in the office.
He thought, "Maybe I could shoot a piece of wood and find out what kind of damage pistol bullets do. After all, a rifle didn't kill Reggie Simmons. In this case, a pistol seems to be the likely suspect. Since the bullet bored completely through his brain and skull and exited the other side, I'll need to fire the pistol into a thick piece of wood and a thin piece of wood.
After finding a few wooden planks outside near a dumpster, Phoenix headed over to the outside of the law office. He secured the planks tightly against the wall with tape, and ran back inside. He found the pistol inside the drawer of a desk in the center of the office, and came outside with it.
He looked through the sight and grinned, ridiculing the killer. "I'm gonna snipe you, Reggie. Huh huh huh!"
Phoenix then made sure the pistol was loaded and stood back 50 feet from the thin board. After he lined up the sight, he used his right index finger to press the trigger inward.
There was a loud explosion and his hand jolted upward. Gunpowder residue shot out the front, along with a volatile-smelling gas. Pulling the pistol down, he went to examine the board. He pulled it off the wall and found a hole had been torn straight through the board. The bullet had continued in flight and was imbedded at least two inches in the wall of the law office.
He repeated the same process again, this time with the thicker board. After firing, he went to see how deep the bullet imbedded. Phoenix assumed that it would bore a hole clean through it, but that was not the case. The bullet had only gone an inch into the board.
"Strange... Apparently, the killer must have used larger bullets. I remember back from the first trial that .75 caliber bullets were found in Reggie's brain, but those were from the fake murder weapon, which was the rifle, and the actual bullets were snatched by the killer. But even if a larger bullet was used, it would have just made a bigger hole."
For the next several minutes, the defense attorney tried many different methods to try and get a bullet to go through the wood completely, but to no avail. At one point, he was able to do so by firing the pistol at point-blank range, but the lack of gunpowder burns on Reggie's face contradicted such a happening.
Out of options, Phoenix thought, "If I can't replicate this murder, maybe it was done by some professional hit man. Except that's impossible because a teenager doesn't seem to be a likely target for an assassin."
He kicked downward at the board in anger and frustration, breaking it clean in half.
He headed back into the office and sat on his bed, fuming in boredom and disarray. "After all, who knows when they'll figure out the drunken kid thing?" he thought. That was when all of a sudden, he realized something. When he had kicked to board, it had instantly broken.
Phoenix yelled, "That's it! The bullets were fired downward at Reggie's head! The killer must've stood up on something, like a toilet seat, and fired the gun pointed down! The force of gravity increased the speed of the bullets!" He couldn't believe how he had come up with such a theory.
But even with this new possibility in tow, Phoenix still had to come with the terms of the case. He would still have to wait for the trial to resume, which wouldn't be until late that evening at the current pace of the investigation. So the defense attorney took a seat again on his bed, and continued to wait.