them from fighting the rope until it was too late.”
“He was conscious, or unconscious?” Zoe asked.
“Hard to say until the coroner releases the report.”
“What about the location?” Zoe glanced back and forth, not seeing anything special about the alleyway or the street on their side of it. “Why was the victim here?”
“This is a route that would take him directly from his store, on the other side, to his home, which is about a five-minute walk in that direction.” Lee pointed back the way that Zoe and Flynn had just come. “He had just locked up the store before being targeted last night. It’s not a heavily trafficked area after dark—stores are closed and the rest is residential. No one saw him until this morning.”
Zoe nodded, taking it all in. Her eyes were seeing trajectories, routes, probabilities. “The location was nothing special. So, this was probably a moment of opportunity for the killer—the one spot in the victim’s regular route home where he would be out of view, and fumbling in the dark.”
“The killer knew his route,” Flynn said, confirming what Zoe was already thinking. “Either he knew the victim personally, or he followed him on prior occasions to find out what his routine was.”
“He had to be lying in wait at the scene,” Zoe said, realizing she had picked up on Flynn’s habit of assuming male pronouns before she corrected herself. “Or she.”
“He,” Flynn argued. “He had to have the strength to string up an adult male. Richards was… what was it?”
“A hundred and sixty-three pounds,” Zoe supplied automatically, from her mental bank of information.
“Right. Had to have been a male perpetrator, to have that kind of arm strength. I mean, he probably looks like SAIC Maitland, too.”
Zoe almost wanted to smile at the image of their commander and his bulging muscles, but Flynn was wrong. She shook her head. “Look at the angle of the rope.”
“The angle?” Flynn looked confused, staring at the rope but clearly not seeing anything. It was strung in a very particular way, looped up over the pole and then hanging down on the other side again. It had been tied up to a bike rack set into the concrete, so the body wouldn’t drop back down to the ground.
Zoe pointed, illustrating the actions with her fingers in the air. “The killer used the height of the pole and length of the rope to their advantage. Look, over there. She could use the struts off the top of the telephone pole as a first pulley, and the bike rack itself as a second pulley, reducing the force needed to lift the body into the air by half.”
The captain and Flynn both turned, squinting, to where Zoe had pointed. Stepping closer to the bike rack—a simple yet sturdy metal hoop set into the ground at the entrance of the alley—they contemplated it in silence for a moment.
“Looks like it would work,” Captain Lee admitted.
“So, what we’re saying is that the killer could be just about anybody,” Flynn said, blowing out a heavy breath as he brushed his perfectly styled dark hair back off his forehead. It fell immediately back into place, just so.
“Anyone who could lift eighty-nine pounds,” Zoe agreed. “And in the adrenaline-fueled situation of tackling a target, that could be a lot more people than you might think. We could be looking for any man or woman of average or even below average strength. If they could lift an average eight-year-old child, they could easily do this.”
“Just about the only thing we could say is that it isn’t someone with exceptional strength, since they wouldn’t need this set-up,” Flynn said glumly. “Unless that’s just to throw us off the scent, too.”
They contemplated this grim reality together for a moment, the fact that the killer could be any number of people. Zoe would have to check that the first crime scene had the same usage of physics to make the load easier, but from this scene, she couldn’t get a lot of information about the strength, weight, or height of the killer. The force of the pull had left no marks, the killer standing on the sidewalk rather than soft ground. They were going to need to look elsewhere for clues.
“We need to visit the coroner,” Zoe said, looking at Flynn. She wasn’t asking permission from the captain, or from Flynn. It was an instruction.
“Right,” Flynn agreed. “Captain, is there anyone who can drive us over there? Detective Morrison…”
“I’m right here,” Morrison said, over