The Blueprint (The Upgrade Book 1) by Wesley Cross

vain. In the past decade the police’s response to any crime fell into two distinct categories; it was either a high profile crime that commanded a lot of resources and support or it was a low profile and was pushed onto the guys like Chuck, and his alcoholic partner Bill Ryan. But in the beginning of this case Chuck felt that the police gods finally threw him a bone.
    It started with an old lady driving over some poor fellow in SoHo, then taking him to a local hospital. She also brought a case that the man had had with him, which was quite a feat considering it weighed almost forty pounds.
    The case had cracked during the accident, and the nurses, to their horror, found that it contained a high powered sniper rifle with laser–guided bullets. Unfortunately, so far they were unable to identify him, and the would-be sniper was in a medically-induced coma, so it was unclear when it would be possible to interrogate him.
    There was also a high-speed chase with shooting on Williamsburg Bridge that ended up with an overturned SUV, with the driver dead and the passenger missing. Going through surveillance videos, Chuck was able to gather that the limo chased by the SUV made a stop in SoHo, just a block away from the place where the sniper had been run over.
    That couldn’t have been a coincidence. A quick scan of the limo’s plates turned up Mike Connelly, a former military, with no priors. It was interesting, and possibly connected, but for now a dead end. As Connelly was working for himself, it was virtually impossible to find out where they were driving from.
    Kowalsky went through eight hours of video feed trying to figure that out, but it was useless. He caught a little break with a camera on Delancey Street. Although the video was out of focus and the lenses were covered in grime, Chuck could still see that a young couple, a man and a woman, got out of the car for few seconds before going on their way.
    Chuck sighed; finding a couple with no names nor faces in the city of eight million people and connecting them to a John Doe with a sniper rifle who was now in a coma. That should be easy.
    First, Kowalsky sorted through real estate records within the five-block radius from their SoHo stop for the past decade. The search returned forty-one couples who jointly owned apartments in the area. Thirty-two of them happened to be much older than the people on the video, six were same-sex couples, and two had too much of a height difference to fit the bill. One couple loosely fit the parameters but a quick check indicated that they had moved to Sweden four years ago and hadn’t been back to the city since.
    Disappointed, but not ready to give up, Chuck dug into the archival system, pulling every registered crime that had happened in the same area in the hope that something would stand out.
    The stats themselves were appalling. Over the past ten years the crime rate increased almost tenfold while the percentage of solved cases dramatically dropped. He scrolled through pages and pages of murders, rapes, and other wonderful examples of human behavior, but nothing was jumping out at him. He leaned back in his chair, frustrated.
    “Good morning, Sunshine.” Bill Ryan plopped his skinny butt on a chair next to Chuck’s and stretched his legs. “You surely look sour.”
    Kowalsky looked up. His partner’s handsome face was sporting the usual two-day stubble and bloodshot eyes. The not-so-subtle smell of hangover was drifting from him in waves Chuck almost expected to be able to see.
    “You don’t sound too happy either,” Kowalsky shot back.
    “What the hell happened to your eye?”
    “Accident.” Ryan flashed a thousand-watt smile. “I was—”
    “Good idea,” said Chuck and turned back to his computer.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Accidents,” said Chuck. “Gotta check those, too.”
    “You’re welcome,” said Ryan, looking part annoyed that he didn’t get to tell the story, part happy that he gave his partner an