“I can’t risk it.” The figure continued on without turning. “Your gas tank ruptured. Can’t you smell it? Your car could go off like a bomb any second.”
“But—” Jared coughed. My God. The guy was right! The raw stench of gasoline was filling his nostrils, making it hard to breathe.
“Wait! Come back, you sonofabitch! Don’t leave me! I have money! I’ll pay you!”
At the mention of money, the climber stopped and turned around. But in the tree shadows, Jared still couldn’t make out his face.
“That’s more like it,” Jared said. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars. Cash. Just get me out of this car and—”
“Ten grand? Is that all you’re worth?”
“No! I mean, look, I’ll give you whatever you want...” A flash of light revealed the climber’s face for a split second. Definitely familiar. Someone Jared had met or... His mind suddenly locked up, freezing with soul-numbing horror.
The flash was a flame. The climber had lit a cigarette. “Oh, Jesus,” Jared murmured softly, licking his lips. “What are you doing? Wait. Please.”
“Jesus?” the climber mimicked, taking a long drag. “Wait? Please? Is that the best you can do? I thought shysters were supposed to be fast talkers.”
Jared didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He watched in growing terror as the smoker tapped the ashes off, bringing the tip to a cherry glow. Then he flipped the cigarette high in the air, sending it arcing through the darkness, trailing sparks as it fell.
Jared’s shriek triggered another bolt of agony from his shattered spine, but he was beyond caring. He couldn’t stop screaming any more than he could stop the cigarette’s fiery fall.
Leaving his unmarked patrol car at the side of the highway, Doyle Stark trotted the last hundred yards along the shoulder to the accident scene. A serious one, by north-country standards. A Valhalla County fire truck was parked crossways across one lane of the highway, blocking it. Two uniformed sheriff’s deputies, Hurst and VanDuzen, were directing traffic around the truck on the far shoulder. Van flipped him a quick salute and Doyle shot him with a fingertip.
Yellow police-line tapes stretched from both bumpers of the fire truck to stakes planted in the roadside snowdrifts. The tapes outlined a savage gap in the snowy embankment, over the top and on down out of sight.
Detective Zina Redfern was squatting at the rear of the fire truck, warming her mittened hands in the heat of its exhaust pipe. She was dressed in her usual Johnny Cash black: black nylon POLICE parka over a turtleneck and jeans, a black watch cap pulled down around her ears. The woman took the term “plainclothes officer” literally. Even her combat boots were the real deal, LawPro Pursuits with steel toes. With a Fairbairn blade clipped to her right ankle.
“Sergeant Stark,” she nodded, straightening up to her full, squared-off five foot five, one forty. “Whoa, what happened to your eye?”
Six foot and compactly built, with sandy hair and gray eyes, Doyle was sporting a white bandage over his left brow.
“Reffing a Peewee pickup game,” Doyle said. “Ten-year-olds watch way too much hockey on TV. What happened here?”
“A car crashed through the embankment, tumbled all the way to the bottom, then blew up and burned down to the frame. What’s left of the driver is still inside. Beyond that, I’m not sayin’ squat. I need you to see this with fresh eyes.”
“Fair enough.” Doyle nodded, picking up the edge in her tone. Zina had worked in Flint for four years before transferring north to the Valhalla force. She was an experienced investigator, and if something was bothering her about this...
He swiveled slowly, taking in the accident scene as a steady stream of traffic crawled past on the far shoulder. Wide-eyed gawkers, wondering what was up. Doyle knew the feeling.
Two sets of broad black skid marks met in the center of the lane, then followed an impossible angle to the torn snowbanks at the side of the road. “Who called this in?”
“A long-haul trucker spotted the wreckage as he crested the hill, around ten this morning. We caught a real break. The wreck’s not visible from the roadside. If we’d gotten a little more snow during the night, the poor bastard might have stayed buried till spring. I marked off a separate trail away from the skid track,” she said, leading him to a rough footpath up and over the berm. “There are footprints that... well, take a look for yourself.”
Clambering to the top of the drift, Doyle stopped, scanning the scene below. A ragged trail of torn snow and shattered trees led down the slope to a charred obscenity crouched at the bottom of the gorge. A burned-out hulk that had once been an expensive piece of German automotive engineering.
The charred Mercedes Benz was encircled by a blackened ring of torn earth and melted slush, its savagery already softening beneath a gentle gauze of lightly falling snow.
Joni Javitz, the Joint Investigative Unit’s only tech, was hunched over the car, dutifully photographing the corpse. Even at this distance, Doyle could see the gaping mouth and bared teeth of the Silent Scream, a burn victim’s final rictus. A few patches of skull were showing through the blackened flesh...
Damn. He hated burn scenes. The ugly finality and the vile stench that clung to your clothing for days. In Detroit, cops called them Crispy Critters. But here in the north, no one in Doyle’s unit joked about them. There’s nothing funny about a death by fire. Ever.
Working his way warily down the slope, Doyle noted the uneven footprints in the snow of the roadster’s trail. “Did the trucker climb down to the car?”
“The trucker didn’t stop,” Zina said. “He spotted the wreck and a little smoke. Wasn’t sure what it was, but thought somebody should take a look.”
“It was still smoking at ten o’clock? Any idea when this happened, Joni?”
“My best guess would be around midnight, boss, give or take an hour,” Javitz said without turning. Tall and slender as a whip, she had to fold herself into a question mark to shoot the wreck’s interior. “The car and the body are both cool to the touch now, but they’re still ten degrees warmer than the ambient temperature. The State Police Crime Scene team is already en route from Gaylord. They should be here any time.”
“Okay...” Doyle said, swiveling slowly, taking in the scene. “We’ve got a hotshot in a Benz roadster who runs off the road at midnight, crashes and burns. Tough break for him. Or her?”
“Him, definitely,” Joni said.
“Fine. Him, then. And why exactly am I here on my day off?”
Wordlessly, Joni stepped away from the car, revealing the charred corpse and the deep crease in the driver’s-side door.
“Wow,” Doyle said softly, lowering himself to his haunches, studying the dent more closely. “Metal on metal. Red paint traces. No tree did this. Which explains the second set of skid marks on the highway. Somebody ran this poor bastard off the road...” He broke off, eyeing a small circle of dark red droplets, scattered like a spray of blood near the trunk.
“Plastic pellets?” Doyle said. “Any chance they’re from the taillights?”
“Nope, the taillight lenses are Lexan,” Joni said. “These pellets are definitely polypropylene, probably from a plastic gas container. A small one, a gallon or two. Like you’d use for a chainsaw or a lawnmower. The can was definitely on the ground outside the vehicle. I’ve already bagged up some residue to test for accelerants.”
“I didn’t see any skid marks from the other vehicle until the last second, just before it struck the Benz,” Doyle mused. “From the depth of these dents, both cars must have been traveling at one hell of a clip. So car number two runs the stop sign at high speed, nails the Benz dead center, hard enough to drive it through the snowdrifts...”