Beckert turned to Torres, who was glaring at Cloutz. “You said we have street videos of the car approaching and leaving the sniper location. Can you show them now?” It was a directive, not a question.
Torres turned his attention back to his laptop, clicked a few icons, and the monitor on the wall showed a grungy, poorly lit street with garbage bags piled along the curbs. A car appeared, passed through the camera’s field of view, and turned out of sight at the next intersection.
“This is Girder Street,” said Torres. “The footage is from a security camera on the front of a check-cashing place. We’ve edited it down to a few key moments. Watch this next car.”
A small, dark sedan entered the frame. Just before reaching the intersection, it made a turn into what appeared to be a driveway or alley behind an apartment building.
“That’s the building where the shot came from. That alley leads to a back entrance. The time code embedded in the video shows that the car arrived twenty-two minutes before the shot was fired. Now we skip ahead twenty-six minutes, exactly four minutes after the shot, and . . . there . . . you see the car emerging . . . turning . . . proceeding to the intersection . . . and making a right onto Bridge Street.”
The screen showed a wider but equally dismal street with steel-shuttered storefronts on both sides. “This segment comes from a CPSP installation colocated with the intersection traffic light.” He glanced over at Gurney. “Crime Prevention Surveillance Program. That’s an initiative we—”
He broke off his explanation and pointed at the screen. “Look . . . there . . . that’s our target vehicle, driving west on Bridge Street. See . . . right there . . . it passes the Bridge Closed detour sign and keeps heading toward it.”
Kline asked if that road led anywhere except to the bridge.
“No, sir. Just the bridge.”
“Is it possible to drive onto it?”
“Yes, simply by moving the cones blocking it off. And they had, in fact, been moved.”
“How about the other side? Could the vehicle have driven over the bridge to some other destination?”
“The stage of demolition would have made that impossible. We figured the most likely reason for driving out onto the span at that time of night would be to dump something in the river. And it turned out we were right. That’s where we found the tripod used to steady the rifle.”
He pointed to the screen. “There . . . the same vehicle . . . returning from the bridge.”
Kline’s smile returned. “Nice work, Detective.”
Gurney cocked his head curiously. “Mark, how do you know what the tripod was used for?”
“The proof is in the photos we took at the apartment used by the shooter.” He tapped a few keys, and the scene switched to a still photo of an apartment door with a security peephole. The apartment number, 5C, was scratched and faded. The next photo appeared to have been taken from the same position, looking into the apartment with the door open.
“The photos I really want to show you are a little farther on,” said Torres, “but I didn’t have time to change the sequence.”
“Who let you in?” asked Gurney.
“The janitor.”
Gurney recalled his own aborted investigation at the Willard Park site and the trajectory indicated by the bullet’s penetration of the tree. That trajectory included multiple windows in three different buildings. “How did you zero in on one particular apartment?”
“We got a tip.”
“By phone?”
“Text.”
“Anonymous or from a known source?”
Beckert intervened. “We have a policy against discussing sources. Let’s move along.”
The next photo had been taken from inside the apartment door looking through a small foyer into a large unfurnished room. There was an open window on the far side of the room. In the next photo, taken from a position near the center of the room, the open window framed a view of the city. Beyond some low roofs, Gurney could see a grassy area bordered by tall pines. As he looked closer, he could just make out a yellow line—the police tape demarcating the area where he’d just had his confrontation with the local cop. It was clear that the apartment would offer a sniper an ideal perch from which to pick off anyone in the vicinity of the field where the demonstration had been held.
“Okay,” said Torres with some excitement, “now we’re getting to the key pieces of evidence.”
The next photo, taken in the same room at floor level, showed the lower half of a steam radiator and the cramped space under it. In the radiator’s shadow, back against the wall, Gurney noted the soft sheen of a brass cartridge casing.
“A thirty-aught-six,” said Torres. “Same as the recovered bullet.”
“With a clear print on it?” asked Kline.
“Two. Probably thumb and forefinger, the way you’d chamber it in a bolt-action rifle.”
“Do we know it was a bolt-action?”
“That’s the action in most thirty-aught-sixes manufactured in the past fifty years. We’ll know for sure when ballistics takes a closer look at the extractor and ejector marks.”
