Brian Freeman - Stripped

“It took the security company a week to call it in?” Serena asked, shaking her head.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. They rotate a lot, is what I think, and the guy who made the rounds tonight hadn’t been in the lot since last weekend.”

“Go on,” Serena told him, yawning, and hoping she hadn’t been dragged out of bed for nothing.

“Well, when I came out here, the first thing I did was check the front of the car. And sure enough-well, let me just show it to you.”

With loping strides, Officer Crawford guided them around to the front of the Aztek and used the big steel flashlight on his belt to illuminate the car. Serena sucked in her breath. The dead center of the hood was bowed, the grill punched in. The shell of the bumper was cracked and the license plate twisted as if it were on its way to becoming a paper airplane.

Crawford got down on his knees. “If you look real close here, you can see fibers stuck on the grill. There’s other stuff, too, could be skin and blood.”

Serena had seen half-eaten corpses in the desert without her stomach turning over, but something about the damage to the car-not much damage at all, really, for what it had done-left her swallowing back bile. “Good work, Tom,” she told him somberly.

Cordy was silent, but his copper skin paled. He kicked the ground with the toe of his shoe, his hands shoved in his pockets. Only Crawford seemed unaffected and even enthusiastic about what he had found-but he was young, and this was a big deal, the kind of story he’d be telling the other rookies for the next year. He hadn’t been in the Summerlin street last Friday afternoon to see Peter Hale’s broken body, blood puddling under his head. To hear his mother wailing. To see the vacant, dead grief in his father’s eyes.

It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood, the kind where both parents had good jobs and twelve-year-old boys were latchkey kids, taking the bus home after school, letting themselves inside to watch television and play video games. Linda and Carter Hale thought they were lucky. Linda Hale didn’t work. Peter had someone to open the door for him after school. He had been playing outside in the driveway, tossing a tennis ball against the door and catching it in his mitt, when Linda Hale heard the thump all the way inside the kitchen. And she knew, the way any mother knows that something catastrophic has happened. She found Peter outside, half on the sidewalk, half on the street. No one around. No witnesses. The most they found was a maid three blocks away who caught a glimpse of a blue car racing through the neighborhood around the time of the accident. The lab was dragging its feet figuring out the model from the blue paint and the pieces of grill. Serena knew that didn’t matter now. It was an Aztek. It was this car.

“Did you search inside the car?” Serena asked.

“No, ma’am, I sure didn’t,” Crawford assured her. “The car was locked, and that wouldn’t be procedure anyway. I didn’t touch a thing.”

“How about running the plates?”

“Well, that I did do. Yes, ma’am. The car is registered to Mr. Lawrence Busby. He doesn’t have a sheet. Thirty-four, African American, six-foot-two, two hundred forty-five pounds. Or that’s what his driver’s license says. Mr. Busby reported the car stolen at eight thirty last Friday night.”

“Several hours after the accident,” Serena said. “Isn’t that convenient?”

Crawford offered her a shy, country-boy smile. “I thought so myself. A little too convenient. That’s why I offered Mr. Busby a free ride over here to collect his vehicle.”

“You did what?” Cordy asked.

“I got the supervisor to send a patrol car over to Mr. Busby’s home on Bonanza. You know, in case he decided to make like a prairie dog and scamper. Then I called him. Told him we had found his car and we’d be happy to bring him over to the scene. He should be here in a couple minutes.”

“You’re one smart Texan, Officer Crawford,” Serena told him.

“Thank you, ma’am. That’s what my mama says. My wife, she’s not so sure.”

“How did Busby sound on the phone?”

“Well, the first thing he asked was whether there was any damage,” Crawford said. “Guess that’s natural, but I thought it was interesting. I told him it was nothing a good body shop couldn’t make go away.”

Serena thought about it, trying to put herself in Busby’s shoes. He’s just killed a kid. He’s afraid someone saw the car, or that he left evidence behind at the scene that would lead them right to his doorstep. Another perp who watches too much CSI. So he ditches the car at the mall, then hops the bus home and reports it stolen. If he’s lucky, no one ever connects it to the accident. If they do, he’s laid the blame on someone else.

But something didn’t smell right. The Summerlin neighborhood in which the Hales lived was lily-white, and she figured that a black man the size of Lawrence Busby would have attracted somebody’s attention. She also couldn’t understand why Busby, who lived a couple of miles from downtown, would be speeding around a residential neighborhood on the far west side of the city.

“Open the car for us, will you, Crawford?” Serena asked. “I’d like to take a look before Busby gets here.”

“Don’t we need a warrant for that?”

Serena shrugged. “That’s a stolen vehicle, according to Mr. Busby. We need to look for evidence of who stole it.”

Crawford popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a stiff narrow wire with a loop at one end, and disengaged the lock on the driver’s door of the Aztek in a few seconds. Taking care not to disturb any prints, he gingerly swung the door open.

Serena peered inside, then squeezed behind the wheel. She looked around. Busby had cleaned up after himself. The interior was spotless, vacuumed clean, no papers or trash. With the tip of a pen, she opened the glove compartment, but found only the owner’s manual inside. She pulled open the ashtray. It was unused.

She heard the back door open.

“Anything up front?” Cordy asked.

“Zip.”

“I’ll check under the seats.”

Serena saw a flashlight beam scooting like a searchlight on the floor.

Cordy whistled. “Come to papa,” he said. “Got a piece of paper here. Looks like a receipt.”

Serena got out of the car and watched Cordy maneuver his arm under the seat. He emerged triumphantly a few seconds later, clutching a two-inch by three-inch white slip in the tiny jaws of a tweezer. He shined the flashlight on the paper, and Serena leaned in with him to get a better look.

The receipt was from a convenience store somewhere near Reno, more than four hundred miles to the north. Six Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a Sprite at eight in the morning. Breakfast of champions. The receipt was dated more than two weeks prior to the accident.

“I reckon that’s Mr. Busby now,” Crawford said, as a second patrol car pulled silently into the lot.

As the car drew closer, Serena could see what looked like a grizzly bear in the front passenger seat. His driver’s license stats didn’t do him justice. Lawrence Busby had to weigh three hundred pounds. He had a moon-shaped face, black hair cut as flat as a pan on top of his skull, and jowls that drooped like the face of a bloodhound. Serena could see a sheen on the man’s ebony face. He was sweating.

“I bet his breasts are bigger than yours, too,” Cordy said, winking.

Serena fought back a grin. She saw Busby reaching for the door handle, and she held up a hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic in its tracks. The woman cop inside the car spoke sharply to Busby, and Serena saw the whites of his eyes get bigger. He put his hands back in his lap. Now he was sweating and scared.