Chapter 6 - The Ballistics of Bone and Steel
Detective Marcus Kane did not look like a man who spent his time dealing with tearful domestic disputes. He was broad-shouldered, with a gray-streaked buzz cut and a face that looked as if it had been chiseled out of granite by an indifferent sculptor. He pulled a folding chair up to my ICU bed, set a battered leather notebook on his knee, and clicked a ballpoint pen.
"Your fiancé called me three hours ago, Ms. Vance," Kane said, his gravelly voice low so as not to carry into the corridor. "He said you invoked the Vance Engineering metallurgy lab."
"The corset," I said, breathing shallowly through the persistent ache in my reconstructed thoracic spine. "Did you impound it from the venue?"
"The local precinct bagged it as an accidental property hazard. They were going to release it back to your sister along with the rest of your bridal belongings." Kane’s eyes narrowed. "I intervened. I put a hold on the evidence locker. Tell me why I did that, Sarah."
"Harper spent three months volunteering to restore our great-grandmother's Victorian pearl corset," I explained, the technical clarity returning to my mind like clean water washing over stones. "She insisted on doing the fitting alone. She claimed she was replacing the rotted whalebone with flexible steel to support the weight of the hand-strung pearls."
"And?"
"The stay that punctured my canal wasn't flexible steel. High-tensile spring steel has an ultimate tensile strength exceeding two thousand megapascals. If you create a transverse microscopic laser score across the concave side of a pre-bent stay, it behaves normally under light loads. But when you apply maximum human torque—like two hands yanking an heirloom lace to tighten the waist—the tensile stress at the root of the notch exceeds the fracture toughness."
Kane stopped writing. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. "Brittle fracture mechanics."
"It doesn't bend," I whispered, the memory of that terrible *crack* echoing in my marrow. "It snaps like a mousetrap. And if the curvature is oriented toward the vertebrae... the elastic energy stored in the steel propels the fractured end backward with the velocity of a low-caliber bullet."
Kane stared at me for five full seconds without blinking. "Your sister studied art history, didn't she?"
"Art history and high-end antique metal conservation," I replied coldly. "She spent two years working in the metal restoration lab at the Metropolitan Museum before Father cut her trust fund. She knows how to manipulate metallurgical failure better than most civil engineers."
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Kane closed his notebook with a soft, decisive slap. "Then this isn't a tragic wardrobe malfunction. This is attempted murder with an engineered weapon."
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