“Yeah, something like that,” she said.
“So, it could be the same truck,” he admitted. “Although there’s how many models in the Lower Mainland like that?”
“If we could narrow down the year,” she said, “I could spit out a run, and we could check on them. But other than it being clunky and old looking, I’m not getting any clue on how old it was. I could pull several images and see if I can get any of our witnesses to narrow it down again.”
“Yeah, that would be good,” he said. “Get any of the witnesses to take another look.”
She nodded. “I’m working on one of the paint programs to try to get the color right. And add a few dents, if I can.” She laughed. “Everybody seems to remember it was dented, but nobody could really say where the dents were.”
“And, of course, nobody ever has a picture,” he said.
“Always,” she said, with a shrug.
She headed back to her desk and brought up several of the old Chevys around in the 1960s. She printed it off when the model changed in ’63 and then another for the few tweaks made in ’67. Other than that, she had four different prints in color. She had to send them to a different part of the office, since they didn’t have a color printer in their area. With that done and the printed copies in hand, she headed back to the files for the witnesses’ phone numbers and contacted a couple previous witnesses. She got through to two, who agreed to let her email them some photos of trucks.
She fired off the emails and, while on the phone with one woman, said, “Okay, so do you recognize any of these as the truck?”
“Honestly I don’t remember,” she muttered. “It all happened so fast. The color seems right, but I don’t know about the truck.”
“Okay, is there anything about the truck that you think isn’t right?”
“The front,” she said. “The grille on the front. I think it was more vertical looking. The ridges were sticking up somehow.”
“Okay, good enough. Thank you.”
The second one said something similar but wasn’t sure about the color. Even by the time she left messages for the third and fourth witnesses, Kate knew it was probably a long shot and wouldn’t come anywhere close to giving her more details. Then she moved on to the second drive-by case and contacted anybody associated with that one. Another four witnesses had seen the shooting, and, by the time she phoned them and had them take a look at the truck photos, she was pretty bummed because she wasn’t making any progress.
Rodney looked over at her, shrugged, and said, “You know that it’s really hard for people to remember details of vehicles, unless they’re car buffs.”
She nodded. “And what are the chances that any of these people were one?” she muttered. She still had a couple more, and, just when she was running out of options, she got an email back from one of the ones she had emailed the photos to.
It was the second one. But the dent was in the front, and there was damage to the grille. I remember that specifically because, at the time, I was dealing with a problem with my own grille, and I thought he must have smacked his up too.
She picked up the phone and called him and asked, “Did you put that in your statement?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but seeing that picture reminded me.”
“Good enough,” she said. “Any chance it jogged any other information you can think of?”
His tone was thoughtful when he said, “I’m looking at the picture now. The color is close but not quite right. It was a long time ago. But that’s an odd color.”
“Do you think it was a custom paint job?”
“No,” he said, “I doubt it. I’m not sure it’s quite the paint that was used in that year though.”
“Right, I can get the manufacturer to give me a better idea on the colors back then.”
“Yeah,” he said, “it was also, you know, I hate to sayfaded, but it was faded.”
“So, maybe just old paint?”
“Well, it was definitely old paint,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. It’s close to this, but it’s not exactly.” Then he asked, “Why are you worried about this now?”
“It’s not that I’m worried about it now,” she said, “but we’ve had another drive-by shooting, and there are a few similarities.”
“That son of a bitch,” he said. “He gets away with it once and then tries a second time?”
“Which is why we’re checking everything again,” she said.