One Shot (4 page)

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 fibre. 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 fibres. 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
Chiefs 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.

'Hollow points,' the pathologist said. 'All of them
through and through.'

Emerson turned and looked at the ornamental pool.

Six bullets in there, he thought. Five through-and-throughs, and one miss. The pool was finally empty by
nine fifteen. The fire department hoses started sucking
air. All that was left was a quarter-inch of scummy grit,
and a lot of trash. Emerson had the lights re-angled and
sent twelve recruits from the Academy over the walls,
six from one end and six from the other.

The crime scene techs in the parking garage extension
logged forty-eight footprints going and forty-four
coming back. The perp had been confident but wary on
the way in, and striding longer on the way out. In a
hurry. The footprints were size eleven. They found
fibres on the last pillar before the northeast corner.

Mercerized cotton, at a guess, from a pale-coloured
raincoat, at shoulder-blade height, like the guy had
pressed his back against the raw concrete and then slid
round it for a look out into the plaza. They found major
dust disturbance on the floor between the pillar and the
perimeter wall. Plus more blue fibres and more raincoat
fibres, and tiny crumbs of crepe rubber, pale in colour,
and old.

'He low-crawled,' the lead tech said. 'Knees and
elbows on the way there, and knees, toes and elbows
coming backwards. We ever find his shoes, they're
going to be all scraped up at the front'

They found where he must have sat up and then knelt.

Directly in front of that position, they saw varnish
scrapings on the lip of the wall.

'He rested his gun there,' the lead tech said. 'Sawed it
back and forth, to get it steady.'

He lined himself up and aimed his gaze over the
varnish scrapings, like he was aiming a rifle. What he
saw in front of him was Emerson, pacing in front of the
empty ornamental pool, less than thirty-five yards away.

The Academy recruits spent thirty minutes in the
empty pool and came out with a lot of miscellaneous
junk, nearly eight dollars in pennies, and six bullets.

Five of them were just misshapen blobs of lead, but
one of them looked absolutely brand new. It was a boat
tail hollow point, beautifully cast, almost certainly a.308.

Emerson called his lead crime scene tech up in the
garage. 'I need you down here,' he said.

'No, I need you up here,' the tech replied.

Emerson got up to the second level and found all the
techs crouched in a low huddle with their flashlight
beams pointing down into a narrow crack in the
concrete. 'Expansion joint,' the lead tech said. 'And look
what fell in it'

Emerson shouldered his way in and looked down and
saw the gleam of brass.

'A cartridge case,' he said.

'The guy took the others with him. But this one got
away.'

'Fingerprints?' Emerson asked.

We can hope,' the tech said. 'Not too many people
wear gloves when they load their magazines.'

'How do we get it out of there?'

The tech stood up and used his flashlight beam to
locate an electrical box on the ceiling. There was one
close by, new, with unconnected cables spooling out
like fronds. He looked on the floor directly underneath
and found a rat's nest of discarded trimmings. He chose
an eighteen-inch length of ground wire. He cleaned it
and bent it into an L-shape. It was stiff and heavy.

Probably overspecified for the kind of fluorescent
ceiling fixtures he guessed the garage was going to
use. Maybe that was why the project was stalled for
funding. Maybe the city was spending money in all the
wrong places. He jiggled the wire down into the open
joint and slid it along until the end went neatly into the
empty cartridge case. Then he lifted it out very carefully,
so as not to scratch it. He dropped it straight into a
plastic evidence bag.

'Meet at the station,' Emerson said. 'In one hour. I'll
scare up a DA.'

He walked away, on a route exactly parallel to the trail
of footprints. Then he stopped, next to the empty
parking bay. 'Empty the meter,' he called.

'Print all the quarters.'

'Why?' the tech called back. 'You think the guy paid?'

'I want to cover all the bases.'

'You'd have to be crazy to pay for parking just before
you blow five people away.'

'You don't blow five people away unless you're crazy.'

The tech shrugged. Empty the meter? But he guessed
it was the kind of insight detectives were paid for, so he
just dialled his cell phone and asked the city liaison guy
to come on back again.

Someone from the District Attorney's office always got
involved at this point because the responsibility for
prosecution rested squarely on the DA's shoulders. It
wasn't the PD that won or lost in court. It was the DA. So
the DA's office made its own evaluation of the evidence.

Did they have a case? Was the case weak or strong? It
was like an audition. Like a trial before a trial.

This time, because of the magnitude, Emerson was
performing in front of the DA himself. The big cheese,
the actual guy who had to run for election. And
reelection.

They made it a three-man conference in Emerson's
office. Emerson, and the lead crime scene tech, and the
DA. The DA was called Rodin, which was a contraction
of a Russian name that had been a whole lot longer
before his great-grandparents came to America. He was
fifty years old, lean and fit, and very cautious. His office
had an outstanding victory percentage, but that was
mostly due to the fact that he wouldn't prosecute
anything less than a total certainty. Anything less than a
total certainty, and he gave up early and blamed the
cops. At least that was how it seemed to Emerson.

'I need seriously good news,' Rodin said. 'The whole
city is freaking out.' "We know exactly how it went
down,' Emerson told him. 'We can trace it every step of
the way.'

'You know who it was?' Rodin asked.

'Not yet. Right now he's still John Doe.'

'So walk me through it.' "We've got monochrome
security videotape of a light coloured minivan entering
the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can't see
the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn't
great. But it's probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with
aftermarket tinted windows. And we're also looking
through old tapes right now because it's clear he
entered the garage at some previous time and illegally
blocked off a particular space with a traffic cone stolen
earlier from a city construction site.' 'Can we prove
stolen?'

'OK, obtained,' Emerson said.

'Maybe he works for the city construction department.'

'Maybe.'

'You think the cone came from the work on First
Street?'

'There's construction all over town.'

'First Street would be closest.'

'I don't really care where the cone came from.'

Rodin nodded. 'So, he reserved himself a parking
space?'

Emerson nodded in turn. 'Right where the new
construction starts. Therefore the cone would have
looked plausible. We have a witness who saw it in place
at least an hour before. And the cone has fingerprints on
it. Lots of them. The right thumb and index finger match
prints on a quarter we took out of the parking meter.' 'He
paid to park?'

'Evidently.'

Rodin paused.

"Won't stand up,' he said. 'Defence will claim he could
have placed the cone for an innocent reason. You know,
selfish, but innocent. And the quarter could have been
in the meter for days.' Emerson smiled. Cops think like
cops, and lawyers think like lawyers.

'There's more,' he said. 'He parked, and then he
walked through the new construction. At various points
he left trace evidence behind, from his shoes and his
clothing. And he'll have picked trace evidence up, in the
form of cement dust, mostly. Probably a lot of it.' Rodin
shook his head. 'Ties him to the scene sometime during
the last two weeks. That's all. Not specific enough.'

We've got a three-way lock on his weapon,' Emerson
said.

That got Rodin's attention.

'He missed with one shot,' Emerson said. 'It went into
the pool. And you know what? That's exactly how
ballistics labs test-fire a gun.

They fire into a long tank of water. The water slows
and stops the bullet with absolutely no damage at all. So
we've got a pristine bullet with all the lands and grooves
we need to tie it to an individual rifle.' 'Can you find the
individual rifle?'

'We've got varnish scrapings from where he steadied it
on the wall.'

'That's good.'

'You bet it is. We find the rifle and we'll match the
varnish and the scratches. It's as good as DNA.'

'Are you going to find the rifle?'

'We found a shell case. It's got tool marks on it from
the ejector mechanism.

So we've got a bullet and a case. Together they tie the
weapon to the crime.