Mia rounded on Charlie. “Did you ever think that there are some truths people don’t want to know? I’d rather believe it was all an accident than to know my husband was in so much emotional pain that he killed himself.”
Charlie’s forehead wrinkled as he raised his hands as if to protect himself. “That’s not what I was saying, Mia. Not at all.”
“So what are you saying? Scott was drunk and he went off the road and hit a tree. It was either an accident or deliberate.” She took a ragged breath. “I’ve made my peace with the idea that I’m never going to know why he kept so many secrets from me, like the fact that he’d started drinking again.” When he had sworn on the lives of their children that he had stopped. “But this is one secret I would really rather not know.”
“He was only .06,” Charlie said. Given Scott’s body weight, it was the equivalent of about three drinks. “Not enough to be legally drunk.”
“But enough to be impaired. And he’d probably lost his tolerance.”
“That still doesn’t explain what you can see in the reports. Scott’s injuries don’t make sense.” Charlie took a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say, Mia, is that I think he might have been murdered.”
Mia tried to take this in, but it was impossible. Murdered? “What exactly did you see in the reports?”
“They’re out in the car.” He stood up. “Let me go get them.”
While he was gone, Mia put her head in her hands. She wished this were a dream. Even a nightmare. Today had been like a nonstop roller coaster, but one with only sickening drops. She heard a car pull up outside.
Charlie came back with a file folder in one hand and two pizza boxes balanced on the other. He called the kids downstairs, then asked Gabe to supervise Brooke while the kids ate in the kitchen. When he returned to the family room, he had the file folder tucked under his arm and was carrying paper plates topped with two pizza slices. Mia was embarrassed to see that Gabe had taken full advantage of Charlie’s credit card, ordering two different combos instead of cheaper, single-ingredient pizzas.
From his pocket Charlie produced two crumpled paper towels, handing one over with a flourish. “Your napkin, madam.” He settled down next to her. “So have you seen any of the reports?” He kept his voice low.
“No.” Mia shook her head. “I figured looking at them wasn’t going to change anything. All I know is they didn’t do an autopsy.” She had been grateful for that. She took a bite of pizza, oddly ashamed that her body could still be hungry after everything that had happened today. Still be hungry when they were discussing her husband’s death.
“They don’t do an autopsy if they figure the cause of death is self-evident. So what they did in Scott’s case was take a chest tap, test his blood for alcohol, snap some photos, and write up a short report about the external condition of the body. I got that and the accident report.”
“Okay.” Mia waited for the rest.
“In a case like this, when you’ve got no witness, figuring out what really happened depends on the competency of the CSI who processed the scene and the forensic pathologist who did the exam. Only in this case, there was no CSI, just a patrol officer who responded to the 911 call. And the guy who did the exam wasn’t a pathologist, but a death investigator. Who knows how much training either one of them had or whether they’re certified and by whom.”
He pulled out the accident report, which had a freehand sketch of the accident scene. Mia had to work to swallow what suddenly felt like a wad of cotton in her throat. Two lines curved to the left, indicating a road. A rectangle representing the car sat on the right-hand side just after the curve. A row of triangles showed the line of trees, one of which overlapped the front passenger side of the car.
“How much do you know about car accidents?” he asked.
She lifted one shoulder. “When you work in violent crimes, most of those aren’t committed with a vehicle.”
“How about physics?”
“Probably not my forte either.”
“Accidents basically follow Newton’s first law of motion,” he said, “which says that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless something acts on it.”
“Okay.” Mia drew out the word. It was strange to hear Charlie sounding like a professor.
“So. Scott’s car failed to completely negotiate the curve and left the road here.” He tapped on the illustration. “He hit gravel and then slid into one of these trees. The impact was on the front passenger side door—the right side. The airbags deployed, but he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. So he was—”
Mia sucked in her breath. “What did you say?”
“Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” Charlie continued. “So he was thrown from the driver’s seat into—”
“That’s not possible.” Mia shook her head so hard she felt dizzy for a second. “Scott always wore a seat belt. Always.”
“Even when he’d been drinking?”
“Especially when he’d been drinking. He got super cautious behind the wheel when he was drunk.”
Charlie paged through the paperwork. “But the first responder told the police that Scott passed him earlier and he was speeding.”
“No.” Mia knew Scott. “No. He never took chances when he was drunk.”
Charlie leaned forward. “Wait a second. You sound like you’ve been in the car with him when he was drunk.”
“I was.” She met his eyes. “Not with the kids, never the kids, but sometimes just me.”
“So you let him drive when you knew he was drunk?”
Mia tucked in her lips. “We both know that alcoholics can handle amounts that would put other people under the table. Of course if Scott was too drunk, I didn’t let him drive, no matter how angry he got. But there were times it wasn’t worth arguing with him if it was only a few miles and the roads were quiet. Especially since I knew how careful he was.”
Charlie looked disgusted. “Maybe he was only careful when you were in the car.”
She sighed. “You could be right. But I know Scott would never not wear a seat belt. The only time he didn’t wear one was after the doctor gave him sleeping pills. The whole next day he drove around unbelted, and he didn’t even realize it until evening. He told me he was never going to take another one of those pills again. That he couldn’t get into as much trouble with alcohol. So for a long time, he used that as his sleeping pill.”
Charlie shrugged like he didn’t believe her but didn’t want to argue.
“Well, for whatever reason, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt,” he reiterated. “And when the car hit the tree, that part of the car stopped while the rest kept moving, just like Newton said it would. Basically that means the rest of the car started to rotate around the tree. Meanwhile, because Scott wasn’t wearing a seat belt, his body kept moving forward at the same speed and in the same direction while the car was starting to move around him. His body hit the interior of the car’s passenger side, which caused a lot of damage to the right side—head, shoulder, ribs, and hip.” He touched the spots as he named them. “But that’s not all that happened. My friend who’s a forensic pathologist says that there’re really three collisions in any accident, even though they all happen in the same split second. First there’s the car hitting something. Then there’s the body hitting something inside the car.”
“So what’s the third collision?” Mia asked. Hadn’t everything stopped at that point?
“The internal organs. They follow the first law of motion too. They keep moving until they tear away or hit something hard inside you, like your ribs or your skull. In this case, when the death investigator did a chest tap, he got a syringe full of blood.” Charlie touched his chest. “That means Scott’s aorta got torn.”
“And he bled out inside.” Every word was making her flinch. “I know that part, Charlie.”
He took a second report from the file. “But in addition to the injuries on the right side of his body, there were blunt-force injuries to the left side of his head. Not the right. The left. His left cheekbone and his left jaw were broken.” He again touched the spots as he named them. “Both upper and lower.”
“Then he must have hit the dash or the steering wheel.”
“I thought of that. Which is why I talked to my friend. The fractures were depressed. He told me that means the head was probably stationary and something moving hit it. Like if you clubbed a block of Styrofoam. The Styrofoam wouldn’t crack in half. Instead, the club would leave a sunken imprint in the Styrofoam. And that’s what my pathologist friend thinks happened to Scott. He thinks he was hit twice on the side of the head with some sort of club.”
“Wait.” Mia’s thoughts were whirling. “First Scott was in an accident, and after that someone hit him in the head?”
“Well, it’s hard to see how it could be the other way around. Because he wouldn’t have been able to drive after receiving two blows like that.”
“Let me just repeat this so I can get it straight.” Mia straightened up. “You think Scott was in an accident.”
“I think his car left the road and hit a tree, yes.”
“And that hitting the tree caused his death by tearing his aorta.”
“Yes.”
“Then why would someone come along and hit him in the head if he was already dead? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“My friend said he might have lived for several minutes, maybe longer. I think someone wanted to make sure Scott was good and dead. Maybe they forced him off the road. Maybe they tampered with his car. But whatever happened, they—”
Mia caught her breath.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“The reason Scott was driving a loaner that night was because his car was in the shop. Its brakes had failed a week before.”