The case was so simple that Abby Kaplan decided to stop for a beer on her way to the scene.
This wasn’t encouraged protocol—drinking on the job could get her fired, of course—but there wasn’t much pressure today. The cops had already gotten one of the drivers to admit guilt. They had a signed statement and a recorded statement. Not much for Abby to do but review their report, take her own photos, and agree with their assessment. Cut and dried.
Besides, Hammel was a forty-minute drive from the Biddeford office of Coastal Claims and Investigations, and Abby, well…Abby got a little nervous driving these days. A beer could help that. Contrary to what most people—and, certainly, the police—believed, a beer before driving could make her safer for society. It settled twitching hands and a jumpy mind, kept her both relaxed and focused. Abby had no doubt that she drove better with a six-pack in her bloodstream than most people did stone-cold sober. She was damn sure safer than most drivers, with their eyes on their cell phones and their heads up their asses.
This wasn’t an argument you’d win in court, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the truth.
She stopped at a brewpub not far from the Portland jetport, a place busy enough that she wouldn’t stand out, and she paid cash so there would be no credit card transaction to haunt her if something went wrong. Not that anything would go wrong, but she’d seen the ways it could. She also made a point of tearing the receipt into bits, because cash could help you only so much; there were different kinds of paper trails. She’d worked one case where the driver had been dumb enough to leave a receipt on the console recording the five margaritas he’d knocked back just before getting behind the wheel and blowing through a stop sign. It wasn’t that abnormal, really. You stopped by the body shop to take pictures of a cracked-up car and found damning evidence just sitting there in the cup holder, a tiny slip of paper with a time-and-date stamp that blew up any possible defense. Amazing. Abby had been on the fringes of the PI game for only a few months, but already she understood what sustained the profession: people lied, and people were stupid.
Oh, and one more: People sued. People loved to sue.
That was precisely what worried the good folks in the risk-mitigation office of Hammel College, her current client. When a world-renowned engineer was killed on your campus while in the care of a student escort, you didn’t have to be paranoid to imagine the lawsuit.
Abby sat at the bar, sipped her beer, and reviewed the case file. She didn’t see much for the college to worry about. The girl who’d been escorting the engineer around town had had clean bloodwork—a relief to the college, since it meant no DUI claim, but not much help to the girl, because she was still lights-out, five days in a coma now. And even though she had a negative drug screen, she could still have been negligent or at fault, which could turn into an expensive wrongful-death suit, but—good news for the Hammel Hurricanes—the second driver involved had taken responsibility on the scene!
He’d given a full statement to the police that was the accident-report equivalent of tying a hangman’s noose and sticking his own head through it: He’d been using his cell phone, trying to get his bearings through the phone’s map application, and when he looked up, he realized that what he’d thought was a road bridge was in fact a pedestrian bridge. He swerved to avoid it—and ended up in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Mr. Carlos Ramirez of Brighton, Massachusetts, was now into the realm of criminal courts, because one person was dead and another was a vegetable and Ramirez had eliminated any compelling argument for even a shared-fault case, what was known in Maine as modified comparative negligence. A good investigator paired with a good attorney could almost always find a weasel’s way into a modified-comparative-negligence ruling, but Carlos Ramirez was going to make it tough on his team.
It was Abby’s job to imagine what that team was considering, though, and in this case, it would be Tara Beckley’s location at the time of the accident. She was supposed to deliver her charge to an auditorium that was nowhere near where she’d parked. Some enterprising attorney might wonder whether her failure to follow the plan for the evening’s keynote speaker might qualify as negligence and, if so, whether the college might be responsible for that.
After Tara had parked her CRV beside a bridge that led to the Hammel College campus, Carlos Ramirez smashed into the car, killing Amandi Oltamu and knocking Tara Beckley into the cold waters of the Willow River. A bystander on the opposite side of the river had heard the crash but hadn’t seen it, and he managed to pull her out in a heroic but ultimately futile effort, because Tara Beckley was in a coma from which she was unlikely to emerge.
That left one dead man, one silent woman, and no witnesses.
I need to get my hands on her cell phone, Abby thought. Cell phones could either save you or hang you in almost any accident investigation. The beautiful simplicity of the case against Ramirez could be destroyed by something like a text message from Tara Beckley saying that her car had run out of gas or that she had a migraine and couldn’t see well enough to drive. You just never knew. Dozens of apps kept tracking information that most users were blissfully unaware of; it was entirely possible that the precise timing of the accident could be established from a cell phone. And if Tara Beckley had been using the phone while she was behind the wheel, Oltamu’s family might take a renewed interest in suing the college and their selected escort. Any whiff of negligence had to be considered.
Only problem: her phone seemed to be missing.
So it went into the river with her, Abby thought. She came up, and the phone didn’t.
She drained her beer and frowned, flipping back and forth through the pages of the report. Explaining Tara Beckley’s missing phone didn’t seem to be difficult, but Amandi Oltamu’s phone could also contain evidence, and Abby didn’t see where that was either. The police report included the items removed from the car, and the coroner’s report had a list of personal effects removed from the body, ranging from a wallet to a Rolex.
No phone, though.
The lead investigator was a guy with the state police named David Meredith. Abby wasn’t eager to speak to police these days, considering that there were two cops in California still urging a prosecutor to press charges against her for an accident that had made her more of a celebrity than she’d ever desired to be.
The concern conjured the memory, as it always did. Luke’s empty eyes, his limp hand, the soft whistle and hiss of the machines that kept him breathing. Synthetic life. And the photographers waiting outside the hospital for a shot of the woman responsible for it all: Abby Kaplan, the woman who’d killed Luke London, cut down a rising star in his prime. James Dean and Luke London, joined in immortality, young stars killed in car crashes. The only difference was that Luke hadn’t been driving the car.
That was a fun little secret about his movies. He never drove the car.
Never felt any shame over that either. Luke was completely comfortable in his own skin, happy to hand the keys over to a woman who barely came up to his shoulder, to smile that magazine-cover smile and say, “One day you’ll teach me how to do it myself.”
And I was going to. That was the idea, you see. It was his idea, not mine, I just happened to have the wheel, and my hands were steady, my hands were…
She shook her head, the gesture violent enough to draw a curious glance from the bartender, and Abby tried to recover by pointing at her now-empty glass, as if she’d been intending to attract attention.
One more, sure. One more couldn’t hurt.
She took out her phone to call David Meredith. He was safe. Most people here were. This was why she’d come back to Maine. David Meredith knew Abby only as Hank Bauer’s employee, nothing more. Hank was the closest thing Abby had to family, and he wasn’t telling any tales about her return to Maine. She owed him good work in exchange, even if that meant speaking with police.
She found Meredith’s number, called, and explained what she was working on.
“You guys caught that one?” Meredith said. “Good for Hank. It’s easy money.”
“Sure looks that way,” Abby agreed. “But I’m heading out to take some pictures at the scene and see if there was anything that might be trouble for the college.”
“There isn’t. Tell the lawyers they can sleep easy.”
“I’m curious about the phones, actually. Where are they?”
“We’ve got his.”
“Ramirez’s, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“What about hers? Or Oltamu’s?”
David Meredith paused. “I’m assuming hers is in the water.”
“Sure. But his?”
“The coroner’s office, probably.”
“The report doesn’t account for it. His wallet and watch and keys and even a comb were mentioned. But there was no phone.”
“So he didn’t have one. Some people don’t. His doesn’t matter, anyhow. Now hers, I could see what you’re worried about there. Was she texting or whatever. But…she was parked and out of the car. Hard to imagine a scenario where she gets blamed.”
“She wasn’t where she was supposed to be. That’s my only worry.”
“I can’t help you on that one. But like you said, the wreck is simple, and Ramirez is going to be formally charged tomorrow. That’ll help you. I’ve got to talk to the girl’s family today. I’ll ask about the phone, see if I can figure out who the last person to hear from her was.”
“Great.” Abby thanked Meredith and hung up, glad that her client was the university, faceless and emotionless, and not the family of that girl in the coma. Five days she’d been in there, alive but unresponsive. Abby didn’t like to imagine that, let alone see it. That was precisely the kind of shit that could get in her head and take her back…
“I’ll have one more,” she told the bartender.
One more wouldn’t kill her. It just might save her, in fact. Thinking about the girl in the hospital and wondering if her eyes were open or closed was not the sort of image Abby needed in her head before she got behind the wheel. Another beer would help. People didn’t understand that, but another beer would help.
Abby was five foot three and a hundred and fifteen pounds, and two pints of Sebago Runabout Red would bring her blood alcohol content up to, oh, 0.4. Maybe 0.5, tops. Still legal. And steadier.
A whiskey for the spine and a beer for the shooting hand, her dad used to say. Abby had no idea where he’d picked up that phrase, but it had always made her laugh. He also liked to say One more and then we’ll all go, which was even funnier because he was usually drinking alone. Jake Kaplan had been one funny guy. Maybe not in the mornings, but, hell, who was funny in the morning?
Abby sipped the pint and held her slim right hand out level above the bar.
Steady as a rock.
She turned back to the case file and flipped through it to see where the cars were impounded. Tara Beckley’s CRV and the cargo van rented by Carlos Ramirez had both been hauled off by an outfit with the exquisite name of Savage Sam’s Salvage.
Abby called. The phone was answered almost immediately with one curt word: “Sam.”
Savage Sam? Abby almost asked, but she managed to hold that one back and explained who she was and why she was calling.
“Ayuh, I got ’em both, the van and the Honda,” Sam acknowledged without much interest. “Both of ’em beat to shit, but the Honda took it worse. Those are little SUVs, but they’re stout, so it must’ve taken a pretty good pop.”
Abby thought of the photos of the bloodstained pavement and of Tara Beckley in her hospital bed, body running on tubes and machines, eyes wide open and staring at Abby.
“Yes,” she said. “It did take a good pop. I’ll need to see the vehicles, but I’m also interested in what you might have found in the car.”
“I don’t steal shit out of cars, honey.”
That was an interesting reaction.
“My name is Abby, not honey, and I didn’t mean to imply that you stole anything,” she said. “It’s just that I’m looking for a phone that seems to have gone missing and that might still be in the car.”
There was a long pause before he said, “I can check it again, maybe.”
First the adamant claim that he didn’t steal things out of cars, now the willingness to check it again. Perhaps Savage Sam was uptight for a reason. Abby had a hunch that he was going to discover the phone—and maybe a few other valuables. She suspected this wasn’t the first time he’d swept through a wrecked car in his impound lot.
“I’d appreciate that,” Abby said. “Because that phone is going to be pretty important to the case, and we’ve got one dead and one in a coma. You know what that’ll lead to—trial, lawyers, cops, all that happy crap.”
She said it casually but made sure to emphasize the police and lawyers. It did not seem to be lost on Savage Sam, who said in a more agreeable tone of voice, “It’s possible I overlooked somethin’.”
Abby smiled. “Can happen to anyone. If you don’t mind checking, that would be great. And I can keep the cops out of your hair. If they come by, they’ll waste more of your time than I will, you know?”
“I’ll check it, sure,” Savage Sam said, now seeming positively enthusiastic about the prospect.
“Just give me a call back if you find anything.”
Five minutes, she thought when she hung up. That was how long it would take Savage Sam to call back with news of the discovery of a cell phone. He probably already had it in his desk drawer, waiting on a buyer from Craigslist or eBay.
She was wrong—it took nine minutes.
“It turns out there was one in there,” Savage Sam informed her with a level of shock more appropriate for the discovery of a live iguana in one’s toilet. “Jammed down by the gas pedal and wedged just between it and the floor mat. Crazy—I never would’ve seen it unless I’d been looking for it.”
Abby grinned. “I bet. Well, I’m sure glad you checked again for me.”
“Yeah, happy to help.”
“You’re positive there was just one?” Abby said.
“Positive. What do you want me to do with it?”
“I can pick it up today, or I can have the police do it?”
“Why don’t you grab it,” Sam said. “I don’t need to get in the middle of things.”
Abby wondered just how much swag this guy sold. “I can be there just before five, if that works for you?”
“That works.”
Abby paid the tab. Three beers—when had the third one snuck in there? Oh, well, she was still legal. One for the spine, one for the shooting hand, and one for the memories she’d rather not let into her head while she was behind the wheel. Clarity could be a bitch sometimes.