One Shot (3 page)

veteran who had come all the way up from patrolman.

His name was Emerson. He was blasting through slow
traffic, dodging construction, hopelessly, desperately,
with no way of knowing what had happened. Robbery,
drugs, gang fight, terrorism, he had no hard information.

None at all. But he was calm. Comparatively. His heart
rate was holding below a hundred and fifty.

He had an open channel with the 911 despatcher,
desperate to hear more as he drove. 'New guy on a cell
phone now,' the despatcher screamed.

Who?' Emerson screamed back.

'Marine Corps, from the recruiting office.' "Was he a
witness?'

'No, he was inside. But he's outside now.'

Emerson clamped his teeth. He knew he wasn't going
to be first-on-scene. Not even close. He knew he was
leading from the rear. So he needed eyes. Now. A
Marine? He'll do. 'OK,' he said. 'Patch the Marine
through.'

There were loud clicks and electronic sounds and then
Emerson heard a new acoustic. Outdoors, distant
screaming, the splash of water. The fountain, he
thought. Who is this?' he asked.

A voice came back, calm but rushed, loud and breathy,
pressed close to a cell phone mouthpiece. 'This is
Kelly,' it said. 'First Sergeant, United States Marine
Corps. Who am I speaking with?' 'Emerson, PD. I'm in
traffic, about ten minutes out. What have we got?'

'Five KIA,' the Marine said.

'Five dead?'

'Affirmative.'

Shit. 'Injured?'

'None that I can see.'

'Five dead and no injured?'

'Affirmative,' the Marine said again.

Emerson said nothing. He had seen shootings in
public places. He had seen dead people. But he had
never seen only dead people. Public-place shootings
always produced injured along with the dead. Usually in
a one-to-one ratio, at least. 'You sure about no injured?'

he said. 'That's definitive, sir,' the Marine said. Who are
the DOAs?'

'Civilians. Four males, one female.' 'Shit'

'Roger that, sir,' the Marine said.

'Where were you?'

'In the recruiting office.'

"What did you see?'

'Nothing.'

What did you hear?'

'Incoming gunfire, six rounds.' 'Handguns?'

'Long gun, I think. Just one of them.'

'A rifle?'

'An autoloader, I think. It fired fast, but it wasn't on full
automatic. The KIAs are all hit in the head.' A sniper,
Emerson thought. Shit. A crazy man with an assault
weapon. 'Has he gone now?' he said.

'No further firing, sir.'

'He might still be there.'

'It's a possibility, sir. People have taken cover. Most of
them are in the library now.' Where are you?'

'Head down behind the plaza wall, sir. I've got a few
people with me.' Where was he?'

'Can't say for sure. Maybe in the parking garage. The
new part. People were pointing at it. There may have
been some muzzle flash. And that's the only major
structure directly facing the KIAs.' A warren, Emerson
thought. A damn rat's nest. 'The TV people are here,' the
Marine said. Shit, Emerson thought.

'Are you in uniform?' he asked.

'Full dress, sir. For the recruiting office.'

'OK, do your best to keep order until my guys get
there.'

'Roger that, sir.'

Then the line went dead and Emerson heard his
despatcher's breathing again. TV people and a crazy
man with a rifle, he thought. Shit, shit, shit. Pressure and
scrutiny and second guessing, like every other place
that ever had TV people and a crazy man with a rifle. He
hit the switch that gave him the all-cars radio net.

'All units, listen up,' he said. 'This was a lone nutcase
with a long gun.

Probably an automatic weapon. Indiscriminate firing in
a public place.

Possibly from the new part of the parking garage. So
either he's still in there, or he's already in the wind. If he
left, it was either on foot or in a vehicle. So all units that
are more than ten blocks out, stop now and lock down a
perimeter. Nobody enters or exits, OK? No vehicles, no
pedestrians, nobody under any circumstances. All units
that are closer than ten blocks, proceed inward with
extreme caution. But do not let him get away. Do not
miss him. This is a must-win, people. We need this guy
today, before CNN gets all over us.'

The man in the minivan thumbed the button on the
remote on the visor and the garage door rumbled
upward. He drove inside and thumbed the button again
and the door came down after him. He shut the engine
off and sat still for a moment. Then he got out of the van
and walked through the mud room and on into the
kitchen. He patted the dog and turned on the television.

Paramedics in full body armour went in through the
back of the library. Two of them stayed inside to check
for injuries among the sheltering crowd. Four of them
came out the front and ran crouched through the plaza
and ducked behind the wall. They crawled towards the
bodies and confirmed they were all DOA.

Then they stayed right there. Flat on the ground and
immobile next to the corpses. No unnecessary
exposure until the garage has been searched, Emerson
had said.

Emerson double-parked two blocks from the plaza and
told a uniformed sergeant to direct the search of the
parking garage, from the top down, from the southwest
corner. The uniforms cleared the fourth level, and then
the third. Then the second. Then the first. The old part
was problematical. It was badly lit and full of parked
cars, and every car represented a potential hiding place.

A guy could be inside one, or under one, or behind one.

But they didn't find anybody. They had no real problem
with the new construction. It wasn't lit at all, but there
were no parked cars in that part. The patrolmen simply
came down the stairwell and swept each level in turn
with flashlight beams.

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 judgement the PD had turned
in an immaculate performance in the first phase of what
would eventually be seen as an immaculate
investigation from beginning to end.

By seven o'clock in the evening it was going dark and
Ann Yanni had been on the air eleven times. Three of
them network, eight of them local. Personally she was a
little disappointed with that ratio. She was sensitive to a
little scepticism coming her way from the network
editorial offices. If it bleeds, it leads, was any news
organization's credo, but this bleeding was way out
there, far from New York or LA. It wasn't happening in
some manicured suburb of Washington D.C. It had a
tinge of weirdo-from-the-heartland about it. There was
no real possibility that anyone important would walk
through this guy's cross hairs. So it was not really prime
time stuff. And in truth Ann didn't have much to offer.

None of the victims was identified yet. None of the slain.

The local PD was holding its cards close to its chest
until families had been notified individually. So she had
no heartwarming background stories to share.

She wasn't sure which of the male victims had been
family men. Or churchgoers.

She didn't know if the woman had been a mother or a
wife. She didn't have much to offer in the way of visuals,
either. Just a gathering crowd held five blocks back by
police barricades, and a static long shot down the
greyness of First Street, and occasional close-ups of
the parking garage, which was where everyone seemed
to assume the sniper had been.

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, connected to another guy's
voice mail. The cellular company retrieved the recording
and six gunshots were faintly audible on it. But the
medical examiners had counted only five entry wounds
in the five DOAs. Therefore there was a bullet missing.

Three other witnesses were vague, but they all reported
seeing a small plume of water kick out of the
ornamental pool.

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 travelled 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.

Ann Yanni left the black glass tower at eight thirty and
took a camera crew down to the barricades five blocks
away. She figured she might be able to identify some of
the victims by a process of elimination. People whose
relatives hadn't come home for dinner might be
gathering there, desperate for information. She shot
twenty minutes of tape. She got no specific information
at all. Instead she got twenty minutes of crying and
wailing and sheer stunned incredulity. The whole city
was in pain and in shock. She started out secretly proud
that she was in the middle of everything, and she ended
up with tears in her eyes and sick to her stomach.

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 space 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.