Collateral Damage A Matt Royal Mystery - By H. Terrell Griffin Page 0,18
the Grand Beach condos,” J.D. said.
“You’re pretty sure that’s where the shot came from?”
“Yes. It’s the tallest building in that area and we found a filtered cigarette butt and some scuff marks on the flat roof at about where the shot had to come from.”
“Did you find the slug that killed him?”
“Yes. It went right through him and hit the sand. We found it with a metal detector.”
“Did the bullet tell you anything?”
“Only that it was a thirty caliber.”
“Anything else?”
“No. And we couldn’t pull any DNA from the butt. We don’t even know if it belonged to the shooter. We’re thinking it didn’t, because it’d been on the roof long enough that the weather had degraded any DNA that might have been there.”
“You’re sure you’ve got the right building?”
“Pretty sure. The crime-scene techs were able to figure a pretty good trajectory of the bullet. It fits with the Grand Beach and the scuff marks we found on the roof.”
“I’m not sure I understand the significance of the scuff marks.”
“We’d had a gully washer the night before. Lots of rain. It would have washed off any marks that had been on the roof. The new ones had to have been made that morning and the maintenance guys were the only ones with keys to the roof. Neither of them had been up there that morning.”
I held up the photographs. “Elevator surveillance?”
“Yes. Not much help.”
I looked closely at the pictures. Each one had a time stamp in the bottom right corner. Several were taken about an hour before the second group. I separated them out according to the time stamp. I saw a man wearing a light windbreaker jacket made of some dark material, jeans, running shoes, and a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. He never looked at the camera. In all the pictures, he had his head down.
“He knew about the camera,” I said.
“Yes. We never got a shot of his face.”
“He’s carrying a briefcase in all of them.”
“We’re assuming that was a container for his rifle. He could break it down and it would fit perfectly in the case.”
I looked more closely at the pictures. “Are you sure this is a man?”
“Because he’s small?”
“Yes. It could be a woman.”
“I thought of that, but it doesn’t seem too plausible. Women usually aren’t professional killers. They have to have some other motive. Jealously, sometimes money, something that rattles their system and makes them angry enough to kill. Besides, most women wouldn’t be trained snipers, and we think this guy had to have been well trained in order to hit the target at that range.”
I sat quietly for a moment, staring at the pictures. “How did the killer know that Jim Desmond would be jogging on the beach that morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the murder was random? That the killer just went up on that rooftop with the idea of killing somebody, anybody, and Jim came trotting up?”
“We considered that. But there have been no other killings in the past three years in Florida that match the pattern here. I think if it was just random, we’d have had more murders just like this one. A serial killer can’t stop with just one.”
“What about the killings on Dulcimer?” I asked.
“No connection that we can see.”
“What if the sheer randomness of all the killings is the connection?”
J.D. shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. One was a long-range shooting and the others were knifings. The captain was killed by someone skilled in martial arts. Either that, or the killer was very strong. Up close and brutal. And we’re pretty sure there had to be a team of at least two people working the boat. One to take care of the captain and another to kill the passengers.”
“And you never found any connections between any of the four dead people.”
“None.”
“If Jim’s killing wasn’t random, then the killer must have known that Jim would be on the beach that morning. Any thoughts?”
J.D. nodded. “Desmond had been at the Hilton for three days before his wedding. He jogged the beach every morning at about the same time. We think the killer was betting on his being at the same place at pretty much the same time on the day of the murder.”
“Do you think there was anything significant about the fact that he was murdered on the day after his wedding?”
“I thought about that, but decided that it was probably a coincidence. If the new wife had been part of it, it would