“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.”