A glance in the morning light confirmed that there were no skid marks on the asphalt. Any glass or other debris from the collision would have been cleared off the road by the troopers. But if the driver had meant to kill Prescott, it made sense that he’d stop the truck, get out, and check to make sure he’d finished the job. If he’d done that, he would have left tracks.
The trouble was, there were plenty of other tracks at the scene. Sky identified the standard-issue boots the troopers wore. The paramedics usually wore sneakers. There’d be no way to tell what footgear the trucker had been wearing except by elimination.
The tinder-dry grass on the slope made for poor tracking. But the car had come to rest on a bed of sand, washed down the barrow pit by storms and runoff. Kneeling a few feet back, Sky studied the sand.
Most of the prints would have been made by the paramedics. If the truck driver had been wearing sneakers as well, picking out his tracks would involve calculating which had been made first. But no—there would have been two paramedics, and Sky could see now that there were only two sets of sneaker prints, which left—
His heart slammed as he saw it—the narrow cowboy boot print with the pointed toe. Here was another one, and another, all but covered by the larger sneaker imprints. He’d seen boot tracks like those before, near where Jasper had been shot, and it wasn’t hard to guess who might have left them. But how could the truck driver have been Marie?
Sky forced his sleep-starved mind to concentrate. Lauren had mentioned a brown truck. The Haskell trucks were brown. Stella Rawlins owned Haskell Trucking, and Marie worked for Stella. But did Marie know how to drive a semi? Was she capable of using one of those huge trucks as a murder weapon?
There was a lot he didn’t know about his cousin, Sky reminded himself. Marie had come a long way from the little girl he’d left crying in the kitchen the night he ran away.
But maybe he was wrong about the boot prints. Some truckers wore cowboy boots. And not all truckers had big feet. Some were even women. He needed more evidence. And even if he found it, there were still a lot of questions to be answered.
Using his cell phone as a camera, he snapped photos of the tracks, then walked a cautious circle around the Cadillac, taking pictures of the wreck from all sides. That done, he headed back up to his pickup.
Halfway out of the barrow pit, his eyes glimpsed something bright in the yellowed grass. There, at his feet, was a cheap cigarette lighter encased in pink plastic, exactly like the one he’d seen Marie use. After snapping a photo, he took out his handkerchief and picked it up. It was clean and free of dust, which meant it couldn’t have been here long.
How many macho truckers would carry a pink cigarette lighter? It wasn’t final proof, but if Marie had dropped it, the fingerprints should tell the tale.
With the lighter safely wrapped in the handkerchief, Sky climbed back into his truck. His thoughts churned like black dust in a twister as he started the engine and pulled onto the road.
He’d been cutting Marie slack from the first night he’d seen her in the Blue Coyote. When she’d blamed Coy for shooting Jasper, he’d chosen to believe her, and he’d looked the other way when he found the marijuana patch. Even when Coy’s body turned up, he’d kept his suspicions secret, telling himself there was no evidence against her and that the wistful little girl of his childhood memories couldn’t be a murderess.
But it was time to face the truth—and time to act on it.
Twenty minutes later he arrived at the Rimrock and parked next to Beau’s Jeep. He found Beau alone in the kitchen, drinking his morning coffee.
Beau glanced up as Sky walked in. “You look like you just spent a night in hell,” he said. “We got the message you left. How’s Lauren?”
“Awake and giving me sass. Those nurses are going to have to hog-tie her to the bed. I promised her that if she’d rest, I’d call the mortuary and write a press release about her father. Maybe you could give me a hand with that.”
“Sure. Heart attack, right?”
“Right. Short and sweet. No mention of the scandal or the gunshot. Funeral pending. When it’s ready, we can e-mail it to the local TV and radio stations and the newspaper.” Sky fished in his pocket for his cell phone and the lighter he’d wrapped in his handkerchief. “Right now I’ve got something you’ll want to see.
”
He showed Beau the photos he’d taken and the lighter he’d found at the crash site. While Beau studied the evidence, Sky got a lock-top sandwich bag and slipped the lighter into it. “Lauren says she was rammed by a big brown truck. Sound familiar?”
“The Haskell trucks are brown. But we’ll need more than this to prove the driver was your cousin.”
“How about fingerprints? It shouldn’t be too hard to get a bottle or can from the Blue Coyote with Marie’s prints on it. If the prints on that lighter are a match, we can put her at the scene.”
“But we’d also have to prove she was driving the truck. For that we’d need to show cause and get a warrant to search the Haskell lot for the truck.” Beau glanced at Sky. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
Sky gave him a grim nod. “If we want to go ahead with this, we’ll need to involve your buddy Abner.”
“Leave Abner to me. The fact that he’s running for office will put some pressure on him. He might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he’s smart enough to know that an arrest will make him look good to the voters.” Beau pushed his chair back from the desk and stood. “Marie’s your cousin, Sky, the closest thing you had to a sister growing up. Are you sure you can do this without backing off?”
“Damned sure. She almost murdered Lauren. The woman’s got to be stopped.”
“Then here’s what I’m thinking,” Beau said. “Hear me out, and feel free to argue when I’m finished. If the truck checks out, we may be able to get Marie for attempted murder. But a smart lawyer could claim the wreck was Lauren’s fault and get the charge reduced to leaving the scene of an accident. That’s a slap on the wrist—most likely a fine and probation or a few weeks in the county jail.”
Sky forced himself to keep quiet and listen. Beau was making sense, he knew. But that didn’t mean he had to like what he was hearing.
“Marie had no reason to ram Prescott’s car unless she was following orders,” Beau said. “What we really want is to get the person behind those orders—and behind a lot of other things. I’d say we give Marie some rope, let her work her way into Stella’s organization. As long as she doesn’t know we’re onto her, she could slip up again. Meanwhile we can look for ways to prove she shot Jasper and murdered her brother.”