This perfectly fit the timetable for Markham's accident. "So let me ask you this, Lexi. Would you close your eyes for a minute and just try to visualize everything you can think of about the car or its driver-I know it was only a second-just tell us what you see."
Obediently, she leaned back into the couch, scrunched between her mom and her dad. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. "Okay. I was on Lake, just running like, and then I usually turn up Twenty-fifth and cross over, so I got to the corner and there was this car maybe, I don't know, a ways down the street, but coming to the stop sign, so I thought it would stop."
"Was the car speeding, do you think?" Bracco asked.
"I don't know. Probably not, maybe, or I might have noticed it more."
"Okay."
"But then I was off the curb like one step, and I heard the brakes go on, or the skid, you know that sound, whatever it's called. So I turned and she was going to hit me, so I jumped backwards and was facing her. Luckily she stopped just as I was reaching out. You know, in case she hit me."
"All right," Fisk said gently. "So you're leaning on the hood of the car. Is it damaged at all? Crashed in a little?"
"The light, yeah. I guess it would be the front, my left. I remember because I didn't want to cut myself on the broken headlight."
"Front right then, on the car."
"Okay, I guess so." She opened her eyes and seemed to be silently asking her parents if she was doing all right. A couple of nods assured her, and she closed her eyes again, but shook her head uncertainly. "I was kind of shaking then. It was pretty scary. But then I just got really mad and slammed my hands down on the hood again, really hard. I screamed at her."
"Do you remember what you said?"
"You almost killed me. You almost killed me, you idiot. I said it twice, I think. I was really mad and screamed at her."
"Then what?"
"Then she held up her hands, like it wasn't her fault, like she was sorry."
"Lexi," Bracco said with urgency, "what did she look like?"
It was almost comical the way Lexi screwed up her face, but there was no humor at all in the room. "Maybe a little younger than Mom, I think. I can't tell too good about adults' ages. But dark hair, kind of frizzy."
"Any particular hairstyle?"
"No. Just around her face. Frizzy."
"What race was she?"
"Not black. Not Asian. But other than that, I couldn't say."
"How about what she wore? Anything stick out?"
"No. It was only a second." She was showing the first signs of defensiveness. "We just stared at each other."
"Okay, that's good, Lexi," Fisk said. "Thank you so much."
But Bracco wasn't quite done. "Just a couple more things about the car, okay? Would you call it an old car or a new one? How would you describe it, if you can remember?"
Again, she closed her eyes. "Not a sports car, but not real big, you know. Kind of like a regular car, maybe, but not a new one, now that I think about it. The paint wasn't new. It just looked older, I guess. Not shiny." Suddenly, she frowned. "The back lights were kind of funny."
"The back lights?" Bracco asked. "How were they funny? How did you see them?"
"I turned right after I started running again. They kind of went out from the middle, almost like they were supposed to make you think of wings, you know?"
"Fins?" Fisk asked.
"Like on Uncle Don's T-Bird," Mrs. Rath volunteered. "You know how they go up in the back. They're called fins."
But she was shaking her head. "No, not just like that. Lower, kind of along the back, where you'd lift up the trunk. Oh, and a bumper sticker."
"You are doing so good, Lexi," Fisk enthused. "This is great. What about the bumper sticker?"
She closed her eyes again, squeezing them tight. But after a minute, she opened them and shook her head. "I don't know what it said. I don't remember. Maybe it wasn't in English."
At the day's last light, the two inspectors made one last stop, at the stop sign at Lake and Twenty-fifth. They had already decided to send a composite artist specialist out to the Raths' to work with Lexi. Fisk had a book at home with front and back views of every car made in America for the past fifty years, and he was planning on bringing that by, as well, to see if Lexi could give them a positive identification on the make and model.
They got out and walked from the stop sign back to the first streetlight. There was no sign of a skid mark, from which Fisk hoped to get something, perhaps a tire size. And then Bracco remembered. "The storm," he said. "We can forget it."
Kensing reached Hardy on his cell. It sounded as though he was in a restaurant somewhere. Jackman had already talked to him. He'd phrased the subpoena as a request. They wanted to proceed with dispatch on investigating Kensing's list, and without his testimony, the grand jury would be left in the dark. Hardy thought cooperation here wouldn't hurt them, and he'd okayed the new deal. But he wasn't nearly as sanguine when Kensing told him about the search warrant. "Glitsky was there tonight? Looking for what?"
"I don't think anything really. I think it was just to scare me, although they did take some of my clothes."
"Why did they do that?"
"They said they were looking for blood. They probably found some."
"Christ on a crutch."
Hardy had meant to turn off his cell phone when he and Frannie had left the house on their weekly date. It was one of their rules, but he'd forgotten and then of course it had rung and he'd answered it, telling her he'd just be a sec. That had been nearly five minutes ago. Once he had Kensing on the line, he wanted to grill him at length about the discrepancy between Judith Cohn's account of Tuesday night, when he hadn't gotten home by at least one o'clock, and his own, which would have put him there by about 10:30.
But they wound up talking about the search, and then about tomorrow's grand jury appearance. Then their waiter came up and gave him the sign and Hardy realized he really ought to hang up. They frowned upon cell phones here. Hardy did, too. Just not at this precise moment.
He squeezed in one more sentence. "But we really need to talk before you get to the grand jury."
If either Glitsky or his inspectors talked to Cohn as Hardy had done, they'd get the message to Marlene Ash and Kensing's appearance tomorrow in front of the grand jury wouldn't be pretty. With his multiple motives and Glitsky's animus, the squishy alibi might just be enough to get him indicted. At least he ought to know his girlfriend's story, or he'd get bushwhacked.
So they were meeting tomorrow at Kensing's at 8:15.
Now Frannie raised her glass of chardonnay, clinked it with his. "That sounded like a pleasant conversation," she said.
Hardy ostentatiously turned off his cell phone, put it in his jacket pocket. "Honest mistake, I swear," he said. "Which is better than the one Kensing made when he talked to Abe, or when he lied about when he got home last Tuesday."
Frannie stopped midsip. "I don't like to hear about clients who lie to you."
"It's not my favorite, either. In fact, as a general rule, I'd put lying in my top ten for what I'm not looking for in a client."
"And Abe just now searched his house?"
Hardy dipped some sourdough bread into a shallow dish of olive oil, pinched sea salt over it all. "I got that impression."
"Last night Abe seemed to think it might not be Kensing after all."
"Right. But last night we were all hot over Mrs. Loring, and we knew for a fact that Eric wasn't around when she was killed, so it looked like he was completely in the clear. But today, unfortunately, it turns out that these other deaths at Portola might have nothing to do with Markham or his wife. Basically, it looks like nobody in the universe that could have killed Mrs. Loring even knew Carla Markham, much less went to her house. In which case, they're unrelated."