“Uh-oh.” She groaned and said, “Here we go.”
Both checked their phones, each notified of another drive-by shooting. Racing for their jackets, they headed out.
“I’ll drive,” he said. Running to his vehicle, they drove straight to the scene. Traffic was on their side, making the trip fast.
Kate stood off to the side, taking it all in. They were on scene earlier than the other shooting cases, in time to see people mingling around, witnesses still crying, the victim on the ground with a sheet atop him. Atopthem. She stepped up toward Rodney. “This would be a first, if it’s the same guy.”
He looked at her in surprise.
She pointed. “Look. More than one victim.”
Rodney frowned and nodded. “Could have been accidentally caught by the gunfire.”
She nodded. “But still, it doubles his kill count, and, in that case, he may want to keep that up.” Rodney’s gaze narrowed. She shrugged. “Just something to keep in mind.”
As they turned and took in the scene of the crime, she studied everything that she could get her mind wrapped around. But it seemed fairly simple: a vehicle drove by, took potshots at a couple guys walking along the road, and took them down. She bent to study the two young men; they were once again healthy, under twenty-five most likely, tall and slim, and looked to be athletic.
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 saidaqua.”