Hometown Hero

by Libby Howard

  I took my notebook out and jotted down a few things, grateful that Doug was assisting. I didn’t know a power steering pump from…well, from any other part of the truck.

  It took Doug a while to get to the inside of the truck. The hood needed to be removed in a procedure that involved a crowbar and a hammer, which involved a few trips back to the office while I stood by the wreck and tried not to look at the inside where someone had died, the inside that would be covered with glass and broken plastic and twisted metal and blood, just like Eli’s car had been.

  “Power steering pump is crushed, and I doubt that happened before the accident. Looks like it was functional before. I’d need to pull all the hoses and belts and look at them, but I’m not sure it would tell me much. There’s bound to be cracked and broken hoses and belts from the accident itself and I don’t think I can make a determination about whether the damage was because someone poked a hole or cut partway through a belt or if the radiator fan cut through it when the truck hit the trees.”

  “So…maybe?” I made a note, just in case.

  “Maybe. You gonna go by the accident scene at all?” Doug’s head popped up out of the truck’s engine compartment.

  “Yes, I plan on it.” I really, really didn’t want to, but I needed to check to see if there was anything in the road that might have contributed to the accident, like a giant boulder, or a dead elephant.

  “Look for fluid on the road. We haven’t had any rain, so it should be there if the pump or a hose gave way—either power steering or brakes. Look for that a quarter mile in to where he went off the road, and if you see something, check it. Power steering fluid and brake fluid should be slippery to the touch. If it’s oil, that’s not good but it wouldn’t cause him to wreck. Or greenish, syrupy-smelling radiator fluid, or gasoline either.”

  I seriously needed to bring this guy more muffins. I probably needed to buy him dinner by this point.

  “Thanks. Got it.” I scribbled in my notepad while Doug’s head vanished again into the engine compartment.

  “Brakes might cause loss of control as well,” Doug’s muffled voice continued, “especially on a road like that. If he passed you going fast, then tried to slow to take the corner and found he’d lost his brakes, that could have been the swerving you saw.”

  “And brakes can go just like that?” I asked, remembering what he’d said about the tires.

  “Yep. Actually that’s a likelier cause than the power steering going out. I can’t tell you the number of wrecked cars I’ve had to pick up because a hose blew in their brake system. The fluid is under pressure, so when it goes, it goes. Bam! Suddenly you have no brakes at all. The parking brake is on a different system, but when you’re trying to slow for a traffic light or a curve, you don’t usually have much time to think of engaging your parking brake.”

  This guy was a gem. Even if this turned out to be nothing more than a tragic alcohol-related accident, this was fascinating information.

  “Okay. I’ll check for fluid in the roadway,” I promised.

  Doug’s head appeared again. “Brake system looks intact. I’ll yank off the tires and take a look at the pads to see if there’s anything wrong there, although that’s not likely to cause your accident. Pad comes loose and your braking makes a horrible noise and gets wonky. It might pull you to the side, but I can’t see it causing a complete loss of control.”

  My lunch hour was quickly turning into two hours, and I hadn’t even gone by the accident scene yet. Doug slid under the front left wheel of the truck while I debated telling him not to bother. J.T. had always allowed me to have a somewhat flexible schedule. I could just work late tonight, or even come in early tomorrow. Honestly, I was at a bit of a standstill until the Creditcorp folks got back to me on that one file anyway. I might as well stay and learn about brake pads and the different things that could go wrong with them.

  Doug made a yelp noise from under the truck. I squatted down to eye him, alarmed that he may have cut himself on some jagged piece of metal.

  Excited brown eyes met mine. “Tie rods. Suspension. This is it.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but clearly it was something big. Doug scooted out from under the truck while I backed up to give him room.

  “Vehicle suspension is set up so the wheels can turn in and out and allow for a degree of torsion. It’s a system that improves handling. There’s struts and shocks and bearings and joints that all need to be greased and maintained. Older cars have failures and if someone’s been sloppy about maintenance, then there can be a failure and suddenly there’s no way to control the wheels. A rod can break off, and the wheels aren’t lined up properly and you lose control, and if you’re going fast and there’s a curve, then you’re gonna go over the edge.”

  Doug was talking a hundred miles an hour, his words mashing together as he gestured wildly. All I got out of it was that some rod thing in the suspension sometimes breaks, then like the old cartoons, the driver finds himself holding a steering wheel that doesn’t do anything to control the car.

  “You’re saying this rod is broken?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Driver’s side front wheel. The tie rod is broken. If it’s weak, all it takes is for the tire to hit a curb, or be under strain from going around a tight corner at speed, and it will snap. Once it snaps, there’s no way to control the car. You’re steering the other wheels, but this one keeps yanking the car in the other direction. This happens, and you’re looking at a serious accident. It’s why mechanics check for fatigue when they pack the bearings or are replacing the tie rod ends. This kinda thing happens in old cars.”

  I frowned at the wreck. “But this truck is only a few years old at most.”

  “Yeah, which means either there was a manufacture defect, or something happened to it. If the truck was in a major accident, and the mechanics fixing it didn’t check, they could have missed a damaged tie rod. Or…” Doug gave me a smug grin. He was practically hopping up and down.

  “Or someone tampered with it?” I assumed that what he was getting at. “How can someone do that? You said it would take a major accident, so I assume these tie rods aren’t the sort of thing than can be easily damaged.”

  “All it takes is a torch. Someone who knows what they’re doing, someone with a welding set and ten or twenty minutes can cut far enough through the tie rod so that with any kind of stress it will break. Could break the same night. Could be a week later. Could be a month later.”

  I stared at him. It seemed unbelievable that someone would have deliberately sabotaged Holt Dupree’s car. “It seems more likely that it was a manufacturing defect, or a bad repair from a previous accident,” I told him.

  “It would, except I can clearly see where the metal was cut through.” Doug gave me a self-satisfied, grim smile. “Clear as day. That’s no inherent weakness in the metal. That’s no bend from a previous accident. That’s cut through with a torch, that’s what that is.”

  Which meant ‘that’ was murder.

  Chapter 18

  Deputy Miles Pickford scooted out from under the wrecked pickup and brushed his hands off on his pants. “I’m not a mechanic, but it does look like someone tampered with the truck. The questions now are ‘who’, ‘how’, ‘when’, and ‘why’.”

  Indeed, those were the questions. I’d immediately called in the police once Doug found the cut tie rod, and had been surprised to see they’d sent Miles out instead of a detective from homicide. Although without a cause of death, it might be premature to do anything but claim the tampering was any more than a contributing cause.

  “How is easy,” Doug told him. “You can tell by the edges and the color around the sliced section that someone used a blow torch. Looks like they cut almost the entire way through it. It’s a clean cut aside from the small broken portion where it gave way.”

  Miles put his hands on his hips. “How long do you think it would have held, being cut like that? I’m trying to figure out timing here—if it
was cut in the last few days, or if Holt was driving around with it like that for weeks, or months.”

  Doug scratched his nose and frowned. “It’s hard to tell. With careful driving it might have held for a few weeks.”

  “Can’t have been,” I chimed in. “There was the party at Persimmon Bridge, and parking there is all off-road in the flood plain. You said it would have given way if he’d hit a pothole or a curb, well driving through that flood plain to park would have been the equivalent of a field of potholes.”

  “True.” Doug nodded. “So it happened after that party. Or possibly during it, although I doubt the tie rod would have held getting out of there and back on the road.”

  “There’s no way someone crawled under this truck and took a blow torch to the undercarriage while it was parked in that flood plain,” Miles argued. “The grass there is up to my knees and we haven’t had rain in two weeks. The whole field would have gone up in flames.”

  “The Persimmon Bridge party was Saturday night,” I mused. “Sunday was the regatta. Then Monday, the parade, fireworks at the carnival grounds, and whatever parties Holt went to before driving Peony home.”

  “So as for the ‘when’, we’re looking at Sunday or Monday the Fourth.” Miles put his hand on the quarter panel of the truck and bent down to peer underneath. “What’s your best guess, Doug?”

  Doug looked thrilled at his ‘expert’ status. This was clearly the highlight of his year, if not of his entire adult life. “I’d guess it was done not much before when he had the accident. I’d say Monday night, but there’s always a chance someone did it on Sunday and Holt just didn’t drive much that day.”

  “We’ll need to trace what Holt did those two days and where the truck was parked,” I told Miles. “It’s not like a guy blow-torching under a parked truck isn’t going to be noticed. It had to be a time when the vehicle was parked in an out-of-the-way place—and a place where the person doing this wasn’t likely to set a field on fire.”

  “And probably during the day,” Doug said. “’Cause at night, someone is gonna notice sparks from the torch pretty far away. Might be easy to crawl under the truck under the cover of night, but people would see the sparks from the torch and know something was going on.”

  “Not on the Fourth of July,” I countered. “The carnival grounds had a gravel parking area as well as the field spots, and people were setting off mini fireworks and sparklers near their cars.”

  I knew this because Judge Beck had been horrified and glad that we’d walked and his SUV wasn’t in danger of getting burn marks from a rogue roman candle.

  “But was Holt Dupree at the fireworks?” Miles asked. “And did he park there?”

  I could tell by his expression that he was dreading the amount of legwork this was going to take. Figuring out when and where the tampering took place would require a ton of interviews, and that didn’t even begin to address who might have done this.

  Miles turned to Doug. “Is there any circumstance where this kind of tampering wouldn’t lead to an accident?”

  He laughed. “Uh, no. It’s not going to give way while the truck is parked in the garage. If it’s moving, and that tie rod goes, you lose control of the vehicle. That means going off the road, or hitting another car. Maybe if you’re really lucky, you manage to get it to a complete stop before you hit something or end up in a ditch, but if you’re that lucky you should be buying some lottery tickets.”

  “So there was definitely intent to harm, but was it intent to disable the vehicle and cause an inconvenience, or to injure the driver, or to kill him?” I asked, because I’d seen enough cases come through the office on our bail clients that I knew if this ever went to court, the prosecutor would have to at least prove intent to harm if they wanted more than a manslaughter conviction.

  “Murder? Probably not murder,” Doug replied. “Definitely intent to wreck the car, and I’d say intent to injure, since the wreck would likely be serious enough to result in cuts and bruises at least. Beyond that…with air bags and seat belts and crumple zones the way they are on these newer vehicles, I’d say this wasn’t the way to go if you wanted someone dead.”

  “But there’s always that chance….” I thought out loud.

  “Oh yeah, always that chance. If that tie rod broke clipping the curb while parking or hitting a pothole on Main Street, then he probably would have walked away with a few bruises at most. I can’t think whoever did this would have known it would break while going fifty around a sharp curve on a road lined with trees and ditches.”

  Maybe. Or maybe not. If the sabotage had happened during whatever party Holt had been at late Monday night, then maybe whoever did this knew Holt would most likely take the Jones Road short cut going home, and that he tended to drive faster and more aggressively than he should. Although that was a long shot of a theory. More likely someone was pissed at Holt Dupree and decided a few bruises and a wrecked truck would do him some good.

  Miles stared down at his notepad. “Don’t do anything further on this truck, Doug. I’ll let you know when you can send it off to be crushed, but until then hang on to it. And for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

  Doug’s chest puffed out, and he beamed. “Will do, Deputy Pickford.”

  I pulled my notebook from my pocket as Miles and I headed out of the salvage yard. “Do you want to see my suspect list?”

  The officer stopped so abruptly that I nearly ran into him. “What are you doing, Kay? Is J.T. investigating this for Holt’s mother for a wrongful death suit? Or for the insurance company? He didn’t mention anything to me this morning, but there has to be some reason you were out here at Doug’s looking at his truck.”

  J.T. didn’t blab about every client we had. He was a gossip, but he understood the need for confidentiality, even if he bent privacy expectations quite a bit in his YouTube videos. All I needed to do was tell Miles this was for an unnamed client, and refuse to elaborate further. But I hated to lie.

  “It’s not a case. Peony is one of Madison’s friends and I’m looking into this for her.”

  “Well you don’t need to look into it further.” Miles suddenly put on his cop-face, and although he was more than thirty years younger than me, I felt like a child who’d been caught stealing candy from the corner store.

  “So you’ll interview these people?” I tore the page out of my notepad and tried to hand it to him.

  “No, I’ll talk to a few people and try to get an idea of what Holt was doing for the last two days of his life so I can figure out where and when the truck was tampered with.”

  “And who,” I pushed the list toward him once more.

  He still had his stern, cop-face on. “Maybe, if I get the go-ahead from work to pursue this.”

  “Why wouldn’t you get the go-ahead?” I demanded, still holding the outstretched paper. Yes, the cop-face intimidated me, but I was determined to persist, refusing to let a man young enough to be my son cower me into silence and inaction.

  Miles sighed in frustration. “Because this is all most likely a civil matter, Kay. It’s something Holt’s mother will use to fight the insurance company to get them to pay full benefits even if it turns out Holt was drunk. It’s something she’ll use to bring civil suit against whoever sabotaged the car. You heard Doug. The intent here wasn’t murder, and I’m not even sure how much this contributed to Holt’s death.”

  “How can you say that?” I demanded. “At the very least it’s vandalism and assault. And even if Holt was drunk, he might have gotten home safe if that tie rod hadn’t failed along the way. The tie rod being tampered with caused the accident. It was a contributor to his death, if not the cause of it. That’s got to be good for at least a manslaughter charge if not second-degree murder.”

  “This is Holt Dupree,” Miles countered. “He was a celebrity. His death is all over the news. There’s no way the big brass is going to want to stir up the kind of attention a bogus murder charge will cause. The chances of co
nviction on something like this are slim to none. The DA’s office isn’t going to want to take a case where they have to argue whether the primary cause of the accident was Holt being drunk or because his truck was messed with.”

  “You don’t know for sure he was drunk,” I shot back. From Miles’s expression, I was pretty sure I had the sixty-year-old-widow version of his cop-face on right now.

  “He. Was. Drunk. And when we get the labs back and the M.E. finalizes the report, you’ll see that I’m right.” Miles ran a hand through his buzzed hair. “Kay, I’ve seen hundreds of drunk driving accidents in my career. I’ve been first on the scene more times than I want to remember. I’ve held people’s hands as they’ve died, waiting for the bus to arrive. I know an ‘under the influence’ wreck when I see one. I get that you want to help your friend, but you’re not a detective. You’re not a private investigator.”

  His words stung more than I cared to admit. Was I really just a gossipy old lady playing at being a sleuth? Did he see me as an eccentric fool, sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong? “No I’m not a private investigator, I’m just a woman who witnessed a fatal car accident, a woman who wants to see justice done.”

  The cop-face faded, and suddenly Miles was just a tired man in a uniform, standing in the parking lot of a salvage yard next to his cruiser. “Justice is what we all want, Kay. But sometimes we get something different, and that needs to suffice.”

  Maybe for him, but not for me.

  Chapter 19

  I found Kendra’s number through her social media accounts, and surprisingly she was willing to meet with me after work. I guess I wasn’t the only one in town who loved gossip because the gorgeous redhead had barely sat down with her chai latte before she started grilling me about the details of Holt’s accident. I would have thought she’d be upset rather than excited over the death of a guy she’d spent the last weekend sleeping with, but that wasn’t the case.