fifteen:
tuesday mid-day

It was a world-class shot. Allison had heard tales of longer shots, but those targets were elk, deer, or the occasional bear or moose—not a human. The added wrinkle here was the wind coming out of the canyon, over the right shoulder of where the shooter had allegedly stood. Or sat. Or something.

“Is it six hundred yards?” said Allison.

“Within a few,” said Chadwick.

“It would take somebody with solid experience,” said Allison. “Anything beyond a gentle breeze over that distance, you’d be clueless where the shot would end up.”

“Agreed,” said Chadwick.

And then there was the elevation and adjusting for the drop.

“What did the wounds say about angle?”

All the way down from the Flat Tops, Chadwick said they wanted her to look at the scene without the cops’ vision of events bouncing around in her head. So he hadn’t said much about the case. The only conclusion Allison could draw was that the cops didn’t have much. Or didn’t have anything.

Allison had fought back a rare case of nerves as they approached the scene, side-long glances from the cops and officials as the sea parted to make way for her inspection. The air had been thick with doubt. If Trudy had been there, she would have lost count of the black auras and clogged throat chakras.

“Six or seven degrees north of horizontal,” said Chadwick. “He was above his target, but not by much.”

“Plus the bullet drop,” said Allison.

“Correct,” said Chadwick.

“Were there any strays?”

“Four,” said Chadwick. “Two hit the steel decking on the Grand Avenue bridge deck behind the pedestrian bridge to the west. Those two bullets are most likely in the water, but they left a mark. A third bullet was in the rear quarter panel of a southbound late-model Chevy pickup, a carpenter on his way to a job in Aspen. The last bullet, though of course we don’t know the order, was on the front bumper of a northbound minivan, family of five from Alamosa on their way to the hot springs pool.”

“A spotter,” said Allison, almost without thinking it through. The first two shots had likely hit the cars, then they adjusted and hit the decking and adjusted again. “How you’d pick up the misses without a spotter is beyond me. No dirt or dust to kick up, no idea how to adjust.”

“It’s a problem,” said Chadwick.

“And how many of the shots hit Lamott?”

“Two,” said Chadwick. “One high in the chest, one in the shoulder.”

The hill they were standing on was steep. The pitch was walkable, but you’d want to hold onto a branch or something for stability. The ground was rough. The trees were sparse, but two were substantial enough to climb. The space between trees consisted of bare dirt and scruffy bushes and grasses that looked sad and beat-up.

Allison squatted on the trail, tried to calm her breathing like a sniper. Her thoughts buzzed in a swirl that started along the lines of “what the hell do you think you are doing here?” to “make this quick and be on your way” to “maybe, just maybe, you can help.”

“Suppressor?” said Allison. A few hunters preferred to shoot with a suppressor because they cut down on noise and saved their ears.

“The witnesses said the noise was kind of muffled,” said Chadwick. “More of a tick-tick-tick.”

“So yes?”

“That’s our supposition at this point,” said Chadwick.

“How many heard them? How many pointed to this area?”

“Four solid witnesses,” said Chadwick. “We got a guy right down below the hill, he was out in back of his house painting this new trellis, said he hadn’t heard that sound since street fighting on the way into Baghdad during Desert Storm. He knew instantly what it was, though at the time he figured the shooter was someone who picked an unsafe place to test a gun.”

“But he isn’t sure,” said Allison. “Really sure.”

Chadwick shook his head. “Not with suppressors. They throw sound like a ventriloquist.”

“Good one,” said Allison.

“Thanks,” said Chadwick.

There was a non-cop side to Chadwick. He was more teddy bear than grizzly and his eyes hadn’t gone jaded and accusatory.

“So you’re going by bullet angle?” said Allison.

Allison propped an imaginary rifle like she was sighting it, right elbow jabbed into right thigh, left elbow resting on left knee. The grade was so steep that her left leg didn’t come up high enough to hold the rifle level. Or steady. To be reliable at this distance, the weapon would have carried some weight.

“The shooter wasn’t on top of the train station,” said Chadwick. “The angle from there would have been too much from the side.”

“How about that apartment building on this side of the train station?”

“The angle still isn’t right,” said Chadwick.

“But you checked it?”

Chadwick let out a heavy, slow sigh.