One Shot

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