It was 7:22 PM.Callie was at the Sheriff's Office in Lewis, finishing paperwork. McKenzie was in the break room when she was alerted.
"Active shooting. High Peaks. Restaurant on Main Street. One victim confirmed. Scene is chaotic."
She grabbed McKenzie on the way out. They were in the Tahoe and moving within two minutes. The drive from Lewis to High Peaks took forty minutes on a good day. McKenzie made it in eighteen.
The scene was visible three blocks before they arrived. There were flashing lights and sirens wailing. Fire trucks were present. Ambulances were angled across the street. Yellow tape had been strung between lampposts. A crowd of onlookers had formed on the far sidewalk, some of them still holding napkins from dinner, some of them recording on their phones.
Callie badged through the perimeter and stepped onto the patio.
It was a disaster. Forty witnesses had been sitting within fifty feet of the kill. Most had run. Some had stayed. All of them had walked through the scene, moved chairs, stepped in blood, touched the table, picked up belongings. The forensic integrity of the site was compromised before the first patrol car arrived.
She found the body at the center table. Richard Kline. By now the blood had soaked through the tablecloth and pooled on theflagstone beneath the chair. His right hand was still on the table, fingers curled around the stem of a broken wine glass.
One shot. Upper back. The same placement as Torres.
McKenzie came up beside her. He looked at the table, the blood, the broken glass, the phone still glowing.
“He went public," he said. "First time."
"First time anyone was watching."
"Aye. That changes things."
It changed everything. The previous kills had been isolated. Rural properties. Empty roads. No witnesses. The shooter had operated in darkness and silence, invisible to everyone except the person he was killing. This was different. It was risky. This was a restaurant patio on Main Street in High Peaks during dinner service.
Callie worked the scene as efficiently as the chaos allowed. She photographed the table, the body, the blood pattern, the broken plate on the ground. She noted the gap between the two buildings across the street, a narrow alley that opened onto a side road. The shot had come through that gap. Two hundred and fifty yards, maybe less, from a position that would have required elevation and a clear sightline through a corridor no wider than eight feet.
A shorter distance than the previous kills. But a harder shot in some ways. It was urban. Confined. No ridge, no open terrain, no forest for egress. The shooter had adapted. He had taken a skill set built for the backcountry and applied it to a town center. That required a different kind of confidence.
McKenzie coordinated the witness interviews while Callie worked with the forensic team. Four patrol officers were dispatched to search the area around the alley. They found nothing. No shell casing. No vantage point that showed signs of recent use. The rooftops on either side of the alley were accessible by fire escape, but all were empty.
He had come into town, taken the shot, and left. In a place where cameras existed on businesses and ATMs, where people walked the sidewalks and cars lined the curbs, the shooter had operated with the same invisibility he had shown in the mountains.
The witnesses were useless in the way that panicked people are always useless. Everyone saw something different. No one saw the shooter. Three people reported hearing "a pop" but couldn't agree on the direction. Five people claimed they saw someone running, but descriptions ranged from a tall man in black to a short woman in a red jacket. The contradictions would take days to sort through and would likely yield nothing.
By nine o'clock the patio was cleared, the body removed, the scene secured behind a wall of tape and patrol cars. The media had arrived in force. Three television crews. Two newspaper reporters. A helicopter circling overhead with a searchlight that swept the rooftops and found nothing but shadows. The restaurant owner stood in the doorway watching his business become a crime scene, his face the color of the tablecloth.
Callie stood on the sidewalk across from the restaurant and looked at the gap between the buildings. A narrow alley. Brick on both sides. A dumpster at the far end. Beyond it, a side street that connected to Route 86. A car parked there could be moving in any direction within sixty seconds of the shot.
She thought about the board at the station. Three photographs that were about to become four. And in the back of her mind, the thing she had been turning over since Torres, the thing she had noticed but not yet assembled, clicked into place.
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through her case notes. The names. The roles. The overlap she had flagged at the Torres crime scene that McKenzie had deflected with the institutional argument. She looked at them again now, with a fourth name to add, and the pattern was no longer a question.
The task forceconvened at ten-thirty at the High Peaks station. The room was full again. Quieter. The energy was not the chaotic urgency of the Torres briefing. It was worse than that. It was grim.
Ray stood at the board and added Kline's photograph to the row.
Callie stood and addressed the room. "Richard Kline. Assistant District Attorney. Shot at approximately seven-ten PM on the patio of Lago's Restaurant on Main Street in High Peaks. Single round. Same profile as the previous three kills. We believe the shot came from an elevated position in an alley, through a gap between two commercial buildings." She paused. "This is the first urban kill. The first time the shooter has operated in an environment with witnesses, cameras, and active foot traffic. And he still left nothing behind."
The room was silent.
Callie took a breath and continued.
"So now we have Maggie Coleman, retired editor of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. Burt Halvorsen, former county medical examiner. Michael Torres, former deputy. Richard Kline, assistant district attorney."
She picked up a marker and wrote on the board beside each photograph:
COLEMAN — EDITED HALE COVERAGE
