As if he were fleeing something,
Brisebois wanted to say, but didn't. Instead, he asked,
"Where would he have been going that time of night?"
"Work," said their mother. "He was a watchman, at the rail yards."
"He was a teacher," said Warren.
"Retired," said their mother. "We were both teachers. Henry taught shop, I taught Home Ec. Henry was feeling—was feeling housebound, had started working, part time, as a night watchman."
"Would he have worn a uniform?"
She nodded.
"I ask because he didn't have one on. He was wearing"—
Brisebois checked his notepad—"a sweater. Slacks. Loafers. The loafers came off in the crash. Would he have kept his uniform at work?"
"I suppose," said their mother, voice distant. "I just don't understand why he would be on Ogden Road in the first place. He always took Blackfoot Trail."
Brisebois jotted this down. "And did your husband wear his seatbelt? Generally?"
"Oh yes. He was very careful about that sort of thing." Laura's mother was holding a wad of Kleenex as though clutching a rosary.
"Mrs. Curtis, your husband phoned in a complaint a few weeks ago, said someone was across the street watching your house."
"Oh, that? It turned out to be nothing. Henry was up late and thought he saw somebody prowling under a street lamp. The police came, but—I'm sure you have a report."
The officer nodded. "We do. I'm just trying to ascertain if—"
Laura's brother leaned in, bristling. "Why are you asking these questions? This is bullshit."
"I m trying to piece together what happened, and why."
"Why? I'll tell you why. Because this fuckin' city never clears its fuckin' streets after it fuckin' snows. That's why. Always waiting for a fuckin' chinook to do their work for them. Assholes. The snow gets packed in, we drive on ruts for months. Sure! Why pay for snow removal when you can wait for a la-di-da warm wind to come down from the fuckin' mountains and melt it. Well, it doesn't fuckin' melt, does it?" His voice was cracking in anguish. "Do you know how much I pay in property tax? Do you?"
"Language, Warren!"
"Sir, I understand you're upset. But I do need to—"
"A fuckin' shitload, that's how much. And what do I get for it? My father—The city, that's who did this. I pay my taxes, they raise them every year like clockwork. For what? You want to arrest someone, arrest the fuckin' mayor."
When Laura finally spoke, her voice was so soft the officer almost missed it. "Did they say what kind of sweater?
Brisebois looked at Laura. "Sorry?"
"The sweater he was wearing, did they say what kind? Was it green, a green cardigan?"
"Um..." He flipped through his pad. "No, I believe it was blue. With patterns."
"What kind of patterns?"
"I'm not sure. It'll be in the accident scene photos, and the Medical Examiner's Office will have the actual sweater. Why do you ask?"
"I was just... wondering. It doesn't really matter. Not now."
Outside, the first whisper of a warmer wind was stirring, trickling down distant mountainsides, moving across the foothills.
Above Ogden Road, the tire tracks in the packed snow would melt, first to slush and then to sludgy water. Traces of the accident would slowly vanish—except for one distinct streak of rubber, an extended skid on the asphalt where a second set of tire treads led toward the guardrail beside the bridge. Those marks would last a long, long while.
I'm asking you
—
Who is dey mugu now?
CHAPTER 5
Members of the collision reconstruction team had already gone through by the time Officer Brisebois arrived. They'd laid down tent cards for the GPS survey to follow, and under the glare of floodlights, their breath formed winter haloes.
He checked in with them first. "Colin. Greg."
The older constable, Colin, looked up, grinned. "Sergeant Brisebois. Nice of you to show up."
They never referred to him as Matthew. It was one of their few concessions to his higher rank.
Brisebois had been on call. "Pager was in my jacket. Jacket was in the coat check."
"Coat check?"
"I was at a show. Had to change in the car, if that makes you feel better."
He hoped that would be the end of it, but of course it wasn't.
"You can't sneak out of a movie? Flash your badge, demand a refund?"
"Not that kind of show."
Greg, the younger constable, laughed. "Don't tell me you were whooping it up at a peeler bar while we were out here in the cold."
"No, not that kind of show either. "
Sergeant Matthew Brisebois had been at the city ballet's annual production of
Swan Lake
, his wife's ticket on the empty seat beside him. He sighed. Might as well get it over with.
"I was at the ballet. The wife and I, we bought season passes.
Well, she did. For the both of us. Anyway, I had the tickets, seemed a waste."
"The ballet? What, like the
Nutcracker
?"
"No, not the
Nutcracker.
"
"The nutcracker?" said the younger constable. "I think I dated her.""Hell," said Colin. "I think I was married to her at one point."
He looked at the cup of coffee curling steam in Brisebois's hand.
"See you had time to stop by for a cuppa Tim's, though. We're investigators, we notice things like that."
"You brought some for us, too, I'm assuming?" asked Greg.
"I did. But I dropped it on the way down." Brisebois took a deep and intentionally satisfying drink from the cup. "So," he said.
"What do we have?"
"Pontiac Olds. Came over the hill and then left the road—down there. Hit some ice from the looks of it. Driver missed the bridge, went over the edge of the embankment. Flipped, end over end, two, maybe three times."
"Oldsmobile?" said Brisebois. "That's a lot of metal. They don't even make those anymore; it's been, what, ten years at least. So... Male. Senior citizen. Somebody's grandpa. Am I right?"
Colin nodded. "Died on scene. He's still down there. I don't know how they're going to get him out."
"Was he belted?"
"Nope."
"You run the plates yet?"
"We did. Nothing on the vehicle. Not even a speeding ticket."
"And the driver?" asked Brisebois. "You run him through PIMS?" This was the police department's updated central information system. Any previous contact with police, whether through an arrest or as a witness or in a report of any kind, from domestic disputes to noise disturbances, and the driver's name and background would pop up.
"Nothing much. He called in a complaint a couple of weeks ago about someone hanging around outside his home in the middle of the night. Turned out it was a bush."
A classic old-man complaint.
You kids get off my lawn!
Snow was filtering down, phantom flakes melting on contact.
Under the silent flash-and-throb of police lights, Brisebois and the senior constable walked over to where the car had careered off course, plummeting over the side. Tire tracks: leading off the asphalt, onto packed snow, and then—disappearing, into nothingness.
The fire department had parked a light truck on the bridge, and the spotlight was trained on the upside-down vehicle leaning drunkenly against a stand of poplar trees at the bottom of the embankment. Brisebois could see where the Olds had first hit, nose in, and then pivoted, rolling end over end. It wasn't like in the movies, where cars soared upward with a certain cinematic flair, sent off hidden ramps with their motors often as not removed ahead of time. In the real world, cars were front-heavy, and when one left the road it dropped—like a stone. An Oldsmobile? That would have been like driving a tank off the side of a cliff.
The touchdown point was a wet black bruise in the snow, shards of debris fanning outward. "Let me ask you something," Brisebois said. "From up here, where the vehicle first leaves the embankment, to where it hit, down there—from liftoff to touchdown, so to speak. That's more than a car length, wouldn't you say?"
"Yup."
They both knew what that meant: all four wheels had left the ground. The car had been airborne.
Brisebois looked up at the road that curved toward them.
"Would be hard to work up a decent speed from there. Any sign of braking?"
"Not here, where it went off the road. But there's something farther back that you should take a look at. Something strange."
They headed up, toward the flashing lights of a police cruiser that blocked off the road at the crest of the hill.
"We found these when we first walked the scene," Colin said.
There on the asphalt, and already flagged with a numbered tent card—a second set of tire marks.
Brisebois crouched down, ran his flashlight along them. "That's a hell of a skid."
The other officer nodded. "We'll pull the drag sled, find the surface friction, calculate the speed. But just from looking at it, I can tell you, whoever left these marks was travelling fast and braking hard."
Brisebois looked down toward the bridge. "So... What do you figure? Same guy?"
"Maybe. But the tracks don't line up."
He was right. The tracks that ran off the embankment, missing the guardrail, were at a different angle than the tire marks higher up. "And if he did brake halfway down, that would've made it even harder to get up the speed he'd need to become airborne."
Brisebois ran the beam of his flashlight along the skid mark.
"Whoever it was, they came to a complete stop."
Beyond the skid was a faint dusting of grit. This was part of the snowplow effect of a braking tire, pushing pebbles and dirt forward into its path. When a vehicle came to a hard stop, then rolled ahead,
through
its own debris... "We've got tread prints?"
"We do. Good ones, too. Greg already logged them, took pictures. They're faint, but very clear. Here's the weird part, though. Up ahead?" Colin angled his light low across the asphalt. "Do y'see?" The tread marks curved sharply to the left.
"The driver turned around."
"Whoever it was would have had to crank the wheel hard to make that," said Colin.
"So," said Brisebois. "This second driver comes flying over the hill, sees the first vehicle go over the side, brakes hard to a full stop, then pulls a sharp U-turn. Was the second car chasing the first one? Or did it turn around when it saw the accident, to get help?""Maybe."
"Who called it in?"
"The warehouse, over there." Colin pointed across the hill, to a distant line of docking bays under pooled light and falling snow.
"Truck drivers, unloading their long hauls late at night."
"They saw it?"
"Heard it. We've got an officer over there taking statements. Don't imagine it will be much help, though. It was dark and they're far away."
Brisebois looked again from the skid mark down to the other set of tracks. The first driver: falls asleep, or has been drinking, or maybe suffers cardiac arrest, leaves the road, missing the guardrail and plunging over the side. A second driver: sees this happen, hits the brakes, comes to a stop, turns his or her vehicle around... and leaves the scene. Why? Panicked? Maybe this second driver'd been drinking too. Or was driving without a licence, didn't want to call the cops. Or was there something else going on here?
The flatbed had arrived. Brisebois could hear its backup warnings beeping. Once the fire department got the driver's body out, the flatbed would haul the wreck to a reconstruction facility where they'd check the brake lines for tampering, begin the process of crossing items off a list, narrowing the possibilities.
Brisebois finished the last of his coffee. "I'll let you guys finish up. Measure the marks, calculate speed, all that fun stuff. I'll notify next of kin. Do you have an address?"
The other officer, Greg, grinned. "I did, but I dropped it."
"Guess I'll just look it up myself then," said Brisebois with a weary smile. And then, as he was about to leave: "Did you check for scrub marks? Down by the bridge, where the vehicle left the road, went over the side?"
"We did."
"And?"
"Just gets stranger and stranger."
CHAPTER 6
A fan stirred the humidity, raising a breath of goosebumps across her skin. Her hair, still damp from her brief foray outside, formed unintentional ringlets, wet against her skin.
He had her passport.
Inspector Ribadu—"Please, call me David," he'd said, waving her to a seat across from his desk—was turning over the blank pages as though they told a story. And maybe they did.
Above his desk, on the wall behind, the national motto:
Unity, Faith, Peace & Progress.
"All three in short supply," he joked, when he noticed her looking at it.
"Four," she said softly. She couldn't help it; when you see a discrepancy, you flag it. Four, not three.
He turned, looked at the motto as though for the first time.
"Oh no, madam. Only three are in short supply. This is Nigeria.
We have plenty of faith."
He found the stamp he was looking for in her passport, and the stapled pages that were attached.
"A letter of invitation from the Nigerian consulate. Good, good.
A mere formality, of course, as visitors are always most welcome.
Often I say, why does someone need to be invited? In Nigeria, if a visitor comes to our door, even in the midst of night, we must welcome them in."