“Right, we definitely needed a break. What about you? Find anything?” she asked.
“A little bit of footage, nothing identifiable.”
“Okay,” she said. Before they were done talking, she looked up to see him walking into the office.
He pocketed his phone and said, “Let me grab a coffee, and then we’ll sit down and see what we can do.”
She nodded. “I’ve already got him tracked and heading over toward the Lions Gate Bridge.”
“In that case,” he said, “skip the coffee. I’m here.”
And he sat down beside her.
*
Within seconds, bothRodney and Kate had their screens up, tracking the truck on different cameras. With both of them talking back and forth, they tracked the shooter through town and across the Lions Gate Bridge—also known as First Narrows Bridge—over to West Vancouver.
“Shit,” he said, “we have to change districts.”
She quickly moved to shift to cameras in another direction, noting the time the truck went over the bridge. But, when they got to the other side, the truck headed into the mall, one of the great big strip malls that ran along the right side of the highway, and they lost him from the view of the cameras. Using as many other cameras as she could, she tracked for hours through the mall area and the highway to see if he ever came back onto the highway.
But searching through twelve hours’ worth of film later, using fast-forward mode, backtracking several times, she sat back in defeat. “Well, if he went in there, I don’t know how he came out.”
“There are exits out the back,” Rodney said, shifting. “If you wanted to avoid the cameras, that would be the easiest way to do it.”
“Goddammit,” she said. “Now what?”
“You realize, in all that time, we never got an ID on his face, and we never got very much on the license plate.”
“I took a couple screenshots,” she said, shifting to where she had saved them. She pulled them up and showed them to him. “Do you think Forensics could do anything with that?”
He tapped the screen of one and said, “That one is damn close. We might get some of the letters on it.”
She immediately sent it off to the guys and gals in Computer Forensics to see if they could enhance it at all. When Stoop called her, saying there wasn’t much to go on, Kate heard the doubt in his tone. Tired and frustrated, she snapped at him. “Come on. It’s all we’ve got, and he just killed two more guys today.”
“Right, I’m on it,” he said.
“I guess you haven’t had a chance to look at that laptop, have you?”
He said, “I wouldn’t even have gone in that direction with the jumpers, and I get that you think we have nothing going on here. But cases like these drive-by shootings take precedence over suicides.”
“Just not much precedence,” she said, “please. We need to make sure that these suicides aren’t murders.”
“You really think they are?”
“This David guy was threatened with pictures of his wife with a bullet hole in her head if he didn’t do what he was told.”
“Well, crap,” he said. “I’m on it.”
She hoped so; she just wasn’t so sure. It would be tough right now because she also knew that they were swamped. She sat back and looked over at Rodney. “You realize that took hours.”
“Yep,” he said, “the day is done.”
She shook her head. “How the hell is the day done already?”
He got up, reached in his open drawer for his keys and wallet, and said, “I’ll see you later.”
She nodded. “I guess.”