"He picked the smarter one,” she replied.
McKenzie said nothing for a moment. "Disciplined."
"Very."
They climbed the ridge. The rock shelf was about four feet wide and flat enough to lie prone. Callie crouched on it and looked back down toward the house.
"You don't rush a shot like that," McKenzie said, scanning the ground around the shelf. "You sit. You watch. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. You wait for the target to be still."
A light wind moved through the spruce above them. From this elevation, Callie could hear the distant sound of a car on the main road, half a mile east. The shooter would have heard it too. Would have tracked every vehicle. Would have waited until the road was silent before pulling the trigger.
There was no shell casing on the rock shelf. No boot prints in the soil, which had been baked hard by weeks of August heat. No cigarette butts, no gum wrappers, no fibers caught on bark. The shooter had come, fired, and left without a trace.
“So the shooter policed his brass," McKenzie said.
“Yeah. Took it with him.”
“Him? Could be a woman,” McKenzie said.
“Anything’s possible.”
Back inside, Callie began documenting.
She photographed the office from the doorway, then from each corner. The overturned chair. The glass scatter pattern. The wine glass, shattered on the floor beside Maggie's head, a puddle of red dried into the hardwood grain. Small paw prints tracked through the dried wine and out the door. The cat. Chester, according to a name tag on the food bowl, was missing.
She moved to the desk. Papers were scattered by the draft through the broken window. She glanced at a corkboard on the wall above the monitor, pinned with clippings and photographs. She scanned a staff photo. There were a few yellowed articles. Business cards. A takeout menu from a diner in Saranac Lake.
Her laptop sat open on the desk, the screen dark, the sleep light pulsing beside the keyboard. There was probably a document window hidden behind the lock screen. Maggie had been working when the shot came.
"Leave it," McKenzie said from the doorway. "Digital forensics will pull it."
Callie nodded and photographed the desk as it was.
The forensics team arrived at seven-fifteen. Two technicians, both carrying equipment cases. They went to work on the bullet in the wall. It took them ten minutes to extract the fragment without damaging the rifling marks. The round was deformed but intact enough.
"Looks like a .30-caliber rifle round," one of them said, holding it up in an evidence bag. "Something common. Hunting rifle most likely. Half the gun safes in the county have something chambered for this."
"So we're looking at thousands of possible weapons," Callie said.
"At least."
They placed a trajectory rod through the hole in the glass and aligned it with the impact point in the wall. The angle confirmed what Callie already knew. The shot came from elevation, from the ridge, on a slightly downward path through the window.
Outside, four deputies walked a grid pattern across the field between the house and the tree line. Metal detectors swept the grass. After forty minutes they had found a rusted bottle cap, a length of old fence wire, and nothing else.
McKenzie supervised the grid search while Callie handled the neighbor interviews. The closest property belonged to a man named Gendron, a retired carpenter who lived through the trees to the south. He had been asleep by nine-thirty. Heard nothing. Saw nothing. His wife confirmed it. She stood on the porch ina bathrobe with her arms folded and kept glancing toward the police cars as if they might multiply.
"Her office light was on most nights," Gendron said. "She worked late. Always did. You could see the light through the trees if you were looking."
"Did you ever notice anyone parked on the road? Any vehicles that didn't belong?"
He shook his head. "Not that I can recall. It's quiet out here. That's why we live here."
A second neighbor, farther down the road, remembered seeing headlights. "Around ten, ten-fifteen maybe. A vehicle heading east. Couldn't tell you the make or color. Just headlights."
"Fast or slow?"
"Normal speed, I guess. Nothing that stood out."
