At the moment, Trent Archer’s eyes were lingering on Sarah’s breasts. His smile was humorless, confident. “If you want to risk a trial, that’s your business. There’s no doubt brake failure led to my father’s accident and subsequent death.”
Sarah leaned back in her blue leather chair, fingers steepled as she contemplated Archer and his stepmother. McLean, studying the couple’s profiles, wondered if calling someone two years his junior “mother” stuck in Archer’s throat. He examined the lawyer’s spindly thirty-year-old neck and figured almost anything would jam.
Sarah’s voice was soft, persuasive. “You’re absolutely certain you want to put this family,” she nodded toward Robbie and Carl, “through the agony of a court proceeding that you may well lose?”
Mercy Archer rose abruptly. “This has gone far enough. We’ve tried to be fair to you people. My husband is dead and—” she pointed a bejeweled finger at Robbie “—that boy is responsible. My stepson,” she gave Archer a curiously flat stare, “found his father’s body, desecrated, burned, mangled.”
She scowled across the room at Sarah. “We’ve suffered a terrible loss. Terrible. I’ll have no more of this. Come, Trent.”
Trent rose with a faint air of embarrassment, a twisted smile locked in place, and brushed against Mercy as he swung the door open. She hissed, and there was a short, angry exchange in the outer office before the front door banged shut.
Carl Sutton stared after them, his jaw muscles etched in hard ridges. “That man blames my boy, thinks I’m a fool and yet when he needed a tire changed, it was me he called.” His work-roughened hands squeezed his thighs. “Maybe I am a fool, since I changed the damn thing.” He rose reluctantly, shook hands with McLean and Sarah, and left quietly, a protective arm around his son’s shoulders.
McLean moved to Mercy’s still-warm chair, nudged it around to face the desk, and slouched down. Sarah’s sour look mirrored his own feelings.
She wadded up the paper she’d been doodling on and hurled it toward the wastebasket. “I was a fool for allowing this meeting. It seems compassion simply doesn’t run in that family.” She pushed off from the desk, slid open the window, and in two short strides retrieved the crumpled paper, dropped it where it belonged, and shut off the air conditioner.
“They didn’t leave with any more information than they came with,” McLean said. “An interesting pair. Archer’s not actually going to act as their lawyer?”
Sarah shook her head, her auburn hair cutting short arcs. “He’ll have to get someone else, since he’s his own star witness. But he’s convinced it’ll never go to trial. Given his track record with juries, he’d better hope not.”
“Rocky Point going to settle out of court?”
“They will unless you find a reason not to.”
“Did Robbie mess up?”
“I don’t know. The child wants to please his father, more than anything in the world. If Carl told him not to touch customers’ cars, he wouldn’t.” Sadness tinged her smile. “But it depends on how Carl worded it. Robbie is terribly literal.”
Her eyes dropped to the insurance company’s file in McLean’s fist. “I’m afraid right now a jury will look at Robbie, feel sorry for him, and look at the widow and the insurance policy and...” She rose and paced the room in long, angry strides. “You know how it is. The insurance company will pay the freight, and Sutton won’t be driven out of business. The Archers—” her eyes flashed, “—have been smart enough to ask only for the face value of the policy. It’ll be the usual ‘no one gets hurt but the insurance company.’ ”
McLean opened the folder. “Three million dollars’ liability seems like a lot for a small garage.”
Sarah grimaced. “That was my doing. Carl’s also carrying a large life policy. He came to me right after Robbie’s mother died. He wanted to provide for the boy in case anything else went wrong. He doesn’t want him institutionalized, so, well, we loaded up on insurance.” She sighed. “I still think it was the right thing to do.”
McLean frowned at the color photographs of Rex Archer’s Blazer, fire-gutted when it ran off a back-country road and into a house-sized boulder. He’d seen worse, but repetition never dulled the nagging sense of waste that accidents always triggered.
Rex Archer had picked up the vehicle from Sutton’s garage and headed straight into the mountains for his annual autumn hunting trip. He had said the brakes grabbed, but Sutton couldn’t find anything wrong. As a courtesy the mechanic had cleaned the shoes and flushed the hydraulic system.
Trent Archer found the wreck the day after it happened. He told the sheriff’s department he went looking because his father no longer went on overnighters. Studying the report’s dry wording, McLean found no hint of the distress Mercy claimed her stepson felt.
McLean shrugged it off and concentrated on the photographs he’d spread along the desk’s edge. The photos, with the fifty-five-year-old Archer’s shriveled remains still in the seat, showed the Blazer from every angle, inside and out. He studied the shots carefully with a small magnifying glass plucked from a shirt pocket.
“Rex Archer have any enemies?”
“Let’s just say he didn’t have any old friends,” Sarah said. “He was a manipulator. Famous for buying minority stakes in small, successful businesses, then grabbing control and milking them dry. It’s a rumor he dabbled in commodities, but I don’t buy it.”
She leaned against the windowsill. “He also speculated in housing, although that implies he took chances, and he decidedly didn’t. I’ve handled a few cases, on the losing end,” the pain of defeat gave her voice a sharp edge, “of dreamers he sold property to for a large cash advance and small payments.” Disgust lurked behind her violet eyes. “Somehow he usually found a way to foreclose. One house has had five owners in as many years.”
“I don’t suppose there’s a corpse.”
“No. In what strikes me as the height of tastelessness, Mercy had the remains cremated last week. The police are satisfied it was an accident.”
McLean grunted, stacked the photos, squared the edges, and slid them into the folder. “I’ll need copies.”
Sarah’s normally fluid face aligned itself carefully. “Those are copies. I knew you’d take the case, the Suttons being the underdogs.”
He rapped the folder smartly with two fingers. “I might have rooted for the widow.”
“But you didn’t.”
McLean didn’t answer. He admired Sarah, and if she hadn’t been married, he might have admitted to more.
What he didn’t like was her assumption that she could read her sometime fire investigator like a book. It didn’t help that so far she had. That it made her a minority of one provided scant comfort.
Sarah looked away uneasily, her sandalwood perfume eddying across the desk on a stray puff of wind from the window. “We don’t have much time. Rocky Point’s about to cave in, and they’ve given you three days, tops.”
McLean scooped up the folder and turned for the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll bail you out.” He grinned at Sarah with a confidence he didn’t feel as he left.
The pickup’s vinyl seat, baking in the autumn sun, hissed when he slid behind the wheel. McLean ignored the sweat running down his back as he jotted questions on the manila folder propped against the steering wheel, absently licking the broken pencil’s tip between scribblings. With a disgruntled sigh fueled by low expectations, he turned the pickup’s snout toward Copper Valley Auto Wrecking.