Excellent.
He worked fast, left to right. The second shot hit the next man in the head. Same result as the first, exactly. The third shot hit a woman in the head. Same result. Three shots in maybe two seconds. Three targets down. Absolute surprise. No reaction for a split second. Then chaos broke out. Pandemonium. Panic. There were twelve people caught in the narrow space between the plaza wall and the pool wall. Three were already down. The remaining nine ran. Four ran forward and five spun away from the corpses and ran back. Those five collided with the press of people still moving their way. There were sudden loud screams. There was a solid stalled mass of panicked humanity, right in front of the man with the rifle. Range, less than thirty-five yards. Very close.
His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit. His fifth missed completely. The Sierra Matchking passed close to a woman’s shoulder and hissed straight into the ornamental pool and disappeared. He ignored it and moved the Springfield’s muzzle a fraction, and his sixth shot caught a guy on the bridge of his nose and blew his head apart.
The man with the rifle stopped firing.
He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled backward three feet. He could smell burnt powder and over the ringing in his ears he could hear women screaming and feet pounding and the crunch of panicked fender benders on the street below. Don’t worry, little people, he thought. It’s over now. I’m out of here. He lay on his stomach and swept his spent shell cases into a pile. The bright Lake City brass shone right there in front of him. He scooped five of them into his gloved hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an unfinished expansion joint. Just dropped right down into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench. He heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom.
Decision?
Leave it, surely.
No time.
He jammed the five cases he had in his raincoat pocket and crawled backward on his toes and his forearms and his belly. He lay still for a moment and listened to the screaming. Then he came to his knees and stood up. Turned around and walked back the same way he had come, fast but in control, over the rough concrete, along the walkway planks, through the dark and the dust, under the yellow-and-black tape. Back to his minivan.
The rear door was still open. He rewrapped the warm rifle in its blanket and slid the door shut on it. Got in the front and started the engine. Glanced through the windshield at the parking meter. He had forty-four minutes left on it. He backed out and headed for the exit ramp. Drove down it and out the unmanned exit and made a right and a left into the tangle of streets behind the department stores. He had passed under the raised highway before he heard the first sirens. He breathed out. The sirens were heading east, and he was heading west.
Good work, he thought. Covert infiltration, six shots fired, five targets down, successful exfiltration, as cool as the other side of the pillow.
Then he smiled suddenly. Long-term military records show that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended by its infantry. But for its specialist snipers, the result is better. Way better. Twelve and a half thousand times better, as a matter of fact. A modern army scores one enemy fatality for every one-point-two combat rounds expended by a sniper. And one for one-point-two happened to be the same batting average as five for six. Exactly the same average. Simple arithmetic. So even after all those years a trained military sniper had scored exactly what his old instructors would have expected. They would have been very pleased about that.
But his old instructors had trained snipers for the battlefield, not for urban crime. With urban crime, factors unknown on the battlefield kick in fast. Those factors tend to modify the definition of successful exfiltration. In this particular case, the media reacted quickest. Not surprisingly, since the shootings took place right in front of the local NBC affiliate’s window. Two things happened even before a dozen panicked bystanders all hit 911 on their cell phones simultaneously. First, every minicam in the NBC office starting rolling. The cameras were grabbed up and switched on and pointed at the windows. Second, a local news anchor called Ann Yanni started rehearsing what she knew would be her very first network breaking-news report. She was sick and scared and badly shaken, but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. So she started drafting in her head. She knew that words set agendas, and the words that came to her first were sniper and senseless and slaying. The alliteration was purely instinctive. So was the banality. But slaying was how Ann Yanni saw it. And slaying was a great word. It communicated the randomness, the wantonness, the savagery, the ferocity. It was a motiveless and impersonal word. It was exactly the right word for the story. At the same time she knew it wouldn’t work for the caption below the pictures. Massacre would be better there. Friday Night Massacre? Rush Hour Massacre? She ran for the door and hoped her graphics guy would come up with something along those lines unbidden.
______
Also not present on the battlefield is urban law enforcement. The dozen simultaneous 911 cell phone calls lit up the emergency switchboard like a Christmas tree, and the local police and fire departments were rolling within forty seconds. Everything was dispatched, all of them with lights popping and sirens blaring. Every black-and-white, every available detective, every crime-scene technician, every fire engine, every paramedic, every ambulance. Initially there was complete mayhem. The 911 calls had been panicked and incoherent. But crimes were plainly involved, and they were clearly serious, so the Serious Crimes Squad’s lead detective was given temporary command. He was a high-quality twenty-year PD 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 dispatcher, desperate to hear more as he drove.
“New guy on a cell phone now,” the dispatcher 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 gu
nfire, 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 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.
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br /> 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.”
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