Page 11 of Luck of the Devil
Something in my brain shifted, and Detective Adams took over, shoving Grieving Harper out of the way.
I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
I scanned the skid marks again, then the landscape or the riverbank on the northern side. My heart began to hammer in my chest.
There’s no way her car went into the river from that side.
Shoving my rising panic down, I walked the length of the bridge, studying the trajectory of the markings. The angle was wrong. Everything about it felt wrong. I knew it in my gut, and I felt my instincts take over. I trusted them far more than my grief.
“These skid marks aren’t hers.” I said out loud, letting it sink in.
Malcolm didn’t react, just stood there for a moment as though he’d been waiting for me to get on the same page.
“Her car would have run off into the trees on the other side, not the water.”
“Could it have hit the river bank, then rolled in?”
I studied the bank. “Do you happen to have any photos or diagrams of how her car landed in the water?”
He slipped his phone out of his front jeans pocket and swiped the screen a few times, then handed it to me.
Of course he had photos of the crime scene. The first photo showed a huge wrecker with an extendable crane was parked on the bank, the arm hanging over the murky water. A thick cable was attached to the bumper of my mother’s Lexus, the front end of the vehicle still submerged in the water. The next photo showed the car being pulled toward the river bank, the water inside the interior barely visible through her tinted windows. I looked up at him. “How did you get these?”
“I have my sources.”
“Like, seriously, Malcolm. This is a huge breach.”
He gave me a sardonic look, then said, “Does that mean you don’t want to look at the evidence?”
“I never said that. I just asked how you got them and you refused to answer.” My head was pounding, and I decided it wasn’t my problem that the sheriff’s department had a breech. Especially if it worked to my advantage. I studied the images again, then compared them to the river, the northern river bank, and the direction my mother’s car had supposedly traveled.
I was even more convinced.
“This doesn’t line up,” I said. “The car was more in the middle of the river, not close to the bank. And for argument’s sake, let’s say it hit the bank, then rolled into the river, it would have gone in back end first.” I studied the photos, then moved onto a drawing of the car in the river. “I think it went in from the other side.”
“Which doesn’t line up with the skid marks at all.”
“Exactly. Because they didn’t come from my mother’s car.” I took out my phone and checked for traffic before walking out into the road and taking multiple photos. “Happen to have a tape measurer?” I asked.
He didn’t respond; instead, he walked to the driver’s door and leaned over.
Shivering, I turned back to the road and studied the marks. I’d guess them to be a few weeks old, maybe a month. How had the sheriff’s department gotten them wrong?
I felt something slip onto my shoulders and felt the warm weight of Malcolm’s leather jacket settle over me. I stared up at him in surprise, unsure what to say, but he held out a metal tape measure. “This work?”
So, we were pretending he hadn’t just done something nice? I was good with that.
“Perfect. Can you extend it and hold it up to the skid marks there?” I pointed to a mark in the road.
A car was approaching from the Jackson Creek side, so we both moved to the shoulder. I ignored the curious stare of the man driving past, trying to ignore the smell of Malcolm’s jacket, a mixture of leather and cedar.
Malcolm moved back onto the road and held the extended measuring tape over the first skid mark while I took a photo.
“You gonna compare the width to the tires on your mother’s car?” he asked, glancing up at me while he squatted next to the markings.
I had to stop thinking about what he’d just done, and I definitely had to stop thinking about how much the jacket smelled like him. “Yep. I need to prove her tires didn’t make these marks.” I walked down the road and motioned for him to follow so I could take more measurements. “They’re not fresh.”
“The preliminary report says they faded due to weather.”
