Kill Shot by Susan Sleeman

Author:Susan Sleeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Mobile, Alabama

2:30 p.m.

Detective Skinner was an earnest-looking guy with mounds of case files stacked on his desk. Rick hoped his investigation would also close Santos’s murder investigation, thereby lessening Skinner’s heavy workload.

He gestured at a metal side chair by his desk and plopped a folder in front of Rick. “Your copy of our records. I don’t have the time to review each page with you. So I’ll give you an overview, then we’ll visit the scene. You can read the file on your own time and call if you have questions.”

Rick took out his notebook and pen. “Before we start, mind telling me why you used ViCAP before you had time to run down all the possible leads? It’s often a last resort.”

“This one is odd.”

“In what way?”

“For starters, we don’t get many long gun killings in the city. And as far as I know, we’ve never had a large-caliber shooting from such a distance. Couple that with the slug being removed from the fence, and I knew we had something else going on.” He steepled his fingers. “Seems I’m right, as the entry brought a fed running to my door within twenty-four hours.”

The guy was looking awful smug, but Rick wouldn’t comment. “Go ahead and give me that overview.”

“Dispatch received a 911 call from a bread truck driver on his morning route. He passed the deceased lying on the street, but thought nothing of it. Not with the high homeless population in that part of town. He made three deliveries, then doubled back to another stop at the end of the block near the deceased. That’s when he noticed that Santos was nicely dressed, so he went over to investigate and, upon discovering he was dead, called 911.”

“You check out the delivery schedule to confirm the driver’s story?”

He gave Rick a well-duh look. “I caught the case at seven a.m. on Friday morning, and the ME placed time of death two hours prior.”

Olivia’s schedule showed back-to-back appointments that day starting at eight a.m. She couldn’t have been in Mobile and gotten back to her office for that appointment. Still, they would confirm her alibi with the client.

“As the ViCAP report says,” Skinner continued, “we didn’t recover a slug, but one had embedded in a fence and was removed with a knife. We called in an SBI ballistics expert who placed the shooter at about eight hundred yards.”

Rick respected the staff at Alabama’s State Bureau of Investigation and had no reason to doubt their accuracy, but he would still check it out. “Your thoughts on who might want to kill Santos?”

Skinner leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Not too many shooters who can make that kind of shot, so we’re looking for a very skilled marksman.”

Rick wished he could tell Skinner that he was way off base here, as his theory was likely driving his investigation, but Rick wasn’t free to mention the smart bullet.

“You’ll see in my files that Santos had no connections to the local gun community,” Skinner continued.

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