Again Jones shook his head. “No. The battery was still strapped in the battery box. The casing was cracked from the crash, but there was no indication it exploded.”
Slowly we paced around the hulk, studying it in mutual frustration. “There is one idea we had,” the lieutenant continued. “What about some kind of a fuel leak and a buildup of gasoline vapor in the engine compartment? That could explain why we’ve got no explosive traces.”
It was my turn to shake my head. “Nah, that wouldn’t work, either. Joe didn’t have a belly pan on his ’vette. In fact, he even had a set of cooling louvers cut into his hood. The front end of this car was wide open with a fifty-mile-per-hour slipstream blowing through it. A gas leak might have caused a fire, but there wouldn’t be any place for a vapor pocket to build up.”
The forensics man sighed. “What about an outside factor? Could he have run over something in the road?”
“A dozen other rods went down that same stretch of road immediately ahead of Joe. Nobody hit anything. Nobody saw anything.”
“What about something being thrown at the car? Like a hand grenade.”
“By who, and from where? We were coming down a steep-sided canyon, Lieutenant. It was almost straight up on one side and straight down on the other with no cover. There was no way anyone could have chucked anything at Joe without me seeing it.”
Lee scowled. “Is there anything at all that might have happened just before the explosion? Anything out of the ordinary that you can remember?”
For about the thousandth time I reran the mental film of those last few seconds up on the highway. “It was just starting to get dark,” I said finally. “I remember reaching down and turning on my lights. Then, boom, the ’vette blew. Hey! Maybe Joe saw my lights come on and that prompted him to hit his. Maybe something was wired into his headlight circuit.”
“Possibly. The Corvette’s headlight switch was turned to the ‘on’ setting. But we’ve examined every inch of the wiring harness and we can’t find any point where anything has been spliced or patched into the electrical system. There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there.”
“Fan-damn-tastic.”
Jones ran a hand through his thinning hair. “For the moment we’re stumped. We’ll be getting more chemical trace tests back later this morning and we’ll be talking with the FBI’s bomb specialists. If we come up with anything, we’ll let you know. For now, I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”
“Yeah, understood. Do you mind if I poke around the wreck a little?”
“Go ahead. We’ve got everything catalogued and dusted for prints. If you can spot something we’ve missed, we’ll be grateful. Just wear a pair of lab gloves if you’re going to touch anything.”
I intended to touch a lot of stuff. I don’t pretend to be a scientific genius like Lee Jones and his crew, but I do know cars, inside, outside, and sideways. And for the next couple of hours, that’s exactly how I went over the trashed hulk of Joe’s roadster.
I checked out the Corvette’s 265-cubic-inch small-block engine, and its fuel lines, fuel pump, and carburetion system. I examined the brakes, the clutch, and the transmission linkages. I eyeballed the wiring from the battery terminals to the charred headlight plugs. I had a look at the horn, the heater blower, and the radio, going over anything Joe or Linda could have touched that might have triggered a detonator.
Nowheresville.
Eventually I found myself standing in the center of the garage floor, just staring at the crumpled nose of Joe’s car and at the hundreds of bits of chrome and metal and Fiberglas surrounding it. The lieutenant was right. There was nothing there that shouldn’t be.
Chrome and metal and Fiberglas... and then it hit me. What wasn’t there that should have been?
Where was the glass?
I don’t mean like from the windshield. There were plenty of faceted chunks of broken safety glass lying around on the tarps. I mean the shards of plain old everyday glass glass.
I had to study on that one for a while. Then I started for the Central Jail parking lot.
On the way out, I stopped to put in a call to Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. The antiseptic voice of the charge nurse delivered the words I didn’t want to hear.
“I’m sorry, Deputy, but Miss Bell’s condition continued to deteriorate overnight. She was returned to surgery at six o’clock this morning. She died on the operating table about half an hour ago.”
“Has the family of her fiance, Joe Summervale, been notified?”
“I believe so. The Summervales asked to be kept abreast of her condition and Miss Bell’s family authorized it.”
I tried to phone the Summervale house next. There was no answer.
I had to flash my star twice at pursuing motor officers as the ’57 and I roared up the Arroyo Seco Parkway to Pasadena.
As I skidded to a halt in front of the house, I noted that Mr. Summervale’s Plymouth sedan was the only car in the driveway. It took a couple of minutes of hard pounding on the front door to lift a response. Joe’s father eventually appeared in his bathrobe, looking wrung out and bleary eyed.
“Where’s Danny?” I demanded as the door swung open.
“Uh... Danny?” It took a second for the older man to get his tongue working right. “What’s wrong, Deputy? Isn’t he here?”
“His car’s gone. When did he leave?”
“I don’t know,” the man replied thickly. “Last night I called our doctor to get something for my wife. He gave us both a couple of sleeping pills. Danny didn’t say anything to us about going anywhere... What’s the matter?”
“I don’t have time to explain just now. Did you get a phone call from the hospital awhile ago?”
“The phone? No... yes. I remember the phone ringing. Danny must have answered it. I must have gone back to sleep.”
“Oh great! Look, Mr. Summervale, I need permission to search your garage.”
“Search the garage?”
I took that for a yes and bolted around the side of the house.
Joe had the garage set up as a pretty fair automotive workshop, well equipped and with everything in its place the way a good mechanic likes it. Thanks to that, it took me only about two minutes to find all of what I was looking for. The tools were still set out on the workbench, the power drill, the fine diamond bit, the needle inflater for a basketball pump, and the tube of epoxy sealant. And there were the tanks of a welding rig right over in the corner. The two empty sealed beam boxes from an automotive supply house were buried in the bottom of the trash can.
And then I saw the length of cut-up garden hose heaped in the corner and that killed the last of my doubts. I ran back to the house and grabbed the phone, dialing up L.A. County Dispatch.
“This is Deputy Kevin Pulaski, Metro Division, badge number seven forty-eight! I want an all-points bulletin put out on a black-primered nineteen thirty-seven Ford coupe, plate number... Summervale, what in the hell is Danny’s license number?... Lincoln Ocean Ida four niner six!”
Car seemed to know that this race wasn’t just for fun. My steel lady soared above the L.A. smog layer, treating the San Gabes like they were Pike’s Peak with Duntov himself at the wheel. Her twin Carter four-barrels shrieked as they sucked air, a tremolo counter tone to the thunder of her dual exhausts. Belly to the ground, we clawed our way back up the Angeles Crest Highway, our tires smoking on the curves.