Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 13, Mid-December 1993

Hot Wheels by Steve Corwin

Robbie Sutton’s puzzled look slid off the adults’ faces, then returned to his fingers, twisting in his lap. His round face crinkled. “I didn’t do it. I don’t think I did it.”

Mercy Archer snickered. “Of course he did it, that’s why we’re here.” Her left hand, dwarfed by a diamond and ruby ring, rested on the tanned flesh above her plunging neckline. Her right hand caressed a platinum watch, and her grey eyes sliced through the boy on their way to his father beside him, who picked nervously at grease-stained fingernails and slouched deeper into his chair.

Sarah Shallott, every inch the conservative lawyer, tapped the collar of her blouse, buttoned to the neck. “We’re here to sort this tragedy out, Mrs. Archer, not lay blame.” Sarah’s gaze softened as it moved to Carl Sutton, who spread his hands helplessly.

“Lord, I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes Robbie gets things mixed up, you see, but it’s not like him to mess up twice. If I ask him not to do something, he don’t do it.” Sutton tugged at his tie. “It ain’t fair to blame Robbie. It ain’t fair to make my boy go through life thinkin’ he’s killed a man. Even if it was an accident, like they says.” He nodded toward Mercy and her stepson, Trent Archer.

Robbie twisted his head toward the corner of Sarah’s office, his brown eyes pleading for help. P. J. McLean winked reassuringly. The air conditioner rattled in the background, straining to overcome the room’s rising temperature.

Mercy stared defiantly at the five other people jammed into an elegant office better suited for one-on-one frays. The cunning intelligence burning behind her eyes overpowered the beauty of her high cheekbones and sensuous mouth, which twitched with something like contempt. “I’ll let my stepson the lawyer do the talking. It’s why he’s here.”

Trent Archer’s ears turned scarlet, and his muddy eyes roamed Shallott’s Oriental carpet before settling on a vacant spot between Carl and Robbie Sutton. “But there was a similar problem. When the boy damaged my car.”

“I promised you that Robbie wouldn’t touch customers’ cars again, but—” Sutton twisted his shoulders “—my boy likes to help around the garage and I can’t watch him all the time.”

Archer’s fingers twitched across his thin mustache. “Did your boy touch my father’s car?”

“No!” The denial exploded from Robbie, who looked around panic-stricken before pulling his head back in, turtlelike.

McLean, sickened by the boy’s terror, said gently, “Then you did not put power steering fluid in Mr. Rex Archer’s brakes?”

Robbie shook his head violently.

McLean stared out Sarah’s window at the distant Siskiyou Mountains, etched against the Southern Oregon skyline, before letting his gaze settle on Trent Archer. “Well, somebody did.”

“Look, we all know the boy has, ahh, problems,” Archer said. “We know without doubt that he put the wrong fluid in my car six months ago. I’m willing to believe it was an accident. We know my father left his Blazer with Sutton to have the brakes worked on, and we know power steering fluid was found in his brake cylinder by the sheriff’s lab.”

Sarah leaned forward. “Examined at your suggestion?”

“Yes, well, under the circumstances.” Archer sounded defiant.

McLean toyed with a pencil as a conversation he’d had two days before gnawed at him. A mail truck driver he knew had made the same mistake and spent a harrowing two hours limping out of the mountains in first gear. The power steering fluid froze his brakes so badly that he had to replace the entire hydraulic system.

He was a fire investigator, not a mechanic, but this case looked like a loser, something Sarah didn’t want to hear, ever. The boy’s manful efforts to keep from crying jerked McLean back to his own childhood, and the day he learned his father would never come home from the VA hospital. His fist contracted, and the pencil snapped. He scanned the room, more in annoyance than embarrassment, and decided that no matter what the odds, Robbie deserved a chance for a defense.

At the moment, Trent Archer’s eyes were lingering on Sarah’s breasts. His smile was humorless, confident. “If you want to risk a trial, that’s your business. There’s no doubt brake failure led to my father’s accident and subsequent death.”

Sarah leaned back in her blue leather chair, fingers steepled as she contemplated Archer and his stepmother. McLean, studying the couple’s profiles, wondered if calling someone two years his junior “mother” stuck in Archer’s throat. He examined the lawyer’s spindly thirty-year-old neck and figured almost anything would jam.

Sarah’s voice was soft, persuasive. “You’re absolutely certain you want to put this family,” she nodded toward Robbie and Carl, “through the agony of a court proceeding that you may well lose?”

Mercy Archer rose abruptly. “This has gone far enough. We’ve tried to be fair to you people. My husband is dead and—” she pointed a bejeweled finger at Robbie “—that boy is responsible. My stepson,” she gave Archer a curiously flat stare, “found his father’s body, desecrated, burned, mangled.”

She scowled across the room at Sarah. “We’ve suffered a terrible loss. Terrible. I’ll have no more of this. Come, Trent.”

Trent rose with a faint air of embarrassment, a twisted smile locked in place, and brushed against Mercy as he swung the door open. She hissed, and there was a short, angry exchange in the outer office before the front door banged shut.

Carl Sutton stared after them, his jaw muscles etched in hard ridges. “That man blames my boy, thinks I’m a fool and yet when he needed a tire changed, it was me he called.” His work-roughened hands squeezed his thighs. “Maybe I am a fool, since I changed the damn thing.” He rose reluctantly, shook hands with McLean and Sarah, and left quietly, a protective arm around his son’s shoulders.

McLean moved to Mercy’s still-warm chair, nudged it around to face the desk, and slouched down. Sarah’s sour look mirrored his own feelings.

She wadded up the paper she’d been doodling on and hurled it toward the wastebasket. “I was a fool for allowing this meeting. It seems compassion simply doesn’t run in that family.” She pushed off from the desk, slid open the window, and in two short strides retrieved the crumpled paper, dropped it where it belonged, and shut off the air conditioner.

“They didn’t leave with any more information than they came with,” McLean said. “An interesting pair. Archer’s not actually going to act as their lawyer?”

Sarah shook her head, her auburn hair cutting short arcs. “He’ll have to get someone else, since he’s his own star witness. But he’s convinced it’ll never go to trial. Given his track record with juries, he’d better hope not.”

“Rocky Point going to settle out of court?”

“They will unless you find a reason not to.”

“Did Robbie mess up?”

“I don’t know. The child wants to please his father, more than anything in the world. If Carl told him not to touch customers’ cars, he wouldn’t.” Sadness tinged her smile. “But it depends on how Carl worded it. Robbie is terribly literal.”

Her eyes dropped to the insurance company’s file in McLean’s fist. “I’m afraid right now a jury will look at Robbie, feel sorry for him, and look at the widow and the insurance policy and...” She rose and paced the room in long, angry strides. “You know how it is. The insurance company will pay the freight, and Sutton won’t be driven out of business. The Archers—” her eyes flashed, “—have been smart enough to ask only for the face value of the policy. It’ll be the usual ‘no one gets hurt but the insurance company.’ ”

McLean opened the folder. “Three million dollars’ liability seems like a lot for a small garage.”

Sarah grimaced. “That was my doing. Carl’s also carrying a large life policy. He came to me right after Robbie’s mother died. He wanted to provide for the boy in case anything else went wrong. He doesn’t want him institutionalized, so, well, we loaded up on insurance.” She sighed. “I still think it was the right thing to do.”

McLean frowned at the color photographs of Rex Archer’s Blazer, fire-gutted when it ran off a back-country road and into a house-sized boulder. He’d seen worse, but repetition never dulled the nagging sense of waste that accidents always triggered.

Rex Archer had picked up the vehicle from Sutton’s garage and headed straight into the mountains for his annual autumn hunting trip. He had said the brakes grabbed, but Sutton couldn’t find anything wrong. As a courtesy the mechanic had cleaned the shoes and flushed the hydraulic system.

Trent Archer found the wreck the day after it happened. He told the sheriff’s department he went looking because his father no longer went on overnighters. Studying the report’s dry wording, McLean found no hint of the distress Mercy claimed her stepson felt.

McLean shrugged it off and concentrated on the photographs he’d spread along the desk’s edge. The photos, with the fifty-five-year-old Archer’s shriveled remains still in the seat, showed the Blazer from every angle, inside and out. He studied the shots carefully with a small magnifying glass plucked from a shirt pocket.

“Rex Archer have any enemies?”

“Let’s just say he didn’t have any old friends,” Sarah said. “He was a manipulator. Famous for buying minority stakes in small, successful businesses, then grabbing control and milking them dry. It’s a rumor he dabbled in commodities, but I don’t buy it.”

She leaned against the windowsill. “He also speculated in housing, although that implies he took chances, and he decidedly didn’t. I’ve handled a few cases, on the losing end,” the pain of defeat gave her voice a sharp edge, “of dreamers he sold property to for a large cash advance and small payments.” Disgust lurked behind her violet eyes. “Somehow he usually found a way to foreclose. One house has had five owners in as many years.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a corpse.”

“No. In what strikes me as the height of tastelessness, Mercy had the remains cremated last week. The police are satisfied it was an accident.”

McLean grunted, stacked the photos, squared the edges, and slid them into the folder. “I’ll need copies.”

Sarah’s normally fluid face aligned itself carefully. “Those are copies. I knew you’d take the case, the Suttons being the underdogs.”

He rapped the folder smartly with two fingers. “I might have rooted for the widow.”

“But you didn’t.”

McLean didn’t answer. He admired Sarah, and if she hadn’t been married, he might have admitted to more.

What he didn’t like was her assumption that she could read her sometime fire investigator like a book. It didn’t help that so far she had. That it made her a minority of one provided scant comfort.

Sarah looked away uneasily, her sandalwood perfume eddying across the desk on a stray puff of wind from the window. “We don’t have much time. Rocky Point’s about to cave in, and they’ve given you three days, tops.”

McLean scooped up the folder and turned for the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll bail you out.” He grinned at Sarah with a confidence he didn’t feel as he left.

The pickup’s vinyl seat, baking in the autumn sun, hissed when he slid behind the wheel. McLean ignored the sweat running down his back as he jotted questions on the manila folder propped against the steering wheel, absently licking the broken pencil’s tip between scribblings. With a disgruntled sigh fueled by low expectations, he turned the pickup’s snout toward Copper Valley Auto Wrecking.

Herb Krantz only laughed when McLean asked to see Archer’s Blazer. “Hell, it’s in Taiwan bein’ made into refrigerators by now.” He added with a trace of pride, “We work fast here.” He waved toward a collection of steering wheels nailed to the office’s battered sheet metal walls. “I kept the wheel for my collection, it’s that one there.” He pointed to a steel skeleton. “Nothing else was worth saving.”

McLean ran an exploratory finger around the wheel. “You mean this is it?”

“What I said. Kept it because it’s in such good shape, considering he musta hit it pretty hard with his face.” He chuckled. “Didn’t give much, did it?”

McLean had already noticed. “Any more of these come from Blazers?”

“Yep, at least three.” Krantz waved toward a trio of misshapen discs. He spewed a stream of tobacco juice toward the wall, looked at his feet awkwardly, and cleared his throat. “Look, you’re an educated man and work for the lawyer lady and stuff, and what with Archer being dead and all, what do you make of this? Damned things arrived yesterday.”

Krantz shambled over to a battered desk, pushed a stack of parts books aside, and produced a sheaf of papers from the United States Bankruptcy Court in Medford. He thrust them across the desk almost apologetically.

McLean glanced at them out of politeness, knowing it was small repayment for Krantz’s time, even though he knew as much about bankruptcy proceedings as he did about brain surgery. His eyes traveled the sheets while his mind sought the best way to tell Krantz to call a lawyer. Rex Archer’s name stood out like a priest at a rock concert.

“Archer was your partner?”

“Yeah.” Krantz’s tone made it clear his partner’s death was an annoyance but no reason to mourn, and he accepted McLean’s advice to call a lawyer with the same enthusiasm he’d show for a double amputation.

McLean returned the papers and left, almost plowing over another customer as he concentrated on his next stop, the coroner’s office. There he skirmished with an indifferent receptionist and a hostile Dr. Thurston Barton.

“Of course it was Archer.” Barton, short, round, and as pale as his clients, thumped his government-issue desk. “I know my business, thank you very much, even if I am only part-time.” And, McLean thought dryly, a full-time gynecologist, hardly an expert on violent death.

“I wasn’t questioning your abilities, doctor.” McLean rubbed his nose, which twitched from the formaldehyde-laced air. “It’s just that there was no usable identification on the body and it says here,” he tapped the insurance file, “that his dental records were destroyed last summer when his dentist’s office was vandalized.”

Barton rolled his eyes. “There are other ways, you know. For one thing I had enough of the body to make an accurate estimate of the victim’s height and build. There were also X-rays of a broken leg, and the breaks matched perfectly. Besides—” Barton’s smile chilled the room, “—most of his teeth were gone, burned away.”

“Even the rear molars?”

“Yes. The jaw was fractured in the crash.”

“I see, hit the steering wheel, did he?”

Barton’s exaggerated sigh wafted around the room. “Of course he hit the damned wheel. If you don’t mind, the county isn’t paying me enough to answer some insurance man’s inane questions.” He jerked a folder from a stack on his desk and flipped it open.

McLean paused at the door. “Please satisfy a neophyte’s curiosity. What color were the bones?”

Barton lifted his head slowly. “White, you blasted ghoul. Pearl white.”

The secretary, lip-syncing as she read the National Enquirer, lifted her head fractionally and popped her gum at McLean’s distracted goodbye.

Moses nudged his visitor in the crotch, then stood motionless, waiting to be petted, a hard demand to resist since the one hundred forty pound Rottweiler wouldn’t move until satisfied.

Axel Reed grinned over one shoulder as he scooted his wheelchair toward a bank of computers. “So there’s no confusion — you want these photos blown up, and you want large colored graphics of each one with special emphasis on these spots: the tires, the interior, the roof, and the underside of the engine, right?”

McLean nodded confirmation as he rubbed the dog’s ears. Moses closed his eyes and leaned into McLean’s legs, confident he’d found a soulmate, which he had, to McLean’s surprise. He’d always liked dogs from a distance, but Moses was the first one he’d genuinely admired, probably because of the animal’s absolute loyalty to his master. Loyalty being something McLean understood and respected.

Axel studied the photographs before scanning them into his Macintosh. “Grim stuff, but we’ll blow things up and see what we get.” McLean smiled at his friend’s back. If anyone could interpret the pictures it’d be Axel, a colleague from their old fire department in California. They’d been a solid team, until a collapsing roof crushed Axel’s back.

He tugged guiltily at the twisted little finger on his left hand. His only injury from a disaster that nearly sent his best friend’s life spinning out of control. It was the only time he had appreciated the unexpected wealth dropped into his lap by his mother’s death. He bankrolled Axel’s new business specializing in computer-enhanced fire scenes, a loan that was almost paid off, and McLean knew better than to forgive the balance, much as he wanted to.

Axel rolled back from the computers, gripped the wheelchair’s arms, and lifted himself up, relieving, if only for a moment, the chronic ache of bedsores. McLean grimaced in sympathetic pain. Axel shot his friend a lopsided grin, lowered himself, and pointed to the pictures. “This guy knew a lot more pain. Who was it, anyway?”

When McLean told him, Axel stared possessively around his cramped room. “Bought this house from him.” A sly smile warmed his scarred face. “Paid cash up front. Funny guy, if you know what I mean. Married his son’s girlfriend.” He snorted and pivoted back to the desk. “Typical of the guy. When I was renting, he tried to toss me out because of Moses.” He paused, caressed the dog’s head, then added without a trace of humor, “Rex Archer had heart surgery last spring, and it’s rumored the doctors had trouble finding it.”

McLean pulled away from Axel’s house, by itself on the outskirts of town, and headed down Highway 199, past the ever present flock of bearded hitchhikers togged out in surplus army fatigues and hunting jackets. He considered giving one a lift, an older man cradling a small dog, but decided against it since he was only going five miles.

He pulled off the highway several minutes later and dug a map out of the console.

The faded blue-line Forest Service rendering showed every logging road and minor gully in excruciating detail, including the curve, but not the rock, where Rex Archer died.

The fatal spot lay ten miles down a track branching off the road he’d stopped on. The land on either side had been thoroughly logged. No tree thicker than a man’s wrist remained standing, and small mountains of branches, bark, and brush waited to be burned in the spring.

McLean, searching for the turnoff, almost rear-ended an army surplus dump truck, outfitted with a water tank and repainted the color of clotted blood, as it wheezed up the road. The water truck took a hard left into a partially hidden clearing just before the secondary road’s turnoff. There the logging company would be maintaining a fire watch.

McLean found the turnoff, and his pickup took the twisting washboard track with the grace of a crippled elephant, but it got him the ten miles, where he stopped at the top of a long incline and stared down at the rock. The spot where his truck idled was flat, giving way abruptly to a heavily rutted track that dived for three hundred feet at an angle steeper than a tenement stairway. The entire area was desolate, never having recovered from some heavy-handed logging more than forty years before.

He let the truck roll down the incline, its wheels gripped by the ruts. The truck rocketed straight toward the boulder.

He slid to a stop and reversed fifty feet up the hill, then climbed out and inspected the ground around the rock, taking soil samples from the still blackened area left by the wreck. He then backed up to the flat where he scoured the top and, clucking softly, scraped up more dirt samples.

More out of habit than hope, McLean searched the hilltop in a series of concentric circles. Reaching the edge of the flat, he stared down the side of the hill into a small ravine. He crabbed down the slope, boots kicking up puffs of dust left by the abnormally dry autumn.

He walked the ravine, picking up and discarding the odd bits of rusted metal, car parts, and other trash that somehow always find their way to the bottoms of gullies miles from the nearest settlement.

After fifteen minutes his knees began to ache. Half crawling, he worked up the slope toward his truck, using the occasional bush for a handhold. Partway up a loose section of talus gave way and he slipped backwards, flailing for a grip. His slide stopped against a manzanita bush, and he rapped his knuckles on a tire iron dangling in its branches. He started back up the slope, paused, and slid back to the bush, where he examined the tool’s unrusted finish. When he scrabbled up the slope again, he was clutching his find in a handkerchief. He stuffed it into the truck’s utility box and, whistling softly, started for home.

The dark red tanker’s snout caught McLean’s attention as his pickup lurched up onto the wider, and marginally smoother, main road. He hopped out of his truck and walked around the tanker toward an aging couple sitting shoulder to shoulder on a sofa sagging beneath an awning nailed to a small yellow house trailer.

“Afternoon, mister.” The man, weatherbeaten and thin, sounded cautious but unworried. His round wife said nothing but watched him with a sparkle in her grey eyes. They looked starved for company.

“Good afternoon.” McLean squatted on his heels, pleased to have found a greying couple who still enjoyed touching one another. “You folks been on fire watch long?”

“About a month, give or take.” The man glanced toward the cutoff to the side road. “You been hunting?”

“No, just looking into an accident that got a man killed.” The couple looked at one another, then back to him. The woman spoke for the first time, her voice motherly. “We wondered if you folks were going to come around.”

“We?”

“Yes, aren’t you from the sheriff or something?”

McLean tried his most disarming smile. “Something. I’m a fire investigator, just trying to tie up the loose ends. Why were you expecting someone?”

“Well—” the husband sipped from a coffee mug and nodded toward the pot, sitting on a small propane stove. “Want some? No?” He shrugged. “It’s just a guy gets hisself killed you figure people are gonna check up, you know?”

McLean felt a surge of success. “You saw something that makes you wonder about the accident?”

“Naw, nothing special. Just figured someone would ask is all.”

Deflated, McLean pulled off his hat and scratched the ever-widening bald spot where his cowlick used to be. “You see the smoke from the fire?”

“Naw, too far away and on the wrong side of the hill.” The man rubbed his chin. “Surprised the other guy didn’t see it, though.”

“Other guy?”

“Yeah, some guy in a red Bronco went by, oh, I dunno, half an hour after the guy that got killed went by. Took the same road. Another hunter, I figure. Was hard to tell with those stupid damned tinted windows.”

“You see the Bronco come back out?”

“Naw, me and the missus,” the old man leered and his wife blushed, “we were kinda occupied. Ain’t much to do on them high fire danger days when they stop loggin’ altogether.”

McLean studied the ground between his toes, embarrassed for the woman. He didn’t like the old man quite so much. “You’re sure you saw the Bronco and the Blazer on the same day?”

Annoyance flickered across the old man’s face. “Of course I’m sure, it was the first day of the logging ban, and the damned thing went on for better’n a week. Why we noticed them two cars, they really shouldna been up here.”

On his way home, McLean stopped to ship the dirt samples to a friend’s laboratory in San Francisco and to pick up his photographs and graphics from Axel Reed.

He spent the next two days working the phone, calling a prickly friend at the sheriff’s department, Sergeant Mac Toon; the bankruptcy court in Medford; and Carl Sutton.

On Saturday, the insurance company’s deadline day, he called Sarah, then slipped into a cashmere turtleneck, the closest he’d come to wearing a tie, a pair of cotton twill pants, and a deerskin jacket. He dropped the tire iron, lab reports, pictures, and graphics into a large leather briefcase, and went out to the garage, where he stripped the cover off his one prized possession.

The Porsche 928S smoothed out the lumps in Sarah’s office parking lot. She climbed in with a quizzical smile. “Bit out of character, aren’t we?”

McLean shot her an enigmatic smile. “The tweed and cashmere set has trouble taking us jeans and Old Spice types seriously.”

Sarah, wearing a wool wrap skirt and silk blouse, couldn’t be accused of dressing any more stylishly than usual. She twisted around in the contoured leather seat and sniffed. “Actually, I think you wear Tabac. What’s the big mystery?”

“It’s time we had a discussion with the principals.” He stared resolutely ahead as he guided the Porsche out of the lot, then rocketed toward Medford and the Archer villa perched on a bluff overlooking the Rogue Valley. Sarah sat bolt upright, occasionally giving him a hard stare at his refusal to say more.

Trent Archer opened the massive oak door and took his time surveying McLean and Sarah. His eyes once again caressed her chest. McLean gave her a sideways glance.

She smiled at Archer and, in her best Miss America voice, said, “Your fly’s open.”

He slithered backwards and sideways, his right hand surreptitiously fingering his zipper. His look turned poisonous on finding it closed, and he said in a strangled voice, “This way. Mercy’s in the den.”

McLean, fighting to keep a straight face, glided after them, automatically casing the house. Not as a burglar, although first-time acquaintances had been known to quietly count their silverware, but as a fireman; checking for smoke alarms and assessing the fire load as well as construction technique. Given the multiple rooms jammed with furniture, the abundance of wooden paneling, the thick carpets and heavy drapes, he decided the house would be an absolute bitch if it caught fire.

Mercy Archer didn’t rise from behind a massive rosewood desk that dominated the high-ceilinged room, heavily masculine with its gun racks, glass-eyed trophy heads, and black leather chairs. She motioned abruptly toward two wingbacks directly before the desk. Archer went to the bar, poured two drinks, kept one, and handed the other to Mercy. He leaned against the desk, drawing an irritable glance from his stepmother, which he ignored. He raised his tumbler in a half salute. “So, Rocky Point has come to its senses. We’ll just sign the papers and put this incident behind us.”

Sarah glanced at McLean with a lifted eyebrow.

“Rocky Point won’t be settling out of court,” he smiled inwardly at Sarah’s sharp intake of breath, “and you’d be foolish to take this before a jury.”

Mercy jumped to her feet and leaned, trembling, on the desktop. “How dare you. Of course they’ll pay. They owe me. My husband is dead, and they owe me. They owe me.”

Trent Archer tried unsuccessfully to wave his stepmother to her chair. “And just how do you think you can get away with denying us what is rightfully ours? I remind you we have an excellent case, everything is stacked in our favor.”

“What you mean is that you need the three million desperately,” McLean said calmly.

Mercy looked blank. Trent Archer’s drink wobbled dangerously. He set the glass down. “I don’t believe I follow you.” He avoided looking at his stepmother.

“You should, you’re the one who filed the bankruptcy papers for your father the day before his death. He was nearly two million in the hole.”

“You’re lying,” Mercy said quickly. “My husband was a sharp businessman. He would never have allowed that to happen.”

“Perhaps not, but someone was playing the commodities market, using his account. You know the one, Mr. Archer, with the brokerage house of Amy & Taub.”

With a flash of comprehension, Mercy turned to Trent, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You had power of attorney, from when he had that heart attack.”

He returned her stare with undisguised hatred. “Another week was all I needed, I could have been rich. But the broker started getting worried, sold me out. I could’ve made it. Then you’d see, my father would see. I have what it takes.”

Mercy, moving with the speed of a cornered fer-de-lance, struck Trent with an open-handed blow that snapped his head sideways. “You never had what it took. And you never will...”

McLean’s thick forearm interrupted Trent’s lunge for Mercy, who stood her ground. Trent retreated stiff-legged until the back of his knees caught a chair. He dropped into it, spent.

Mercy transferred her contemptuous stare to McLean. “None of this changes our case against Sutton and that retard of his.”

“Robbie has Down’s Syndrome, he’s not a retard,” Sarah said coldly.

Mercy flopped into her chair. “It hardly matters what his problem is, he did it and he owes me.”

“Robbie’s condition may not matter, but Trent’s does.” McLean flipped open his briefcase and pulled out the tire iron. Trent, who’d followed his moves listlessly, paled.

“And just what does that have to do with anything?” Mercy asked.

McLean pointed the bar’s sharply beveled end at Trent Archer. “He killed your husband with it.”

Sarah gasped. “Jesus, P. J.”

Archer staggered to his feet, his eyes darting around the room. With a triumphant sneer he aimed a shaking finger at his stepmother. “No, she did it.”

Mercy jerked a desk drawer open. Her voice rose to a shriek. “You lying little bastard. You’ve stolen everything from me. Everything.”

Even as McLean threw himself across the desk, he knew it was too late. The Colt Python spat with a deafening roar as he wrapped both arms around her flailing body. She pulled the trigger again, nearly kneecapping McLean. Sarah, wielding a lamp, smashed the pistol from her fist. Trent Archer lay doubled up in front of the chair, crying and clutching his stomach.

Sarah’s eyes were as hard as the thin strip of Formica table separating them. “I suppose you should be congratulated.”

McLean winced, partly from her tone, partly from the pulsating welt where Mercy’s bullet had grazed his knee two days before. “Pardon?”

Her strained smile looked reserved for stubborn children or drunken husbands. She knew all about the latter. “Your hearing isn’t that bad, P. J. You did your job but it cost me the fright of my life, and Trent Archer a long stay in the hospital.”

McLean looked up as the cafe’s redhaired waitress set two cups of coffee in front of them. She gave them a curious glance, then retreated to her corner by the kitchen door.

“After talking to Sergeant Toon, I’d say he’ll prefer the hospital to his next stop. He’s already trying to cut a deal.”

“You knew from the beginning something was wrong. Next time I’d appreciate a little warning before the guns go off.”

McLean looked away, through the greasy windows and out into the first true storm of the season. He didn’t feel as guilty about the outcome as he did about putting Sarah into danger.

He gave her a wan smile. “I apologize. I led you into something I had no right to do. It’s cost me some sleep, and a little self-respect.”

Sarah’s mobile face softened, reflecting genuine fondness. “Stop beating yourself. How’d you figure it out?”

McLean leaned back against the hard booth. “If the sheriff had called the fire department — they didn’t because the blaze had been out for hours — this wouldn’t have gone so far. It was clear from the pictures, at least after they’d been enhanced, that there were several separate fires. A clear sign of arson. There’s no point in going into all the details, but two things stood out.”

He sipped his coffee gingerly. “There was fire underneath the driver’s seat, where they just don’t happen by accident. The adjustment mechanism melted, and the seat fell back. The metal discoloration indicated temperatures reached at least sixteen hundred degrees. That’s too high for a normal fire. Second, the roof was buckled, which shows that the hottest spot of the fire was in the passenger compartment, and that also points to a flammable liquid.”

“How did you know he wasn’t carrying an extra can of gas? Hunters do sometimes.”

“I checked the police report carefully, and asked Toon about it. They inventoried everything in the Blazer. No gas cans, just a rifle. Not even a sleeping bag. Archer’s hunting was confined to one day at a time.”

Sarah folded a napkin into squares. “What else?”

A gust of wind followed by a sheet of rain smacked the cafe window. McLean, ordering his thoughts, ignored it. “The coroner said Archer’s bones were white. Bone only turns white at crematorium temperatures, close to two thousand degrees. Normally it’s kind of a dirty color. Again the temperature was much too high. Legit car fires don’t get much over a thousand degrees. And then there were the missing molars.”

“You’re certainly piling it on.”

“Huumph. Well, you wanted the job done right.”

Sarah just grinned, but rubbed her cheek on learning that molars are reluctant burners that have to be ground up even at crematoriums.

“Their absence was a clear indication Archer’d been hit in the mouth by something hard. And it wasn’t the steering wheel, which hadn’t been struck by anything.”

“How did you know it was Trent?”

“I didn’t. At least not for certain. I did know his car, a red Bronco, had been towed into Sutton’s garage the day of the accident, and that he didn’t get it back until the next afternoon, well after he called the cops, claiming to have found his father’s car. Trent told Sutton he couldn’t change the tire himself because he’d lost the lug wrench. That it’d bounced out of its holder. Now I can tell you, my Ford is set up the same way, with the wrench under the hood, and that hunk of steel has stayed in place for ten years.”

“So Robbie’s mistake didn’t cause the accident?”

McLean dropped some sugar into his coffee. A rare move. “Robbie didn’t make a mistake, at least not this time, but he did provide the idea. I found a large puddle of brake fluid at the top of the hill. The lab confirmed it. There was enough gas in the soil around the wreck to run a lawnmower for a week. Faced with the lab report, Trent admitted bleeding the brakes, refilling the reservoir with power steering fluid, then rolling the car down the hill and torching it. He’d already brained his father. He told Toon the death was an accident, but...”

He sighed and looked out the window, then shook his head. “Before you ask, Mercy knew nothing about it. The body was Archer’s. At first I had my doubts. It wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Rex Archer set the whole thing up?”

“Yeah, Archer wanted out of his marriage, and had no intention of splitting fifty-fifty with Mercy. Trent was supposed to troll for a hitchhiker — to provide the corpse — but somewhere along the line he decided he’d had enough of his father. He deeply resented the marriage and saw a perfect way to balance the scales.”

Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “But Archer was bankrupt.”

“Only on paper. Seems Archer, through some very convoluted corporate footwork, owned Arny & Taub. The insurance settlement would have gone to the brokerage. His son, who wasn’t quite the spineless fool his father thought, was to pay off the debt, in essence pocketing the money, then join his father in Mexico City.”

Sarah pursed her lips. “That doesn’t explain why Trent came unglued.”

Sourness tinged McLean’s laugh. “His father suckered him into the trades in the first place. Trent really did think he was going to hit it big. Rex Archer played his son like a fiddle all of his life, and the strings finally broke.”