Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Just one body?” I asked. “What about passengers?”

  Shouts, and a motor revving up. A door slammed. Mack raised her voice. “Can’t be sure yet, but it looks like she was alone. Probably going too fast and lost control.” A pause. “Didn’t you tell me that she has a sister?”

  “Yes, Patsy. Patsy Wilbur. She lives with her parents. Jack Krause should be able to give you their address.” I swallowed, thinking how this was going to hurt others. Sue Ellen’s sister, her parents, my mother. “Will the sheriff—”

  “Yeah. Somebody will handle the notifications.” More doors slamming, another shout. “Sorry, gotta go, China. Ethan is yelling at me. I thought you’d want to know, since you were expecting her.” Mack clicked off.

  I stood there for a moment, staring at my phone, trying to catch my breath. Sue Ellen, dead? How had it happened? I’d only been on that ranch road a couple of times, but I remembered the steep drop-offs, first on one side, then on the other, and the hairpin turns as the road slanted up the hill. If you were going too fast, if you got into a skid around one of those curves—

  Yes, if you got into a skid there was nothing to keep you from sliding right off the road. If that happened, you could die. Even if you were a cute, bouncy cowgirl with high hopes and big dreams. I suddenly thought of my mother, who had come to depend on Sue Ellen’s willing helpfulness and high spirits—and who was expecting to be able to count on her, now that Sam was out of commission. How in the world was I going to tell her that her young friend was dead?

  Soberly, I pocketed my cell phone and went into the living room. Amy and Chris were perched uneasily on the sofa and Sharon on a nearby chair, cans of soft drinks in their hands. Gulping a deep breath, I dropped down onto Sam’s big round hassock, at one end of the coffee table.

  “Sorry,” I said, and heard my voice catch. I cleared my throat. “I’ve just had some bad news. There’s been a car crash. A young woman who was here for dinner yesterday—who has just moved into the guest lodge. Her car went off a road and down a hill and caught fire. She’s . . . dead.”

  “We know,” Amy said. Her voice was trembling, and her hands were squeezed into tight, hard fists. Her iPad was on the coffee table in front of her. “We saw it.”

  “But we didn’t know it was a friend of yours,” Chris put in.

  “Shut up, Chris,” Sharon said sharply. “We agreed. Amy is the one who’s supposed to talk.”

  “Sorry,” Chris muttered. “Tell her, Amy.”

  I was staring at Amy, astonished. “You saw it? What do you mean, you saw it? I just got off the phone with Mackenzie Chambers. She was calling from the accident scene. She said there were no witnesses. Somebody happened to drive by and see the smoke and called 9-1-1, but by that time it was too late.” I could hear my voice rising. I was out of control and I didn’t give a damn. A young woman was dead and these kids— “You don’t mean to tell me you were on that road when it happened? You saw it happen and you didn’t stay around to help? Do you know that you can get twenty years for failure to stop and render aid?”

  Amy shook her head so hard that her red curls bounced. “We weren’t on that road, China. We didn’t see the wreck happen, either. But our drone was there. It saw both vehicles. And recorded what it saw. We’ve got the video.”

  My stomach muscles tightened. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. “Both vehicles? There was another vehicle involved—a second vehicle?”

  “A pickup truck,” Sharon said grimly. “It was the truck that did it. On purpose.”

  “And it wasn’t us!” Chris slammed his hand down on his knee. “We had nothing to do with what happened. You’ll see, when you look at the video.”

  “Just look.” Amy pushed her iPad toward me. “Just look, China. You’ll see what happened.”

  “No,” I said, pushing it back. “Hold on a moment.” I took a deep breath, clenching my jaw, forcing myself to think. This was a tricky situation, for them and for me. I needed to handle it right, from the get-go. I glanced from one to the other. All three of them were white and scared. I thought they were telling the truth. And I thought that their story was essential. I let out my breath between my teeth.

  “Okay,” I said. “Who’s got some money?”

  The two girls looked at Chris. “I do, I guess,” he said uncertainly. “Why are you asking?”

  “Give me a five or a one, whatever.” I was impatient. “Come on, Chris, hand it over.”

  “Ah,” Sharon said wisely. “She wants us to put her on retainer. So she doesn’t have to tell.”

  “Of course,” Amy said, snapping her fingers. “Attorney-client privilege. We see it all the time on TV. Chris, give her something so she’ll be our lawyer. If we’re in trouble with the cops, she can get us off the hook.”

  She can get us off the hook? That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it was close enough. I wanted their information. But I wanted to protect them, especially Amy, Ruby’s daughter. And I wanted to protect the video. If Amy and her friends were telling the truth, it would be evidence. The police were looking at Sue Ellen’s death as an accident, but this video could change that. It could be evidence that could convict a killer.

  Chris fumbled for his wallet and took out a ten-dollar bill. “Here. It’s all I’ve got.” He put it on the table. “But now I won’t have any money for supper.”

  “Thank you. I’ll give you your change and a receipt when we’re done here.” I turned back to Amy. “Now, about that iPad. I’m going to look at the video, yes. But before I do, you are going to tell me how you got it. How and where and when. And why.”

  Amy slid a troubled look at Chris.

  I pushed Chris’ ten-dollar bill back toward him. “We’re not playing games here, Amy. This is serious. If you don’t answer my questions—all my questions, and truthfully—you can count me out.” I hardened my voice. “Now, how did you get that video?”

  Sharon squirmed in her chair. Beside Amy, Chris nudged her. “Tell her, Amy.”

  Amy gulped. “Okay. We were at Three Gates Ranch, spying on a pigeon shoot.”

  “Pigeon shoot?” I shuddered. How could people actually— But now wasn’t the time for that.

  “Yeah.” Amy made a face. “It’s pretty awful. PETA has been trying to call attention to these things, wherever they occur. We wanted to get video of this one to put on YouTube, so everybody can see what goes on. Fourteen states have made it illegal. We think Texas should, too. That’s really why we came here today. Not so much to demo the drone to Warden Chambers, but to video the shoot.”

  “I see. So you were on ranch property when you were conducting this aerial surveillance?”

  “Yes,” Amy said, and added defensively, “It was the only way we could see what we needed to see. The game ranches set up these shoots by invitation only, no public notice, no advertisement. We only found out about this one by accident. A cousin of one of the hunters—”

  “They’re shooters, not hunters,” Sharon put in heatedly. “No self-respecting hunter would want to be involved in something like this.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Chris growled.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Anyway,” Amy said hastily, “a PETA member sent us a copy of the invitation. That’s how we found out. If you want to see it, it’s out in the SUV. It has the directions on it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to find the shoot.”

  “Is pigeon shooting legal or illegal in Texas?” I asked.

  “Legal,” Amy said. “The birds are rock doves or collared doves. Both are open season, which means that they can be shot at any time. At the shoot, this guy grabs one and throws it up, sort of like a clay pigeon, and a shooter tries to drop it. There’s an entry fee—a thousand dollars. And several prizes, around fifteen thousand dollars total.”

  “So you were trespassing on private property to film a lawful p
rocess,” I said. “And interfere with the ranch’s lawful business operation.”

  Chris scowled. “Wait a minute. I thought you’re supposed to be on our side.”

  “I am,” I snapped. “This is what being on your side sounds like.” I turned back to Amy. “So where was this pigeon shoot, exactly? Where were you in relation to it?”

  “A little more than four miles inside the ranch. The ranch road makes a Y about four miles in from the highway. The main road, the right-hand leg of the Y, goes off to the ranch compound. The pigeon shoot was on the left-hand leg, maybe a quarter of a mile past the Y, on top of a hill. We drove as close as we could get without being seen and pulled off behind some trees.”

  I pointed to the iPad. “Show me. On Google Maps.”

  “Oh, good idea,” Amy said, and pulled the iPad toward her. She typed something in, fiddled with the screen display for a moment, then turned the tablet toward me. It displayed a map. “Here’s Route 187, and here’s the ranch road. Here’s the Y. We took the left fork, drove up to about here, and pulled off.” She pointed. “This is the track that leads up to the hill where they were holding the pigeon shoot. Chris flew the drone pretty high and off to one side, hoping they wouldn’t notice it. For a while, they didn’t, and we got several minutes of pretty good pictures. But then somebody shot at it. The drone was hit by some buckshot—”

  “Birdshot,” Chris put in authoritatively. “You don’t shoot birds with buckshot.”

  “Whatever,” Amy said. “Anyway, Chris swung the drone away fast, over this way, toward this other road.” She moved the map display so I could see what she was describing. “See, the main ranch road makes a Y down here. The right leg goes to the ranch compound. We were parked here, on the left leg. The drone was pretty high up. The camera was still running, and Sharon and I were watching on the iPad, trying to figure out where it was. That’s when we saw what . . .” She stopped, swallowed hard. “What happened to the red car.”

  “You were watching this, too?” I asked Chris.

  “On the control panel, yes,” he said. “I was starting to fly the drone in, back to where we were.”

  “So then what?” I said to Amy, and added, “I don’t want to know what you saw on the iPad. We’ll get to that in a minute. I want to know what you did, after you landed the drone.”

  Amy looked puzzled, but she answered. “Well, after we saw what happened on the road, we got really scared. I mean, we were scared for whoever was in that car, of course. From what we could see, it looked really bad.” She glanced at Chris and Sharon, who were both nodding. “But we were scared for us, too. We weren’t sure what was going to happen next—whether somebody from the pigeon shoot was going to hassle us, or whether the guy in the truck might come after us. So Chris flew the drone in as fast as we could, and we put it in the SUV and got the hell out of there.”

  “As you were leaving,” I asked, “did you drive past the wreck?”

  “No.” Amy pointed to the map. “See? It happened on the other fork of the Y. We could see it because the drone was so high.”

  “Did you call 9-1-1?”

  “We tried.” Amy met my eyes. “We tried, honest, we did, China. But the country is rugged and there aren’t any towers on the ranch, so we couldn’t get a signal. When we got off the ranch road and onto Route 187, we saw a sheriff’s truck with the lights and siren on, making a turn onto the Three Gates road. So we figured that somebody else had already called it in. And since we . . .” She stopped, swallowed hard, and went on. “And since we’d been trespassing and shooting that video on private property, we thought we could be in trouble. So we decided to come straight here and show the video to you. We know that it has to be turned over to the police, but we figured that you’d know the right way to do it.”

  I looked from Sharon to Chris. “Is that the way it happened? Amy hasn’t left anything out, or misrepresented anything? If she has, now’s the time to tell me. This is on the record.”

  “That’s how it happened,” Chris said emphatically, and Sharon nodded.

  I nodded. “You can turn on the video now, Amy. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  Amy left the map and went to the drone display. “We’ll skip the footage from the pigeon shoot,” she said. “I’m starting with what we saw after Chris swung the drone away from the shooting area. As you can see, there’s a time-and-date stamp running across the bottom of the video.”

  I saw, and knew that it would be important, if a jury ever saw it—which was by itself an open question. A picture might still be worth a thousand words and a video worth even more. But whether it would be admissible in court was still a matter of opinion. The judge’s opinion.

  The drone was flying at an altitude of about sixty feet. The road, a narrow gravel lane, crossed the iPad screen diagonally left to right. On the left, the rocky hill, pocked with prickly pear and yucca, fell away steeply into the ravine below.

  “Now, watch what happens.” Amy’s voice was taut. “See? Here’s the red car, going along at a pretty good clip. It’s almost to the place where the road turns and starts to go down the hill to the Y. Now, watch the truck. It comes up from behind, fast.”

  Leaning on my elbows over the coffee table, I watched as Sue Ellen’s red Ford came into view, moving along the road from left to right, above a steep drop-off on the driver’s side. A blue pickup entered from the left, some eight or ten car lengths behind the Ford and closing fast. It pulled even with the passenger’s door, then suddenly and deliberately swerved into the front right fender, so hard that I felt myself flinch. I bit my lip, imagining how terrified Sue Ellen must have been as she struggled to keep the car on the road, feeling panicked and helpless with the truck like a battering ram on one side and the ravine on the other.

  The car kept moving forward. The truck slammed into it again, hard. The car veered sharply to the left, out of control, and catapulted over the edge of the road. It smashed into a rock outcrop and bounced into the air, somersaulting once, then rolling over and over, the doors flying open, boxes and bags scattering across the hillside. It settled at the bottom, wheels up, and an instant later exploded into bright flames.

  The truck, meanwhile, had braked hard, skidding in the dust. A guy wearing a green army field jacket and an orange baseball cap jumped out, a scoped rifle in one hand. He ran to the edge of the road and stopped, raising the rifle to his shoulder and aiming it at the burning car. He stood that way for a moment or two, then lowered the rifle and raised a fist in an exultant gesture. I was holding my breath. Was it . . . was it Jack Krause? Had he just murdered his wife?

  Then, so suddenly and unexpectedly that I blinked, the camera zoomed in close. The orange baseball cap had a big UT on it—the University of Texas. The man was thin and dark, with a scar on one side of his face. The truck was an older model silver gray Dodge. In the bed there were three bags of what looked like feed and a red gasoline can. The resolution was so good I could even see the brand name, in big letters, on one of the bags. Big & J Deer Feed. On the back bumper, there was a red bumper sticker—“Gun Control Is Being Able to Hit Your Target.” And below that was the license plate.

  Amy stopped the video, freezing the man in the act of getting into the truck, and I could read the license plate. I could actually read the license plate.

  “Wow,” I whispered. “Amazing.” It was like viewing through a surveillance camera, a mobile surveillance camera, out there in the wilderness. The license plate, the video—this crime had an eyewitness. It was documented, beginning to end.

  Chris cleared his throat. “When I realized what we were seeing, I reacted, sort of by instinct, I guess. I zoomed in fast. That guy had no idea he was on camera.” His voice took on a sharply bitter edge. “The son of a bitch caused that wreck and he was celebrating!”

  Amy started the video again. The man got back in the truck and drove off, fast. The camera followed th
e vehicle for a moment, then the screen went blank. All four of us let out our breaths, all at once, all together, in one long, sustained sigh.

  “That’s it,” Amy said. “Except for the footage of the pigeon shoot.”

  Sharon made a whimpering noise. “We’re not going to be arrested for trespassing, are we?” she asked plaintively.

  “Under the circumstances,” I said, “I doubt if the owners of Three Gates will press charges.” Sharon sighed in relief. I frowned at her, thinking that of all the outcomes of this episode, their arrest for trespassing would be the most trivial. “But they might,” I added. “Just to make sure that you don’t try that stupid trick again.”

  Chris tilted his head, frowning, looking at me. “So what happens next? Do we go to the cops? Do the cops come to us? Are we going to jail? What?”

  “Good questions.” I fished my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. “We’re about to find out the answers.”

  Chapter Ten

  When Mack thought about it afterward, she remembered things happening so fast that the action was like a speeded-up movie, blurry, with chipmunk-like voices. But at the time, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. She was in her state-owned truck heading south on 187 when she heard Dispatch sending Ethan—off duty but on call—to the Three Gates ranch road on an 11-79. She was close, so she put on her lights and siren and drove to the scene to give Ethan a hand. Not long after she got there, EMS showed up, and then the Volunteer Fire Department’s tanker truck with three volunteers from Utopia, and a few moments later, Jack Krause, a big, burly man with thick brown hair, dressed in a camo jacket and jeans. Looking stunned and disbelieving, he identified his wife’s Ford. That was when Mack decided to call China and let her know what had happened.