Herb Krantz only laughed when McLean asked to see Archer’s Blazer. “Hell, it’s in Taiwan bein’ made into refrigerators by now.” He added with a trace of pride, “We work fast here.” He waved toward a collection of steering wheels nailed to the office’s battered sheet metal walls. “I kept the wheel for my collection, it’s that one there.” He pointed to a steel skeleton. “Nothing else was worth saving.”
McLean ran an exploratory finger around the wheel. “You mean this is it?”
“What I said. Kept it because it’s in such good shape, considering he musta hit it pretty hard with his face.” He chuckled. “Didn’t give much, did it?”
McLean had already noticed. “Any more of these come from Blazers?”
“Yep, at least three.” Krantz waved toward a trio of misshapen discs. He spewed a stream of tobacco juice toward the wall, looked at his feet awkwardly, and cleared his throat. “Look, you’re an educated man and work for the lawyer lady and stuff, and what with Archer being dead and all, what do you make of this? Damned things arrived yesterday.”
Krantz shambled over to a battered desk, pushed a stack of parts books aside, and produced a sheaf of papers from the United States Bankruptcy Court in Medford. He thrust them across the desk almost apologetically.
McLean glanced at them out of politeness, knowing it was small repayment for Krantz’s time, even though he knew as much about bankruptcy proceedings as he did about brain surgery. His eyes traveled the sheets while his mind sought the best way to tell Krantz to call a lawyer. Rex Archer’s name stood out like a priest at a rock concert.
“Archer was your partner?”
“Yeah.” Krantz’s tone made it clear his partner’s death was an annoyance but no reason to mourn, and he accepted McLean’s advice to call a lawyer with the same enthusiasm he’d show for a double amputation.
McLean returned the papers and left, almost plowing over another customer as he concentrated on his next stop, the coroner’s office. There he skirmished with an indifferent receptionist and a hostile Dr. Thurston Barton.
“Of course it was Archer.” Barton, short, round, and as pale as his clients, thumped his government-issue desk. “I know my business, thank you very much, even if I am only part-time.” And, McLean thought dryly, a full-time gynecologist, hardly an expert on violent death.
“I wasn’t questioning your abilities, doctor.” McLean rubbed his nose, which twitched from the formaldehyde-laced air. “It’s just that there was no usable identification on the body and it says here,” he tapped the insurance file, “that his dental records were destroyed last summer when his dentist’s office was vandalized.”
Barton rolled his eyes. “There are other ways, you know. For one thing I had enough of the body to make an accurate estimate of the victim’s height and build. There were also X-rays of a broken leg, and the breaks matched perfectly. Besides—” Barton’s smile chilled the room, “—most of his teeth were gone, burned away.”
“Even the rear molars?”
“Yes. The jaw was fractured in the crash.”
“I see, hit the steering wheel, did he?”
Barton’s exaggerated sigh wafted around the room. “Of course he hit the damned wheel. If you don’t mind, the county isn’t paying me enough to answer some insurance man’s inane questions.” He jerked a folder from a stack on his desk and flipped it open.
McLean paused at the door. “Please satisfy a neophyte’s curiosity. What color were the bones?”
Barton lifted his head slowly. “White, you blasted ghoul. Pearl white.”
The secretary, lip-syncing as she read the National Enquirer, lifted her head fractionally and popped her gum at McLean’s distracted goodbye.
Moses nudged his visitor in the crotch, then stood motionless, waiting to be petted, a hard demand to resist since the one hundred forty pound Rottweiler wouldn’t move until satisfied.
Axel Reed grinned over one shoulder as he scooted his wheelchair toward a bank of computers. “So there’s no confusion — you want these photos blown up, and you want large colored graphics of each one with special emphasis on these spots: the tires, the interior, the roof, and the underside of the engine, right?”
McLean nodded confirmation as he rubbed the dog’s ears. Moses closed his eyes and leaned into McLean’s legs, confident he’d found a soulmate, which he had, to McLean’s surprise. He’d always liked dogs from a distance, but Moses was the first one he’d genuinely admired, probably because of the animal’s absolute loyalty to his master. Loyalty being something McLean understood and respected.
Axel studied the photographs before scanning them into his Macintosh. “Grim stuff, but we’ll blow things up and see what we get.” McLean smiled at his friend’s back. If anyone could interpret the pictures it’d be Axel, a colleague from their old fire department in California. They’d been a solid team, until a collapsing roof crushed Axel’s back.
He tugged guiltily at the twisted little finger on his left hand. His only injury from a disaster that nearly sent his best friend’s life spinning out of control. It was the only time he had appreciated the unexpected wealth dropped into his lap by his mother’s death. He bankrolled Axel’s new business specializing in computer-enhanced fire scenes, a loan that was almost paid off, and McLean knew better than to forgive the balance, much as he wanted to.
Axel rolled back from the computers, gripped the wheelchair’s arms, and lifted himself up, relieving, if only for a moment, the chronic ache of bedsores. McLean grimaced in sympathetic pain. Axel shot his friend a lopsided grin, lowered himself, and pointed to the pictures. “This guy knew a lot more pain. Who was it, anyway?”
When McLean told him, Axel stared possessively around his cramped room. “Bought this house from him.” A sly smile warmed his scarred face. “Paid cash up front. Funny guy, if you know what I mean. Married his son’s girlfriend.” He snorted and pivoted back to the desk. “Typical of the guy. When I was renting, he tried to toss me out because of Moses.” He paused, caressed the dog’s head, then added without a trace of humor, “Rex Archer had heart surgery last spring, and it’s rumored the doctors had trouble finding it.”
McLean pulled away from Axel’s house, by itself on the outskirts of town, and headed down Highway 199, past the ever present flock of bearded hitchhikers togged out in surplus army fatigues and hunting jackets. He considered giving one a lift, an older man cradling a small dog, but decided against it since he was only going five miles.
He pulled off the highway several minutes later and dug a map out of the console.
The faded blue-line Forest Service rendering showed every logging road and minor gully in excruciating detail, including the curve, but not the rock, where Rex Archer died.
The fatal spot lay ten miles down a track branching off the road he’d stopped on. The land on either side had been thoroughly logged. No tree thicker than a man’s wrist remained standing, and small mountains of branches, bark, and brush waited to be burned in the spring.
McLean, searching for the turnoff, almost rear-ended an army surplus dump truck, outfitted with a water tank and repainted the color of clotted blood, as it wheezed up the road. The water truck took a hard left into a partially hidden clearing just before the secondary road’s turnoff. There the logging company would be maintaining a fire watch.
McLean found the turnoff, and his pickup took the twisting washboard track with the grace of a crippled elephant, but it got him the ten miles, where he stopped at the top of a long incline and stared down at the rock. The spot where his truck idled was flat, giving way abruptly to a heavily rutted track that dived for three hundred feet at an angle steeper than a tenement stairway. The entire area was desolate, never having recovered from some heavy-handed logging more than forty years before.