31

 

 

I took a different route back to my car, even though it involved walking almost two blocks out of my way. As I walked, I called Adam.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

“I need to pick your brain about something. Can I buy you a cup?”

The moment of silence on the other end of the phone was telling. But then he answered, “Okay, yeah.”

“See you at the Rocket in an hour?”

He agreed and we hung up.

I kept my eyes peeled for the Narco cop in the Taurus, but either I’d lost him, or he’d gotten better at his job, because there was no sign of him. Even so, I drove a long and circuitous route to the Rocket Bakery, doubling back several times to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I couldn’t be certain, but I felt pretty good about the possibility that I was tail free.

The Rocket Bakery was starting to pick up for lunch traffic by the time I took a corner table in the back. I sipped my Americano and leafed through the River City Herald. The stories all seemed to be the same as the last time I read the thing, but I’m sure that said more about me than the rest of the world.

Adam arrived about fifteen minutes later.

“I’m on a short timetable,” he said as he sat down. “They’ve got me redacting some footage for media release.”

“What footage?”

“Some stupid clip we shot during the animal rights protest last month. Remember Mira Tanis, the actress?”

“No.”

“She did those comedies with the guy from that TV show? The one about the guy that had the pet penguin in his apartment?”

I stared at him. “In a million years, I wouldn’t watch a show about a guy with a pet penguin.”

“It was actually pretty funny. Anyway, he made a movie, and she was in it.”

“The penguin?”

“No, the actress. Mira Tanis.”

“You’ve totally lost me.”

The waitress arrived and Adam ordered his usual. Then he turned back to me. “It’s simple. Mira Tanis was at the animal protest. She was part of the whole passive resistance bit they pulled. Some other protestor decided to go from passive to active. He was probably trying to impress her, or something. Anyway, there was a fight, he got Tasered, and now it’s a big deal. You really haven’t heard about this?”

“I don’t watch Entertainment Tonight, I guess.”

He pointed to the paper. “I know the Herald covered it.”

“Not today.”

“Well, anyway, we filmed the whole thing, and now it’s a lot of work. I’ve got to blur out faces and bleep out personal information. It’s a slow process, and not much fun.”

I leaned forward. “Listen, if you’re pressed for time, let me get straight to the point.”

He seemed to shuffle nervously in his seat. I hadn’t asked him for anything in a long time, and that had become the accepted norm in our relationship. I could tell he was wondering if I was about to violate that.

“Relax,” I said. “I don’t want anything illegal…or even a little bit funny.”

That made him smile. “Nothing illegal, just a little bit funny,” he half-sang, and nodded appreciatively. “Nice. A Bruce call back. I thought you’d forgotten that CD I made you.”

The truth was, the CD he was talking about didn’t get much play. Courtesy of superfan Adam, the handwritten title (“An Introduction to Bruce Springsteen”) was supposed to convert me. It hadn’t, though one song did resonate. “The Big Muddy” seemed to possess a kind of simple wisdom that I kept coming back to.

“What’s your question?” Adam asked.

“It’s pretty straightforward. What do you know about collisions?”

His face pinched in confusion. “I don’t follow. That’s a pretty wide topic.”

“I mean, the math of it. I worked my share when I was on the job, and I’m sure you did, too. But that was at a basic level, right? Who should I talk to about the more advanced stuff?”

“What do you want to know?”

I explained the scenario of Henry Brassart’s death to him. At first he listened with an expression of academic interest. After a minute or two, realization flooded his features, and he leaned away.

“You’re talking about the Marie Brassart case, aren’t you?”

I stopped. “Why do you say that?”

He tapped the newspaper. “I read this. And I pay attention to everything that happens inside the department. There are a lot of resources being poured into that case. People talk.”

I wondered for a second if he’d heard about Cole hauling me in to talk to Matsuda. “What do they say?”

He shrugged. “I probably shouldn’t talk about it.” He eyed me more closely. “How are you involved?”

“I probably shouldn’t talk about it,” I said, smiling slightly.

Adam’s coffee arrived. He made a show of stirring it, and taking a sip. Then he said in a stiff tone, “I can’t help you with anything that has to do with a formal investigation.”

“I know.”

“We tried that before, and it nearly cost me my job.”

“I know.”

“And our friendship.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“Then why are you asking me this?” His voice sounded sad and angry at the same time.

I held up my hands in a peace gesture. “Whoa. Look, let’s just talk theoretically here. I want to understand the mechanics of an auto-pedestrian collision. No specifics about any case. Just math.”

He didn’t look at me for a long while. Then he sighed. “Only math?”

“That’s right.”

Another sigh. “Okay. If it’s just math.”

“Good. So who’s the best collision investigator?”

“Corporal Hallock,” he answered immediately.

“Think he’ll talk to me?”

He shook his head. “I doubt it. You’re not exactly on the Christmas newsletter list down there, Stef.”

“That’s no lie.”

“Besides…” Adam trailed off.

“What?”

“He…he probably worked on…uh, a case similar to your hypothetical.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending.

“Very similar,” Adam added meaningfully.

“Oh.” I thought about it for a moment, then asked, “Is there someone else that maybe you could talk to?”

He shook his head again. “No need. About a year ago, he asked me to design a spreadsheet program to work out the different equations.”

“Don’t they have software for that?”

“Sure. But that costs money, and we’re in a budget crunch.”

I held back a snort. The police department was in a perpetual state of self-proclaimed budget crunch. When it goes on that long, there’s another word for it. Cheap.

“Besides,” Adam said, “they spent all of their software budget on some 3D rendering program. New, cutting edge stuff. You punch the data into it and it draws out the roadway, the cars, everything. Then it animates the collision.”

“Crash cartoons,” I mused.

Adam shrugged. “Juries like visual evidence. Anyway, we had to run several test cases through to validate the program for court testimony. It was a pretty big project.”

“But the math?”

“I had to program all of it into the spreadsheet. So I got to be pretty expert on the equations.”

I raised my hands in a hallelujah gesture. “Then let’s talk.”

Adam scratched out a rough diagram on a napkin, drawing a stick figure and a boxy car. Then he asked, “What factor are you trying to determine?”

I thought about Henry Brassart’s murder. “Let’s say the pedestrian was thrown fifty feet or so from the point of impact. How fast would the car need to be going?”

Adam considered. Then he asked, “Flat roadway?”

“Pretty much.”

“Is the pedestrian moving or standing still?”

“Moving.”

“Toward or away from the vehicle?”

“Away.”

“At what speed?”

“What is jogging speed?” I asked. I knew he knew exactly what the scenario was, but he was asking these questions to keep it theoretical. It seemed like a foolish dance to me, but if that’s what he needed, then I’d play along.

“About five miles an hour,” he said. “Guesstimate.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Pedestrian’s weight?”

“Say two hundred.”

“So not a factor. How about the vehicle? Car, truck?”

“A luxury car.”

“Like a Cadillac?”

“More like a Lexus.” I thought about it a second. “Or a Mercedes.”

He scratched out a few more numbers, then worked on the equation for a minute or two using the calculator function on his phone. Finally, he leaned back and sighed. “There are a lot of variables that come into play,” he said, almost apologetically.

“Such as?”

“The height of the bumper on the vehicle, for one. Where it contacts with the pedestrian. Does the car hit the person dead-center, or was it more of a glancing hit. Did the pedestrian get hung up on the car or carried for any of the distance. Did the pedestrian hit a secondary object after being hit by the car? It all factors in.”

“A lot?”

“It can, yeah. Most of these variables can be narrowed down by evidence on the roadway or the medical examiner’s findings. But since we’re talking theoretical here, that’d just be guesswork, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Can you ballpark it?”

“In a theoretical scenario like this, to throw a body fifty feet after collision, the vehicle would need to be traveling between twenty-five and twenty-nine miles per hour at impact.”

“The speed limit, basically.”

Adam shrugged. “Close enough.”

I thought about Henry Brassart and the piece of yellow crime scene tape again. An idea struck me. “Wait, did you say something about one of the variables being if the pedestrian struck a secondary object?”

“Yes.”

“Does a tree count?”

Adam gave me a look. “Are you kidding me? Yes, of course it counts.”

I tapped his sketch on the napkin. “Let’s say that he hit a tree at the fifty foot mark. Does that change the speed?”

“I’m sure it does. There’s a different equation for that, though.”

“Do you know it?”

He gave me a baleful look and returned to his scratching and calculator tapping. After a minute, he piped up, “If he hit a tree square at fifty feet, that puts the vehicle speed at roughly forty-nine miles per hour.”

“That much?”

“That’s what physics says, yes. And keep in mind that’s a minimum speed.”

“Kind of rules out an accident, doesn’t it?”

“That would be for an investigator to decide. But, theoretically, if the collision occurred on a residential street with a speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour?” He nodded. “Yeah, I think for it to be an accident, you’d be looking at manslaughter just based on the recklessness of the driving.”

“Or murder.”

“If it were intentional, yes.”

“How much damage would that do to the vehicle?”

Adam shrugged. “Now you’re getting into trying to determine damage by speed or speed from damage, and that’s a whole other realm. Even Hallock said that’s a mixture of math, educated guesswork, and wizardry, even in car-to-car crashes. Difficult or impossible in auto-pedestrian collisions.”

“Want to take an educated guess?”

He thought about it, then shrugged. “Probably the same as if someone hit a deer at the same speed.”

That made sense to me. I raised my cup to him in gratitude. “Thank you for the intellectual discussion in the theoretical realm, Professor.”

He didn’t raise his cup in response. Instead, he said, “Stef, I’m worried about you. Poking around in police business is a bad idea. Especially a murder case.”

I lowered my cup without drinking. “Relax. I’m just asking questions for a friend.”

“The last couple of times you did that, it didn’t work out so well for you.”

I shrugged. “It turned out all right in the end.”

He didn’t reply. We drank our coffee in silence for a little while, then he said he had to get back to work. As he rose to leave, I stopped him.

“I’m going to be fine,” I said.

He pressed his lips together, gave me a short nod, and left without a reply.