“Hold on, detective,” Holly said before Crawford could speak. “The man we know as Rodriguez threatened Mr. Hunt with a loaded pistol. He opened fire on a deputy sheriff. Whether or not he was the gunman in the courtroom, he had to be stopped.”
“Thanks, judge, but I don’t need you to defend me,” Crawford said, his eyes fixed on Neal. “I don’t know what happened between the courtroom and the roof, but you saw the videos from the security cameras up there. Rodriguez was acting squirrely. He paid for bad choices with his life, and that’s a goddamn shame. But it’s history. Can’t be undone. Your job now is to figure out—”
“Kindly don’t tell me what my job is.”
“—where the switch was made, why it was made, and how. Was Rodriguez a dupe set up to take the fall? Or did he just pick a bad time to lift a pistol that didn’t belong to him, and then panic when confronted? And the really looming question is, since he wasn’t the shooter, who was?
“Until you have answers to all those questions, Neal, you’re gonna have an outraged public, plus every cop in the long chain of command straight up to the chief gnawing on your ass. Now, throw me under the bus if it makes you feel better. Have at it. I’ve survived worse. But until you solve this thing, it’s your butt that’s going to be dog chow. How’s it feel to be lead investigator now, asshole?” He hooked his hand around Holly’s elbow. “Let’s go.”
“Wait.”
Crawford paused in the act of sliding from the booth and dragging Holly with him.
Neal’s pride was wrestling with his better judgment, and the latter won out. “What do you know?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“Then what do you think?”
Crawford hesitated, then scooted back into the booth. When he and Holly were resettled—not as far apart, he noticed—Neal gestured to him that he had the floor.
“I think the shooter had the painter’s outfit stashed inside the closet across the hall from the courtroom. He put it on in there and waited until court convened. How long he waited, I don’t know. We figured he slipped in undetected among all those jurors, but he could have been hunkered down in there for hours. CSU has gone over that closet?”
“It’s a custodial closet. Dust cloths, push brooms, mop buckets.”
“In other words, trace evidence out the wazoo.”
“Bags full.”
“We might not be able to put him in the closet, not conclusively enough to satisfy a jury. But we won’t have to. His DNA will be all over the painter’s outfit. Of course, we need a suspect before that does us any good,” he added grimly. “Have you tracked down the supplier?”
“Of the painter’s clothes? Didn’t seem necessary. We thought we had our perp. I’ll put Nugent on that.”
Crawford wondered if Nugent was competent to handle the assignment. He didn’t believe he was clever enough to qualify as a suspect. “Wherever our shooter is tonight, he’s second-guessing leaving all that stuff behind.”
“Why did he?” Holly asked.
Crawford thought it through. “Maybe he heard me in the stairwell and realized I was making my way up. Better to leave the disguise and hope for the best than to be caught with it. Same with the pistol. He risked being apprehended unarmed, but he knew there would be a shakedown of everyone evacuated from the building.” Looking at Neal, he said, “I’m betting there were no fingerprints on the gun.”
Neal shook his head. “Clean. Serial number filed off. We’re waiting on ballistics.”
“I doubt you’ll get a link to any other crime.”
Neal nodded glumly. “Anybody who’d file off the serial number…”
“What about Jorge Rodriguez?” Holly addressed the question to Crawford. “Do you think he was somehow involved?”
“My gut tells me no. You?”
Neal, to whom he’d address the question, looked back at him with perplexity. “I thought we’d determined that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and made a fatal error in judgment, but had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s one possibility, but we haven’t determined a damn thing. Maybe you should start thinking outside the box, Neal. Like maybe the poor son of a bitch was set up as a dupe, a decoy.”
“There’s absolutely nothing to support that theory.”
“There’s nothing that nullifies it, either. We should at least test every theory, don’t you think?”
“We? I thought you couldn’t wait to get away from this investigation.”
“I’ve got Mrs. Barker to answer to,” Crawford said. “As well as your chief. Remember? You want to complain about my participation, take it up with him.”
Neal squirmed with dislike over the reminder, but he couldn’t dispute it.
Crawford said, “You still need to ID Rodriguez ASAP so you can either eliminate a connection to the perp or establish one. And something else—”
“You’re telling me how to do my job?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. But you need to put everyone who was in the building at the time of the shooting under a microscope. Thoroughly question every person who was evacuated. And you can’t use Prentiss PD or sheriff’s office personnel to conduct the questioning.”
“That’s disqualifying over a hundred officers.”