Steven Havill - The Fourth Time is Murder

Were you dead when your friend stepped on your hand? she thought, and then aloud, she said, “And where did he go?”

“Who?” Matty said. The EMT sat quietly on a nearby rock, watching.

“That’s what we need to find out,” Estelle said. She pushed herself upright and turned back to the truck. Again picking her way using the rocks as her only path, she took her time, finally kneeling at the crushed door on the driver’s side. Because the truck was upside down and twisted, the opening would have allowed a child to wriggle through, but not Christopher Marsh. The inside of the cab was a jumble, with all the trash that had been on the floor now tossed about the crumpled space in senseless disarray. A white plastic cooler was jammed between the crushed roof, the remains of the steering wheel, and the gear lever, jammed so hard that it had cracked open and molded itself around the bent lever.

The smell of beer was moderate, and she could see where some had leaked from the cooler and puddle on the head liner. In the far corner, about where the corner of the windshield had originally met the dashboard, lay a bent but still-sealed beer can, sprung loose from the cooler, no doubt.

“Okay,” Estelle murmured to herself. She had seen hundreds of accidents similar in most respects to this one-crumpled and torn steel, crumpled and smashed drivers and passengers, all tainted with that familiar, depressing aroma potpourri of beer and blown bladders and colons.

She got up and brushed off the knees of her trousers. The accidents were all too familiar, and so was the notion that someone-some Good Samaritan-had stopped and gone to all the trouble of climbing down that forbidding cliff side. But then, instead of phoning 911 from that spot with the ubiquitous cell phone, at that moment he or she had left the scene.

And then what? Estelle thought. Who would stop, climb down, and then leave, panicked by the gurgling death rattles of Chris Marsh?

“Three-ten, PCS.”

Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s disembodied voice startled her out of her thoughts.

“Three-ten. Go ahead.”

“Three-ten, be advised that both Dr. Perrone and Dr. Guzman have been called into surgery. The hospital tells me that it’s going to be a little while before either one of them can answer a call.”

“Ten-four. Keep me posted. The weather might force us to transport here in a little bit. I’m going to hold off as long as we can, though. As soon as one or both are out of surgery, get back to me.”

“Ten-four.”

She could feel the mist on her face like a cold, clingy veil, and she bent to pull the yellow plastic so that it covered the boot-marked left hand of the victim.

By midnight, photographer Linda Real had finished at the crash scene and Estelle was confident that they had a complete portrait of the accident. Pictures would show the wild skid marks on the highway, the battered guardrail, the various gashes and gouges the somersaulting truck had dug in the hillside rocks and in the victim himself. They had examined the carcass of the doe and found white paint flecks that no doubt would match the truck. There was blood and deer hair caught in the crushed metal of the truck.

Unless it had spun about at the last instant, the animal had been crossing from the truck driver’s right, headed for the bank and brush on the left, or uphill, side of the highway. Other deer tracks marked the bank.

The skid marks suggested that the driver may not have seen the deer until the animal was about to leap into his truck’s grill, just as he rounded the curve at the top of the pass-a sweeping right-hander that paralleled the flank of the mountain. Had the driver held the steering wheel motionless while he stood on the brakes, the doe might have bolted away unscathed.

But the wet pavement had conspired with driver panic. The skid marks showed that in concert with slamming on the brakes, the driver had twisted the steering wheel. The truck had rocketed first to the left, veering all the way across the highway toward the inside bank. With overcorrection, it had then spun right, its back tires actually cutting the gravel of the southbound shoulder of the highway. Had there been oncoming traffic, a head-on collision would have been likely.

The truck had smacked the doe, then plunged back across the highway and struck the first section of the guardrail with the left corner of its bumper while the right front tire vaulted up and over a hump of dirt and rock. That had sent the little truck airborne. The driver wouldn’t have had time for more than a short scream during the 133 feet from first skid to bashed guardrail. On dry pavement, that distance would have been enough to stop even if he had been driving at 60 miles an hour, but not in the wet.

As the weather closed in, it was clear to Estelle that she could spend hours on this hillside in the dark without finding what she was looking for-and at this point, she didn’t know what that was. The wrecked truck wasn’t going anywhere soon, either. Short of hiring a helicopter and sky hook, there was no practical way of retrieving the wadded-up vehicle without doing more damage to the evidence. Taking the wreck downhill to the old mining road would require cutting numerous trees, and even then Stub Moore’s tow truck wouldn’t be able to back to within a hundred feet of the crash site. The most direct route would be to drag the wreck back up the rock-studded cliff side to the highway. That would wait for daylight, which was just as well, Estelle reflected. There were too many unanswered questions.

“Hey,” Sheriff Robert Torrez said. So absorbed was she in her own thoughts that Estelle hadn’t heard him approach from behind her. She snapped off her flashlight. “We’re about to head out,” he said. By the glare of the spotlights on the roof rack of the sheriff’s truck, she could see that the two EMTs had secured the gurney in the back of the pickup for the victim’s short ride out to the highway and the transfer to the waiting ambulance.

“Maybe with the light of day,” Estelle said, and Torrez cocked his head. “I just don’t know.” She shrugged helplessly. “We need to take the truck apart. I agree with Dennis-there wasn’t a passenger with Marsh. He was by himself, and I think it’s as simple as a collision with a deer. That happens all the time. The crash is simple,” she corrected. “What happened afterward…” She let the words trail off. “We need answers from Alan.”

“Well, we gotta roll or that ain’t going to happen,” Torrez said. “You want Stubby out here with the wrecker, or you want to wait?”

Estelle shook her head. “I don’t want the truck moved until we have a chance to scour this place. It’s too easy to miss something.”

“That’s a fact. Take your time,” Torrez said. “There might be a real simple answer.” He almost smiled. “I can’t think of one, but who knows.”

“At this time of night, I’d like simple answers,” she sighed. “And by the way, speaking of simple answers…we have a reporter from one of the national magazines coming for a visit.”

Bob Torrez jerked as if someone had slipped a cattle prod down his trousers. “What the hell for?”

“Well, that’s what they do, Bobby.”

“When’s this going to happen? Who thought this up?”

“She contacted me a couple of weeks ago, and I e-mailed a generic, bureaucratic response to her saying that we were a public agency, blah, blah. I hadn’t heard anything, so I thought maybe the idea had been dropped. It hadn’t been, I guess.” She smiled at the thunderclouds on Bobby’s face. “She’s coming tomorrow sometime.” She shined her light on her watch. “Today sometime.”