Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(15)

“Over they’d go,” Lucas suggested.

Armstrong bobbed his head. “Senator Smalls’s story felt strong to me. You couldn’t fake a story like that and sell it to me: I’d sniff it out, if he was lyin’. With the senator, I had the feeling that he was telling the truth. Or, at least, thinks he was. Why would he lie? Neither one of them was drunk, and she was driving. No crime there. Now, he says that when they left the cabin, he sort of dozed off. He woke up when Miz Whitehead said something about the jerk coming up behind them. Is it possible that he thought they were hit, that he believes they were hit, when what actually happened is that Miz Whitehead got scared and yanked the wheel over? I mean, there’s no physical evidence that they were hit by another truck. How do you pull that off?”

“Don’t know, off the top of my head. If they were professionals . . .”

“That’s where I get off the bus,” Armstrong said. “I don’t believe in that kind of thing. Professional killers.”

“I understand that,” Lucas said. “Look, I don’t know anything about accident investigation, but you’d say . . . that it seems completely unlikely, that there are much better alternative explanations, but your gut tells you something unusual happened.”

“That’s it,” Armstrong said. “My gut don’t write the reports, though.”

“Let’s go look at the scene,” Lucas said.



* * *



—

LUCAS TURNED ON the security system, locked the cabin, and on the way out to their vehicles he told Armstrong about his chat with Janet Walker, about the men with the sunglasses and the black Ford F-250. “If one turns up with some unusual dents . . .”

“I’ll make a note,” Armstrong said. “Maybe even spend a couple of hours sniffing around.”



* * *



—

ARMSTRONG LED HIM up the track that went out to the state road and down that road to the point where Whitehead and Smalls went over the side. They pulled well off to the left, and Lucas got out and looked down toward the river.

“South Branch of the Potomac—real nice river,” Armstrong said. He pointed to a notch in the thin roadside berm. “That’s where they went over. You can still see the busted-up brush, and the tracks where Miz Whitehead steered along the hillside until they hit the trees.”

Lucas looked down the hill, at the tracks. A hundred and fifty feet down, the hillside suddenly steepened, not quite to a ninety-degree drop, but close enough. If they’d gone over, they might have bounced once, but they would have been mostly airmailed right into the river.

“Hell of a job, getting over to the trees,” Lucas said.

“Almost saved them. Should have,” Armstrong said. “Car rolled over . . . We think that’s when Miz Whitehead was killed, at the very end of the incident. They were crashing down through those trees, some of them pretty big—it looks to me like she was deliberately trying to hit them, to slow the car down—and a branch or part of a tree come through the driver’s-side window and hit her in the temple, poked a hole right through her skull and into her brain. The medical examiner found pieces of bark inside her skull. His report is in the file.”

He went through the sequence as reported by Smalls, and he and Lucas walked down along the hillside through knee-high weeds and grass to the spot where the Cadillac rolled over. Lucas could still see black patches of dried oil on the pale grass. “According to Senator Smalls, he crawled out of the pickup, which was upside down, got a pistol out of the back, because he thought the people in the truck might be coming down after them, and then dragged Miz Whitehead out. Nobody came down the hill. If there was a truck, it kept going. Sheriff’s deputies took about eleven minutes to get here, from the first 911 call. The ambulance got here a minute later. First state police car got here ten minutes after that.”

“Is that fast or slow?” Lucas asked.

“Not real quick . . . probably average. The deputies got a lot of territory to cover out here.”



* * *



—

LUCAS WALKED SLOWLY back up the hill, along the scarred earth and brush left behind by the Escalade, and asked, “No sign of another vehicle’s tracks?”

“Not in the loose gravel,” Armstrong said. “If there were any, the responding deputies drove over them. Didn’t find any broken glass, either.”

“How far to the nearest highway from here?”

“Couldn’t tell you precisely. Maybe a few miles. Maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. We could do a Google Earth, if you want.”

“I can do that,” Lucas said, “if I need it.”



* * *



—

THEY WERE BOTH sweating heavily by the time they got back to the cars, and Armstrong asked Lucas if he’d be staying overnight at the cabin. Lucas shook his head: “I’ve got some interviews to do in Washington. I’ll give you my cell phone number in case you need to reach me.”

“Wouldn’t count on us coming up with anything new,” Armstrong said. “With the senator involved, we pulled out all the stops on this one.”

“I’d like to look at the Cadillac myself,” Lucas said. “I understand it’s still around.”