Darwin's Blade

19 “S is for Satchelbiggie”

It had been three hours since the “accident” and they had not extricated Paulie Satchel’s body yet. After one quick look, Dar understood why.

Darwin had never given much thought as to how hamburgers were stamped out—he knew that they arrived frozen and preshaped at all of the franchise burger places—but now he saw that Hampton Quality Preprocessing was the place. It was a large, clean, new plant in a crowded, dirty, old industrial neighborhood.

Dar showed his credentials to the people demanding it. Lawrence had already been at the scene earlier and led him on a five-cent tour through the plant. “Loading docks for the beef to arrive, that room’s where it’s cut and separated, grinding room there, this area’s where the extruded raw hamburger is put on a five-foot-wide stainless-steel conveyor belt that runs through the wall into the stamping room.”

The stamping room was where Paulie Satchel—the one possible witness to Attorney Jorgé Murphy Esposito’s final moments—was entangled in the machinery.

Besides a medical examiner finishing some paperwork in one corner, there were two plainclothes detectives there—Dar knew Detective Eric Van Orden—and five other men wearing white coats over their business suits and surgical masks over their faces. Lawrence introduced them as three executive representatives of Hampton Preprocessing International, headquartered in Chicago, and two of their own insurance investigators.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in one of our plants, anywhere, never,” said one of the men behind the masks. “Ever.”

Dar nodded and he, Lawrence, and Detective Van Orden stepped closer to the body. What made the scene especially grisly—besides the fact that Paulie Satchel had been squeezed headfirst through a three-inch maw of a hamburger press—was the river of raw hamburger meat, no longer so fresh, that surrounded his sprawled body like a river current of raw flesh.

“He’s been working here for three months under the name of Paul Drake,” said Detective Van Orden.

“Perry Mason’s chief investigator on the old shows,” said Dar.

“Yeah,” agreed the cop. “Satchel was a little weasel with a lot of TV-watching time on his hands between liability claims. He always got some shit job to tide him over until the insurance checks arrived. We’ve got aliases on him as Joe Cartwright, Richard Kimble, Matt Dillon, Rob Petry, and Wire Palladin.”

“Wire Palladin?” said Lawrence.

Van Orden gave a twitch of a smile. “Yeah, remember Richard Boone in the old Palladin series? The gunfighter all in black?”

“Sure,” said Lawrence. “Palladin, Palladin, where do you roam…” he sang.

“Well,” said Van Orden, “the card that the gunfighter used to hand out on the show read ‘Wire Palladin, San Francisco.’ Paulie was never exactly rocket-scientist material. He must’ve thought that Wire was Palladin’s first name.”

Lawrence gave the headless, armless body a reproving glance. “Everybody knows that Palladin didn’t have a first name,” he said to the corpse.

One of the company insurance men came over and began to speak urgently through his mask. “We know of you, Dr. Minor…know your work…and we don’t know who has called you in on this, but you should know right now that although this plant was highly automated—Mr. Drake should have been the only person in the room at the time of the accident—there are at least eight mechanical safeguards against such an accident occurring while the employee was cleaning the input orifice of the stamping container.”

“He was cleaning the stamping container?” said Dar.

“It was on his schedule for early this afternoon, when the acccident occurred,” said Van Orden.

“Eight safeguards,” repeated the insurance man. “As soon as that T-eleven restraining grate was lifted, the entire line was programmed to automatically shut down.”

Dar ignored the split infinitive and said, “How about the other seven…safeguards?”

“No way that he could stop the line and lift that gate and open the compression claws to clean the stamping container without the failsafe devices shutting it down,” said a company executive who had joined the insurance man. “You can imagine our shock when we found all of these built-in safeguards either bypassed or eliminated from the machinery.”

The detective sighed and pointed to the mass of machinery and maze of circuitry inside the opened stamping-press panel. “This wasn’t new,” he said. “Paulie was too stupid to bypass these things, and the murderer certainly didn’t spend hours tinkering with the machinery before starting the press on Paulie.”

The company man and the insurance man took a horrified step back when they heard the word murderer. Perhaps it was the first time the detective had used it.

Lawrence pointed to the Rube Goldberg rewiring. “This has been like this for years,” he said. “The fail-safes obviously slowed down the process too much, so they just bypassed all this crap and had the operator—Paulie in this case—shut off the power back there.” Lawrence pointed to a huge red button at the far end of the line. “And then he could clean the stamping press entrance five times as fast and they could get back to production.”

“Can someone turn the line and the press back on from outside this room?” asked Dar.

The five company people shook their masked heads so vigorously that sweat actually flew through the air.

“And Paulie was supposed to be working alone?” said Dar.

“He was working alone today,” said Van Orden. “Signed in at one P.M. as usual. Would have ended his shift at nine.”

“Other workers been interviewed?” said Dar.

Van Orden nodded. “The line shut down at the usual time when Paulie cleaned the press. There are only five other workers in the building…it really is highly automated…and four of them were all outside together, taking a smoke break, when the…event…occurred.”

“What about the fifth man?” asked Dar.

“He was working in the back room there and has a perfect alibi,” said Lawrence.

“None of these guys saw anyone enter the building,” said Dar.

“Of course not,” said Van Orden. “That would make our job too easy, wouldn’t it? But there are three other doors where someone could have come in from the opposite street side or the alley without being seen. None of them were locked.”

Dar turned and looked at the river of raw hamburger and the big red button at the head of the line. “So all the killer had to do was push that button.”

Lawrence folded his arms. “But you notice where the button is by the door. Even with Paulie’s head lowered and close to the press, he would have heard and seen a person entering the room. Yet he stayed near the press.”

“Either someone made him stay there,” said Van Orden, “or…”

“Or he knew the person and trusted him,” said Dar.

Lawrence pointed to the slit where Paulie’s body was still embedded; there were only about three inches of space between the steel runway and the serrated maw of the press entrance. Paulie’s shoulders were visibly compressed into that tiny area. Hamburger had flowed by on either side. It looked like an obscene cartoon.

“This would have been a slow death, Dar,” said Lawrence. “Whoever it was who started the line did so when just Paulie’s fingers were in the press entrance. But you see these sort of flippers on the side…They mash the line of raw hamburger into the maw.”

“So Paulie wasn’t stamped all at once?” said Dar, seeing the real horror of the death fully for the first time.

“These guys who built the machine estimate that it must have taken about ten minutes for him to be dragged in—and stuffed in by those two big hydraulic compression claws—far enough for his body to jam the works,” said Detective Van Orden. “First his fingers, then hands, then both arms…”

“With hamburger flowing around him and past him and getting stamped into patties with him the whole time,” said Lawrence.

Not for the first time, Dar wished that he did not possess such a visual imagination. “He must have screamed himself hoarse,” he said.

Van Orden nodded. “But the machinery was still on in other parts of the factory—it’s damned loud in the rendering and sorting room—and four of the other five guys were out front smoking. The fifth guy was out back on the stacking and loading deck, and we interviewed the trucker who was with him. Neither of them heard anything over the diesel engine of the truck running and the other noise back there.”

“And then, finally, Paulie’s head would have been pulled in,” said Lawrence. “The last few minutes would have been silent.”

All five of the company people had backed as far away as they could at this point. Dar felt like taking pity on them and telling them that Paulie Satchel had no family—no one to sue them. He had been a lonely little weasel of a small-time con artist. Now he was…hamburger.

The flies were beginning to buzz en masse.

“Let’s go out this door to the alley,” suggested Detective Van Orden. “Get some air.”

“Is there any question that this is a wrongful death?” asked Dar when the three of them stood in the relatively fresh air of the alley.

Eric Van Orden actually laughed. “No…I know about your investigation into the scissors-lift accident and so forth, but there’s no doubt that this is going to be pursued by Homicide.”

“Why are all the company people allowed to hover around a crime scene?” Dar asked the detective. “I mean, I understand giving the insurance guys some access, but…”

Van Orden looked at Lawrence. “You didn’t tell him about the lawsuit problem?”

Lawrence shook his head.

“Paulie doesn’t have any friend or family,” said Dar. “I doubt there will be a suit.”

Van Orden was shaking his head while giving that ironic cop smile. “No, no, we’re talking about a class-action lawsuit here, Dar.”

Dar did not understand.

“The hamburger line runs to the stacking room back here. The last guy sorts the patties onto trays with wax paper, then slides the trays into a stacked carrier—”

“Oh, damn,” said Dar, seeing where this was going.

“—and then they slide the racked carriers into a freezer truck…one truck every two hours…for fresh and efficient delivery.”

“You interviewed the driver,” said Dar. “That meant a delivery truck was here. The patties were loaded after…Jesus, did he drive off with them?”

“Twenty carriers of four hundred patties each,” said Van Orden. “Eight thousand patties.”

“They were delivered to Burger Biggies all over the metro area,” Lawrence said glumly. Burger Biggy was a client of Stewart Investigations. Usually the claims against the chain were no more serious than the usual obvious slip-and-falls, although there was one nasty case in which a woman sued for half a million dollars because she was raped while in her car in the drive-through waiting for her order.

“How many of the patties had part of…contained bits of…” began Dar.

Both Lawrence and the detective shrugged.

“That’s what the company guys are trying to determine,” said Van Orden.

“I assume there’s been a recall,” said Dar.

“It’s under way as we speak,” said Lawrence.

Dar skipped dinner that Tuesday evening and went to bed early. The next morning he was at the Justice Center at 7:30 A.M. only to find Syd hard at work in her basement office. He was not surprised.

Syd asked, “How was your camping trip? I wish I could have gone along.”

Dar felt a tingle of the pleasant sexual tension he had felt earlier around the chief investigator. Then he made himself remember the easiness—almost visible intimacy—between Syd and Tom Santana, and throttled back his stupid, adolescent imagination.

“You wouldn’t have liked it,” he said. “It rained.” He tossed the three FBI dossiers on her desk and said, “I’ve finished reading these, and wondered if you could give them back to Special Agent Warren when you see him.”

Syd shrugged. “Sure. I’m sorry there’s not more in those reports on Yaponchik and Zuker.”

“The photographs of them helped,” said Dar.

Syd did a slow double take. “Photographs? You mean that useless Polaroid of the Afghanistan sniper platoon? I couldn’t make anything out.”

“No,” said Dar, picking up the CIA dossier, “I mean these photographs.” He opened the folder to the photos from his stakeout, which he’d inserted.

Syd looked at the close-ups. “Holy shit. I don’t remember…” She stopped and squinted at Dar. “Wait a minute.”

Dar had not played poker since the Marines, so he gave Syd his best chess face.

“You realize, Dr. Minor, that any illegal surveillance photographs entered into evidence would be reason enough for the defense to have the indictments—much less a verdict—thrown out.” She had not stated it as a question.

Dar looked puzzled. “What do you mean? You think the CIA photos were taken illegally?”

Still squinting, she looked again at the grainy close-ups of Yaponchik and Zuker. Dar had used the same font as the CIA had used to label each photograph before photocopying them several generations to get the fuzzy look he wanted.

Syd looked at him for a minute, bit her lip, looked at the photos again, and said, “Well, it’s always possible that I missed these, I guess. We’ll get these in circulation right away. For all the grain, they’re good photographs. Those CIA boys know their business.”

Dar waited.

“Yaponchik, the older KGB guy, looks like someone…” she mused.

“Max von Sydow?” said Dar.

Syd shook her head. “No, no. Maximilian Schell. I’ve always thought that Maximilian Schell looked sexy, in a dangerous, sinister sort of way.”

Dar snorted. “Great. He tried to kill me and you think he looks sexy, in a dangerous, sinister sort of way.”

Syd looked at Dar. “Well, I think you look sexy in a dangerous, sinister sort of way.”

Dar did not know what to say to that. After a minute he said, “So how’s the investigation going?”

“Wonderfully,” said Syd. “I guess you’ve heard about Paulie Satchel.”

“I saw Paulie Satchel,” said Dar. “How does he…that…translate to wonderful?”

“Now we have four obvious murders,” said Syd, as happy as Martha Stewart with a new blend of paint. “The police and FBI are finally completely on board.”

“Four?” said Dar. “Esposito, Satchel…”

“And Donald Borden and Gennie Smiley,” said Syd. “Oakland PD got word last night that a scavenger working in a landfill near the Bay found two big garbage bags that had been uncovered by a dozer. They were leaking…”

“Both Richard and Gennie?” said Dar.

“We’ve only got the dental records confirmed on Borden, but the other corpse was a female.”

“Cause of death?” said Dar.

“Double tap to the head for each of them,” said Syd. Her phone rang. Before picking it up, she said, “22R…probably from a Ruger Mark II Target. Short range. Very professional.” Then, “Good morning, Olson here.”

Dar looked at the photographs of Yaponchik and Zuker, studying them as if he had not already been memorizing them for twenty-four hours. Syd said, “Hmmm-mmm, really? Where was it mailed from? Uh-huh? Did you have your lab dust it for prints? Uh-huh? You have a match on all of them already? Uh-huh. Well, I guess sometimes we just get lucky. In fact, Dar and I got lucky with one of these old CIA files. Yeah, I’ll bring them over and show you in an hour or two. Yeah. ’Bye.”

She hung up and looked at Dar with a heavy gaze that many suspects had felt in this very same interrogation room over the decades. “You’ll never guess what Special Agent Warren received in the mail.”

Dar closed the CIA dossier and waited, showing mild interest.

“An envelope—no return address, no prints—mailed from Oceanside yesterday…”

“Yes?” said Dar.

“Photographs,” said Syd. “Glossy eight-by-tens. Pretty good resolution. Seven men. At least four of them are seen talking to Dallas Trace in the photos. Five of the men have been identified already.”

Dar showed his interest.

“Two Russian mafia whom we didn’t know were in the country,” said Syd. “One of them a known ex-KGB strongman who worked with Yaponchik in the good old Soviet days…”

“The others?” said Dar.

“Three of the other four are known mercenary bodyguards and hit men,” said Syd. “They all have rap sheets. One of them was a made guy until he killed one of his boss’s friends.”

Dar whistled. “That brings the organized crime task force and RICO into this, doesn’t it?”

Syd ignored the question. “Quite a lucky break. First finding these lost CIA photos. Then this…”

Dar nodded agreement.

Syd leaned back in her chair, and said, “OK, where were we?”

“How the investigation is going,” said Dar.

Syd nodded toward a tall stack of reports, videocassettes, audiotapes, and files. “Tom and the three FBI people have made contact with the Helpers of the Helpless through coyotes and various emergency rooms. They came into the net by different ways, but are in the same group of recruits now. The Helpers run a sort of swoop-and-squat training school. We already have a dozen names and it’s only been a few days.”

“Great,” said Dar.

“And you know about the special AIU?”

“AIU?” said Dar dubiously.

“The task force’s special Accident Investigation Unit,” said Syd in her no-nonsense voice. “You’re on it. In fact, you’re the head of it.”

“Oh,” said Dar.

“It’s headquartered at Lawrence and Trudy’s place,” said Syd. “I’ll meet you guys out there later this afternoon when I get a break from working on these new photos.”

“I should know what the IUD is investigating,” said Dar.

Syd sighed. “Just a string of little accidents that seem to be murders,” she said. “Esposito. Paulie Satchel. Abraham Willis.”

“Willis?” said Dar. “Oh, the capper attorney who died up near Carmel.”

“The Gomezes,” continued Syd. “Mr. Phong. Dickie Kodiak aka Dickie Trace.”

“I guess I’d better get up to Escondido,” said Dar. “It sounds like I’m pretty busy.”

“I’ll see you later this afternoon,” said Syd.

Lawrence and Trudy were devoting afternoons to task force business. Their dining room had been turned into an extension of Syd’s task force headquarters, with cork boards all around the long table, a white board, projectors, a VCR with a small monitor, and a Gateway laptop with a dedicated modem line just for constant updates on the data and graphics related to the accidents under investigation.

Dar, Lawrence, and Trudy quickly divvied up investigations according to who had done the most work on the original. Lawrence took the Phong, Satchel, and Gomez cases because his clients had involvement in two of them. Dar planned to reopen the Richard Kodiak file and continue investigating Esposito’s scissors-lift death. He told Lawrence and Trudy about the various photographs that had come to light.

“Interesting,” said Lawrence. “Do you have copies of these photos by any chance?”

“I just happen to,” said Dar.

“Doesn’t Dallas Trace live up on Coy Drive near Mulholland and Beverly Glen?” said Lawrence.

“I wouldn’t really know,” said Dar.

“Well, I do. I looked it up the other night after dropping you off on your field trip,” said Lawrence. “All right, let’s see these bad guys.”

They all studied the photos for a while. Dar knew that neither Lawrence nor Trudy ever forgot a face after studying it for a case.

Eventually they decided to start work on the Abraham Willis case because none of them had been involved with it. The CHP and Carmel police had E-mailed and faxed their full files to Syd, and Syd had added her task force investigation materials to the four-inch-thick file before giving it to Lawrence and Trudy.

For a while the three read in silence, looking at photos and accident-scene sketches, passing materials around. The accident seemed straightforward enough.

Counselor Abraham Willis—a San Diego–based lawyer who lent his name to injury-mill cases and capper referrals—had left his office early on a Friday afternoon to drive up to Carmel for the weekend. Witnesses interviewed in Santa Barbara said that he had dinner and several drinks there, and the owner of an inn near Big Sur was able to identify Willis as someone who had stopped in late that evening and had another drink before driving on to Carmel. Willis had been alone in both the Santa Barbara restaurant and the Big Sur tavern.

A little before 10:00 P.M. on that same Friday night, Willis had evidently pulled his 1998 Camry off the road into a turnout at a scenic view on a cliff between Point Lobo and Carmel. There was no one else at the turnout at that time.

“We know that turnout,” said Lawrence. “It has a gorgeous view north toward Carmel.”

“Couldn’t have been much of a view at ten P.M.,” said Trudy.

“Maybe he had to take a leak,” said Lawrence.

“Or just wanted to get some ocean air…to shake off the effect of the drinks,” said Dar.

“Didn’t work,” said Lawrence.

According to the CHP reconstruction, Willis had then climbed back in his Camry, put it in drive rather than reverse, crashed through a small wooden fence at the apex of the turnout—and plummeted, car and all, sixty feet to the boulders below.

“Why no guardrail?” asked Dar.

Trudy sketched the scenic turnout on a napkin. “See, there’s guardrail on both sides of the turnout, then the parking spaces between with low concrete wedges, then thirty feet or so of grass with a gravel path, then this low wood fence with a row of reflectors…It’s just to warn pedestrians not to walk beyond there to the cliff’s edge.”

“How far from the fence to the cliff’s edge?” asked Dar.

“About another thirty feet to the actual cliff overhang, then a sheer drop. But there are a couple of boulders there. Notice that Willis’s Camry struck one of them—the driver’s-side door was found up there, on the clifftop, not on the boulders below.”

“I noticed that,” said Dar. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“The NICB investigator agreed with the CHP investigator that Willis couldn’t stop the car and was trying to jump when the car door hit the boulder,” said Lawrence. “The impact knocked him back into the passenger seat and then the car went over the edge.”

“Why couldn’t Willis stop the car?” said Dar. “Even if he hit the accelerator rather than the brake initially, he had almost sixty feet in which to stop.”

“Drunk,” said Trudy.

“Spontaneous acceleration followed by brake failure,” said Lawrence.

Trudy and Dar gave him sarcastic looks. Spontaneous acceleration only occurred on TV magazine “exposés,” and total brake failure was almost as rare as fatal meteor strikes.

The CHP photographs of the body were suitably grisly. Willis had been thrown from the car upon the initial impact with the sea rocks, and the car had rolled over him before finally coming to rest. The Camry was also in pretty bad shape. Someone had reported the smashed fence at about midnight and the CHP found the wreck and body a little after 1:00 A.M. The crabs had gotten to Counselor Willis, but not so badly that his secretary could not identify the body. Willis had been married but divorced years before, in New York State, and no family had claimed the body.

“OK,” said Trudy, “let’s look at occupant loading on the restraint system.”

They went through the CHP report. They went through the Carmel police officer’s report and the sheriff’s report. They looked at the NICB investigator’s report. They studied the photographs.

Syd showed up then. The chief investigator looked exhausted but happy. She noticed the intense concentration of the group and said nothing after the initial greetings.

Finally Trudy held up a black-and-white photo of the interior of the ’98 Camry. The car had struck the boulders hood-first, so the incursion into the passenger area was total—the crumpled steering wheel and dashboard actually ramming the passenger seats, the windshield completely gone and the roof crumpled down on the driver’s side almost to seat height.

“What’s wrong with this photo?” said Trudy.

“Only one air bag deployed,” said Lawrence.

“On the passenger side,” Dar said, and grinned. Got them.

Syd was frowning. “I don’t get it.”

Lawrence was on the phone immediately, calling the Carmel sheriff. Willis’s Camry was still being held as evidence, unceremoniously stacked out behind an autobody shop in town. “Carmel doesn’t have anything as mundane as a junkyard,” said Trudy, as Lawrence began talking quickly with the sheriff.

“Well then, can you send a deputy or someone over to look at it?” Lawrence was saying. “We need this information now.”

Lawrence listened and nodded. “Have him take a cell phone so that we can talk to him directly. What? OK, then…I’ll hold.” Lawrence covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, “The deputy doesn’t have a cell phone, but they’ll patch through his radio call. I guess the body shop is about two hundred meters from the sheriff’s office.”

“I don’t get it,” Syd said again. “What are we looking for?”

“Occupant loading on the restraint system,” said Trudy.

Syd shook her head. “There wasn’t any,” she said. “I read all of the reports. They’re sure that Willis wasn’t buckled in when he went over. He was actually catapulted out through where the windshield would have been if it hadn’t popped out at the same time.”

“But look at the photo,” said Dar, sliding it over to the chief investigator. “One air bag deployed.”

Syd looked at it. “On the passenger side,” she said. “But I’m not sure what that proves…probably an air-bag sensor malfunction, don’t you think?”

Trudy shook her head. “Sensor malfunctions are so statistically rare that we can almost rule it out,” she said. She paused while Lawrence spoke with the deputy via their radio patch-through.

“OK…yes, hi, Deputy Soames…Lawrence Stewart here, Stewart Investigations. Are you standing by the Willis Camry? OK, good. Yeah, I bet it is. Uh-huh. That’s a good one, Deputy.” Lawrence rolled his eyes. “Deputy, would you look at the driver’s-side seat for me and—”

Lawrence listened a moment. “Yes, Deputy, I know it’s all smashed to hell and squashed and bloody on that side, I’m not asking you to get in the driver’s seat. The driver’s-side door should be missing…It is? Well, good, we’re talking about the same car then.”

Dar slid more photos in front of Syd. She looked at the one of the Camry’s left front door lying by the boulder on the clifftop and bit her lip.

“Now please look down at the base of the seat, Deputy. Yes, right where the seat belt is attached to the frame there. There’s a small enclosure there…see it? Good. Is there a red tag sticking up?”

Lawrence listened a few seconds. “A red tag,” he repeated. “It should be quite visible. It would read ‘Replace seat belt.’” He listened. “You’re sure? Thank you, Deputy.”

Lawrence returned to the table. “No tag.”

“If Mr. Willis had been belted in, the restraint system would have undergone a one-point-seven-g load,” said Trudy. “We could see the effects on the harness and the inertial reel, of course, but Toyota also has that little tag that pops up to remind the repair people to replace the belt restraint system after an accident.”

Syd still looked puzzled. “But both the CHP investigator and our people knew that Willis wasn’t belted in,” she said.

Dar lifted a transcript. “His secretary said in an interview that Willis always belted up. He told her more than once that he’d seen too many cripples and highway KIAs.”

“But he was drunk that night,” said Syd.

“Legally, but certainly not falling-down stupid drunk,” said Trudy. “Not drunk enough to mistake reverse gear for drive, or his accelerator for a brake pedal. Plus, even when you’re drunk, you do things out of habit. He would have buckled up even if it took him two or three fumbles.”

Syd rubbed her chin. “But I still don’t see the significance of the passenger-seat airbag deploying.”

“There had to be weight on the passenger seat for the airbag sensor to deploy that airbag,” said Lawrence, looking at the photo of the crushed interior and the single deflated airbag.

“During the fall he must have fallen over against that seat,” Syd said, saw the fault in the statement, and immediately added, “No…”

“Right,” said Dar. “During the fall from the cliff, Mr. Willis was in free-fall with the rest of the Camry. He wasn’t buckled in, so he was essentially levitating…floating above the seat like a shuttle astronaut in orbit…”

“No weight on the seat, so the sensor doesn’t deploy the airbag,” said Lawrence. “Not even during the terrible impact on the boulders.”

“But the airbag did deploy,” mused Syd.

“On the passenger side,” said Trudy with a grim smile. “But not during the impact with the sea rocks…”

“The wooden fence,” said Syd, getting the entire picture now. “But if Mr. Willis was in the passenger seat when the Camry hit the flimsy fence doing just thirty-five miles an hour as the CHP analyzed…”

“Why didn’t the driver’s-side airbag deploy?” Dar finished for her. “Someone had to be driving. Unless…”

“Unless the driver bailed out before the impact with the fence,” said Syd, speaking to herself. “Someone rapped Willis on the head, knowing that the injuries would not be sorted out from the traumas of the fall, propped him on the passenger side, drove the Camry at the little wooden barrier, then jumped out on the grass just before the car hit the fence, knowing that the Camry would keep going to the cliff’s edge.”

“So the driver’s airbag didn’t deploy during the initial impact with the wooden barrier because the sensors knew that there was no one on the driver’s seat,” said Lawrence. “The same reason the driver’s-side bag didn’t deploy during the impact with the rocks below. It’s not just because Willis was in free-fall as the other investigators reasoned; he was floating around on the passenger side.”

“But he was ejected through the driver’s side of the missing windshield,” said Syd.

Dar nodded. “I’ll have to do a computerized graphic reenactment, but the ballistics math looks consistent with the initial impact of the left front of the Camry on the boulder. Because of the principal-direction-of-force vector, the occupant—not belted in, airbag already deflated—would have been launched tangentially across and out, passing over the hood on the driver’s side. Whereas if the passenger-side airbag had deployed on impact with the rocks…”

“He probably would have been pinned in the wreckage,” said Syd, seeing the whole thing now.

“Which explains why the Camry’s driver-side door hit the rock up above before going over the cliff edge,” said Trudy. “It wasn’t Willis trying to get out. The door was just still swinging open after the murderer jumped out on the grassy berm before the impact with the wooden railing.”

Syd was looking at the grisly photos. “Those arrogant bastards. They’re so arrogant they’re just stupid.”

Syd’s cell phone rang. She got up from the table as she answered, listened, then came back to the table. She was sheet white. Even her lips were bloodless. She grasped the table edge and literally dropped into her chair. Her hands were trembling. Dar and Lawrence leaned closer. Trudy hurried out to get a glass of water for the investigator.

“What?” said Dar.

“Tom Santana and the three FBI agents who went undercover with him,” said Syd, forcing out each word. “That was Special Agent Warren. The CHP found…all four bodies…crammed into the trunk of an abandoned Pontiac just half an hour ago.” She took the glass of water from Trudy and sipped it with shaking hands.

“How…” began Dar.

“All four shot twice by a rifle,” said Syd, her voice steadier but her face still pale. “One head shot or one heart shot each—probably medium range.”

“Good Christ,” said Lawrence. “Who in his right mind shoots three FBI agents and a State Fraud Division investigator?”

“No one in his right mind,” said Dar.

“Those miserable, arrogant fucks,” said Syd, her hand shaking again, the water in the glass spilling. Dar knew that now the shaking was from pure fury. “But now we know who tipped Trace and his shooters,” she said.

“Who?” said Trudy.

There were tears in Sydney Olson’s eyes, but she actually attempted a smile. “Come to my task force meeting tomorrow morning at eight,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You’ll find out then.”