Fairstein, Linda - Final Jeopardy by Final Jeopardy (v1.1) [html]

moments had been like.
    We sat quietly in our car for five or six minutes until Wally’s cruiser and Luther’s black sedan pulled in behind us. When they motioned to us to get out, Mike and I opened our doors and joined them on the strip of tall grass next to the roadway. It was only thirty yards back to State Road, but that was entirely out of view because of the sharp bend in the old path. And although my house and the homes of my neighbors were straight ahead, they were shielded from sight by the dense growth of pines and cedars that crowded both sides of the hilltop that crested before us.
    “Not a bad place for a murder,” I remarked to Mike.
    “This one piece of the drive is completely secluded. It never seemed sinister to me until this moment, but it obviously presented a great opportunity for a killer to go unnoticed.”
    “Now, Alex,” Luther said as he approached us, ‘there’s not much left here to point out to you, but I just want you to get an idea of what we think happened.“
    The neon tape stretched from one of the evergreens on the east side of the path across to the old stone wall that bordered the property on the west. It ran north on the top of the wall for about five car lengths, then squared off by wrapping around a sturdy scrub oak that stood like a sentinel at the crown of the ridge.
    “We figure Miss Lascar was driving back in toward the house sometime in the late afternoon. Still have no idea where she was coming from or exactly what time it was.
    The rental car was a white Mustang convertible, top down when she was hit. She couldn’t have been going more than ten or fifteen miles an hour on this part of the roadway.“
    He was right about that. The dirt path was so deeply rutted and uneven that most cars bottomed out on it and you had to slow down to a crawl to maneuver the craters.
    “We had a field team down from Boston yesterday,” Agent Waldron droned on, ‘but they didn’t come up with very much out here.“
    “Outdoor crime scenes are the Worst,” Mike commiserated.
    “Very hard to define.”
    We had worked a few together in Central Park and in Morningside Park so I knew exactly what he meant.
Without an eyewitness and with no clear boundaries like the four walls of a room in an apartment or the limited confines of a rooftop it was a tough job for cops to know how far to extend the search for clues.
Close it off five feet too soon and you’re likely to overlook an essential piece of evidence, but fail to limit it reasonably at some point and you’re pulling in all kinds of extraneous crap that leads your investigators off course.
“Our best guess at this point is that the killer was concealed on the far side of the stone wall. It provides a natural cover, better than a duck blind, as well as a perfect brace to steady the gun. The target drove in, moving, but nice and slow. Whoever did this was a good shot.
Probably wasn’t much more than ten or twelve feet from Miss Lascar.
    She took two, maybe three shots to the head and neck. Not much left to help us there.“
    “What kind of gun are we talking about?” Mike asked.
    Waldron hesitated. I knew he wanted to be a hard-ass and not tell us anything, but his instincts seemed to be fighting that. It looked as if he actually knew he might get more feedback from a genuine Homicide detective like Mike than from Wally.
    “We don’t have a coroner’s report yet. My guess is a high-powered rifle. Lots of internal destruction is what I heard from the guys at the scene. Skull was shattered.”
    I winced at that description, although I had seen its image flashing in my mind’s eye thousands of times in the past thirty-six hours.
    Waldron continued.
    “She must have been killed instantly.
    When her body was jolted by the shots we figure the car lurched and went smack into that big tree. That’s just where it was when she was found.“
    Wally took over the narrative now, eager to give his men the credit for discovering Isabella’s