“I know. Presumably there’s a meaning behind it,” she said. “But honestly I don’t know what that could be. Am I supposed to think that this suicide was a crime? Is this a family member, saying, ‘Hey, she didn’t commit suicide.’ Or is this an observer, just saying, ‘Hey, you got nothing else to do with your time, maybe you should check this out.’ Or… who the hell knows.” She raised both hands in frustration. “Like we have time for anything extra.”
“Right,” Andy said behind her. “So bizarre.”
“But then people are bizarre,” she said.
Colby frowned at her. “Keep us informed, if you hear anything else, and watch your back.”
“I always watch my back,” she said calmly. “I don’t think I’m being targeted.”
“Well, I’m not sure what else you would call it,” Rodney said pointedly. “When somebody sends you a picture like that, it means that they’ve gone to the time and the energy to take your photo and then to let you know that they saw you.”
She stared at him. “It sounds a little creepier when you put it that way.”
“It is creepy,” Rodney said. “What was this guy doing out there at that hour anyway? I’m just saying, let’s be smart about it, okay?”
She didn’t have any argument with being smart about it, but it just seemed like everybody was making a bit bigger deal out of it than there was reason to support.
Colby said, “Log in the email and open a file, just in case.”
She groaned and said, “That’s just extra paperwork.”
“Do it,” he said. “No arguments.”
She flipped her hands, palms up. “Fine.” And rose, headed back to her desk, got down to work. After making sure her requested file was complete, she carried on with her day. “Where are the witness statements, from that drive-by shooting down on Hastings Street?”
“They were supposed to come in last night,” Lilliana said. “Did they not?”
Kate shook her head. “I wasn’t tagged on them, and they haven’t been dropped into the file. Let me check,” she said. It took a few minutes for her to shake down the officer out canvassing the neighborhood. “He apologized, said that they’d been out all night with a different case, and hadn’t had a chance to send them to us.”
“So, is he sending them now?”
Kate nodded. “Apparently. They should be in the file within a few minutes.”
“Good enough,” Lilliana said.
“I wonder what other case they had?” Kate asked. “I didn’t get tagged. Did anybody else?”
Everyone shook their heads. Lilliana said, “Maybe check the computer.”
“Well, they get called out on plenty that has nothing to do with us, don’t forget.”
It took about twenty more minutes before they had all the statements that had been collected on the recent drive-by shooting.
“What’s the point of a drive-by anyway?” Kate mused out loud.
“To murder and to get away with it,” Rodney said, glancing over at her. “Hands off, easy escape.”
“I get that, I do, but it’s not very personal. You do get a split-second chance to see who it is you’re shooting down, but there can’t be much job satisfaction in that.”
“You mean, it’s not up-front and personal? Yet it is in a way,” Rodney said. “When you think about it, you get to pick the victim. You get to see the shots fired. There is that sense of power, the sense of control, but, at the same time, you have speed on your side, so you get the hell away safely. And, as you can tell with this one, we haven’t got very much to go on.”
“That’s the other thing I don’t understand. I mean, normally we have cameras everywhere, and, while we’re still lobbying for more cameras for this area, it’s one of the heavier populated downtown streets. So we know for a fact that witnesses are around somewhere. Witnesses with cell phones. What are the chances of the shooter getting away with this?”
“Good enough to take the risk apparently,” Rodney said. “If you think about it, their getaway vehicle would be ditched in no time, and they would change to something else. So we’ll have a pretty rough time proving that they were the ones involved.”
She frowned at that. “Not if we can pinpoint who was driving on one of the city cameras, particularly in that area. Then, if we can put that vehicle at the scene of the crime, even better.”
He nodded. “And I get that,” he said, “but things never seem to line up quite so nicely. Remember that.”