Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(21)

Now Wyatt approached Jean Huntoon, who’d arrived with the state’s data retrieval computer. The two had met twice before. They shook hands, made the obligatory comments on the weather, then hoofed it down to the crash site. Huntoon was a slender five six and cycled hundred-mile races in her free time. She also hadn’t hiked in and out of the ravine half a dozen times, Wyatt thought resentfully, as the younger officer beat him to the vehicle.

“Sad ending for a beautiful car,” Huntoon observed.

“Apparently even crossovers weren’t meant to fly.”

“Distributed front-end damage. Took it right on the nose.” Huntoon looked back up the way they came. “Must have left the road up top, sailed right down. No other vehicles involved?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Brake marks?”

“Nope.”

Huntoon arched a delicate brow. “Never a good sign. All right, you got questions. Let me get some answers.”

Huntoon hefted her computer onto a relative flat spot near the frame of the shattered windshield, got out some cables, and went to work.

There were a couple of ways to conduct a vehicle autopsy. One was to dismantle the car in the field and ship away entire parts, doors, seats, the little black box, to the state’s labs. As it was a county case, someone like Wyatt would follow his evidence to the labs, overseeing every step of analysis and data retrieval.

But Wyatt was feeling a pressure he couldn’t completely explain with this one. Maybe because the case had gotten off to such a rough start, dozens of officers tied up in a wild-goose chase. Now he felt as if the investigation had gotten away from them and he needed to rein it back in, define the parameters of exactly who, what, when, where, why and how.

He needed the accident to present factually as just an accident. Run-of-the-mill. Nothing new to be seen here. Then he and his team could settle in, get it done.

Hence he’d called Jean Huntoon to meet him out in the field to retrieve the Audi’s electronic data, rather than waiting another day to handle it in the lab.

Bad news about hooking up to the vehicle directly; Huntoon had to work around the shards of broken glass and bloodstained dash. An experienced officer, she whistled cheerfully as she rigged the cables from the car’s electronic data recorder to her computer. She played with this, fiddled with that, then stood back to let her equipment do its thing.

An hour before, Kevin and a couple guys from the TAR team had wrapped up mapping the scene with the Total Station. Add that data to the info from the vehicle’s EDR and Wyatt was hoping they’d have a nice, neat blueprint of single-car accident 101.

“Nice prints,” Huntoon observed now, gesturing to a pair of bloody handprints on the front dash.

Wyatt nodded. It was true. Vehicles were notoriously tricky to fingerprint. Too much overlay and not enough viable surface. His personal favorite was to print the inside lid of the glove compartment box. Steering wheels, doors, gear shift, mostly yielded garbage. But the inside lid of the glove compartment . . . nice, smooth plastic. Generally accessed only a few times by a few people. He’d scored some lovely incriminating prints from the glove box in his time. Things cops were proud of.

“Blood testing?” Huntoon was asking, indicating the gory mess smearing the driver’s side door.

“Gonna let you guys do the honors. Whole door will ship out later tonight. Probably tear out big chunks of the dash as well. Less dilution that way.”

Huntoon nodded in agreement. Taking a blood sample involved swabbing it with sterile water, which in turn diluted it. In this day and age of modern forensics, a good cop didn’t just find evidence; he protected it.

“Female driver?” Huntoon asked.

“Yep.”

Huntoon gestured through the shattered windshield to the driver’s seat. “Seat setup looks similar to mine, about right for an average-size woman.”

Wyatt crossed behind the vehicle so he was standing outside the driver’s side door. Huntoon was right about the seat position, and now was as good a time as any to consider the rest of the driver-side setup.

“Seat belt is spooled, so I’m assuming it was on,” he said. “Mirrors . . .”

Mirrors were hard to tell. Ideally you needed to sit in the driver’s seat, but given the amount of broken glass, let alone that neither door would open, that was impossible. Wyatt eyeballed it now, would return to it later when they’d removed the doors.

He bent this way, crooked his head that way. “Appear to make sense.”

Huntoon joined him in the juxtapositioning-the-mirrors game. “Nothing looks off to me.”

Her machine beeped. She crossed back over to consult the screen.

Wyatt finished up his brief assessment. “So seat setup, mirror placement, all consistent with female driver five four to five six. Nothing yet to indicate anyone else in the vehicle. In fact, we have a search dog who would swear the driver was the lone occupant. And now you’re going to tell me . . . ?”

“Stability control was deactivated.”

“What?” Wyatt drew up short. Of all the things he’d thought Huntoon was going to read off her data collector, that wasn’t it.

“This model has stability control. You know, to help the vehicle autocorrect if the driver goes into a skid, takes a corner too hot, that kind of thing. The vehicle’s computer senses the potential threat and will take over braking and/or deceleration on its own. Except in this vehicle, where the stability control had been shut off.”