“Move.” Ethel Fiona Crestwater barked the order as she slipped out of her terrycloth robe and wadded it into a ball. Wearing only a gray flannel nightgown, she nudged Jesse aside and pressed the makeshift bandage against the wounded man’s chest with one hand, while feeling his neck for a pulse in the carotid artery.

Ten seconds later she whispered, “May your soul fly with angels.” Then she pulled her blood-soaked robe from the dead man’s chest and unraveled it until she reached her cell phone jammed in a pocket.

Lights began coming on in neighboring houses. A distant siren wailed.

“Jesse, we don’t have much time.” Ethel used a dry corner of her robe to wipe the blood off her phone. “I want you to observe everything you can.” She activated the phone’s light and video app and then ran it up and down Jonathan Finch’s body.

Jesse stared wide-eyed, having trouble pulling his gaze from the elderly woman to the target of her recording.

“Come on. I want an extra set of eyes. I don’t depend upon technology.” She bent down and studied the pistol for a few seconds. “A Beretta. Interesting.” She looked through the open rear passenger door of the SUV. The one opposite was also open. She hurried around the front of the vehicle, pausing to film damage to the grille.

Jesse followed. In the crease of the dent, he noticed white paint streaked onto the SUV’s green. The driver’s door stood ajar, and he looked over Ethel’s shoulder to see a cable dangling from a twelve-volt socket. “Looks like a power adapter for an electronic device.”

“Phone?”

“No,” Jesse said. “From the type of connector, I’d say a computer. I know he has a laptop.”

Ethel turned her phone camera on the open door behind the driver’s. A spiderweb of cracks radiated from a hole in the window.

Jesse bent down and peered through the hole. “Someone shot him through the window. This lines up with where Jonathan must have been standing.”

Ethel focused her phone on the pavement and then ran it up the inside of the rear door. “No. Although the safety glass didn’t shatter, the shards made by the bullet’s impact fell outside the door, not inside.” She moved her phone closer to the window. “And there are blood traces on the door’s interior panel. Jonathan fired the shot and must have hit his killer’s arm or shoulder. The bullet went through but created a DNA signature.”

The wails grew louder.

“I saw two men running away,” Jesse said. “One of them had a dangling arm.”