Sandra Brown - Ricochet

DeeDee knelt down. “My gosh. Duncan, do you recognize this?”

He shook his head, but he was lying. A few hours ago, the sandal had been strapped to Elise’s right foot.

“I do.” DeeDee stood up and faced him. “Mrs. Laird was wearing a sandal like this the other day when we interviewed her and the judge in their sunroom. I remember the turquoise stones. I started to ask her where you can buy sandals like that, but figured it wasn’t any place I could afford.”

The three detectives moved aside so Baker’s photographer could take his pictures of the sandal before it was placed in an evidence bag.

“What do you make of it, Dunk?” Worley asked.

He roused himself from his daze. “Don’t know.”

“You think she did Napoli?”

“Have you ever known a perp who gut-shot a man, then left her recognizable sandal behind?”

While Worley and DeeDee were mulling that over, sirens signaled the speeding approach of a police vehicle in the opposing lane. When it was even with Elise Laird’s car, the souped-up SUV came to an abrupt stop next to the concrete median that divided the inbound and outbound lanes of the bridge.

As soon as the vehicle was braked, doors opened. Bill Gerard stepped from the driver’s seat. Judge Cato Laird was riding shotgun. Duncan had never seen him looking so disheveled. He and Gerard stepped over the low wall and crossed the two inbound-traffic lanes at a brisk clip, reaching the car on the shoulder just as the trio of detectives returned to it.

“Okay for us to approach?” Gerard asked Worley, fairly barking the question at him.

“Yes, sir. Forensics is done with the car.”

“What about it, Dothan?” Gerard asked.

The ME gave them a brief summary of his findings. “I doubt he lasted long.”

“I don’t give a damn how long he lasted.” Laird elbowed Gerard aside and bore down on Dothan Brooks. “What about my wife?”

“I don’t know anything about your wife.” The ME removed a handkerchief as large as a tablecloth from his hip pocket and wiped his sweating face with it.

Gerard turned to the detectives. “What do you know?”

He was uncharacteristically curt, probably because his responsibilities in the VCU were now mostly administrative. It had been a long time since he’d attended the scene of a murder, and no matter who’d been killed, even a nasty character like Napoli, it was never a pleasant experience.

But mostly, Duncan guessed, his boss was feeling pressure from the judge to get answers quick.

Worley removed the toothpick from his mouth and gave a concise account of the facts. “A few minutes ago, we found a shoe, a sandal with turquoise stones. Way over there.” He pointed to where the photographer was still taking photographs.

“Oh, Jesus.” Laird dragged his hand down his face. “Elise owns a pair of sandals like that. I want to see it.” He struck off in that direction.

“You may be tempted to pick it up, Judge. Please don’t touch it.”

He glared at Worley. “I’m not an idiot.”

Duncan looked after him, and despite his dislike of the man, he sympathized with his situation. If circumstances were different, vastly different, he would be behaving exactly as the judge. He would be frantic with worry, anguishing over possibilities, desperate for answers.

But he wasn’t Elise’s husband. He wasn’t even her friend. He wasn’t her anything except the detective who would probably have to hand her over to the DA for indictment. He couldn’t give vent to the uncertainty and fear raging inside him. He had to do his job.

“Chief Taylor called me,” Gerard was saying, speaking to his subordinates in an undertone. “Ordered me to personally oversee this investigation, which takes precedence over everything else we’re working right now. Give the judge anything he wants, he said. Taylor wants everybody sharp on this. Understand?”

“Excuse me,” DeeDee said. “Is Mrs. Laird considered a victim?”

“Until we know otherwise.” Gerard left them then to rejoin the judge.

“So our investigation just got political,” Worley muttered. “Fucking fabulous.”

Dothan Brooks walked up to them, wheezing. “Can I have him?”

Duncan left the ME with DeeDee and Worley to discuss transporting Napoli ’s corpse to the morgue. Slowly he walked back to the cones that sealed off the heel marks on the roadway and squatted down to study them more closely. They might turn out not to be Elise’s heel marks at all, but interrupted tire tracks or someone else’s heel marks. Any number of things could have made those black smudges on the pavement of a highly trafficked bridge that merged with several major boulevards of downtown Savannah on one end, and with South Carolina state highway 17 on the other.

He looked back at the car, gauging it to be about fifteen feet away from the marks. The sandal had been found at the wall, still farther away. All were within the narrow shoulder of the roadway. Duncan stood up and retraced his footsteps to the car, searching the pavement carefully.

“What’re you looking for?” Worley asked, noticing him.

“Blood.”

“He was shot in the car.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he was shot during a struggle, over there where the scuff marks are. He staggered back, managed to get into the driver’s seat and close the door.”

“Thinking maybe he could drive himself away.”

“He could have been gushing blood on the inside, but there was only a trickle on the outside,” Duncan said. “He didn’t drip any, especially if he was clutching the wound, as the smears on his hands and shirt indicate.”

“He could also have been shot right where we found him behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car.”

“Dammit!” Duncan said, acknowledging that what Worley said was true. “What was a slug like Meyer Napoli doing behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Laird’s car?”

“Beats me,” Worley said.

The ambulance had been motioned forward. The driver wove it between squad cars that had the inbound lanes of the bridge temporarily blocked to traffic, which at this time of morning was light. Worley wandered back to where DeeDee was conversing with Dothan Brooks.

Left alone, Duncan returned to the area blocked off by the traffic cones and cautiously peered over the nearby wall of the bridge. He didn’t look at the flowing river this time, however, but at the bridge itself.

Spanning two thousand feet, it had been built to replace a drawbridge that had become inefficient in handling the traffic on the river as Savannah ’s importance as a seaport increased.

Duncan had driven across the bridge a thousand times, but because of his aversion to heights and suspension, he’d kept his eyes on the road. He’d never studied the structure of the bridge. He’d certainly never been this up-close and personal with its awe-inspiring construction and massive proportions.

He leaned as far over the wall as he dared and studied the infrastructure. As he was mentally gauging the height of the nearest tower, which supported the struts, he noticed a descending metal ladder that connected to a piece of machinery-he didn’t even know what to call it-on the underside of the bridge. And on the floor of that thingamajig, he spotted something fluttering, something that didn’t belong.

He jogged toward the tower, keeping his eyes trained on the spot, hoping that what had captured his attention wouldn’t disappear before he could determine exactly what it was. When he was directly above it, he leaned over the wall and looked down onto the mechanism below.

What he’d seen was a piece of cloth. Light-colored, soft-looking, out of place on this brutally masculine structure of iron and steel and concrete.

Napoli ’s body was being transferred from the car to a gurney. Worley and DeeDee had been cleared by forensics to investigate the interior of the car. They were busy with that. Gerard was catching an earful of abuse from Judge Laird, who was punctuating his tirade with jabs of his index finger.