From his pocket Charlie produced two crumpled paper towels, handing one over with a flourish. “Your napkin, madam.” He settled down next to her. “So have you seen any of the reports?” He kept his voice low.
“No.” Mia shook her head. “I figured looking at them wasn’t going to change anything. All I know is they didn’t do an autopsy.” She had been grateful for that. She took a bite of pizza, oddly ashamed that her body could still be hungry after everything that had happened today. Still be hungry when they were discussing her husband’s death.
“They don’t do an autopsy if they figure the cause of death is self-evident. So what they did in Scott’s case was take a chest tap, test his blood for alcohol, snap some photos, and write up a short report about the external condition of the body. I got that and the accident report.”
“Okay.” Mia waited for the rest.
“In a case like this, when you’ve got no witness, figuring out what really happened depends on the competency of the CSI who processed the scene and the forensic pathologist who did the exam. Only in this case, there was no CSI, just a patrol officer who responded to the 911 call. And the guy who did the exam wasn’t a pathologist, but a death investigator. Who knows how much training either one of them had or whether they’re certified and by whom.”
He pulled out the accident report, which had a freehand sketch of the accident scene. Mia had to work to swallow what suddenly felt like a wad of cotton in her throat. Two lines curved to the left, indicating a road. A rectangle representing the car sat on the right-hand side just after the curve. A row of triangles showed the line of trees, one of which overlapped the front passenger side of the car.
“How much do you know about car accidents?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder. “When you work in violent crimes, most of those aren’t committed with a vehicle.”
“How about physics?”
“Probably not my forte either.”
“Accidents basically follow Newton’s first law of motion,” he said, “which says that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless something acts on it.”
“Okay.” Mia drew out the word. It was strange to hear Charlie sounding like a professor.
“So. Scott’s car failed to completely negotiate the curve and left the road here.” He tapped on the illustration. “He hit gravel and then slid into one of these trees. The impact was on the front passenger side door—the right side. The airbags deployed, but he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. So he was—”
Mia sucked in her breath. “What did you say?”
“Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” Charlie continued. “So he was thrown from the driver’s seat into—”
“That’s not possible.” Mia shook her head so hard she felt dizzy for a second. “Scott always wore a seat belt. Always.”
“Even when he’d been drinking?”
“Especially when he’d been drinking. He got super cautious behind the wheel when he was drunk.”
Charlie paged through the paperwork. “But the first responder told the police that Scott passed him earlier and he was speeding.”
“No.” Mia knew Scott. “No. He never took chances when he was drunk.”
Charlie leaned forward. “Wait a second. You sound like you’ve been in the car with him when he was drunk.”
“I was.” She met his eyes. “Not with the kids, never the kids, but sometimes just me.”
“So you let him drive when you knew he was drunk?”
Mia tucked in her lips. “We both know that alcoholics can handle amounts that would put other people under the table. Of course if Scott was too drunk, I didn’t let him drive, no matter how angry he got. But there were times it wasn’t worth arguing with him if it was only a few miles and the roads were quiet. Especially since I knew how careful he was.”
Charlie looked disgusted. “Maybe he was only careful when you were in the car.”
She sighed. “You could be right. But I know Scott would never not wear a seat belt. The only time he didn’t wear one was after the doctor gave him sleeping pills. The whole next day he drove around unbelted, and he didn’t even realize it until evening. He told me he was never going to take another one of those pills again. That he couldn’t get into as much trouble with alcohol. So for a long time, he used that as his sleeping pill.”
Charlie shrugged like he didn’t believe her but didn’t want to argue.
“Well, for whatever reason, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” he reiterated. “And when the car hit the tree, that part of the car stopped while the rest kept moving, just like Newton said it would. Basically that means the rest of the car started to rotate around the tree. Meanwhile, because Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt, his body
kept moving forward at the same speed and in the same direction while the car was starting to move around him. His body hit the interior of the car’s passenger side, which caused a lot of damage to the right side—head, shoulder, ribs, and hip.” He touched the spots as he named them. “But that’s not all that happened. My friend who’s a forensic pathologist says that there’re really three collisions in any accident, even though they all happen in the same split second. First there’s the car hitting something. Then there’s the body hitting something inside the car.”
“So what’s the third collision?” Mia asked. Hadn’t everything stopped at that point?
“The internal organs. They follow the first law of motion too. They keep moving until they tear away or hit something hard inside you, like your ribs or your skull. In this case, when the death investigator did a chest tap, he got a syringe full of blood.” Charlie touched his chest. “That means Scott’s aorta got torn.”
“And he bled out inside.” Every word was making her flinch. “I know that part, Charlie.”
He took a second report from the file. “But in addition to the injuries on the right side of his body, there were blunt-force injuries to the left side of his head. Not the right. The left. His left cheekbone and his left jaw were broken.” He again touched the spots as he named them. “Both upper and lower.”
“Then he must have hit the dash or the steering wheel.”
“I thought of that. Which is why I talked to my friend. The fractures were depressed. He told me that means the head was probably stationary and something moving hit it. Like if you clubbed a block of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam wouldn’t crack in half. Instead, the club would leave a sunken imprint in the Styrofoam. And that’s what my pathologist friend thinks happened to Scott. He thinks he was hit twice on the side of the head with some sort of club.”
“Wait.” Mia’s thoughts were whirling. “First Scott was in an accident, and after that someone hit him in the head?”
“Well, it’s hard to see how it could be the other way around. Because he wouldn’t have been able to drive after receiving two blows like that.”
“Let me just repeat this so I can get it straight.” Mia straightened up. “You think Scott was in an accident.”
“I think his car left the road and hit a tree, yes.”
“And that hitting the tree caused his death by tearing his aorta.”
“Yes.”
“Then why would someone come along and hit him in the head if he was already dead? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“My friend said he might have lived for several minutes, maybe longer. I think someone wanted to make sure Scott was good and dead. Maybe they forced him off the road. Maybe they tampered with his car. But whatever happened, they—”
Mia caught her breath.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“The reason Scott was driving a loaner that night was because his car was in the shop. Its brakes had failed a week before.”
C
harlie’s eyes bored into her. “What was wrong with the brakes?”
“Scott left our driveway, but when he pulled up to that first intersection”—she pointed in its direction—“the one with the four-way stop, he said the brake pedal went right to the floor.”
“Was there an accident?”
“No. There weren’t any other cars in the intersection. It’s always so busy there, but he got lucky that day. He told me he pumped the gas, pulled the emergency brake, and turned into the curb.” Mia had been impressed by his quick thinking. “He just bumped along until he came to a stop. Then he walked home, told me what had happened, and called the tow company. He borrowed my car for the day, and at the end of it I took him to our mechanic and he got a loaner. That’s the car he was driving when he died.”
Charlie cocked his head. “Didn’t you put two and two together?”
“Put what together?” Mia’s thoughts were racing. “No. Because there was nothing to put together. Our mechanic said the undercarriage of the Suburban had some scrapes. He thought Scott must have driven over something that damaged the brake line.”
For a moment Scott rose up in Mia’s mind, so strongly conjured
it was like he was in the family room with them, leaning against the wall, regarding them with his arms crossed and his face expressionless. She was suddenly aware of how close she was sitting to Charlie, their thighs nearly touching. She scooted a few inches away. The low buzz of a headache was making it hard to think.
Charlie spoke slowly, as if putting his thoughts in order. “The question is—did they tamper with the Suburban’s brakes in a failed attempt to kill him? Or did they tamper with the brakes so he’d end up in a car that they knew they could kill him in? Maybe that explains why Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Maybe they disabled it.”
Wheels within wheels. Charlie was starting to sound like some lonely talk show caller with an elaborate conspiracy theory.
“But how could they know Scott was going to end up in a car from our mechanic? A lot of people would just take a car that new to the dealer, but we’ve had the same mechanic for a long time and we trust him. The loaner Scott was in when he died was a beater. It had something like two hundred thousand miles on it. I’m sure it didn’t have any side-curtain airbags or anything like that. But it wasn’t part of any conspiracy.”
Scott’s Suburban, on the other hand, had been top-of-the-line—and it had also turned out not to really be Scott’s. After he died Mia had found out it was leased. And even though Scott was dead, she had still been on the hook to pay it off. She had been lucky to find someone to take over the payments. Even without that burden she was barely making ends meet, struggling to pay all the bills Scott had accumulated.
“I think you’re adding one and one and getting eleven.” Mia wiped her mouth with the paper towel, signaling to Charlie and even to herself that she was done listening to crazy what-ifs. “Scott ran over something in the Suburban that cut the brake line. Then he got drunk and had an accident in an old car that bounced him around like a pinball. He had a run of bad luck, and he made some stupid decisions. End of story.”
“But his face, Mia.” Charlie lightly tapped the left side of his face. “Nothing explains the injuries to the wrong side of his head. I want to ask Puyallup County to reopen the case.”
“Then go ahead,” she said sharply. “You don’t need my permission. But I just can’t see why anyone would want Scott dead.”
“I thought maybe you could help me with the why.” Charlie tilted his head. “You were his wife. You knew him better than anyone.”
“I only wish that were true.” Her mouth suddenly tasted bitter. “I’ve realized Scott was hiding a lot of secrets from me. About our finances, about his business failing, about his drinking. There could even be more that I don’t know about.” And did she really want to?
“Can you think of anyone who was mad at him?”
“Mad at Scott?” She almost laughed. “He was so quiet. He wasn’t the type people got mad at. If anyone was mad at him when he died, it was me. You never met him, right?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Scott was an accountant. An accountant. The most boring job ever. Staring at columns of numbers with a printing calculator under one hand. Because he was a one-man operation, his clients were people who didn’t need much in the way of an accountant, or who only really needed one at tax time. Which was why he was working crazy hours when he died.”
Charlie looked down at the papers and then back up at her. “This is an awkward question to ask, but could there have been anyone else?”
“Scott?” Mia tried to buy time to think. What did she want to tell Charlie? Suspicions were one thing, facts another. “We’d been together since college.”
“Even people in good marriages sometimes fall into something unexpected.”
She bit her lip and said, “To be honest, I used to wonder if he was seeing someone. He was working those long hours, and he was always irritable when I tried to talk to him. I knew he was hiding
something from me.” Heat climbed her cheeks. She looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap. “After he died and I found out how much debt he left us in, I realized that must have been it. That we were living off credit cards and not what his business brought in. Although I guess it’s possible that he had more than one secret. More than two, when you count his drinking again.”
“Maybe he tried to break something off and the lady got upset. Or she could have had a husband or boyfriend.”
Mia tried to picture it. Was Scott so selfish that he would cheat on her physically and emotionally as well as financially? Of course, this was the same man who had broken his promises to her, lied by omission and commission.
“I guess there’s the flip side.” Charlie glanced at her and then away. “Maybe some guy had fallen in love with you and wanted Scott out of the way?”
Mia snorted. “If that’s the case, then where is he?” She mimed looking around. “No one’s exactly eager to put the moves on a widow with a preschooler and a teenager.”
Charlie didn’t deny it. “How about enemies? Or friends he’d fallen out with?”
“Scott didn’t have a lot of friends, but that was by choice. He was sort of a loner.” Mia thought of how Scott had pulled back into himself, like a snail retreating into its shell. He must have been afraid that his failure would slip out. “When he wasn’t working, he went on long runs or played music.” She saw Scott’s brown head bent over his guitar, his eyes closed. The memory brought pain so fierce and sharp it was like someone had slipped a knife between her ribs and given it a good twist. “Even when he was drinking, he was a quiet drunk. He wasn’t the kind of outspoken guy who made enemies.”