—
ARMSTRONG LED HIMup the track that went out to the state road and down that road to the point where Whitehead and Smallswent 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. Ifthere 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 SLOWLYback 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 BOTHsweating 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.”
“Yeah, the truck was pulled up the hill by the local towing service. Hell of a job, too: took two trucks four hours. If you want to follow me, it’s probably twenty minutes from here.”
—
LUCAS FOLLOWED.
Bunson Towing was run out of a junkyard set in a patch of trees that butted up against a railroad right-of-way. The truck had been parked under a tin-roofed shed and wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. A man Armstrong introduced as Lawrie Bunson came out of the yard’s office and helped Armstrong pull the tarp off.
The truck hadn’t been cleaned up, and the blood on the front seat had gone seriously bad in the heat. Flies were crawling all over it, buzzing around them after the tarp was off. Lucas didn’t look, but he was sure that if he stuck his head inside, he’d find a mother lode of maggots.
“Stinks,” Bunson said. To Armstrong: “When you think they’re going to move it?”
“You seen an insurance agent yet?”
“Not yet. Some chick called from Washington and said State Farm would be out, but I ain’t seen hide nor hair of nobody from State Farm,” Bunson said.
“You will, I’m sure,” Armstrong said. “This machine is too pricey to let it go.”
“I’ll talk to somebody, get them out here,” Lucas said.
“Don’t make no nevermind to me,” Bunson said. “I get twenty dollars a day for storage.”
