by Dale Mayer
She straightened, turned to look at the crowd, separated off the witnesses, and took the first one. By the time she was done with the third, the story was the same. These women had been sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the road, and a vehicle drove by. An old blue-green truck. They heard the shooting but didn’t realize it involved people on the far side of the street, until the odd-colored truck was gone. Two men were down. They tried to get across the street, but, because of the shooting, all the traffic had snarled up, and they didn’t get there as fast as they’d hoped, but the two guys appeared to be already dead.
One woman looked at Kate with tears in her eyes and said, “I used to be an ER nurse. Nothing’s more deadly than bullets in the head.”
Kate nodded. “I’ve seen them a time or two myself,” she said quietly. “Can you guys identify anything about the truck?” The three women looked at each other and shook their heads. Kate pressed for more. “Did you see a different colored door? Did you see any dents on the vehicle? Did you see the driver?”
“I didn’t see any of that. We were busy with girl talk,” she said, motioning at the two women beside her. At that, Kate’s eyebrow rose up. “Susie’s got a new boyfriend, so we were deep in a discussion about him.”
“And, therefore, you didn’t notice anything around you? Right, got it.”
“It’s not like we would have known that he was about to shoot somebody, so that we needed to pay attention,” she said in their defense.
“Absolutely,” Kate said. “I’m just checking if you saw anything else.” She asked a few more questions, like if any of these women happened to recognize anybody within the witnesses, or did they know the victims? Had the truck driven by them earlier? All their answers pretty well came back to reveal they didn’t have a clue. They never saw anything.
By the time Kate had gone through the other ten witnesses on her side of the road, she was frustrated because nobody saw anything.
“You might want to check with the ice cream parlor there,” said one of the older men, pointing across the road.
She turned, looked at it, and asked, “Why is that?”
“They just had new security cameras installed last week.”
Her eyebrows shot up at that. “We’ll check it out. Thanks,” she said. “It’s on our list to do anyway. Do you happen to know why they had cameras installed?”
“They’ve had a series of break-ins,” he said. “I know that they were pretty upset because they couldn’t seem to get anywhere with the police on them.”
“Right,” she said; of course it would be something like that. “It’s not always easy to solve break-ins, even with the cameras.”
He nodded. “That’s what I understand. Makes it pretty damn hard when there is no deterrent to crime around here. It’s not like there’s any penalty.”
She looked at him and said, “Well, we’re trying our best to stop it, but we still need people to step up and to share what they saw, when there is a problem.”
He nodded. “All I can tell you is, they’ve got cameras now, so you should check it out.”
“Will do,” she said. “Thanks.” As she headed over to the opposite side of the road, where the victims were, Rodney walked toward her.
He shook his head. “How is it that something like this can happen, and nobody sees anything?”
“Because it happened so fast,” she said, “at least according to everybody I talked to.”
He nodded in agreement with that, as nobody saw anything, except that it was an older blue-green truck. “One actually said aqua.”
“I get it,” she said, “but none of mine could identify any damage to the truck or anything about the driver.”
“One said he had a baseball cap pulled way down. At least he saw that much, which goes along with what we knew already.”
“But maybe we’ll get something from the cameras. I’m interested in knowing if it was deliberate that he shot two this time, or was it just an accident, or was he just firing, and he really didn’t give a damn?”
“In the past he has cared, it seemed,” Rodney said. “So this one is potentially very different.”
“Exactly. He is getting more careless, or this was more impulse, or he knew somebody caught sight of him and decided these two would make a perfect target.”
Rodney frowned, as he nodded.
“Nobody seemed to see him a second time around either,” she mentioned. “I asked the three women who had been sitting there for quite a while. They didn’t see the truck come by earlier.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t though,” Rodney said. “It just means that they didn’t see him if he did.”
She had to agree with that.
At the ice cream parlor, she managed to get copies of the street cam video sent to her email. Knowing she would be more successful with a computer than her phone, she walked over to Rodney and said, “If we’re done here, I’ll head back to the station. I’ve got the video feed coming, sent from the ice cream parlor.”
He nodded and asked, “Are you okay to take a bus?”
She glanced around at a bus coming up now and said, “Sure, that one will take me to just a couple blocks away. What will you do?”
He said, “I’ll see if anybody else has cameras.” She hesitated, he waited but when she didn’t say anything, he added, “Go on. This is a one-person deal at this point in time.”
“Yeah, and you’ve got wheels,” she said, with a smile.
“True enough,” he said, “so it’s up to you.”
Deciding that she would hop the bus, she headed back, wondering at her love of the city buses. It was a nostalgia thing. It just reminded her of better memories of home and growing up. Even later, although she had wheels and drove a lot when she was older, she’d also spent a fair amount of time traveling by bus. As it was, this bus got her near the station pretty fast. When she walked in, Lilliana looked up.
“Is Rodney with you?”
“He’s still at the scene, checking for more cameras,” she said. “I need to look at a feed sent to my email.”
“And they didn’t have a monitor?” Lilliana asked in surprise.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t that clear, and they weren’t sure how to use it. I figured I’d do better by having it sent over, so we could look at it here.”
“You know what? You’d think, for all the technology in the world, we’d have better luck with it,” Lilliana said.
“Yeah, the better quality images and features involve a lot more money,” she murmured. “And they are just out of reach for some of these places.”
“I know,” Lilliana said. “It’s not like everybody is prepared for a break-in.”
The feed was waiting for Kate at her desk. Bringing it up, she fast-forwarded to the time in question. The ice cream parlor camera caught most of it; the vehicle drove in front of the camera straight across. The driver was staring at the two guys walking on the street. He didn’t even slow down, just pulled up a handgun, rested it against the window frame, and started firing. She replayed it several times, but it looked like he fired six shots before he was out of range. She shook her head at that and replayed it several times more.
The angle wasn’t quite right to get the license plate, and a close-up on the driver didn’t give her anything more than a baseball cap pulled low. But what she did note was that the shooter had zero hesitation. There was no slowing down and no indecision about it. He lifted a gun; he killed two men, and he kept on going, as if he were just out on a Sunday drive. The absolute normality of it contrasted so shockingly with the shots being fired and the two deaths, as their blood poured all over the sidewalk, and the witnesses started screaming.
But from the driver, nothing.
Logging into the city camera system, she tried to track the truck and did manage to pick it up a little farther along. She immediately contacted Rodney. “Are you coming back anytime soon?”
“I just pulled into the parking lot. Why?”
“Because the video has some decent footage,” she said. “Nothing that we’ll really identify the driver with, but I’m tracking him through the city traffic, and I could use a hand with that, if you’re up for it.”
“Coming,” he said, “and hot damn if you got something we can track. It’s not like we’ve had anything—up until now.”
“Right, we definitely needed a break. What about you? Find anything?” she asked.
“A little bit of footage, nothing identifiable.”
“Okay,” she said. Before they were done talking, she looked up to see him walking into the office.
He pocketed his phone and said, “Let me grab a coffee, and then we’ll sit down and see what we can do.”
She nodded. “I’ve already got him tracked and heading over toward the Lions Gate Bridge.”
“In that case,” he said, “skip the coffee. I’m here.”
And he sat down beside her.
*
Within seconds, both Rodney and Kate had their screens up, tracking the truck on different cameras. With both of them talking back and forth, they tracked the shooter through town and across the Lions Gate Bridge—also known as First Narrows Bridge—over to West Vancouver.
“Shit,” he said, “we have to change districts.”
She quickly moved to shift to cameras in another direction, noting the time the truck went over the bridge. But, when they got to the other side, the truck headed into the mall, one of the great big strip malls that ran along the right side of the highway, and they lost him from the view of the cameras. Using as many other cameras as she could, she tracked for hours through the mall area and the highway to see if he ever came back onto the highway.
But searching through twelve hours’ worth of film later, using fast-forward mode, backtracking several times, she sat back in defeat. “Well, if he went in there, I don’t know how he came out.”
“There are exits out the back,” Rodney said, shifting. “If you wanted to avoid the cameras, that would be the easiest way to do it.”
“Goddammit,” she said. “Now what?”
“You realize, in all that time, we never got an ID on his face, and we never got very much on the license plate.”
“I took a couple screenshots,” she said, shifting to where she had saved them. She pulled them up and showed them to him. “Do you think Forensics could do anything with that?”
He tapped the screen of one and said, “That one is damn close. We might get some of the letters on it.”
She immediately sent it off to the guys and gals in Computer Forensics to see if they could enhance it at all. When Stoop called her, saying there wasn’t much to go on, Kate heard the doubt in his tone. Tired and frustrated, she snapped at him. “Come on. It’s all we’ve got, and he just killed two more guys today.”
“Right, I’m on it,” he said.
“I guess you haven’t had a chance to look at that laptop, have you?”
He said, “I wouldn’t even have gone in that direction with the jumpers, and I get that you think we have nothing going on here. But cases like these drive-by shootings take precedence over suicides.”
“Just not much precedence,” she said, “please. We need to make sure that these suicides aren’t murders.”
“You really think they are?”
“This David guy was threatened with pictures of his wife with a bullet hole in her head if he didn’t do what he was told.”
“Well, crap,” he said. “I’m on it.”
She hoped so; she just wasn’t so sure. It would be tough right now because she also knew that they were swamped. She sat back and looked over at Rodney. “You realize that took hours.”
“Yep,” he said, “the day is done.”
She shook her head. “How the hell is the day done already?”
He got up, reached in his open drawer for his keys and wallet, and said, “I’ll see you later.”
She nodded. “I guess.”
He stopped, looked over at her, and said, “Look. You were here late last night. You’ve got to go home. You don’t get to live here.”
She glared. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
“And until there’s something more to do,” he said, “we can’t do more. Go home. Refresh your brain while you can.”
“There really should be a way for me to keep working on this.”
“No, there shouldn’t be,” he said, his tone heartfelt. “Look, partner. You’re no good to us when we do need you if you don’t get some rest when you can.”
She nodded, stood. “Fine.”
He laughed. “You’re the damnedest one for not wanting to leave the office.”
“I just want to catch this guy,” she snapped.
“So do I.”
As she headed out to the parking lot, she hopped into her vehicle and wondered; then deciding that it was better to go see for herself, she headed across the bridge out to the mall, where they had last seen the shooter’s truck. She then drove around to the back, so she could get an idea where the cameras were. But there weren’t many, like she had hoped, and she also found not just one or two exits out of the place but several. She noted a road running parallel to the mall in the back that anybody could get on and off of easily.
She groaned. “Okay, you got away this time,” she said, “but we’re on to you now.”
She’d already put out a BOLO for the vehicle. Now she needed a better description and a license plate number. And, for that, she needed the help of the forensic geeks. She slowly drove home. By the time she pulled into her apartment’s parking lot, it was that much later. She hopped up the stairs, still full of energy, and considered a workout immediately upon entering her place. She needed a judo session, so she quickly changed, walked down the stairs, and headed over to her judo center.
Kate stepped inside the dojo and could immediately feel the peace taking over. She went through the paces before doing a bout that worked her hard. By the time she was done, she was grinning like a fool, but she was exhausted.
Her sensei smiled, nodded. “That was good for you.”
“It was,” she said in agreement. “It’s hard to imagine how stressful some days can be.”
“And always that stress,” he said, “comes from within. Stress is basically fear. You must let it go, before it overtakes you.”
She stared at him. “I’ve heard that before.”
“Think about why you’re stressed.”
She shrugged. “I have a case, and I can’t catch this guy.”
“So where’s the fear coming from?”
She snorted. “The fear is that he’ll kill again before I can stop him.”
He nodded slowly. “The work you do, it’s important,” he said. “Not everyone can do it, but you must honor that part of you.”
She smiled. “I don’t even know how much that part of me exists.”
“You’re doing fine,” he said. “Just remember you need stress relief in order to function at your best.”
She nodded quietly, then grabbed her bag and headed outside again. As she started to walk home, she thought she caught sight of a big old truck. Not aqua but suspicious nonetheless. She turned, stared at it, then frowned and kept on walking. When it went past her again, she immediately ducked into a doorway, wondering if it could possibly be this suicide guy, proving her theory that he was local. Or the drive-by shooter in a decoy vehicle. Or anyone else from any number of other cases. And… considering how tired she was… maybe it was just her imagination.
And why would either guy be here, stalking her, unless it was a coincidence? And she wasn’t terribly big on those. But whoever he was, he wouldn’t know where she was—unless of course he’d gone back to the scene of the latest drive-by crime, with his two victims this time, and had then followed her. She swore at that, and, when the truck was gone, raced up to her place and grabbed her laptop.
She sent Rodney a text message. We didn’t check to see if the shooter hung around at the
drive-by crime scenes.
Because he took off. We tracked that aqua truck for hours.
“No,” she snapped back, phoning him now. “What if he ditched the vehicle and then came back to the crime scene?”
“But you saw it drive all the way across West Vancouver.”
“But did you realize that was an hour later?” she asked. “Remember the digital time reads that we were looking at?”
He stopped and swore. “You could be right.”
“I am,” she said. “I need to get back in there and look at those crime scene photos and that ice cream shop’s video to see if we can get anything from somebody who might have been there.”
“Well, there’ll be a lot of people who were there,” he said. “I get that you’re really involved in this, but just stay sane over it all. Just like your suicide cases. If it’s a murderer, we’ll go after him. And don’t you worry. We’ll get him.”
“But will we get him?” she asked quietly, “before he takes out somebody else? And did Andy ever get into the chats?”
“Why ask me? You know where I was all day,” he said in exasperation. “Where the hell are you anyway?”
“I’m at home now,” she said, “after a judo session.”
“Yeah, so everybody else goes home and collapses, but you go work out,” he said in disgust. “What the hell are you, superhuman?”
“No, just pissed. Stressed out, pissed off, and damn angry that this guy keeps getting away with this.”
“You don’t know where the suicide guy is, and this drive-by shooter is a completely different case. Don’t get confused here.”
“I know. I know. I know. I’m trying not to let them run together in my head, but it’s hard when we know that they’re all out there, intent on hurting people.”
“And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing,” he said calmly. “Just remember that.” And, with that, he hung up.
She groaned, got up, and had a shower, her thoughts immediately going to Simon and wondering if she should call him. But she changed her mind, knowing it was much better if she kept a little bit of distance. But, as she came out from the shower, a knock came at her door. Not sure why, she headed for her weapon sitting on the night table, and, with it held behind her back, she walked over to the door and asked who it was.