One Shot

Nobody there.

The sergeant relaxed and called it in.

“Good work,” Emerson said.

And it was good work. The fact that they searched from the southwest corner outward left the northeast corner entirely untouched. Nothing was disturbed. So by good luck or good judgment the PD had turned in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what would eventually be seen as an immaculate investigation from begi

By seven o’clock in the evening it was going dark and A

By eight o’clock Emerson had made a lot of progress. His guys had taken hundreds of statements. Marine Corps First Sergeant Kelly was still sure he had heard six shots. Emerson was inclined to believe him. Marines could be trusted on stuff like that, presumably. Then some other guy mentioned his cell phone must have been open the whole time, co

Emerson ordered the pool to be drained.

The fire department handled it. They set up floodlights and switched off the fountain and used a pumping engine to dump the water into the city storm drains. They figured there were maybe eighty thousand gallons of water to move, and that the job would be complete in an hour.

Meanwhile crime-scene technicians had used drinking straws and laser pointers to estimate the fatal trajectories. They figured the most reliable evidence would come from the first victim. Presumably he was walking purposefully right-to-left across the plaza when the first shot came in. After that, it was possible the subsequent victims were twisting or turning or moving in other unpredictable ways. So they based their conclusions solely on the first guy. His head was a mess, but it seemed pretty clear the bullet had traveled slightly high-to-low and left-to-right as it passed through. One tech stood upright on the spot and another held a drinking straw against the side of his head at the correct angle and held it steady. Then the first guy ducked out of the way and a third fired a laser pointer through the straw. It put a tiny red spot on the northeast corner of the parking garage extension, second level. Witnesses had claimed they had seen muzzle flashes up there. Now science had confirmed their statements.

Emerson sent his crime-scene people into the garage and told them they had all the time they needed. But he told them not to come back with nothing.

A

The parking garage was where the case was broken. It was a bonanza. A treasure trove. A patrolman three blocks away had taken a witness statement from a regular user of the garage saying that the last slot on the second level had been blocked off with an orange traffic cone. Because of it, the witness had been forced to leave the garage and park elsewhere. He had been pissed about it. A guy from the city said the cone hadn’t been there officially. No way. Couldn’t have been. No reason for it. So the cone was bagged for evidence and taken away. Then the city guy said there were discreet security cameras at the entrance and the exit, wired to a video recorder in a maintenance closet. The tape was extracted and taken away. Then the city guy said the new extension was stalled for funding and hadn’t been worked on for two weeks. So anything in there less than two weeks old wasn’t anything to do with him.

The crime-scene technicians started at the yellow-and-black Caution Do Not Enter tape. The first thing they found was a scuff of blue cotton material on the rough concrete directly underneath it. Just a peach-fuzz of barely-visible fiber. Like a guy had dropped to one knee to squirm underneath and had left a little of his blue jeans behind. They photographed the scuff and then picked it up whole with an adhesive sheet of clear plastic. Then they brought in klieg lights and angled them low across the floor. Across the two-week-old cement dust. They saw perfect footprints. Really perfect footprints. The lead tech called Emerson on his Motorola.

“He was wearing weird shoes,” he said.

“What kind of weird shoes?”

“You ever heard of crepe? It’s a kind of crude rubber. Almost raw. Very grippy. It picks everything up. If we find this guy, we’re going to find crepe-soled shoes with cement dust all over the soles. Also, we’re going to find a dog in his house.”

“A dog?”

“We’ve got dog hair here, picked up by the crepe rubber earlier. And then scraped off again where the concrete’s rough. And carpet fibers. Probably from his rugs at home and in his car.”

“Keep going,” Emerson said.

At ten to nine Emerson briefed his Chief of Police for a press conference. He held nothing back. It was the Chief’s decision what to talk about and what to conceal.

“Six shots fired and five people dead,” Emerson said. “All head shots. I’m betting on a trained shooter. Probably ex-military.”

“Or a hunter?” the Chief said.

“Big difference between shooting deer and shooting people. The technique might be the same, but the emotion isn’t.”

“Were we right to keep this away from the FBI?”

“It wasn’t terrorism. It was a lone nut. We’ve seen them before.”

“I want to be able to sound confident about bringing this one in.”

“I know,” Emerson said.

“So how confident can I sound?”

“So far we’ve got good stuff, but not great stuff.”

The Chief nodded and said nothing.

At nine o’clock exactly, Emerson took a call from the pathologist. His staff had X-rayed all five heads. Massive tissue damage, entry and exit wounds, no lodged bullets.