“Really?”
That was the wrong part of Plenty to do that. The residents of the Heights weren’t criminals. They were just poor. The occasional meth dealer might try to set up production independent of the big boys on the drug scene, but most people didn’t have the time for crime between their job, their other job, and their children. Given the opportunity, they might pick a drunk—or dead—man’s pocket or jack the radio out of a busted Jeep. A car like this? That was too rich for their blood.
If they took it, what would they do with it? They couldn’t keep it—even if it wasn’t obviously stolen, the Chevy probably got ten miles to the gallon—and most of the local chop shops would figure it was either a trap by the cops or a drug dealer’s ride.
So the victim knew the town, but her assailant didn’t?
It didn’t make sense.
“What about the owner?” Cloister asked as he leaned sideways to squint along the hood. It was hard to see under the mud, but there was an arc of scratches etched into the expensive paint job and a dent that might have been caused when it cracked into a body.
Tancredi checked her paperwork. “Cristina Lopez.” She nodded across the lot to the office where the back of a heavyset blonde woman could be seen through the window as she argued with the attendant on duty. Tancredi’s voice was dry as she went on, “Apparently Mrs. Lopez only uses this car for towing her boat, and the rest of the time, her housekeeper uses it to run errands. So she only reported it stolen this morning when the housekeeper came back from his weekend off and found it gone. Last time he saw it was Friday morning. We let her know it was here, and then I got called down when she kicked off about the fine and the condition the car is in. So could you identify this car as the one that hit you, Deputy Witte?”
“Maybe.”
Tancredi sighed. “Not good enough, Witte. In case you missed the fact that she has a boat to tow her car, Mrs. Lopez is a very wealthy woman, and Frome won’t be happy if we piss her off for no reason.”
They both looked over at the office just in time to see Mrs. Lopez take a cup of coffee from the attendant and throw it on the floor.
“Piss her off more,” Tancredi corrected herself.
Cloister paused at the other side of the car and crouched down at the passenger door. His thigh ached dully as the injured muscle spasmed, and Cloister had to clench his jaw against a groan. He remembered his stepdad used to grunt whenever he got down on his knees to do something, his joints battered by a lifetime of bar brawls and wiped-out motorbikes. If this was what it felt like to get old, Cloister would have to stop running his body so hard.
“What?” Tancred asked.
Cloister ran his thumb over the pocks dented into the door handle, above and below, and then he brushed his hand down to knock some of the mud loose. Underneath it, long, evenly spaced gouges ran down the door where the paint was scraped away right down to the metal. Bourneville had really made a mess of it the other night.
Cloister sat back on his heels and brushed dried dirt off his hand against his knee.
“Tell Mrs. Lopez we’re sorry,” he said. Tancredi huffed out an aggrieved sigh and slapped the clipboard against her thigh. “But I think she’s going to have to find another car to tow her boat.”
AMBROSE TWISTEDher dull gray hair up off her neck and secured it with a stray pen. She’d already stripped off the top half of her oil-stained coveralls to bare wiry arms and the sharp points of the Batman tattoo worked into the scars on her chest. Behind her, the coffee-bronze pickup was jacked up over the pit so Ambrose could look it over.
“I can strip her down once the techs have gone through, let them ferret out any trace evidence in the cushions,” she said as she wiped oily hands across her hips. “And I can pull down the data from the event recorder and onboard computer. I’ll need to send it off to get analyzed, though. It’ll take a while. The techs will need to hit up Chevy for access codes and data keys.”
“How long?” Cloister asked.
Behind Ambrose, one of the junior mechanics popped the hood to a Charger and stuck his head under it. From his muffled “Fuck sake,” it didn’t look good.
“Could be weeks,” Ambrose said. She shrugged at Tancredi’s sigh. “My stuff I can rush, Deputy. Once it goes out of here? The techs don’t care about some grease monkey getting on their case for test results.”
“If it’ll get Mrs. Lopez her car back sooner, Frome might be willing to put the pressure on,” Tancredi said.
Ambrose raised her eyebrows. “Mrs. Lopez?”
“She didn’t…. She wasn’t driving,” Tancredi said. “It’s just her car.”
“No, I figured that,” Ambrose said. “It was just—”
Cloister interrupted apologetically, “Can I have ten minutes?” he asked. “Let Bourneville give the car the once-over?”
Ambrose scratched her nose and left a smudge of grease left of center on the bridge. Then she looked over to where Bourneville sprawled in the shadow of a worktable. Bourneville lifted her head off her paws when she realized they were looking at her.
“Aren’t you the victim?” Tancredi asked.
“I won’t touch anything,” Cloister promised, his hand raised as though he were about to swear on the Bible. “If Bon finds something, Tancredi can retrieve it. There’ll be no way for me to interfere.”
Ambrose stared at him for a second and then shrugged and turned to Tancredi. “Up to you.”
