“Yes, sir,” they both said, then spread out, as Ashton knelt by the body.
In short order, Ashton had ascertained that there was no other injury on the body save for the contiguous entry/exit wounds, and he found the misshapen remains of the projectile on the floor along the far wall, only a few feet away. Near the center of the splatter on that wall, he found a dent in the sheet rock where the projectile had impacted; two passages through bone, as well as more than eight inches of brain tissue, had robbed it of much of its momentum, and it had not been able to penetrate the sheet rock. Which, he thought, argues for a lower relative kinetic energy on the projectile than, say, my personal weapon. Hm.
“Hey, Brandon,” he called, “have you found anything yet?”
“Yes, sir, I think I might have,” Elliot responded, “but if I have, I dunno how we’re ever gonna find the weapon.”
“Show me.”
Elliot pointed to the window, putting his finger very near a small, round hole in the glass, some six and a half feet above the floor, give or take. Obviously the shot had come from outside the apartment, but there was no building across the street of anywhere close to comparable height.
“Hum,” Ashton said, studying the location of the body, as well as the height of the bullet hole, then estimating a line of sight. “Well, we’ll need to get the forensics team in here, but I’d say we had a sniper. Probably...” He gave one more educated look at the body, then pointed out the window at an angle. “Probably over on that rooftop there. It’s a slightly catty-corner shot, but it’s taller than this building, and would give a clear sight line from the roof near that AC unit, down into this apartment.”
“Oh,” Elliot said, stepping back and studying the body a little closer. “Okay, I can see that... now that you’ve pointed it out. I was figuring for something straight across, except there’s not a building over there that’s anything like high enough to do… this.”
Ashton grinned. “You’re still fairly new to this,” he said. “It’s okay. You’ll learn, and I can help teach you. This is one reason why Lee wanted me to tag along. But we do need to go over and have a look at that rooftop. Call the forensics team, and I’ll go see what Donna is up to, then we’ll go over to the rooftop and see what we can find.”
“Hey, Donna,” Ashton said, coming up behind the woman as she systematically went through the victim’s desk in the apartment’s home office. “Got anything?”
“OH!” she cried, jumping and startling badly. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir! I was totally absorbed in this, and didn’t hear you come in the room!”
“Heh, that’s okay,” Ashton chuckled as Law flushed. “Though you do need to start practicing situational awareness. You never know when the perp is still there, hiding somewhere in the crime scene, and you could get ambushed. Find anything?”
“A few sketches of what look like some sort of spacecraft,” she said, holding up some doodles on paper. “What do you think?”
Ashton riffled through the sheets of paper, considering what he knew of the plans that he’d been given to pass on to Betty Conrad, the spy that had started the whole Carolina/Annalia infiltration. I think I need to get this to General Daggert, he decided, without saying anything of significance aloud. Because I don’t know if this is legit, or a faked plan, but it’s interesting. And it needs an expert eye, which I don’t have, at least on this subject.
“I think I’ll take this, for now,” he said, tucking the sheaf into an evidence bag, thence into an inner pocket of his jacket, “and run it by one of our subject-matter experts. It may be nothing – probably is – but it’s best to check. Did you find anything that indicates she was working for another polity? A point of contact or the like?”
“Not here,” Law said, shaking her head. “There looks to be some interesting stuff in her VR channels, though.”
“Then that’s something else we need to look at,” Ashton decided. “Meanwhile we need to go to the roof of the building diagonally across the street.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because it looks like our shooter was over there.”
Across the street on the rooftop, the two less-experienced investigators simply watched as their division lead surveyed the area.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Ashton murmured after a few moments. “No sign of bullet casings anywhere. But there are indistinct foot marks in the roofing material, and... hm. Condensation ring stains on the ledge. Somebody brought a drink up here. None of that is conclusive, though – it could be somebody who lives in the building, and came up here to relax.”
He produced a tape measure and measured the marks in the roofing, then kept looking, while Elliot and Law watched.
Abruptly Ashton bent, then knelt, and looked under the edge of one of the big air conditioning units. He straightened up, fishing a set of gloves out of his pocket and donning them. Then he bent back down and reached under the unit.
“Guys,” he said, “somebody get out a large evidence bag. I don’t have any that size on me.”
Law produced a bag from one pocket, then opened it and moved to Ashton’s side, holding it out, as he retrieved...
...A compressed air tank, roughly the size of a half-liter water bottle.
“Damn,” Elliot muttered, as Ashton eased it into the evidence bag. “That guy has eyes like an eagle.”
“Not really,” Ashton said then. “I was looking for it.”
Law and Elliot gaped at him.
Back at the victim’s apartment, the forensics team was hard at work, marking the bullet, splatter marks complete with angles, and attempting to determine the bullet
