“Now I wouldn’t be doing that if I was you. That metal’s like bunches of knives in there. And there’s an awful lot of blood on the seats and ever’ where I hung up the car phone and turned on the ignition. The phone sounded its tone to tell me it was working, and red lights went on warning me not to run down the battery. The radio and the CD player were off. Headlights and fog lamps were on. I picked up the phone and hit redial. It began to ring and a woman’s voice answered.
“Nine-one-one.”
I hung up, my pulse pounding in my neck as chills raced up to the roots of my hair. I looked around at red spatters on the dark gray leather, on the dash and console, and all over the inside of the roof. They were too red and thick. Here and there bits of angel hair pasta were cemented to the interior of my car.
I got out a metal fingernail file and scraped off greenish paint from the damage to the rear. Folding the paint flecks into a tissue, next I tried to pry off the damaged taillight unit. When I couldn’t, I got the man to fetch a screwdriver.
“It’s a ’92,” I said as I rapidly walked away, leaving him staring after me with an open mouth.
“Three hundred and fifteen horsepower. It cost eighty thousand dollars. There are only six hundred in this country–were. I bought it at McGeorge in Richmond. I don’t have a husband.” I was breathing hard as I got in the Lincoln.
“It’s not blood inside it, goddam it. Goddam it. Goddam it! ” I muttered on as I slammed the door shut and started the engine. Tires squealed as I shot out into the highway and raced back to 95 South. Just past the Atlee/Elmont exit I slowed down and pulled off the road. I kept as far off the pavement as I could, and when cars and trucks roared past I was hit by walls of wind. Sinclair’s report stated that my Mercedes had left the pavement approximately eighty feet north of the eighty-six-mile marker. I was at least two hundred feet north of that when I spotted a yaw mark not far from broken taillight glass in the right lane. The mark, which was a sideways scuff about two feet long, was about ten feet from a set of straight skid marks that were approximately thirty feet long. I darted in and out of traffic, collecting glass.
I started walking again, and it was approximately another hundred feet before I got to marks on pavement that Sinclair had diagrammed in his report. My heart skipped another beat as I stared, stunned, at black rubber streaks left by my Pirelli tires the night before last. They were not skids at all, but acceleration marks made when tires spin abruptly straight ahead, as I had done when leaving the Texaco station moments earlier. It was just after she had made these marks that Lucy had lost control and had gone off the road. I saw her tire impressions in the dirt, the smear of rubber when she over corrected and a tire caught the pavement’s edge. I surveyed deep gashes in the road made when the car flipped, the gouge in the tree in the median, and bits of metal and plastic scattered everywhere.
I drove back to Richmond not sure what to do or whom to call. Then I thought of Investigator McKee with the state police. We had worked many traffic fatality scenes together and spent many hours in my office moving Matchbox cars on my desk until we believed we had reconstructed what had led to a crash. I left a message with his office, and he returned my call shortly after I got home.
“I didn’t ask Sinclair if he got casts of the tire impressions where she left the road, but I can’t imagine he would have,” I said, after explaining a little of what was going on.
“No, he wouldn’t have,” McKee concurred.
“I heard a lot about it. Dr. Scarpetta. There was a lot of talk. And the thing was, what Reed first noticed when he responded to the scene was your low number tag. “