Steven Havill - Before She Dies

“Jesus,” Holman murmured.

And just beyond the parking lot, as I was pulling back out onto the highway, the sheriff found his missing puzzle piece.

“Stop,” he barked, and I did so, the patrol car half on and half off the pavement. “Turn the light around this way.” The fender of the patrol car blocked the beam and I backed up. “What’s all that stuff?”

I craned my neck, pulling myself up against the steering wheel. “The remains of an old sign base, maybe.”

Holman was out of the car before I finished the sentence. My guess was correct. Hidden in the bunchgrass just far enough off the highway’s shoulder that the mowers wouldn’t hit it in summer was a concrete slab two feet square and a foot thick or more. The sign base rested skewed, sunken into the ground where ants undermined it and occasional careless drivers coming out of the saloon’s parking lot clipped it. One corner of the concrete had spalled and crumbled to pebbles.

Martin Holman knelt down in the grass and played his flashlight back toward the saloon. The harsh artificial daylight from the parking lot’s single sodium-vapor light washed out the flashlight’s beam, but I could see what excited Holman.

“Look there,” he said. “You can see impressions in the grass where people have pulled out of the parking lot, driving right over this thing. If you cut the corner more than just a little, bang.” He played the light around the base. “He must have had an old sign up on this at one time.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and grunted down on my knees. “Enough here to rip up a tire, that’s for sure.” A three-inch spike of naked rebar angled up from the back corner of the pad.

“Are there traces of rubber on that?” Holman asked, the excitement raising the pitch of his voice so much he sounded like a teenager on his first date.

“I’m not a human microscope, Martin,” I replied. I sat back on my haunches. “And even if there were, what would it mean? This thing’s been hit a hundred times over the years.”

“Maybe there’s some kind of match-up we could make with the rubber?”

I grimaced and stood up. “Martin, think on this, now.” I held up a hand and ticked my fingers. “First, we have the assumption that the disabled vehicle had a flat tire.”

“Didn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“What about the lug wrench?”

“We don’t know for sure that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, Martin. Second, if we assume that the wrench belongs to the vehicle in question, we can further assume that maybe, just maybe, that vehicle was one that was stolen up in Albuquerque-we assume that on the thin basis that the wrench was new and fit the type. Now, we assume even further that if the vehicle had a flat tire, it must have been because of a road hazard.” I shrugged. “Maybe. And then we have to assume that this thing,” and I nudged the concrete slab with my toe, “is the hazard.”

Holman rose to his feet and stood head down. Maybe he was thinking, maybe he was crying. Maybe he was just plain flummoxed.

“And then we have to assume ,” and I leaned on the word, “that if all the other puzzle pieces are what we think they are, that this thing managed to gouge a brand-new, steel-belted radial in just such a fashion that it held air for roughly two miles.” I pointed off into the dark. “Two miles that way, until the driver was forced to stop and deal with it.”

“But can’t we match rubber fragments?” Holman persisted.

I grinned in the darkness. Martin was game, I had to give him that. “No, sheriff, we can’t. In the first place, the rubber compound that makes up a given line of tires-a given batch regardless of size-is all the same. A match wouldn’t tell us anything. In the second, far more important place, we don’t have a damn thing to match to. We don’t have the suspect’s vehicle.”

Holman squared his shoulders and turned toward the patrol car. “Yet,” he said with finality.

The first five rings of the telephone merely enhanced a ridiculous dream. The first jangle came as my son Kendall was waiting patiently while his wing commander argued with me about the weight of an airplane. It wasn’t an airplane that either he or Kendall was preparing to fly, but it was parked in the way. Why the weight was important was anyone’s guess. Why I was on my son’s aircraft carrier was also a mystery.

The wing commander heard the second ring and said something about the operations’ Klaxon and that we’d better settle this problem before we had four incoming jets land in our laps.

I argued, somewhere between the third and fourth ring, that there was no point in doing anything until we knew the weight of the aircraft. Kendall stood off to one side, occasionally gazing out across the blue, calm Caribbean, not interested. That irked me, since it was an airplane that belonged to his squadron. And then I awoke with a start.

The phone rang again. The two-inch, glowing digital numbers on the nightstand clock announced 3:16 A.M. I rested on my elbows for a moment and let the phone ring three more times. I’d fallen into bed at one-thirty after dropping Martin Holman at his home. Dispatch knew where I was, so I groaned and reached for the receiver.

“What?” I said, not the least bit cordial.

“Sir,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, and her husky voice sounded loud in the dark, predawn silence of my ancient adobe house. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“Uh,” I said, and lay back down, the phone buried in the pillow. “I guess I dozed off for a little bit. What’s up?”

“Sir, I’m down at the hospital. It looks like Linda Real might be gaining some strength.”

I frowned in the dark, trying to remember all the pieces. “She’s awake, you mean?”

“Not yet, sir. But a few minutes ago, one of the nurses said something to her, and she responded. She murmured a few sounds in response.”

“Did you get a chance to talk with her?”

“She can’t talk, sir, and she drifted off again. Francis said that’s normal. But she’s close to the surface now, sir.”

I pushed myself upright and swung my feet over the bed. “Did you have a chance to process the wrench handle?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“Several clear prints, sir. I’m going to have Tony Abeyta run it up to the state lab later today. Maybe they’ll find something I missed. It’s going to be time-consuming to separate the prints, though.”

“Separate?”

“If it’s a new vehicle, sir, then there’ll be prints of the factory worker who put the wrench in the kit, in addition to the person who used it.”

“It won’t be hard to trace the Detroit end, or wherever that thing was made.”

“No, sir.”

“Did you make any comparisons?”

“Just one, sir. I checked Victor Sanchez’s prints more out of curiosity than anything else. We’ve got them on file. No match.”

“That’s not surprising,” I said. “If Victor Sanchez ever kills someone, there’ll probably be a hell of an audience. By the way, Holman thinks he found the road hazard that ruined the tire.”

“Oh?”

“A chunk of concrete near the Broken Spur. It’s got a piece of rebar sticking out of the side.”

Estelle caught the tone of my voice and said, “And you don’t think so?”

“Well, I think he’s jumping at the first thing he sees. Yes, here’s an object that could wreck a tire. To make the jump to proving it’s the object is just that…a jump.”

“Especially since we don’t know for sure that that’s what happened,” Estelle said.

“That’s about the size of it.” I stood up beside the bed. “Give me about ten minutes to pull myself together and I’ll be down.”