Cause of Death

6

Together we start up the hill. I feel the softness again; my legs and chest labor as I climb.

Finally we crest the hill and both take a moment as our lungs settle.

“So.” Terry takes a long breath. “What is it?”

I look around, focusing on the asphalt. I ask, “What do you see?”

“Squashed squirrel.”

“What else?”

“Blood from the deer she hit.”

“Keep going.” I’ve slipped into my professorial mode. Historians are, at heart, detectives.

“A skid mark.”

“Exactly. Her car had two front brakes but there’s one skid mark.”

“Hmm.”

“Patience is driving along. She brakes hard—”

Terry says, “But hits the deer anyway.”

“Put a pin in that thought, Terry. She brakes hard. Both front wheels should leave skid marks, right?”

He looks at the black line. “She drive with the ABS disabled? The antilock braking?”

“She did. Pulled the relay. She liked the control better. So, what do you think? Only the one skid mark. The left front tire. Why not two?”

He’s nodding slowly as he stares down. “You see that in a blowout, no marks.”

“But... a blowout at the same time she hits a deer?”

“Maybe the tire blew because she braked. How old were the tires?”

“Less than a year. Not old.” I’m looking up a hill covered with forsythia, juniper and yew. “Imagine this: Somebody’s across the road. There.” I point.

“Somebody?”

“And he takes out the right front with a shot.”

“Shot? A gunshot?” Terry is smiling, an expression that would come not from humor but from puzzlement.

“Pax runs off the road. The car tumbles, ends up in the valley.” I look downhill to the stream, the swamp, the mud. Dark water is everywhere.

“Well...”

I continue, “The deer?”

“That I put a pin in?”

“Then he drags a fresh carcass into the middle of the road, cuts it to get more blood. Makes it look like she veered but hit it anyway. Then he hikes down the hill—”

“Jon—”

“Let me ask you a question. How many fatal accidents you run in your career? You’ve worked, what, eight years?”

“Nine. And run fifteen, sixteen fatalities.”

“You ever know anybody to die from a broken neck? With all those airbags?”

“It can happen.”

“Maybe. But did you ever run an accident where it did?”

“No. You’re saying he’s down there and if she’s still alive, he breaks her neck.” He says this hesitantly, aware of whom he’s talking to and whom he’s talking about.

“That’s right.”

He considers this for a moment. “But then there’d be a bullet hole in the tire.”

“But he changes it. And takes the old one with him. Where would the county’ve taken Pax’s car?”

Terry hesitates, then says, “Probably Evan’s. Scrapyard.”

“And the deer?”

“A dead-deer place. I don’t know.”

I crouch and point to the road. “There.” It’s a shallow streak about two inches long in the asphalt. Just where it ends, the gravel shoulder begins.

“Could be from a slug, grant you that.” Terry crouches too, squints.

I step across the road and climb the brush-covered hill.

Grassy knoll, I think. I wrote a dissertation on the Kennedy assassination.

I aim an imaginary gun at the streak.

“Lines up, Terry. Perfectly.”

“But who’d kill her? Why?”

I join him on the highway. “Pax told me, about a month ago, she was in Cooper and got involved in this road rage thing. A man thought she cut him off. He threatened her. She called the police. She was worried enough to tell me to keep an eye out around the house. And at the funeral? I think he might’ve been there.”

I tell him about the Man in Gray.

“I’ll look into it. When did it happen, the road rage? Where?” Out comes his cop notebook.

I give him the approximate date and the location.

He puts the pad away. He says, “Listen to me.”

“I know. Bizarre. But, think about it: blowout at the same time that a deer runs in front of the car? That’s too much of a coincidence.”

He crosses his arms and sways slightly. He’s thinking. “Jon, I see this all the time.”

“What?”

“Mostly with car wrecks, fires, choking, drowning. God blinks, something stupid happens. The littlest thing, and a dad or mom or kid dies. Pointless. Everybody wants more. A human villain, that’s what they want. A conspiracy’s even better.”

Deer. Fate...

“Just give me a half hour of your time, Terry.”