“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. “Ri
ght 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. Emerson 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.
But the arrest was a walk in the park. James Barr barely even woke up. They broke down his doors at three in the morning and found him asleep, alone in bed. He stayed asleep with fifteen armed men in his bedroom aiming fifteen submachine guns and fifteen flashlight beams at him. He stirred a little when the SWAT commander threw his blankets and pillows to the floor, searching for concealed weapons. He had none. He opened his eyes. Mumbled something that sounded like What? and then went back to sleep, curling up on the flat mattress, hugging himself against the sudden cold. He was a large man, with white skin and black hair that was going gray all over his body. His pajamas were too small for him. He looked slack, and a little older than his forty-one years.
His dog was an old mutt that woke up reluctantly and staggered in from the kitchen. The K9 team captured it immediately and took it straight out to their truck. Emerson took his helmet off and pushed his way through the crowd in the tiny bedroom. Saw a three-quarters-full pint of Jack Daniel’s on the night table, next to an orange prescription bottle that was also three-quarters full. He bent to look at it. Sleeping pills. Legal. Recently prescribed to someone called Rosemary Barr. The label said: Rosemary Barr. Take one for sleeplessness.
“Who’s Rosemary Barr?” the assistant DA asked. “Is he married?”
Emerson glanced around the room. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“Suicide attempt?” the SWAT commander asked.
Emerson shook his head. “He’d have swallowed them all. Plus the whole pint of JD. So I guess Mr. Barr had trouble getting off to sleep tonight, that’s all. After a very busy and productive day.”
The air in the room was stale. It smelled of dirty sheets and an unwashed body.
“We need to be careful here,” the assistant DA said. “He’s impaired
right now. His lawyer is going to say he’s not fully capable of understanding Miranda. So we can’t let him say anything. And if he does say something, we can’t listen.”
Emerson called for the paramedics. Told them to check Barr out, to make sure he wasn’t faking, and to make sure he wasn’t about to die on them. They fussed around for a few minutes, listened to his heart, checked his pulse, read the prescription label. Then they pronounced him reasonably fit and healthy, but fast asleep.
“Psychopath,” the SWAT commander said. “No conscience at all.”
“Are we even sure this is the right guy?” the assistant DA asked.
Emerson found a pair of dress pants folded over a chair and checked the pockets. Came out with a small wallet. Found the driver’s license. The name was right, and the address was right. And the photograph was right.
“This is the right guy,” he said.
“We can’t let him say anything,” the ADA said again. “We need to keep this kosher.”
“I’m going to Mirandize him anyway,” Emerson said. “Make a mental note, people.”
He shook Barr by the shoulder and got half-opened eyes in response. Then he recited the Miranda warning. The right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer. Barr tried to focus, but didn’t succeed. Then he went back to sleep.
“OK, take him in,” Emerson said.
They wrapped him in a blanket and two cops dragged him out of the house and into a car. A paramedic and the ADA rode with him. Emerson stayed in the house and started the search. He found the scuffed blue jeans in the bedroom closet. The crepe-soled shoes were placed neatly on the floor below them. They were dusty. The raincoat was in the hall closet. The beige Dodge Caravan was in the garage. The scratched rifle was in the basement. It was one of several resting on a rack bolted to the wall. On a bench underneath it were five nine-millimeter handguns. And boxes of ammunition, including a half-empty box of Lake City M852 168-grain boat tail hollow point .308s. Next to the boxes were glass jars with empty cartridge cases in them. Ready for recycling, Emerson thought. Ready for handloading. The jar nearest the front of the bench held just five of them. Lake City brass. The jar’s lid was still off, like the five latest cases had been dumped in there recently and in a hurry. Emerson bent down and sniffed. The air in the jar smelled of gunpowder. Cold and old, but not very.
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