No Safe Haven

Bishop and the Queen

Bishop had originally left the parking structure with the intention of allowing Victoria and her team of detectives to manage the case until some sort of useful evidence had been obtained. Nearly halfway home, he came to the conclusion that if something was found, he would be more useful in person than over a phone. A quick change in direction, and he made his way to the 12th Precinct, where Victoria and her team worked from. 

He had been seated here for hours now, hoping that one of the forensic techs would manage to find something useful. To kill the time early on, he had made a tower out of various office supplies. As more and more time went by without anything useful being found, he stopped building and began to dismantle his tower; the only thing it would accomplish would be to suggest to Victoria that he was wasting time. 

A handful of paper clips and thumb tacks poured from his palm into the desk drawer. A soft sound - like what Bishop imagined metallic rain would make - made its way to his ears. Bishop allowed his focus to slip away, losing himself in the hurricane of personnel who swirled about the room. 

Bishop sat to the side of the room, his feet up on a desk he commonly used when consulting here at the 12th Precinct. From this desk he was afforded an excellent view of most of this floor. This room, the bullpen, was where the detectives of the precinct manned their desks when they weren't running down some sort of lead. Over the heads of seated detectives, he could see the elevators, the interrogation rooms, and the in-house forensics labs. Everywhere Bishop looked, people moved about in a veritable frenzy, working on one case or another. 

"We haven't got anything?" Victoria asked someone from her desk, becoming evidently more frustrated every time she asked that question. She had bounced from desk to desk throughout the day, pushing her team of investigators to find something, anything, that they could use to get a lead on the suspect. Victoria hadn't changed in the time she and Bishop had spent apart. She remained driven, and would work every angle of a case until it either crumbled beneath her unrelenting pursuit, or paid off in some way.  

Victoria received a negative response to her question regarding leads. In frustration, she crumpled a piece of paper and hurled it toward a waste basket in the nearest corner.  

Bishop understood her frustration, since he was in the same boat. Where Victoria showed her frustration though throwing balls of paper, he built office supply towers. Even now, with his tower disassembled, Bishop felt his frustration level rising, and looked toward the forensics department hoping to find excitement on any of the technician's faces.  

Excitement was in short supply apparently, as every technician had the same dreary expression on their face as Victoria had on hers. There weren't very many bright spots in this case as far as forensics was concerned. 

One bright spot though, was that the Ballistics team was able to identify the type of bullet as a .308 and had recorded the striations in an effort to "finger-print" the bullet. This was only marginally helpful in the long-term however, as whatever gun had been used in this case hadn't been used in a previous crime. Until the ballistics team had a gun barrel to test and compare the striations to, they had nothing they could offer. The report Bishop had received suggested that even tracking the bullet through a supplier would be nearly impossible, as the round was a caliber commonly sold. 

Even the basic investigation of the victim had come to a surprising halt. From the driver's license found on the victim, Victoria's team had confidently identified him as Robert Mankins. Beyond finding that Mankins designed most of the buildings built in downtown Haven over the last five years, the forensic accountants hadn't found a single thing that would be considered helpful. Robert Mankins paid his bills on time, hadn't been late on his taxes, and there were no questionable transactions any time in the last five years.