Page 94 of The 9th Man

“So Ray and Benji were reconstructing President Kennedy’s assassination?”

“It certainly seems that way. Along with our mysterious David Eckstein.”

He pointed at the phone. “There’s a notation, DE=6M, at edge of Elm Street. David Eckstein? Apparently, Eckstein filmed the shooting with a better camera than Zapruder’s. He used a Canon 814. We know this from Simmons’s notes. I checked. It had a higher frame rate, sharper resolution, zoom, and built-in slow-motion capability.”

“So why has no one ever heard of him? That movie would’ve been sensational.”

“The guy I talked to last night told me that, for decades, there’s been an urban legend that someone else filmed the assassination, then vanished. The Warren Commission looked. So did the FBI and every conspiratorialist since. But no one was ever found. I’d bet good money that was our DE. There’s a problem with that, though. The Canon 814 didn’t go on sale until 1967, four years after the assassination.”

“That seems a serious inconsistency.”

He agreed. “The expert last night pointed out another detail from the Warren Report. A guy named James Dalton was standing about three hundred feet south of the book depository at the corner of Houston and Main. He testified that in the moments following the shooting he watched a man carrying a backpack, running south away from Elm. He crossed Main, then Commerce, to the Union Station parking lot, where he gets into a red Chevrolet Corvair or Oldsmobile Jetfire and ‘tears out like he’s late for his own wedding.’ The driver was never identified and the tidbit forgotten, just another of a thousand other dead-end leads. There were a lot of frame cameras, plenty, in fact, but none caught the actual shooting. As for movie cameras, only Zapruder. Officially, that is.”

He led her across the street, toward the center of the plaza, to the point on the drawing labeled DE6. Traffic remained light and he noticed no one nor anything of concern. “This is where David Eckstein was supposedly standing.”

He pointed at the X in the middle of the road.

Not all that far away. Maybe thirty feet.

“What’s the calculation below DE’s position?” she asked.

“I’m told it’s a spin drift equation,” he said, referring to how much a bullet drifted according to its weight and barrel rifling. “The expert told me that, according to this, the details are damn compelling.”

At first, the expert had been a little aggravated, woken in the middle of the night, sent a bunch of strange drawings, and asked to make sense of nonsense. How many theories had been spit out about how and why John Kennedy died? It seemed a conspiracy that just kept on giving. Never ending. But an hour after receiving everything, the guy had sung a different tune.

Which seemed significant.

He explained to Jillian that the two equations in the upper left-hand corner were for ballistic kinetic energy and muzzle velocity. A bullet’s destructive power and how fast it left the muzzle. At the bottom of the diagram was a list of words.Magnus, MOA, Throw off, MPI, Pejsa.All ballistic terms noted as wrong.

“Now focus on Elm Street,” the expert said. “Where the actual assassination happened. The black dots numbered 1 and 2 are the shots that strike Kennedy, first in the upper back and then in the head. To the right of those dots are three more equations. They represent how fast the motorcade was traveling at the time and their change in speed after Oswald opened fire.”

“You really know this stuff.”

“I’ve studied it for decades. I’m the FBI’s Kennedy assassination person. Every crackpot theory that surfaces nearly every year, I evaluate it. It’s not all that known, but the murder remains, to this day, an open investigation.”

That he had not known.

“And here’s where it got really interesting,” he said to Jillian.

“This diagram is fascinating,” the expert said. “It was prepared by people who knew what they were doing. Look at the upper edge of Elm Street. That formula, the one that starts with G, is a measurement of deceleration and gravity. This is the moment the trail car behind Kennedy’s car brakes hard. The equation gauges the effect on the occupants of the car. Then go down the street to the note, BT=0°.”

He found it on the drawing.

“That stands for Bullet Trajectory Zero Degrees. Meaning the shooter is in a straight line with his target. Now trace your finger down to the underpass to that angle symbol. See the no? This is another place the math does not match.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because whoever created this drawing has the physical evidence to back it up.”

“Which is?”

“Straddling that angle symbol are two numbers, 6552 and 556. Put a decimal in the right places and drop in a multiplication sign and they turn into 6.5x52 and 5.56. The first number is the caliber of Oswald’s Carcano rifle. The second number is the nomenclature for ammunition used by a Colt AR-15. Above the 556 there’s a black dot labeled 2. This is where a bullet fragment from Kennedy’s kill shot ended up. There’s a notation to the left of the black number 2 dot. PbCu. Those are chemical symbols for lead and copper, the primary makeup of an AR-15 round. Now stick with me. Go back to the asterisk in the middle of Elm Street. That’s the secondshot’s point of origin. The one that took off the top of Kennedy’s skull. According to this diagram it didn’t come from the book depository. It came from ground level. From the Secret Service trail car.”

Jillian stared at him as he recounted what the expert had told him.

And he saw she understood.

“Someone in that trail car may have shot President Kennedy.”

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