Out of the Black - Lee Doty [5]
The driver was indeed "extremely dead"- slumped forward and to the right in his harness, his head was mostly missing. From the pattern of... tissue... on the passenger's door but not the deployed airbag, it appeared that he had died before the car hit the wall. In his left hand, the driver clutched the detached steering wheel. Upon closer inspection, the wheel was deformed as if it had been wrenched off.
Ping blinked and shook his head, "Looks like the driver died before the car hit the bridge."
Malloy nodded, "The shot probably came through the window. What do you make of the steering wheel?"
"Souvenir?" Rodriguez said around abbreviated breaths. The air was tinged with the smell of the butcher shop.
Ping blunted his visceral reaction to the carnage by pulling his tablet from its holster and getting to work. He expanded it to notepad size and switched it out of standby. He detached the stylus and brought up a new incident report. He used the tablet's three-dimensional scanners to record the contents of the car. He paused occasionally to scratch notes and diagrams, linking them with the images. "I'll need a download of your raw reports."
The two officers entered the necessary commands on their tablets. Ping's tablet chirped twice in acknowledgment of the inbound data feeds. He would review and incorporate them into his report later.
"We already did the full survey," Rodriguez said.
Ping nodded absently from behind the shelter of his tablet as he finished surveying the front seat and moved on to the rear.
When looking from the front, he hadn't noticed the damage to the back seat- four holes in a tight configuration at about chest level- definitely bullet holes. They were probably fired from outside the driver's door, from about where he was now standing. On a hunch Ping turned around and looked down. He stood at one end of another bloody skid mark radiating away from the car. At the far end was what might have once been a body- so much for the shooter.
He snapped some images and turned his attention to the car's second occupant. Not much to see there; at least not much to want to see. Patterns of blood on the seats implied that the victim had probably been standing when he was killed, but whoever had done it had stopped to make very, very sure that he was dead. Ping gritted his teeth and documented. He hoped that he would never get used to stuff like this.
When his tablet contained all the information he could get about the car, he turned toward the bullet-pocked wall. He was documenting the placement of the shots when Malloy spoke. "We got here 'bout twenty minutes ago. Traffic dispatched us to check out the intersection's Big Brother. It went offline about an hour before and wouldn't respond to remote diagnostics.
Ping nodded, "Just coincidence, I'm sure."
"Yeah... Someone didn't want to show up in the background of a traffic violation video. The Bro' took a round powerful enough to scrap it. You'll find a link to its logs and a scan of the scrap in the feed I gave you."
"Witnesses?" Ping asked, knowing the answer.
Malloy bit his lip, shook his head.
"We saw something..." Rodriguez said, eyes lingering on the car's interior, "something fast."
Ping looked up from his work, giving Rodriguez his full attention; he left the question unasked.
After a pause, Rodriguez continued, "I didn't get a good look..."
"Just a good scare, hey?" Malloy interrupted, looking amused, his game face nearly impenetrable.
With an effort, Rodriguez looked away from the car and faced his partner. "You know, your terror squeak was quite... distracting." His game face was back too.
"I got a touch of the asthma, Junior!" Malloy came back.
"Children..." Ping eased into the friendly sparring with the patient-but-firm voice he'd perfected while counseling troubled families. His gaze settled on Rodriguez.
"Yeah... well, we'd found the bodies there," Rodriguez said, pointing to a ragged crater in the concrete behind the patrol car.
"Mortar round?" Ping said, staring at the raised