Page 2 of Justice for Aleta

* * *

“Three dead.One seriously injured. What a way to start the morning,” his buddy, MattColvin, had said when Jack wandered into the office at Elizabethtown. PostFour had been his assignment for over six years, and he felt at home there. He’d gotten to know all the guys well and they all got along. Their captain, MorganSeitzer, was a veteran officer who ruled with an iron fist but knew when to trust his men and let them use their instincts. As a result, their investigations had never needed a KDCI detective. They did their own and did them well.

“Yeah. I fucking hate fog. It’s the devil,” Jack muttered under his breath as he looked down at his uniform. Blood. Yeah, he was going to have to change. As soon as he got his report finished, he’d pull another uniform from his cruiser and go to the locker room for a shower. “Hey, I’m out of report forms. Got an extra one?”

“Sure.” Matt pulled one from the desk next to Jack’s and handed it to him. Well, it wasn’t really Jack’s desk. It was a community desk. There were five of them in the office, and they were places for the officers to sit and drink a cup of coffee and fill out paperwork. There wasn’t enough room for everybody to have one of their own, and besides, they weren’t supposed to be desk jockeys. A lot of guys sat in their cars, but Jack hated trying to do that in his shop. Between the steering wheel and all the emergency gear in the front seat, it wasn’t a comfortable place to try to balance a clipboard. Fortunately, he could make whatever mess he wanted on the form. When he was finished with it, he’d transfer the information to the online version. But he’d been taught by his trainer at the academy that the action of actually writing down information with pen on paper often jogged a memory that might’ve been lost otherwise.

The boxes were easy enough to fill out. Date, time, badge number, name, incident. That particular form was specifically for traffic accidents, and it asked about the vehicles?descriptions, license plate numbers, the whole enchilada. In the box for number of vehicles, he put two, then stopped.

Jack closed his eyes and tried to visualize the scene as he’d come from the other direction. He could’ve sworn there was a third vehicle involved, but it hadn’t been present when he arrived on scene. Thinking back, his mind laid the arrangement out for him. The white van was in the front, the red car smashed into it. The driver’s side of the van was crushed, and so was the front of the car. There’d been no damage to the front of the van that he’d noted, so he ran through scenarios in his mind. It looked like the red car had plowed into the van, but in the side? That didn’t make sense. The third vehicle, where had it been?

In front of the van. Closing his eyes again and trying to force out any other chatter or noise, he thought about the scene he’d driven past. Therehadbeen a third vehicle there?he was sure of it. What color? Black? Dark blue? Dark gray? Something dark. That was all he was sure of. But he was certain it had been there. Had they been hit too and then just driven away? Were they startled to see the trooper’s cruiser? And when had they left? He’d only gone two miles down the parkway to turn around, so that was roughly five minutes. In that time, they’d disappeared.Not hard in that fog, he groused internally. Everything was hidden in that.

Except that third car. The investigators were out there, trying to recreate the scene of the accident. The parkway was shut down and traffic was being rerouted because they needed to work undisturbed. Jack wanted to know what was going on, what they were discovering, and he wondered if they’d found any hint of the vehicle. “Matt, I’m going back.”

“Where? Accident scene?”

“Yeah. Something’s not right. I need to see the investigators. Tell Cappy where I am?” he asked, using their nickname for their captain.

“Sure thing.” He barely heard Matt answer as he ran out the door and jumped in his car.

It wasn’t far at all, just a few miles, and he rolled up on the accident scene. The NelsonCounty reconstruction team was working, and he wandered over to their sheriff, DannyFoley. Jeremy, Danny’s son, had played basketball with Jack in high school. “Heard this was yours,” Danny said when Jack got close.

“Yeah, and I need to talk to you.” When Danny glanced around, Jack added, “Privately.” The older officer just nodded and began to walk away from the scene, Jack right behind him.

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know how to say this, but there was a third car.”

Danny gave him a strange stare. “No, there were just two.”

“No, I swear to you, sheriff, I was going east and when I came down that hill over there,” Jack indicated, pointing, “there was a third car there. Because of the fog, I went down to the cross over and came back. When I got here, it was gone. It was just these two.”

Jack gave him a piercing glare. “You’re sure about that?”

“Positive. You’ve found no indication that there was another vehicle?”

“No.”

It was bewildering. Why would the vehicle have left unless it shouldn’t have been there in the first place? “Hey, sheriff! Can you come here a sec?” one of the deputies yelled.

“We’ll talk about this again in a minute. Yeah, whatcha got?” Danny yelled.

“We’ve got dark blue paint on the right front bumper of this van and a wrinkle that looks fresh. No rust.”

Danny wheeled to Jack, his eyebrows impossibly high. “Don’t go anywhere. Stay right there.”

Three minutes later, it was officially designated a three-vehicle accident. But where was the other car? And based on the van’s location and its surroundings, there was no indication it had been moving when it was hit by the red car. Why was it stopped on the highway on a morning like that? There was only one person who’d know the answer, and Jack had every intention of asking her.

* * *

The chairs werehard and cold, but at least he was there. Looking around, if there was any family there for her, he couldn’t identify them, so he just settled in and tried to read a magazine. He’d alerted the medical staff to his presence and they told him they’d update him when they could.

AletaCulp. That was the name of the bloody, battered, broken woman who’d been sitting on the side of the highway. According to the information in her bag, she was twenty-nine. The man on the rocks below the bridge was her husband, JoshuaCulp, and the infant, their son, five-month-old JorieCulp. From the information they’d been able to glean, the Culps were returning home to Mayfield, where Joshua was a minister, from a visit to their relatives in MountSterling, Kentucky, a small town in the eastern end of the state. And Jorie had been their only child.

The man in the other car, twenty-four-year-old FrankieMcIntosh, had a rap sheet as long as the KentuckySpeedway’s front stretch, but they were all petty crimes. He hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, and his head had hit the windshield, killing him instantly.

But the question no one could answer: How had the Culps gotten out of the car? It was too far for them to have been ejected over the side of the bridge, and besides, Mrs.Culp was somewhere else altogether.

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