“The BDA sniper? Those were his words?”
“Those were his words.”
“He was that sure about a BDA connection?”
“Absolutely positive. You have doubts about it?”
“I have doubts about everything connected with this case.”
“We’ll know more as soon as Garrett pulls the bullet out of the woodwork. It’s taking extra time because we’re trying to preserve as much of the entry channel as we can.”
Gurney looked over at the tech in the flower bed, his coveralls hanging loosely on his tall, gangly frame. He was up to his knees in purple alliums and evening primrose—which Gurney recognized as two of Madeleine’s favorites, along with bee balm and foxglove.
Torres went on. “We figure the shot had to have come from up there.” He gestured toward a broad area of houses several blocks up the hill. “I have four of our guys up there now doing door-to-doors, trying to find out if anyone heard or saw anything. Somebody up there must have heard the gunshot, even if it was suppressed—which I guess it was, or some of the neighbors down here would have heard it, and nobody did.”
Gurney recalled that the police canvassing of the Grinton neighborhood for information at the time of the Steele shooting hadn’t produced much cooperation. But Bluestone was a different kind of place, the kind where cops were viewed as allies, not enemies.
“Got it!” With a satisfied smile, the tech in the flower bed was holding up what appeared to be a remarkably intact bullet. Gurney and Torres stepped under the tape and went over for a closer inspection.
“Looks identical to the one you dug out of the tree in Willard Park,” said Torres.
“Yep. Same caliber, same full metal jacket, no significant deformation, nice and clean for ballistics.” He slipped the bullet into a small evidence envelope, already labeled and dated.
“Great work,” said Torres. “Thank you.”
“So that’s the whole deal here, right? Just the bullet recovery? No combing the site?”
“Nothing here to comb for. We’ll be in touch when we find the shooter site.”
The tech got into his van and departed.
Gurney, followed by Torres, headed for the hole in the woodwork. After giving it a quick examination, he took out his pen and inserted it as far as it would go, about three inches below the surface. The range of vectors created by the angle of the pen substantially reduced the portion of the hillside that Torres had originally indicated as the area from which the shot had come. Even allowing for the imprecision of the method and the possibility of the bullet channel being skewed one way or the other by contact with the victim or by the grain of the wood, it narrowed the area of interest to a couple of dozen hillside houses.
As Gurney was removing his pen from the channel, Torres’s phone rang.
He took the call and mostly listened, eyes widening with excitement.
“Okay, I got it. Thirty-Eight Poulter Street. We’ll be right there.”
He grinned at Gurney. “We may have lucked out. Uniforms found a couple of homeowners who say they heard something that could have been a shot—coming from a vacant house that sits between them. Let’s roll.”
They got into the Crown Vic and three minutes later were parked behind two WRPD cruisers at the Poulter Street address. It was a street of two-story Colonials on modest plots of land with driveways leading to detached garages. Most of the front yards consisted of neatly trimmed lawns with a few azaleas or rhododendrons in mulched planting beds.
The exception was number thirty-eight—where overgrown grass, wilted shrubs, and lowered blinds created an impression of abandonment. The open garage door was the only indication of recent use. Two patrol cops with yellow tape were turning the house, garage, driveway, and backyard into a restricted area. A third officer—a heavy-shouldered, thick-necked young man with a shaved head and a stolid expression—was emerging from the neighboring house on the left.
Gurney and Torres met him in front of the driveway. Gurney learned his name was Bobby Bascomb when Torres introduced them. He pointed back to the house he’d come from. “Lady in that house, Gloria Fenwick, says she heard a car pulling into this driveway earlier this afternoon.”
“She know the time?” asked Torres.
“Not when it pulled in, but she knows it pulled out at exactly thirty-six minutes after three. And she knows it was a black Corolla sedan and the driver was in a hurry.”
“She’s that sure about the time and car model?”
“She’s sure about the car because she has an old Corolla herself. She’s sure about the time because it was unusual for anyone to come to that house, so when she heard a car pulling in she went to her side window, trying to see who it might be. She couldn’t see anyone because the car was already in the garage. But she stayed by the window. A few minutes later she heard a loud ‘bang’—which she thought was a door slamming. Maybe thirty seconds after that, the car came backing out of the garage onto the street and, as she put it, ‘peeled rubber’ and was gone. That got her attention. That’s when she looked at the clock.”
“She get a look at the driver?”
“No. But she said it had to be a man because women don’t drive that fast.”
“Did you call in a description of the car?”
“Yep. They’ve put an APB out on it.”
Torres called headquarters and told them to add the plate number of the car associated with the Steele shooting to the APB on the black Corolla in Bluestone.
He resumed his debriefing of Bascomb. “Does the lady know anything about the people who own this house?”
“She said they moved to Florida six months ago. They weren’t able to sell the house before they left, so they put it up for rent.”
“She know anything about the renters?”
“Just that she’s never seen them, but a friend in the real estate business told her it was someone from down in Grinton.”
“How’d she feel about that?”
Bascomb shrugged. “About like you’d expect. ‘Grinton’ is not a popular word on this side of town.”
“How about the neighbor on the other side?”
“Hollis Vitter. Piece of work. Pissed off at the grass not being mowed, pissed off at ‘the Grinton element’ moving into Bluestone, pissed off at ‘gun-control faggots.’ Lot of things piss him off.”
“Has he ever seen the people who rented the house?”
“No. But he thinks they must be foreigners.”
“Why?”
“Some bullshit about them not cutting the grass. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“Jesus,” muttered Torres. “Did he tell you anything that could be relevant to the case?”
“Actually, yes. And that part’s more interesting. Like the lady on the other side, he heard a sharp ‘bang,’ but he didn’t get to the window right away. Says he was locked in the shitter.”
“Locked?”
“That’s the word he used. The point is, the window was open, and he’s sure what he heard leaving wasn’t a car. He says it was a motorcycle and that the sound didn’t come from the street, it came from the weedy little hill that drops off in back of these houses.”
Torres looked uncertain. “Do we trust what he says about the sound?”
Bascomb sucked at his teeth. “I kinda pushed him on that, and he said he used to be a motocross mechanic down at Dortler’s Speed Sports.”
Torres appeared puzzled by the conflicting vehicle descriptions. “We’ll have to get that sorted out. Right now we need Garrett up here. And we need to get into that house. I’ll call in a request for a search warrant.”
“If you want to, for the record,” said Gurney. “But we have justification to go in immediately. We have reason to believe a shot was fired from the premises, and we have to ensure that the evidence techs aren’t blindsided when they go in, which they need to do ASAP.”