Collateral Damage by H. Terrell Griffin Page A

the Gulf. It would be a spectacular sunset, and I wanted to be sitting on the deck of the Hilton watching it.
    â€œYou got time for dinner at the Hilton tonight?” I asked. “We could sit on the deck and watch the sunset.”
    â€œSure. Just us and all the other tourists.”
    I smiled. I loved our sunsets and she always kidded me about it. Said it was something for the tourists to enjoy. I took the position that sunsets were tonics for beach bums and since I was a beach bum we had to watch the sun set.
    I pulled some photographs from one of the folders. They were grainy, black-and-white, some kind of security photos probably.
    â€œFrom the elevator at the Grand Beach condos,” J.D. said.
    â€œYou’re pretty sure that’s where the shot came from?”
    â€œYes. It’s the tallest building in that area and we found a filtered cigarettebutt and some scuff marks on the flat roof at about where the shot had to come from.”
    â€œDid you find the slug that killed him?”
    â€œYes. It went right through him and hit the sand. We found it with a metal detector.”
    â€œDid the bullet tell you anything?”
    â€œOnly that it was a thirty caliber.”
    â€œAnything else?”
    â€œNo. And we couldn’t pull any DNA from the butt. We don’t even know if it belonged to the shooter. We’re thinking it didn’t, because it’d been on the roof long enough that the weather had degraded any DNA that might have been there.”
    â€œYou’re sure you’ve got the right building?”
    â€œPretty sure. The crime-scene techs were able to figure a pretty good trajectory of the bullet. It fits with the Grand Beach and the scuff marks we found on the roof.”
    â€œI’m not sure I understand the significance of the scuff marks.”
    â€œWe’d had a gully washer the night before. Lots of rain. It would have washed off any marks that had been on the roof. The new ones had to have been made that morning and the maintenance guys were the only ones with keys to the roof. Neither of them had been up there that morning.”
    I held up the photographs. “Elevator surveillance?”
    â€œYes. Not much help.”
    I looked closely at the pictures. Each one had a time stamp in the bottom right corner. Several were taken about an hour before the second group. I separated them out according to the time stamp. I saw a man wearing a light windbreaker jacket made of some dark material, jeans, running shoes, and a ball cap pulled low on his forehead. He never looked at the camera. In all the pictures, he had his head down.
    â€œHe knew about the camera,” I said.
    â€œYes. We never got a shot of his face.”
    â€œHe’s carrying a briefcase in all of them.”
    â€œWe’re assuming that was a container for his rifle. He could break it down and it would fit perfectly in the case.”
    I looked more closely at the pictures. “Are you sure this is a man?”
    â€œBecause he’s small?”
    â€œYes. It could be a woman.”
    â€œI thought of that, but it doesn’t seem too plausible. Women usually aren’t professional killers. They have to have some other motive. Jealously, sometimes money, something that rattles their system and makes them angry enough to kill. Besides, most women wouldn’t be trained snipers, and we think this guy had to have been well trained in order to hit the target at that range.”
    I sat quietly for a moment, staring at the pictures. “How did the killer know that Jim Desmond would be jogging on the beach that morning?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHave you considered the possibility that the murder was random? That the killer just went up on that rooftop with the idea of killing somebody, anybody, and Jim came trotting up?”
    â€œWe considered that. But there have been no other killings in the past three years in Florida that match the pattern