One Shot

in all the wrong places.
    He jiggled the wire down into the open joint and slid it along until the end went neatly into the empty cartridge case. Then he lifted it out very carefully, so as not to scratch it. He dropped it straight into a plastic evidence bag.
    “Meet at the station,” Emerson said. “In one hour. I’ll scare up a DA.”
    He walked away, on a route exactly parallel to the trail of footprints. Then he stopped next to the empty parking bay.
    “Empty the meter,” he called. “Print all the quarters.”
    “Why?” the tech called back. “You think the guy paid?”
    “I want to cover all the bases.”
    “You’d have to be crazy to pay for parking just before you blow five people away.”
    “You don’t blow five people away
unless
you’re crazy.”
    The tech shrugged. Empty the meter? But he guessed it was the kind of insight detectives were paid for, so he just dialed his cell phone and asked the city liaison guy to come on back again.

    Someone from the District Attorney’s office always got involved at this point because the responsibility for prosecution rested squarely on the DA’s shoulders. It wasn’t the PD that won or lost in court. It was the DA. So the DA’s office made its own evaluation of the evidence. Did they have a case? Was the case weak or strong? It was like an audition. Like a trial before a trial. This time, because of the magnitude, Emerson was performing in front of the DA himself. The big cheese, the actual guy who had to run for election. And reelection.
    They made it a three-man conference in Emerson’s office. Emerson, and the lead crime-scene tech, and the DA. The DA was called Rodin, which was a contraction of a Russian name that had been a whole lot longer before his great-grandparents came to America. He was fifty years old, lean and fit, and very cautious. His office had an outstanding victory percentage, but that was mostly due to the fact that he wouldn’t prosecute anything less than a total certainty. Anything less than a total certainty, and Rodin gave up early and blamed the cops. At least that was how it seemed to Emerson.
    “I need seriously good news,” Rodin said. “The whole city is freaking out.”
    “We know exactly how it went down,” Emerson told him. “We can trace it every step of the way.”
    “You know who it was?” Rodin asked.
    “Not yet. Right now he’s still John Doe.”
    “So walk me through it.”
    “We’ve got monochrome security videotape of a light-colored minivan entering the garage eleven minutes before the event. Can’t see the plates for mud and dirt, and the camera angle isn’t great. But it’s probably a Dodge Caravan, not new, with aftermarket tinted windows. And we’re also looking through old tapes right now because it’s clear he entered the garage at some previous time and illegally blocked off a particular space with a traffic cone stolen earlier from a city construction site.”
    “Can we prove stolen?”
    “OK, obtained,” Emerson said.
    “Maybe he works for the city construction department.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You think the cone came from the work on First Street?”
    “There’s construction all over town.”
    “First Street would be closest.”
    “I don’t really care where the cone came from.”
    Rodin nodded. “So, he reserved himself a parking space?”
    Emerson nodded in turn. “Right where the new construction starts. Therefore the cone would have looked plausible. We have a witness who saw it in place at least an hour before. And the cone has fingerprints on it. Lots of them. The right thumb and index finger match prints on a quarter we took out of the parking meter.”
    “He paid to park?”
    “Evidently.”
    Rodin paused.
    “Won’t stand up,” he said. “Defense will claim he could have placed the cone for an innocent reason. You know, selfish but innocent. And the quarter could have been in the meter for days.”
    Emerson smiled.
Cops think like cops, and lawyers think like lawyers.
    “There’s more,” he said. “He parked, and then he walked through the new construction. At various points he left trace evidence behind, from his shoes and his clothing. And he’ll have picked trace evidence up, in the form of cement dust, mostly. Probably a lot of it.”
    Rodin shook his head. “Ties him to the scene sometime during the last two weeks. That’s all. Not specific enough.”
    “We’ve got a three-way lock on his weapon,” Emerson said.
    That got Rodin’s