Page 86 of Moving to Love
The room was quiet, each person processing their thoughts on the matter.
“Honey, I know you didn’t. I know you never would. Jeremiah knows that, too.”
Joci calmed herself as much as she could. She placed her hand on her belly again. Everything just had to be okay. She was doing her best to remember everything that had happened, but she was still groggy.
* * *
In the hospital hallway, Jeremiah’s mind whirled. Fuck! Joci’s bike had been sitting at the shop for about a week. Anyone could have done something to it. Something could have fallen against it and damaged it. She said she didn’t try to hurt herself or the baby. He believed her. Pulling out his cell phone, Jeremiah called Deacon. “Deacon, where are you?”
“I just got home. How’s Joci?”
“She just came around. She said she tried her brakes, but there wasn’t anything there. Are you sure you didn’t see her brake lights?”
Deacon let out a breath. “I’m positive, Dog. I kept waiting for her brake lights, knowing she was heading into the corner.”
“Where’s her bike now?”
“I have it at the shop, in the back storeroom. The door is locked, just like you asked.”
Fuck! Jeremiah walked back into Joci’s room. He looked around the room and found his brother, Tommy. “I need to speak with you.”
Tommy looked at Erin, stood up, and walked into the hall with Jeremiah. When he stepped into the hallway, he and Jeremiah walked a few feet away from the door.
“I just got off the phone with Deacon. He has Joci’s bike locked in our back storeroom at the shop. He swears Joci never hit the brakes.”
Tommy rubbed his forehead. “I’m starting to think the worst here. I watched her face. I don’t think she’s lying.”
Jeremiah looked like he wanted to hit something. “Of course, she isn’t lying. Fuck, Tommy!”
“Hey. Ease up, man. We have to look at everything. I’ll call my chief. We’ll have officers inspect it with a mechanic. Gunnar shouldn’t be the mechanic.”
Jeremiah was enraged, “Gunnar would never do anything to hurt Joci.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean to make it sound that way. But if he was the last one to work on the bike, he shouldn’t be the mechanic to work with the police on the findings. We need an official report.”
Jeremiah let out a breath. “Find out when someone can get over there. I’ll call Frog.”
Within a couple of hours, two officers, Frog, Tommy, and Jeremiah, were at the shop looking at Joci’s bike. It was a mess. Jeremiah’s stomach turned looking at the wreckage. The largest part of her bike was standing up on a trailer. The handlebars were twisted and scratched. One of the mirrors listed on the side of the handlebar, and the other mirror lay on the floor of the trailer. The parts that had flown off when she crashed had also been placed on the floor of the trailer, scattered here and there. Some pieces had been broken into tiny pieces. Others were scuffed from sliding across the road or from the impact. They were so damn lucky she hadn’t been killed.
“Fuck!” Frog swore.
“What?” Jeremiah quickly asked.
Frog pulled his hands out of the bike wreckage. “Her brake lines were cut.”
Jeremiah looked at Frog in disbelief. One of the officers looked at the bike where Frog had been working.
“Show me why you think that,” he said.
Frog reached his hand into the mangled mess and pointed to the brake lines. The officer shined his flashlight into the area. Cuts were clearly visible across the top of each line. Frog cleared his throat.
“When the tops of the lines are cut, the fluid leaks out slowly and drips down the top of the lines. It falls into the bike somewhere and doesn’t leave a big mess on the floor.”
The officer then pointed with his index finger, following the path the brake lines took, and showed them spots on the bike frame and other parts where older, hardened brake fluid had settled.
Frog went on. “It has likely been slowly leaking over the past few days. We had the bike here at the shop and moved it around out of the way a couple of times. No one started it up to move it; we just pushed it around. But we would have used the brakes to stop it when we got it in place. Each time the brakes were pushed, fluid leaked out and dripped down the lines. The brakes would have worked for a little while.”
Jeremiah’s stunned face found his brother’s. His voice cracked. “Someone cut her brake lines?” Everyone here loved Joci—except LuAnn. She had been enraged the day she found out Jeremiah and Joci had gotten engaged. “Deacon told me he sent LuAnn home from work the day our engagement was announced because she was throwing things around and being a bitch to everyone. Then the Milwaukee fiasco.”
