The place where Amandi Oltamu had died was beautiful and peaceful. Crisp orange leaves glowed in the fading sunlight as they swirled across the pavement, and beneath them were glittering bits of pebbled glass that the cleanup effort had missed. The blood had been hosed off the pavement.
Abby stepped out of her car, looked at that bright, too-clean patch of asphalt, and tried to ignore the steady accelerating of her heartbeat.
Exposure therapy, that’s what this job of studying car wrecks was supposed to be. You kept things from taking up damaging residence in your brain by meeting them on your own terms in small, planned doses, building up a tolerance. The mind was no different than the body—it could become immune to a bad memory just like it could to a virus.
This was what a therapist in California had told her. Granted, the therapist hadn’t recommended changing careers, let alone moving back to Maine. She’d encouraged Abby to look at some pictures, that was all. And Abby had tried. But…
But the therapist hadn’t killed her boyfriend in a car wreck, and once you’ve done that, well, those pictures can become harder to look at than most people would believe.
The job Abby had now was an almost ludicrous outgrowth of a technique she’d been asked to embrace in California, but she was the only person who understood the bridge between the two. Nobody on the West Coast knew what she was doing now, and she hadn’t volunteered any of her stories to Hank or anyone else in Maine. She’d had absolutely no desire to.
Until today, at least. When Hank had given her the overview of the wreck in Hammel, Abby had almost broken and told him the details of her horror story, told him about the way Luke’s hand had closed on her arm just before they left the road, told him that maybe his last words hadn’t been Faster, Abby, but rather Slow down, told him how his eyes had seemed to track hers in the hospital even after the doctors said there was absolutely no indication of awareness. For an instant, she’d been ready to tell Hank that under no circumstances could she investigate an accident that had put someone in a coma.
She hadn’t said a word, though. In the end, she’d just taken the file and headed out to do her job—with that quick stop for a beer on the way. Because the past was the past, Luke was nothing but a memory, and Abby couldn’t afford to spend any more of her life with her eyes on the rearview mirror.
But now, standing here in the cold fall air with the sun setting behind the wooded hills and the smell of the sea riding the wind, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the wreck photos. They would make her think of the miles of roads that lurked between here and home. Intersections and stoplights, sharp curves and banked slopes, all of those challenges so simply handled by basic instinct, and challenges that could be turned into creative triumphs if your mind was fast and your hands were steady. It was a bitch if that basic instinct ever wavered on you, but if you’d once had a fast mind and steady hands and a hundred and twenty miles per hour felt like fifty? In that case, it was worse. Deeper and darker. In that case, you began to feel like you didn’t really know yourself anymore.
Focus, damn it. Focus on the job and then get out of here.
She stood at the base of the hill and looked out at the two-lane bridge that crossed the river and led to the college campus. There was a concrete pillar on the sidewalk identifying the bridge’s place in the state’s history. This was what Tara Beckley’s CRV had struck after Carlos Ramirez, his head down and cell phone glowing, drove his van into the car.
Lives ended from mere moments of distraction. Happened all too often.
Doesn’t require distraction, though. There are variations on the lost-lives theme. Stunt drivers taking famous actors out for a spin, for example. Those trips can end badly too.
Again, Abby could see Luke’s hand reaching for hers.
She shook her head, then walked up the hill to put herself in the position the van’s driver had been in. She took out her camera and pivoted slowly, shooting a 360-degree view. The sun was sinking fast and lights were visible on both sides of the bridge. The campus was on the western side of the river, and atop the steep hill on the east, everything was residential. If Ramirez hadn’t already fallen on his sword, there might have been some mitigation from the lighting. The streetlights were toned-down replicas of old gas lamps, designed more for aesthetics than illumination.
Abby was about 280 degrees through her 360-degree turn when she lowered the camera and frowned, thinking of the massive amount of destruction done to Tara Beckley’s Honda CRV. Carlos Ramirez had to have been hauling ass when he hit them to inflict that sort of damage. Down a steep hill and into those angled parking spaces…
She paced up the hill a few steps and turned to look back at the parking spots.
The wind that gusted and stirred the brittle leaves was getting colder. Abby zipped up her fleece and paced back down to the edge of the bridge and looked up at the hill, and now her old instincts were alive. This insurance investigator—could there be a less glamorous occupation?—had once been the fabled Professional Driver on a Closed Course, and while that was an adrenaline-jockey business, it was also a science-based business.
Abby Kaplan didn’t need to run a calculation to know what was troubling her—the police photos didn’t do justice to the hill.
That hill was much steeper than Abby had imagined. The road crested and then seemed to dive toward the river. The police had probably viewed that as a contributing factor to the wreck. Carlos Ramirez had been driving an unfamiliar cargo van, he’d been going fast, he’d been distracted, and he’d been on a dangerous slope. Check, check, check, check. All of that played well on paper. But…
How come he didn’t roll it?
Abby chewed her lip and stared at that steep hill rising from the river and thought about the nearly new tires she’d seen on the van.
There were two types of rollovers, tripped and untripped. Most rollover accidents were tripped, which meant that some external object—a curb, a ditch, a guardrail—upset the vehicle’s balance. The rarer untripped rollovers were the result of the battle among three cornering forces: centripetal (tire friction), inertial (vehicle mass), and good old gravity.
Untripped rollovers were caused or avoided by the driver’s ability (or lack thereof) to understand and control the car. The driver was alone in that critical moment, tethered to the world by nothing but four points of rubber and her own skill.
Abby could remember standing on a course in Germany waiting to drive a Mercedes prototype while an engineer droned on about this; she kept wishing she could just get behind the wheel and go because her hands and eyes already understood everything the guy was babbling about.
Back then they had, at least.
He’d been talking about the CSV, or critical sliding velocity. She had started to pay more attention at that point, because he’d uttered the word that owned Abby’s heart: velocity. The CSV formula determined the minimum lateral speed at which the vehicle would roll.
When he’d killed Amandi Oltamu and knocked Tara Beckley into a coma, Carlos Ramirez had been executing a fishhook maneuver. On test runs, that meant you followed a fishhook-shaped curve: You went straight, then turned sharply in one direction—as you’d do to avoid something in the road—then overcorrected in the other. On each run, you widened your path, steering at sharper and sharper angles, testing it until the tires howled and threatened to lift off the pavement—or until they did lift off.
Abby had executed maybe two thousand fishhook runs. She didn’t need an engineering degree to see the problem with the scenario on the bridge across from Hammel College. The slope was too steep and the fishhook turn was too narrow.
He’d have rolled first. He might have hit Beckley’s car, but he’d have had his van on its side by the time he did. The cargo van was too tall, its center of mass too high, to handle such abrupt cornering and remain upright.
Unless he’d never tried to turn. Unless he’d been coming straight at them, targeting them.
Abby didn’t hesitate to look at the photos this time. Her curiosity had overridden her apprehension, and she was able to see past the blood on the pavement and focus on the vehicle positions.
The cargo van was upright, the CRV was upright, the damage was catastrophic, and all of that made sense until you stood down here and looked up the hill and thought about the angles.
Her phone rang, a shrill shattering of the quiet, and she closed the accident report and looked at the phone. Hank Bauer, her boss and friend and onetime sponsor, a man who’d paid the fees to get a teenage Abby Kaplan into stock-car races in Wiscasset, Scarborough, and Oxford.
“Hey, Hank.”
“How’s it going, Abs?”
“Fine. Actually…well, it’s a little messed up.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Something’s wrong in that report. What Ramirez said happened is impossible. It might be what he thinks happened, but it isn’t right.”
Hank’s voice dropped an octave. “He smashed directly into a parked car. How wrong can he be about that?”
“He would have tipped that van,” Abby said. “Hank, I’m telling you, there’s no way he could have hit the passenger side of her car that hard if he’d swerved the way he said he did. He’d have rolled it into the river first.”
“Let the police worry about Ramirez,” Hank said. “I just want our girl Tara to be clean as a whistle. Okay?”
“Right,” Abby said, but she didn’t like it because she wanted someone who could talk on her level about this problem. She changed tack instead. “I might have good news there. I think I’ve got her phone.”
“How’d you do that?”
Abby told him about the trip to the salvage yard, and Hank began to laugh before she was done.
“Only thing surprising about that is Sam hadn’t sold it yet.”
“Well, I’ve got a box of phones now and I don’t know which is hers. I’ll charge them up tonight and test them.”
“Save yourself the trouble—you can ask her sister tomorrow.”
“What?”
“She wants to know what you’re doing, I guess. Wants to meet you. Wants to meet anyone and everyone who’s involved.”
“She’s coming up here?”
“No, you’re going down there, to the hospital in Massachusetts. Bring your treasure chest from Savage Sam along.”
“The hospital? Why?” Abby felt a cold fist tighten in her gut. She did not want to go to the hospital. She most sincerely did not want to see that girl in the coma. “I’ll call the sister. I don’t need to go to Boston to see her in the hospital.”
“You think I don’t know that? I already called her. The sister is a law-school student but apparently believes she’s already passed the bar and been appointed district attorney. I’m glad it’s you and not me who gets the treat of meeting her in person.”
“I’m not wasting a day in Boston just to explain what I’m doing.”
“Like hell you’re not. Billable hours! Abby, do you have any idea how much I can soak that college for? If the family wants to see you at the hospital, you go to the friggin’ hospital. You can show her the phones. That won’t be a waste of time. And you can take the Challenger!”
His enthusiasm made Abby close her eyes. “I’m good with the Chrysler, thanks.”
“Aw, c’mon, Abs.” Sorrowful now. “I bought the damned thing.”
“Nobody told you to.”
“Just drive it, would you? Get a taste again. See what it does for you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Abby said, and then she hung up.
What Hank wanted her driving was a Dodge Challenger Hellcat with 707 horsepower growling under a black-on-red hood. He’d bought it for well under value after it was repossessed by a friend of his who sold cars in New Hampshire. Because Hank still believed Abby craved speed, he’d purchased the Challenger and offered it to her as a temporary “company car.”
It could do zero to sixty in under four seconds, was outfitted with Pirelli racing tires, and was generally everything one could want in a modern American muscle car.
Abby hadn’t had it over sixty miles an hour yet.
On a couple of occasions, Abby pretended that she’d put the car through its paces on the back roads and been duly impressed. One part of that wasn’t a lie—she did keep it on the back roads. That was because she could avoid the anxiety of driving in traffic and at higher speeds, though, not so she could test those beautiful Pirellis on a double-S curve.
Hank wasn’t wrong. Abby should have been driving it. Exposure therapy. Stare the fear down, in small doses.
Soon, she told herself.
Any day now.
She pocketed the phone and walked toward her Chrysler 300, a pleasant if somewhat staid sedan. Nothing threatening about it. Not like the Challenger Hellcat.
As she crossed the road, her right ankle throbbed, a souvenir from an early crack-up at the Oxford Plains Speedway in western Maine. She looked down and watched the way her hiking shoes flexed across the top as she walked sideways across the steep slope. The leather uppers pulled right, toward the river, while the rubber soles fought them and tugged left, biting into the pavement.
It would have rolled, she thought. That van would have rolled.