Steven Havill - The Fourth Time is Murder

“Three-oh-eight, three-ten.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’m on the westbound shoulder about seven miles out,” she said. “There’s a highway department truck working here, and he’s good cover.”

“Ten-four. She’s westbound, sittin’ right at an even eighty,” Torrez said.

“To where,” Estelle mused, dropping the mike in her lap. “CJ, where are you going.”

“You can’t just pull her over now?” Madelyn asked.

“I think she’ll run,” Estelle replied. “It worked once before.”

“Can she outrun this?” the writer asked, patting the door sill.

“Oh, yes. Besides, we have everything to gain by waiting,” Estelle said. “Wait and see what she’s going to do. If she thinks that she’s away clean, that’s a good thing.”

“What’s your guess? What do you think she knows?”

“That’s still part of the puzzle, Madelyn.” Estelle watched the traffic approaching from the east. “Before this, we could imagine that maybe she didn’t know what happened up on the pass Wednesday night…that she didn’t have a clue what Chris Marsh was up to.” She hunched her shoulders and held them up in a frozen shrug. “If she’s not involved in any way, why would she make the decision to run the instant she saw a Posadas County unit parked at the end of her street?” She relaxed and looked across at Madelyn. “If she saw Tony’s vehicle, the odds are good that she also saw the detective’s unit parked at the other end of the block. So she ran, leaving the new boyfriend to take the heat. That’s my guess.”

“How far are you going to let her go?”

“We might as well find out all we can,” the undersheriff replied.

“Three-ten, three-oh-eight. She’s kickin’ up to about eighty-seven, leapfroggin’ through traffic. You got about a minute before she passes your location.”

“Ten-four.” Estelle tugged her belt tighter. “Now we find out.”

As the blue sports car shot past, Estelle looked down at her center console, hoping that, to the Mustang’s driver, the occupants of the unmarked white state car were just a couple of highway supervisors comparing notes with the workers in the truck parked behind them.

A car hauler, its trailer jangling empty, shot by, also well over the speed limit. “Comin’ up,” Bob Torrez’s disembodied voice said over the radio. A black luxury car shot by and, ten car lengths behind that, Torrez’s new silver county Expedition. With a quarter mile clear, Estelle pulled out, tires chirping on the pavement. In three miles, she had passed the sheriff’s Expedition, caught the BMW, and pulled in behind the car hauler. A quarter mile ahead, she could see the squat shape of the sports car. Glancing at the speedometer, she saw that the car hauler was holding at 87 on the level, fast enough to earn a ticket.

For the next twenty miles, the car hauler continued, its speed pacing the Mustang’s, and then the truck took the first Deming exit. Estelle sucked in a sharp breath, and at the same time her hand darted to the channel selector on the radio console. Running in the left-hand eastbound lane, the sedan that had attracted her attention was identifiable even from a great distance. Squat, black, a white pimple of a computer antenna growing from the aft panel of the roof, the state police cruiser would be running just below the speed limit. Sure enough, its front end dipped, and as Estelle shot by, the state officer pulled over to cross the center median. She didn’t have time to read the car number, but the cruiser accelerated hard in pursuit.

“I’ll tell ’em to hold back,” Torrez radioed, but they weren’t the only ones who had spotted the state car, and that it had swung around in pursuit. The Mustang pulled abruptly into the passing lane, flying past two trundling bus-sized RVs.

With the fugitive car now cutting through traffic at more than 100 miles an hour, the driver had forced their hand.

“PCS, three-ten. We have a high-speed pursuit westbound on the interstate. We’re coming up on mile marker seventy, ETA Posadas exit about eight minutes. Is anyone close enough to drop a spike strip immediately west of the Posadas exit?”

“Three-ten, we’ll work on it.”

Estelle’s radio scanner picked up Torrez’s radio on the state police frequency. “Triple five,” he said, “we’re going to spike the highway just west of the Posadas exit. We’re going to have to clear this traffic.”

“You got it.” The black state car shot past. The problem was simple enough. In the dozen or so miles between their current position and the Posadas exit, there might be half a hundred vehicles, all traveling in their own private worlds, going who knew where that Sunday afternoon. The Mustang would blow by first, easily outpacing its pursuers.

“Three-ten.” Gayle Torrez’s voice was tight. “Mitchell and Collins ETA about three minutes. John Allen is coming in from the south. ETA about six.”

“Ten-four. Have Allen clear the intersection at the bottom of the Posadas exit ramp.”

“Ten-four. Eddie has the spike belt.” Somehow, Captain Mitchell would have to deploy the belt in front of the speeding Mustang, avoiding confused civilian traffic that would hopefully be slowing or pulling off as they saw the winking lights of parked police vehicles.

“Sheriff, I clocked her at one forty-one and climbing,” the state officer said.

“Ten-four.” Estelle’s cryptic reply belied the hard knot of apprehension in her gut. A nervous tick of the steering wheel could hurtle a car traveling at that speed into catastrophe. The state car couldn’t keep up, and neither could she.

Far ahead, she could see a clutch of traffic, the big rigs nothing but tiny dashes on the line of highway. The interstate entered a series of lazy curves, the roadbed banked ever so slightly so that vehicles tended to follow the highway without any conscious input from the drivers. What the curves did accomplish was blocking an easy view to the rear for the truckers for more than a mile or so.

“She’s off,” the state officer’s voice broke through urgently. At the same time, Estelle saw the enormous dust cloud rising up from the prairie as if a bomb had detonated.

Dust still hung thick in the air as Estelle slid her car to a halt. The westbound lanes of the interstate became a kaleidoscope of lights and milling people. Five semis sat motionless, blocking both lanes, their diesel engines muttering quietly. More would line up behind them by the minute, with all the rest of the arterial flow adding to the clot until it stretched for a mile or more.

The ball of junk that had once been the sleek, fashionable sports car rested in the center median. One of the truckers had climbed down from the cab of his rig and trotted over to the car, and he stood helpless, hands pumping up and down as if he were reciting an incantation. Three others were walking cautiously around the wreck, two of them with fire extinguishers in hand.

In the distance, Estelle heard the wail of sirens eastbound.…It would be Eddie Mitchell and Dennis Collins. An EMT rescue squad and ambulance would be en route close behind them.

“He just ticked the left rear of my trailer,” the first driver said when he saw Estelle. “Jesus H. Christ, he come out of nowhere.” He was an older man, pleasant enough looking, his face white as a sheet. “Musta rolled five or six times. I guess he’s still inside.”

The car lay on its top facing eastbound, three wheels askew but still attached to the car, the fourth ripped off to join the trail of parts marking the car’s path along the median. Estelle took a few seconds to walk a circle around it, making sure the area was clear of hazards. She approached the driver’s side. As she cut across through the stumpy desert scrub, Robert Torrez’s Expedition pulled off the interstate, crossing the median well behind where the first marks of the car’s trajectory marked the shoulder. He parked on the median side of the eastbound lane’s shoulder fifty yards beyond the crash site, facing traffic.