New York | The words “delay” and “depose” were written on a shell casing and a live round recovered in front of the New York Hilton Midtown, where UnitedHealth Group insurance chief Brian Thompson was fatally shot on Wednesday.

The inscriptions loosely echo the book title Delay, Deny, Defend, which describes tactics allegedly used by insurers to deny claims. Law enforcement officials may look at whether it suggests a potential motive – anger against health insurers.

UnitedHealth was among a group of companies slammed in a Senate report earlier this year for using automated tools to increase claim denials.

Just coming at the murder from a cyber-tracking perspective, it's like in the old spy movies, where they'd say, Can you enhance that? Back then they couldn't do much more than zoom in, which weakens the pixel quality. But now we have AI, you really can do it. We've gone a long way from grainy CCTV to either full-clarity CCTV, or, AI assisted rendering that can recreate a very good look alike. The irony whereby the murderer may have been motivated by United Health's abuse of automated tools (AI), which is now being used to identify him is very movie-style.