"It's a nightmare, really," I said. It took half an hour to get to the Texaco gas station with the twenty-four-hour towing service that had taken care of my car. I spotted my Mercedes in a corner near a chain link fence, and the sight of its destruction tightened my stomach. I got-weak in the knees. The front end was crumpled up against the windshield, the driver's side gaping like a toothless mouth. Hydraulic tools had forced open the doors, which had been removed along with the center post. My heart beat hard as I got close, and I jumped when a deep drawl sounded behind me.
"May I help ya?"
I turned to face a grizzled old man wearing a faded red cap with purina over the bill.
"This is my car," I told him.
"I sure as hell hope you wasn't the one driving it."
I noticed the tires were not flat and both air bags had deployed.
"It sure is a shame." He shook his head as he stared at my hideously mangled Mercedes-Benz.
"Believe this is the first one of these I've seen. A 500E. Now, one of the boys here knows Mercedes and tells me Porsche helped design the engine in this one and there aren't but so many around. What is it? A '93? I don't reckon your husband got it around here."
I noticed that the left taillight was shattered, and near it was a scrape that was smudged with what appeared to be greenish paint. I bent over to get a closer look as my nerves began to tensely hum. The man talked on.
"Course, with as few miles as you had on it, it's more'n likely a '94. If you don't mind my asking, about how much would one like this cost? About fifty?"
"Did you tow this in?" I straightened up, my eyes darting over details that were sending off alarms, one right after another.
"Toby brought it in last night. I don't guess you'd know the horsepower."
"Was it exactly like this at the scene?"
The man looked slightly befuddled.
"For example," I went on, "the phone's off the hook."
"I guess so when a car's been flipping and slams into a tree."
"And the sunscreen's up."
He leaned over and peered in at the back windshield. He scratched his neck.
"I just figured it was dark because the glass is tinted. I didn't notice the screen was up. You wouldn't think someone'd put it up at night."
I carefully leaned inside to look at the rearview mirror. It had been flipped up to reduce the glare of headlights from the rear. I got keys out of my pocketbook and sat sidesaddle on the driver's seat.
"Now I wouldn't be doing that if I was you. That metal's like bunches of knives in there. And there's an awful lot of blood on the seats and ever' where I hung up the car phone and turned on the ignition. The phone sounded its tone to tell me it was working, and red lights went on warning me not to run down the battery. The radio and the CD player were off. Headlights and fog lamps were on. I picked up the phone and hit redial. It began to ring and a woman's voice answered.
"Nine-one-one."
I hung up, my pulse pounding in my neck as chills raced up to the roots of my hair. I looked around at red spatters on the dark gray leather, on the dash and console, and all over the inside of the roof. They were too red and thick. Here and there bits of angel hair pasta were cemented to the interior of my car.
I got out a metal fingernail file and scraped off greenish paint from the damage to the rear. Folding the paint flecks into a tissue, next I tried to pry off the damaged taillight unit. When I couldn't, I got the man to fetch a screwdriver.
"It's a '92," I said as I rapidly walked away, leaving him staring after me with an open mouth.
"Three hundred and fifteen horsepower. It cost eighty thousand dollars. There are only six hundred in this country-were. I bought it at McGeorge in Richmond. I don't have a husband." I was breathing hard as I got in the Lincoln.
"It's not blood inside it, goddam it. Goddam it. Goddam it! " I muttered on as I slammed the door shut and started the engine. Tires squealed as I shot out into the highway and raced back to 95 South. Just past the Atlee/Elmont exit I slowed down and pulled off the road. I kept as far off the pavement as I could, and when cars and trucks roared past I was hit by walls of wind. Sinclair's report stated that my Mercedes had left the pavement approximately eighty feet north of the eighty-six-mile marker. I was at least two hundred feet north of that when I spotted a yaw mark not far from broken taillight glass in the right lane. The mark, which was a sideways scuff about two feet long, was about ten feet from a set of straight skid marks that were approximately thirty feet long. I darted in and out of traffic, collecting glass.
I started walking again, and it was approximately another hundred feet before I got to marks on pavement that Sinclair had diagrammed in his report. My heart skipped another beat as I stared, stunned, at black rubber streaks left by my Pirelli tires the night before last. They were not skids at all, but acceleration marks made when tires spin abruptly straight ahead, as I had done when leaving the Texaco station moments earlier. It was just after she had made these marks that Lucy had lost control and had gone off the road. I saw her tire impressions in the dirt, the smear of rubber when she over corrected and a tire caught the pavement's edge. I surveyed deep gashes in the road made when the car flipped, the gouge in the tree in the median, and bits of metal and plastic scattered everywhere.
I drove back to Richmond not sure what to do or whom to call. Then I thought of Investigator McKee with the state police. We had worked many traffic fatality scenes together and spent many hours in my office moving Matchbox cars on my desk until we believed we had reconstructed what had led to a crash. I left a message with his office, and he returned my call shortly after I got home.
"I didn't ask Sinclair if he got casts of the tire impressions where she left the road, but I can't imagine he would have," I said, after explaining a little of what was going on.
"No, he wouldn't have," McKee concurred.
"I heard a lot about it. Dr. Scarpetta. There was a lot of talk. And the thing was, what Reed first noticed when he responded to the scene was your low number tag. "
"I talked to Reed briefly. He wasn't very involved."
"Right. Under ordinary circumstances, when the Hanover officer… uh, Sinclair, rolled up. Reed would have told him things were under control and done all the diagrams and measurements himself. But he sees this low three-digit tag and bells go off. He knows the car belongs to somebody important in government.
"Sinclair gets to do his thing while Reed gets on the radio and the phone, calls for a supervisor, runs the tag ASAP. Bingo. The car comes back to you, and now his first thought is ifs you inside. So you can imagine how it was out there."
"A circus."
"You got it. Turns out Sinclair just got out of the academy. Your wreck was his second."
"Even if it was his twentieth, I can see how he might have made a mistake.
There was no reason for him to look for skid marks two hundred feet up from where Lucy went off the road."
"And you're certain it was a yaw mark you saw?"
"Absolutely. You make those casts, and you're going to find the impression on the shoulder's going to match the impression back there on the road. The only way that yaw mark or scuff could have been left was if an outside force caused the car to suddenly change direction."
"And then acceleration marks two hundred or so feet later," he thought out loud.
"Lucy gets hit from the rear, taps her brakes, and keeps on going. Seconds later she suddenly accelerates and loses control."
"Probably about the same time she dialed Nine-one- one," I said.
"I'll check with the cellular phone company and get the exact time of that call. Then we'll find it on the tape."
"Someone was on her bumper with their high beams on, and she flipped on the night mirror, and finally resorted to putting up the rear sunscreen to block out the glare. She didn't have the radio or CD player on because she was concentrating hard. She was wide awake and scared because someone's on top of her.