"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 dispatcher'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 climbs 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 armor 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 toward 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 ordered.
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 problematic. 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 judgment 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 skepticism 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 outside 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 crosshairs. 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 grayness 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 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.
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 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 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.
"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 reangled 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 fibers on the last pillar before the northeast corner. Mercerized cotton, at a guess, from a pale-colored raincoat, at shoulder-blade
height, like the guy had pressed his back against the raw concrete and then slid around 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 fibers and more raincoat fibers, and tiny crumbs of crepe rubber, pale in color and old.
"He low-crawled," the lead tech said. "Knees and elbows on the way there, and knees, toes, and elbows coming backward. 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 dialed 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 Rodin 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-colored 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. "Defense 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. The scratches tie the weapon to the garage location. The garage location ties the crime to the guy who left the trace evidence behind. "
Rodin said nothing. Eme
rson knew he was thinking about the trial. Technical evidence was sometimes a hard sell. It lacked a human dimension.
"The shell case has got fingerprints on it," Emerson said. "From when he loaded the magazine. Same thumb and index finger as on the quarter in the parking meter and on the traffic cone. So we can tie the crime to the gun, and the gun to the ammo, and the ammo to the guy who used it. See? It all connects. The guy, the gun, the crime. It's a total slam dunk. "
"The videotape shows the minivan leaving?"
"Ninety seconds after the first 911 call came in. "
"Who is he?"
"We'll know just as soon as the fingerprint databases get back to us. "
"If he's in the databases. "
"I think he was a military shooter," Emerson said. "All military personnel are in the databases. So it's just a matter of time. "
It was a matter of forty-nine minutes. A desk guy knocked and entered. He was carrying a sheaf of paper. The paper listed a name, an address, and a history. Plus supplementary information from all over the system. Including a driver's license photo. Emerson took the paper and glanced through it once. Then again. Then he smiled. Exactly six hours after the first shot was fired, the situation was nailed down tight. A must-win.
"His name is James Barr," Emerson said.
Silence in the office.
"He's forty-one years old. He lives twenty minutes from here. He served in the U. S. Army. Honorable discharge fourteen years ago. Infantry specialist, which I'm betting means a sniper. DMV says he drives a six-year-old Dodge Caravan, beige. "
He slid the papers across his desk to Rodin. Rodin picked them up and scanned them through, once, twice, carefully. Emerson watched his eyes. Saw him thinking the guy, the gun, the crime. It was like watching a Vegas slot machine line up three cherries. Bing bing bing! A total certainty.
"James Barr," Rodin said, like he was savoring the sound of the words. He separated out the DL picture and gazed at it. "James Barr, welcome to a shitload of trouble, sir. "
"Amen to that," Emerson said, waiting for a compliment.
"I'll get the warrants," Rodin said. "Arrest, and searches on his house and car. Judges will be lining up to sign them. "
He left and Emerson called the Chief of Police with the good news. The Chief said he would schedule an eight o'clock press conference for the next morning. He said he wanted Emerson there, front and center. Emerson took that as all the compliment he was going to get, even though he didn't much like the press.
The warrants were ready within an hour, but the arrest took three hours to set up. First, unmarked surveillance confirmed Barr was home. His place was an unremarkable one-story ranch. Not immaculate, not falling down. Old paint on the siding, fresh blacktop on the driveway. Lights were on and a television set was playing in what was probably the living room. Barr himself was spotted briefly, in a lighted window. He seemed to be alone. Then he seemed to go to bed. Lights went off and the house went quiet. So then there was a pause. It was standard operating procedure to plan carefully for the takedown of an armed man inside a building. The PD SWAT team took charge. They used zoning maps from the city offices and came up with the usual kind of thing. Covert encirclement, overwhelming force on standby front and rear, sudden violent assault on the front and rear doors simultaneously. Emerson was detailed to make the actual arrest, wearing full body armor and a borrowed helmet. An assistant DA would be alongside him, to monitor the legality of the process. Nobody wanted to give a defense attorney anything to chew on later. A paramedic team would be instantly available. Two K9 officers would go along because of the crime-scene investigator's theory about the dog in the house. Altogether thirty-eight men were involved, and they were all tired. Most of them had been working nineteen hours straight. Their regular watches, plus overtime. So there was a lot of nervous tension in the air. People figured that nobody owned just one automatic weapon. If a guy had one, he had more. Maybe full-auto machine guns. Maybe grenades or bombs.