Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(14)

“Is that unusual?”

“Well . . . no, maybe not. Maybe you remember that kind of thing when something like the accident sets you off. These guys seemed to be looking around, but not doing anything in particular. Saw them myself, and my boss saw them, too. The kind of guys who are in really good shape. Those black razor sunglasses and ball caps, squared-away, military-looking.”

“Huh. Anybody tell the cops?”

“Tell them what? That we saw some guys in a pickup truck?”

“What kind of truck?” Lucas asked.

“Black Ford F-250. New,” she said. “Or almost new,”

“Local plates?”

“Didn’t notice.”



* * *



—

WALKER DIDN’T HAVE much else to say. She finished the beer, and headed up the road in a cloud of yellow dust.

Lucas went back inside the cabin and poked around for a while. There were four smallish bedrooms, the master with a king-sized bed, the other three with two beds and bathroom each.

Lucas owned a cabin himself and recognized the layout: it was more or less a dormitory meant to sleep as many people as possible inside a fairly spartan envelope. The living room was separated from the compact kitchen by a breakfast bar, with a dining table and eight chairs parallel to the bar. A poker table was sitting in a corner, and there were scratches on the plank floor where it’d been pushed into the middle of the room when needed. A couch and four overstuffed chairs faced a sixty-inch TV.

He’d been looking around for ten minutes—he’d spent two of those minutes with The Joy of Sex, which he found under the bed—when a car pulled into the driveway. He went back out on the porch as Carl Armstrong was climbing out of a state police vehicle, a blue-and-gold Chevy SUV. Armstrong was Lucas’s age, a heavyset man with a red face and a gray flattop haircut, wearing tan slacks and a blue dress shirt. He raised a hand to Lucas and walked around to the passenger side, popped open the door, and came out with an old-fashioned leather briefcase.

“You Marshal Davenport?” he asked, as he came up to the porch steps.

“That’s me,” Lucas said. “You’re Carl?”

“Yup. Damn, it’s hot.”

“I got a key from the senator, turned the air-conditioning on. Come on in. You want a beer?”



* * *



—

ARMSTRONG DIDN’T drink on duty, so Lucas got them two Diet Pepsis. They sat at the dining table, and Armstrong produced an accordion envelope from his briefcase that contained a stack of paper, several sheaves held together with spring clips.

He peeled them apart and shoved them across the table at Lucas. “Photos of the car, reports from the lab, photos and reports from the scene, transcripts of interviews with Senator Smalls, a transcript of the 911 call. It’s all yours.”

“Senator Smalls said you seemed competent,” Lucas said. “I’ll go through the paper inch by inch, but what I want is your best judgment . . . off the record . . . What happened here?”

Armstrong had an accent that Lucas could only think of as wiry, something like an early Hank Williams recording on vinyl. He said, “I do appreciate the senator saying that. He can be scary if you’re sitting on the far end of some federal funding, you know what I mean? Wouldn’t want him pissed off at West Virginia ’cause of something I said.”

Lucas nodded. “I was with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for years before I took this job. People would get seriously puckered up around federal grant time.”

“Exactly,” Armstrong said. He put his elbows on the table and linked his fingers. “Anyway, nineteen out of twenty accident investigators would give you the same story about what happened that night: maybe the senator’s girlfriend got careless, or maybe there was another pickup that scared her and she drove off the road. Or—don’t quote me on this—the senator reached over and gave her a little pluck, and over the side they went. Because there’s no physical evidence of anything else.”

“She wasn’t on her cell phone?”

“No—one of the first things we checked. The senator wasn’t, either. They both made calls earlier in the afternoon, but nothing after about four o’clock, when the senator made a call to a woman in Washington who works as an aide.”

“A Kitten Carter?”

“Yes. Miz Carter said it was a routine business call. I didn’t ask what it concerned because that has no connection with the accident.”

“So, nineteen out of twenty would say Senator Smalls’s story about the other truck was wrong, one way or another. That nothing hit them. And what would the twentieth accident investigator say?” Lucas asked.

“That would be me,” Armstrong said. “I’ve filed all these reports, and if anybody looks at them, they’ll get the same conclusion as the other nineteen. But I’ll tell you, marshal, there’s something not right about it. They went off the road where it’s perfectly straight, at the top of a hill, at a place with the biggest drop into the river. Wasn’t any reason for Miz Whitehead to jerk the steering wheel to the right. Not unless she was trying to kill them both. The way she fought that truck going down the hill, it sure don’t look like she was trying to kill herself. If somebody was trying to kill them, and if they tried to do it by ramming that Caddy, that’s the exact spot they would have picked. The road is narrow, and gravel don’t give the best footing, and if the truck was overtaking them and gave them a good whack . . .”