Judged (23 page)

“You’ll see.”

Ridley looked forward and rested his chin on his chest, focusing on his steering wheel. “Where did my airbag go?”

“You already asked me that four times,” Tim said. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

The car slowed. Tim reached over and reset the cruise control with the controls on the steering wheel. He pressed the button to increase the speed.

“Keep your damn feet off of the pedals,” Tim said. He focused through the windshield. Their stop was just a mile or so ahead.

“Where are we going?” Ridley asked.

“You already asked me that as well. Your stop is right up here, and I’m going to go take care of someone else.”

“Wha…?” Ridley’s question trailed off.

The car started listing to the right. Tim reached over and steadied the wheel. Ridley’s hands dropped to his lap. Tim was then in complete control. He spotted the huge green sign hanging over the freeway in the distance. He looked at Ridley, who was passed out. Tim clicked the button on the cruise control to increase speed again. The speedometer read eighty-seven miles an hour. Through the windshield, Tim could see a small cross and plastic flowers someone had placed twenty feet off the edge of the freeway, at the three-foot-wide concrete base holding the sign.

Tim sat back in his passenger seat while controlling the steering wheel with his outstretched left hand—he started turning right. The passenger’s side wheels ran through the reflectors and rumble strips on the shoulder of the interstate. Then they found grass, as did the driver’s wheels a moment later. Tim took his aim and let go of the steering wheel. He crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes. A split second later, the SUV made impact.

Tim opened his eyes. Smoke clung to the air inside the car. He flipped the visor on his helmet and tried to get a look at himself and his surroundings. Blood covered his left arm, with a bit more on his right. He wiggled his fingers and tried moving his arms. Sharp pain came from his left arm, but his right was fine. Tim looked down. The dash of the vehicle was pinning his left leg against the seat bottom. When he tried moving it, he felt a bit of pain. His eyes went to his right leg, free and fine. Tim looked up at the shattered windshield. He could see the metal pillar of the freeway sign and some cracked concrete from its base ten feet ahead—they must have bounced backward. The hood directly in front of him was crushed but still extended almost a full two feet farther than it did on the driver’s side. Tim turned his head and looked over at Ridley. He saw one arm that looked almost undamaged, but Ridley’s torso was crushed between the dash and the seat. What remained of his head was mostly covered by the sunken-in windshield on the driver’s side. Everything was covered in red. Tim couldn’t see Ridley’s legs. Tim reached for the kitchen knife he had taped to the shoulder support of his HANS device. He pulled it off and cut through the seatbelt. He tried the door handle, which operated, but the door didn’t open. Metal from the front of the car was pinning the door closed. Tim yanked at his left leg but couldn’t free it.

“Hey, are you all right?” someone asked.

Tim looked past what remained of Ridley, through the blown-out driver-side window, to see a man rushing to the driver’s side of the car.

“What the hell?” the guy said.

“Get me out,” Tim said.

The guy stood dead in his tracks.

Tim pulled at the door handle again while shouldering the door. The door came free from whatever was pinning it, and he spilled out, still being held halfway inside the car by his pinned leg. He reached down for the buttons that operated the power seat and found the one to move it backward. His leg came free, and he fell to the ground outside the vehicle.

Tim got his legs under himself and stood. He looked down at his bloodied left leg—the damage seemed to be superficial. After undoing the tethers securing his helmet to the HANS device, he pulled it off. He tossed it in the grass and took a look at what remained of the black Mercedes. He rounded the crushed front of the SUV and approached the man that was still standing there and staring at him. Tim looked up at the shoulder of the freeway, which was lined with cars that must have witnessed the accident. Tim spotted no cops on the scene. He reached for his back waistline and pulled his pistol.

Tim pointed it at the guy, who was still stuck in place. “Which car is yours?” he asked.

The guy said nothing.

Tim walked to him, grabbed him by the back of his white T-shirt near his neck and stuck the gun in his face. “Which car, asshole?”

“The blue Ford,” the guy said.

“Show me.” Tim turned the man by the nape of his neck and started walking him toward the freeway, keeping the barrel of the gun planted against the man’s cheek.

“That one?” Tim asked.

“Yeah,” the guy said.

“Keys?”

“They’re in it.”

Tim let the guy go and walked toward the car the man had described.

He looked up and down the interstate. Aside from several people standing outside their cars and gawking, he spotted no immediate danger. Tim got into the Ford and pulled out. He got up to speed and pulled the HANS device from around his shoulders. After a few miles, he tossed it out the window and exited the freeway.

The local PD arrived a few minutes after we’d entered and cleared the property. Neither Ridley nor Wendell were there, but all the signs told us that something definitely went down at the house. The blood and liquor on the tile were still wet, so whatever had happened was recent. We found no confession letter. The bar stool had a couple of tie-down straps hanging from it. The blood on the tile was enough for a fairly significant injury, but not a fatality. The funnel had blood all over it. I wrapped up the phone call I was on with Couch and stood next to Beth in the kitchen, trying to figure out just what exactly we were looking at.

Harrington walked back into the room from a phone call he was making outside. “Any new ideas on this?”

Beth shrugged and stared down. She crouched over a spot of blood. “There’s something in this blood.” She got a closer look. “It almost looks like… Yeah it is. There are bits and pieces of teeth in this.”

“Funnel with blood, broken teeth, and empty booze bottles. Pretty much just one conclusion,” I said. “Tied to the chair, funnel jammed in mouth, and liquor poured in. About the only thing I can come up with.”

“That’s about the only thing that makes any sense. But why?” Harrington asked.

“Who the hell knows,” I said. “We need to find Ridley, though. There’s not enough blood here for this to be a homicide. If Wendell took him somewhere, we need to find out where, and fast.”

“The BOLO is out on the vehicle. We just are waiting to get a hit,” Harrington said.

“Waiting isn’t going to get us very far with this guy,” I said.

“What did Couch say?” Beth asked.

“He’s on his way with a forensics team,” I said. “We need to see if there’s any prints on any of this—specifically, fingerprints that belong to Wendell. Let’s take a look around the rest of the house until Couch and forensics get here. Maybe we can find something.”

We split up and began looking around. I left the kitchen area and walked down the hall toward the bedrooms. I took a look through each, not finding anything that would send us in a specific direction. Then I walked back to the living room and had a look around. The blinds on the window seemed to be hanging more to one side than the other, so I walked over and had a look. The window behind the blinds was closed, yet the screen behind the pane of glass looked a little bent. On the cushions of the sofa directly below the window was some dirt and grass. I stood, stared at it for a second, and then looked over my shoulder at Harrington in the kitchen. “These windows here may have been our point of entry,” I said. “You see anything over there?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. His cell phone is here, so trying to track Ridley by that isn’t going to do us any good. Kitchen stuff in a kitchen is about all I’m seeing—some drawers and cabinets open. It kind of looks like he had an abundance of liquor on hand, so it’s probably safe to say the booze came from here.”

Beth entered the room from the garage area. “Why don’t you guys come and take a look at this,” she said.

“Find something?” I asked.

“Um, I don’t know. There’s an airbag for a Mercedes lying on the garage floor in the corner.”

“Airbag?” I asked.

“Yeah, the center section of the steering wheel holds it,” Beth said.

“I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “But why was it removed?”

“I don’t know.”

“What else?” I asked.

“There’s a suitcase that’s sitting open. The little tag that you fill out at the airport and attach to your bag—that says Ridley, with the address of his wife’s house that we were at. Inside the suitcase, there’s some empty packaging for a HANS device. Not really sure what that is,” she said.

“A HANS device?” Harrington asked.

“Yeah,” Beth said.

“That’s something they use in racing. It protects your head from coming forward in an accident,” Harrington said.

I looked at Beth. “Show us,” I said.

We followed Beth to the garage.

“There’s the airbag.” She motioned toward the far corner, where a black driver-side airbag with a Mercedes logo lay on the cement next to a couple of boxes.

“The suitcase with the packaging?” I asked.

She walked us to some shelving at the front of the garage and motioned to an open suitcase lying near a pair of garbage cans.

Harrington knelt and poked his finger through the Styrofoam, plastic, and cardboard packing. “Packaging for one.” He looked back at Beth and me observing over his shoulder. “He’s staging an accident.” He stood. “I’m betting there was a helmet involved as well. The HANS device tethers to a helmet, to keep your head stable.”

“Look for a passenger-side airbag,” I said.

We pushed things to the sides and searched the garage quickly but found nothing.

“If we only have a driver-side airbag removed, it tells me that Wendell was making Ridley drive,” I said. “The safety equipment was for himself.”

“So get the guy drunk, take away his airbag, and make him crash?” Beth asked. “That’s a hell of a dangerous plan. If his goal was to kill Ridley, the accident would surely have to be severe enough to kill them both. I mean, if you just want to kill the guy, then kill him. You’re going to crash a car with both of you in it?”

“Who the hell knows?” I said. “But the safety equipment and the manner are consistent with that theory.”

“What do you mean
manner
?” she asked.

“Well, if he thinks Ridley was involved in causing his sister to die via car accident, his killing Ridley in the same fashion fits.”

“Got it,” she said. “Still, it seems too reckless. Good chance of getting yourself killed.”

I shrugged. “Who is to say that he puts any value on his own life? He doesn’t put any value on others’.”

“True,” Beth said.

“So why do you suppose he left all this just lying here?” Harrington asked.

“The jig is up. He can’t hide who he is—we know. Now he’s just scrambling to check the names off of his list,” I said.

“So Ridley, he thinks, was involved in his sister’s death. It’s the closest potential victim to him. Is Ridley the last? What happens after?” Beth asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Harrington’s phone rang. He excused himself and left the garage to take the call.

“So back to spitballing this,” Beth said. “So, if Wendell’s plan is to kill Ridley by making him crash, where is he going to do it?”

“Well, I can think of one place,” I said.

“Where his sister died?” Beth asked.

“It fits.” I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and scrolled through the e-mails I’d received from Ball. I clicked on the accident report from Wendell’s sister.

“What are you looking for?” Beth asked.

“Where exactly this took place. When Harrington gets done with his call, we’ll have him call whatever precinct covers this area and get them on alert.”

The second I finished my sentence, Harrington shot back into the garage. His face said just about everything Beth and I needed to know.

“That call,” Harrington said. “We found our BOLO vehicle. Crashed. There’s a fatality.”

“A fatality?” Beth asked. “As in singular? Just one deceased on scene?”

“Correct. Just one. Witnesses reported a man in a helmet stealing a car from someone who saw the accident and fleeing the scene.”

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Maybe ten or fifteen minutes,” Harrington said.

“The vehicle that was stolen?” I asked.

“Officers on the scene said they called it in. The station put out a BOLO.”

“That’s not good enough. Get someone on the phone who knows the car description and tag number. I’m going to call Couch. We need helicopters in the air, searching. If Wendell only has a ten- or fifteen-minute head start, we at least have a vicinity to search for the car in.”

“On it,” Harrington said.

“Where did it happen?” I pulled out my phone to dial Couch.

“North of Kendell a mile or two, on Highway 821,” Harrington said.

“The same location as where his sister died.”

“It looks like it.”

“Okay. Make the call to see what he’s driving.”

Harrington did, and I dialed Couch. The phone rang in my ear.

“Yeah, Hank,” he answered.

I quickly gave Couch everything we knew.

“Where did this happen?” Couch asked.

“As far as we can tell, it happened in the same location where his sister crashed and lost her life. Harrington is now getting the exact make and model of the vehicle he stole. What can we do about getting some helicopters in the air?”

“Let me make the call to get them up now. Call me back as soon as you know the vehicle we’re looking for.”

“Okay,” I said. “How far out are you from our location here?”

“Still twenty minutes. Is the local PD on the scene?” Couch asked.

“Yeah.”

“Head to the scene of the accident and see what you can find out. Leave the house you’re at now with the locals until I get there.”