Cold Justice: A Judge Willa Carson Mystery (The Hunt for Justice) (2 page)

Mere inches before we’d have slammed into the rear of the white Toyota SUV sitting dead still in the middle of our northbound traffic lane.

If we hadn’t been wearing our seatbelts, we’d both have been thrown into the windshield. As it was, we were jerked back like snapped rubber bands. Fortunately, the airbags didn’t deploy, although I wondered why not while my heart pounded like a thundering herd of wild buffalo in my chest and the sound amplified in my ears.

A few moments of silence enveloped the Jeep inside and out as we gathered our senses and discovered that we were not hurt.

The fluffy down parka I wore over a heavy wool sweater padded me enough that I might avoid a dandy seatbelt-shaped bruise across my torso tomorrow.

Otherwise, we were shook up, but fine.

“What the hell?” George eventually asked. His tone implied actual curiosity, a bit of his trademark composure returning. “There’s not a sign of a taillight or a flasher on that vehicle.”

The Toyota hadn’t moved since I’d first glimpsed it. I could see no brake nor tail lights nor flashers of any kind, either.

And the engine was off.

If there had been snow on the road, the white Toyota would have been all but invisible. As it was, the blacktop beneath its wheels had provided enough contrast for me to see it. Thank God.

George flipped on the Jeep’s flashers and unbuckled his seatbelt.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, still checking to be sure I hadn’t broken any bones, trying to calm my heartbeat which was still pounding “Wipeout” in my head.

Without answering, he opened the door and stepped out onto the center of the road. “George?”

“I’ll be right back. The driver may be in trouble here,” he said, in what turned out to be the understatement of the century.

CHAPTER THREE

We hadn’t seen another vehicle for a while, and leaving the Jeep in the middle of the travel lane didn’t seem wise. The snow wall on the right shoulder left us no choice. If another vehicle slammed into the Jeep, I didn’t want to be sitting inside it. Time to get out while I still could.

After a couple of tries, I realized we were so close to the snow wall on the right that I couldn’t open the passenger door wide enough to exit.
Swell.

I wiggled around and lifted one long leg and ridiculously huge boot over the console in the middle of the Jeep’s front seat, straddling the gearshift for a few moments before I managed to get the other leg over.

There are plenty of times when being almost six feet tall is a real handicap. Climbing around inside of vehicles while dressed like a Laplander was one of them.

Eventually, I managed to get myself out through the driver’s side door and joined George where he was standing, stock still, at the Toyota. His gaze focused straight ahead.

The first thing I noticed was the driver.

A man. Thirty-five, maybe forty. Impossible to guess his height or weight because of his position and attire. He was dressed in heavy winter gear like we were, except his hands were bare of gloves and very pink with cold.

His head was bowed and he slumped forward slightly, held in place by his seat belt. Maybe he’d had a heart attack or a stroke or something. Maybe he would be okay.

Why wasn’t George trying to get into the car and help the guy?

My gaze rested on the Toyota’s windows and I recognized the whole problem.

Involuntarily, my breath sucked in with a vacuum-like roar in the silence.

The driver’s side window was shattered but still in place. The passenger side window was blown out, but a few shards remained, covered with blood and flesh and bone. And gray matter that could only have been the driver’s brain. Some of the smaller grisly bits had already frosted over in icy crystals. The rest was probably embedded in the snow bank opposite where we stood.

My joy in this magic world had shattered, too, just like the glass on the Toyota’s windows. Nerves hummed along my body unrelated to the frigid cold. Warnings I didn’t heed.

The scene was surreal. A murder in the middle of nowhere, nobody around, the Toyota and its occupant blending with the pure sparkling snow but sticking out, too. Unmistakably murder.

The area felt sinister to me now, menacing. I looked around for the shooter, even as I knew he was probably long gone. If he were nearby, watching, he’d wear camouflage to make him invisible. Either way, I didn’t see him. Which made things worse instead of better.

I’d seen gunshot wounds to the head that weren’t fatal, but I could tell even from a distance that this wasn’t one of them. Still, to be sure, I opened the door, pulled off my glove, reached through and touched his cold and bright pink flesh above his carotid artery to confirm.

He felt frozen, almost, which made me wonder how long he’d been sitting here, dead or alive. The interior of the Toyota smelled like blood and frost. Or maybe my imagination conjured those odors because as cold as he was, the smells should have already dissipated.

I stepped back and re-gloved. The temperature was way too cold for unprotected flesh to be exposed very long without frostbite.

“Do you have your cell phone?” George asked me, his question grabbing my gaze from the evidence spatter.

In all our lives together, the more serious the situation, the calmer George got. It’s one of the things that drives me crazy about him. Another man would have been shouting, panicked. In other words, normal. But not George.

“I do,” I replied.

“Call the police,” was all he said, as if the call would solve everything. Which, of course, it would not. No one knew better than me that discovering a murder victim led to years of pain for everyone involved.

But we couldn’t simply leave the scene for someone else to discover, either.

So I pulled out my cell and made the call while I continued to scan for shooters.

CHAPTER FOUR

I marched in place, trying to keep warm, which was impossible. Deep breaths drawn in through my nose burned all the way down into my lungs. Sunlight glared off the snow, blinding, even through my reflective sunglasses. Cold-induced tears seeped from the corners of my eyes and trailed warmth down my cheeks, lasting only a moment before all warmth evaporated with the saline.

George had crossed the two-lane road and was now examining snowmobile tracks on the side nearest the shoreline, opposite our two vehicles. No clue what he hoped to find over there, but I didn’t feel like tromping around and didn’t discourage his explorations beyond reminding him to be careful of the evidence.

We could have collected the victim and driven him back to town, but there seemed to be little point to that option, and it would have been counterproductive. Crime scene techs should sort this one out fairly quickly. As long as we could avoid a chain-reaction collision until help arrived.

The 911 operator had assured me that responders were on their way. The first to arrive would probably be from the Michigan State police post in Traverse City, she’d said. When I asked her how long it would take, she’d deflected. I looked at my watch. Only ten minutes had passed since the call and we were about an hour from town. I guessed we probably had fifty minutes of time to kill.

We remained alone with the body, the cold and the now-screaming quiet.

Seeking something useful to do that wouldn’t destroy the crime scene, something mundane that would make the scene less real while it kept my circulation going, I looked in the back of the Jeep and found four small plastic orange cones and flares in the emergency kit.

I walked back from the Jeep to the curve in the road that blocked a traveler’s view of both vehicles and put two cones in the northbound lane. Then, I walked the other two up to the southbound lane, about 100 feet in front of the Toyota. The cones might not have made us any safer, but I felt better doing something. Warmer, too.

When I returned to the Jeep, George had finished his survey of the snowmobile tracks and the rest of the accident scene.

“It looks like a rifle shot,” he said, pointing to the shattered driver-side glass.

“Deer hunters live in this area and just about everyone knows how to shoot a shotgun,” I replied. “But this looks like above-average marksmanship to me.”

George was a handgun enthusiast. But I knew more about forensic evidence in firearm-related deaths than he did. Besides my personal experience at crime scenes, I’d also heard plenty of expert testimony on the subject.

“You think the killer shot at the car while it was moving?” he asked.

The possibility didn’t seem likely to me. Any kind of drive-by shootings were fairly rare in Tampa, but out here they had to be non-existent. Even a highly-trained military sniper preferred not to aim at a random moving target, given a choice.

“Doubtful. Come on. Let me show you something,” I replied.

George followed me up the road a little way and around the bend where I pointed to the snow covered pavement in front of the Toyota closer than the spot where I’d placed the orange cones.

“The wind has been gusting hard. Might have blown the snow over the road there,” George said.

The road had been plowed clean. At some point yesterday or the day before the sun had heated the blacktop enough to melt any snow that had been left after the plow came through. We’d been lucky enough to drive on good road. Which was one of the reasons we hadn’t slammed into the Toyota. The pavement was fairly dry and mostly clear.

Everywhere along the blacktop, that is, except the one spot.

“Look at this.” George walked near the shoulder a little farther north. I followed him. He showed me where tracks indicated a snowmobile had left the snow and pulled onto the dry road, dragging some of the snow that had been on its runners along with it and transferring that snow onto the blacktop.

George said, “The snowmobile pulled up here and blocked the traveled lane of the highway.” He gestured with his gloved hand.

“But the Toyota never got this far,” I replied.

“So you think the snowmobile rider walked back and flagged the Toyota down?” George asked me, as if I had a crystal ball.

“That doesn’t explain the broken driver-side window and the long-range rifle shot,” I said. I stood where the snowmobile must have been parked and looked south toward the Toyota. “You can’t see the vehicle from here because of the bend in the road and the amount of snow piled up and because it’s white. If it had been a dark color, maybe it would have stood out.”

I looked at George to see if he understood my meaning. He nodded, but I explained anyway, to be sure. “Not just a lucky shot by some guy taking target practice as the cars went by. The snowmobiler stopped the Toyota intentionally.”

This was more bone chilling than the frigid cold air surrounding us, but I waited for him to recognize and verbalize the only possible conclusion. He got it fairly quickly.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Which means the snowmobiler knew who was driving the car and wanted to kill him,” he said slowly.

Hearing it from him didn’t make the truth any better.

“It looks like a set up. Yes,” I said.

I looked around again. Unlikely the guy would still be anywhere within fifty miles of us. But I didn’t like standing out in the open like this.

George bent his knees and lowered his body so that his gaze was even with what must have been the snowmobiler’s sightline. Then he stood and walked over to the snowmobile tracks on the other side of the road again.

“Let’s not disturb the scene any more than we have already,” I told him, knowing only too well the number of problems a contaminated crime scene would present at the killer’s eventual trial. And there would be a trial if I had anything to say about it.

Glancing at my watch again, I saw that only twenty minutes had passed since we’d first found the Toyota. I was thoroughly chilled outside by the weather and inside by the cold-blooded murder. Maybe the shock of the entire thing was starting to settle into my bones a little, too.

Without thinking, I took a deep breath and the cold seared all the way into my lungs again. A hint of pine scented the air and added to the burn.

George returned to the area where I’d found the snow on the road and looked at it more closely, squatting down to get a better angle. A stronger breeze had kicked up. Clouds of dry snow swirled fine white powder around us now, chafing my face and forcing my hands deeper into my pockets. One of my gloved hands connected with my phone.

Which reminded me that I should take some photos of the scene before the weather destroyed even more evidence. I removed my gloves to operate the camera and my fingers immediately stiffened as if my warm blood had immediately chilled to pudding.

The brittle cold had sucked humidity from the air and the snow. Snowmobile tracks on the road itself, if any had been there before we arrived, were blown away. By the time the state police arrived, the tracks would be completely gone, as if they’d never existed at all. No doubt the killer was counting on that very thing.

I grabbed as many snapshots as I could, blowing on my fingers from time to time to keep the joints flexible. Documenting the crime scene as well as possible under the circumstances.