I stepped into the middle of an ongoing conversation. Lutz looked over his shoulder as I came up from behind on his right.
“What do we have?” I asked.
“Same shit, different day,” he answered with what sounded like anger in his voice.
Don backed out of the vehicle and turned off the headlamp he wore. “Entry wound looks just like the other two. Only difference is there’s stippling around the bullet hole.”
I grimaced. “So the shooter was within inches of Ted’s face?”
“It appears that way, and with the window down, the killer could have easily reached in and fired.”
“What would you say the firing distance was from Dwayne and Brice?”
Don looked to be pulling the previous scenes from his memory. “Keep in mind, all the men were shot with a handgun, which is highly unreliable as far as hitting a small target like a forehead. In order to hit someone in that exact spot, the shooter had to be a crack shot or relatively close—within ten feet of his victim. That’s also if the victim remained stationary. To cause gunpowder stippling, the shooter had to be within three feet of his target, and with the amount evident on Mr. Hunt’s face, I’d say the shooter was less than a foot away.”
“As if he stuck his gun through the open window.”
“That’s correct, Jesse.”
I rubbed my brow. “Humph. That means the killer had to get Ted’s attention. Possibly some type of ruse that sounded urgent.”
Lutz nodded. “And that sounds like what might have gone down at the Lincoln house. Dwayne opened the door in the middle of the night to a possible stranger who might have been faking an urgent situation.”
I added my take. “And Brice was likely blindsided as he walked to his car. By the way, what was the verdict on the video footage from the casino?”
“Nobody showed up on camera other than Brice and the employee who found him.”
I cursed under my breath. “It’s getting harder and harder to catch a break these days.”
Crawford spoke up behind me. “Or the criminals are just getting a hell of a lot smarter.”
“Yeah, or that.” I tipped my chin at Lutz. “I’m going to head to the station so I can write down my thoughts.”
“No way. You can write down your thoughts from home. Go on. Beat it.”
“You sure?”
“Yep, and thanks, McCord. I’ll see you in the morning, and bring those thoughts with you.”
“Copy that.”
As I drove, I was already taking the mental notes that I’d write down over a beer at the kitchen table. Don would probably confirm the slug to be the same weight as the others. The MO was the same, and the fact that nobody heard anything at any of the scenes made me rethink my previous theories about Dwayne’s neighbors not wanting to talk. There was a good chance that they actually didn’t hear anything other than the neighbor, Mr. Baker, who heard Coby barking outside. I would add the silencer angle to my list. The connections between the men didn’t make sense—one low-rent type of guy, one mid-level supervisor, and one wealthy liquor tycoon. I highly doubted that they knew each other, or their killer, but they did share livelihoods that one could consider vices, deadly sins, and the like.
Is that it? The connection between them is only in the eyes of the killer. He’s murdering people who don’t fit his image of God-fearing people without sin or vices? Maybe the victims’ lifestyles brought back bad memories of the killer as a child who lived with a gambling father, a drunken mother, or both. Maybe there was abuse in the household too.
I wondered if I was onto something and couldn’t wait to get home before some of the thoughts bubbling up in my mind slipped away.
It was ten o’clock by the time I had that beer in hand and paper and a pen in front of me. My neighbor Dean had left a note on the counter saying he’d fed Bandit and taken him to his house for an hour of playtime with Jackson. I smiled as I read it and couldn’t appreciate a neighbor any more than I appreciated Dean.
I put bullet points by each entry and hoped I hadn’t forgotten anything. Tomorrow morning, I planned to present my thoughts to our detectives and Lutz, either in a brainstorming session or during the roll call updates, but that would be Lutz’s call.
With a profile of sorts on the killer, and then learning his rationale for his actions, I hoped we’d get a better idea of who he was and what kind of person we were looking for.