have to call you 3M.”
Wire laughed uncontrollably.
Mac smiled, “I like it, Detective, I like it lot.” Then he looked to his temporary partner, “Detective Ring, this is Dara Wire.”
“Ahh,” Ring answered, his two hands swallowing her one. “You are the pretty unaffiliated cop my friend Herdine mentioned. It is my pleasure indeed.”
“Pleasure’s all mine,” Wire answered with a big smile.
Pleasantries were exchanged for another minute and then Wire moved to business, “Detective Ring, I assume your colleagues filled you in why we’re down here.”
“They did indeed, Ms. Wire. This is a most peculiar case, I must say, and quite interesting,” Ring replied while opening his umbrella. “Let us go stand in the median and I can describe to you the events that transpired here this past Wednesday night.”
Ring led them across the westbound side of East Juneau to the median which was ten feet wide. He faced the apartment building entrance. “So here’s what happened. Gabriel Martin exits the Waterview Tower there and he crosses the westbound side of the street like we just did and gets to the median here and pauses.”
“How do you know he pauses?” Wire asked.
The detective opened a Milwaukee Police Department file and pulled out some still photos. “Because we have traffic camera photos of Martin standing here to wait for traffic to pass.” Wire and McRyan each looked at the photo. A man is standing in the median under a streetlight. Rain is falling and he’s looking in the direction of oncoming traffic. Mac looks to the west and see’s the traffic camera high up on the light pole, one camera looking to the north on Water Street and the other looking east on Juneau towards their position.
“Anyway, traffic passes and Martin quickly walks across the two lanes to his car parked on Juneau here.” Ring pulled out his cell phone and opened a video file. “The rest you should see for yourself.” The detective hit play and Wire and Mac leaned in to watch.
“Whoa!” Mac recoiled from the video.
“Oh my God,” Wire yelped, raising her hands to her face.
As Martin reached his car and opened the door, a Chevy Suburban comes from the west and runs him over. The Suburban ran over Martin, the car door and didn’t stop, just kept going and out of camera view.
“The Suburban didn’t slow down a lick,” Mac added. “There was no attempt to evade or anything.”
“No there was not,” Ring replied. “The driver was either completely oblivious, looking in a different direction or down or to the left or …”
“… It was intentional,” Wire finished. “If the driver was distracted or looking in a different direction, the truck wouldn’t be on such a straight path …”
“… Nor would it have accelerated like that,” Mac finished. “That’s a hit, plain and simple.”
“I agree,” Ring answered.
“I take it you never found the driver?” Wire asked.
“Nor the Suburban,” Ring replied. “I got the video footage you just looked at. I tracked the license plate and it was for a Suburban reported stolen at literally the same time this accident happened. The owner was at the Menomonee Falls police station filing the report when Martin was run down. In any event, we used some traffic cams to track the Suburban for a number of blocks until it got out of downtown to the north but then we lost it.”
“How about GPS?”
“Tried that but we lost track of it on that as well up around Lac Du Cours Lake north of town here.”
Mac shook his head and gave a knowing smile. “It’s probably at the bottom of that lake. There was a panel van that we were tracking last night that was involved in the shooting outside my family’s pub. We tracked the van to the bottom of the Mississippi River south of St. Paul. I bet they did the same here.”
Ring jotted down some notes. “I’ll have to check on that. See if we find it there. Not that it’ll do much good at this point.”
“You never know, forensics is an amazing thing,” Mac added.
“Did you get a look at the driver at all?” Wire asked.
The detective shook his head, “Wish we did, my lady. The driver was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low and the collar of his coat was pulled up so the face is obscured so we didn’t really get a good look at his face.”
“Was there a passenger?”
Ring nodded. “That’s yet another reason why I think it’s a hit, because even if the driver was