Nice little house with a well-kept lawn and a welcome mat in front of the door. It opens before she has a chance to knock.
Hugo Garrison is at least seventy, maybe older. Hard to tell. He has a little bit of hair left and a smile as big as his belly.
“Karen?” he says.
“Yes, I apologize for being a little late.”
He opens the door wide, motioning for her to enter. “Not a problem. When you’re retired, time is just a number.”
“I supposed that’s true.”
Karen steps into the house, which immediately feels stuffy. Hugo leads her down a hall lined with boxes and into a living room, where there are more boxes and plastic containers. A space with two chairs and a table has been cleared off for them to sit. “I’m not a hoarder, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says.
She smiles. “I wasn’t thinking anything.”
Hugo offers no further explanation for all the stuff lying around. “So you said you needed some help with a case?”
“Yes, my old partner gave me your name. He said you were the best he had ever seen at crash reconstruction.”
Hugo’s smile gets even bigger. It fills up the only empty space in the room. “Percy used to say a lot of things.”
He’s right about that. Percy had been Karen’s first partner after she made detective. He taught her a lot she needed to know and a lot she didn’t. Now retired and living down near San Diego, he had been happy to keep her on the phone for an hour before giving her Hugo’s name.
Karen takes out photographs of Joey Fisher’s car. His case file had a lot of them, and she made copies of everything.
“This is the car that was hit,” she says.
The next photos she takes out of her bag are of Ivy’s car. Two years after it was reported stolen, a child had gone missing near Oxhill Lake. When it was dredged, they didn’t find the child but they did find Ivy’s car. It’s long gone now; all Karen has is the pictures from when they pulled it out of the lake.
“This car was found a couple years later,” she says. “See the damage on the front end?”
“I do.”
Hugo puts on a pair of glasses and leans in close to examine both cars. Suddenly, he stands up and walks out of the room, muttering to himself as he goes. Karen hears a bit of banging as he opens and shuts a few drawers and cabinets.
When Hugo returns, he has a magnifying glass in his hand and he’s smiling again. “This is a real doozy you brought,” he says.
“I know it may not be possible to tell—”
“I didn’t say that. I just need to see these in more detail.”
Karen waits in silence as he studies the photos. She glances around the room, noting that the wallpaper is the same kind that was in her house when she first moved in. Off-white, with dark red flowers and brown leaves. She’d removed it immediately.
Just as she starts theorizing about what he keeps in all the boxes, Hugo gets up again. He goes straight to a stack of containers in the corner and starts digging into one of them.
Files. The box is filled with files.
He returns to his seat with one of them and flips it open, thumbing through the pages with alarming speed. Hugo is muttering to himself again, and Karen does not interrupt.
“This reminds me of another case,” Hugo says. Out loud, like he’s talking to her. “Do you have pictures of the road?”
She pulls the file out of her bag. A copy of the original. “I do.”
Hugo flips through the file, stopping to study each picture. Next he looks at Ivy’s car. “I can’t tell for sure, but this looks like a Toyota 4Runner from the mid-2000s.”
Karen opens her Check This app and searches for the list about Ivy’s stolen car. “Two thousand six,” she says.
“Perfect,” Hugo says.
He gets up and disappears again, returning with an iPad. He pulls up a large color picture of the car. Karen waits as he goes back and forth between looking at the screen and looking at the picture of Joey’s car with the magnifying glass.
“Look here,” he finally says, holding out the photo. “Right here.”
She takes the magnifying glass and looks where he points. She has no idea what she is supposed to see other than a dent.
“See it?” he says.
“No.”
“Right here.” He points again. “It’s faint, but it’s there. The outline of this.” Hugo points to the 4Runner, which has square edges in the front. “Those headlights are shaped like parallelograms,” he says. “You can see one side of that shape.”
Now she sees it. A portion of the parallelogram has been imprinted onto the side of Joey’s car, right against the back door. His head had been on the other side of it.
“Now look at the other car,” Hugo says, holding out the picture of Ivy’s 4Runner. It was covered in seaweed and muck from the lake, sitting on the dirt after being removed. “The front left side.”
Karen raises the magnifying glass and focuses on the front fender, which has been crushed. The headlight is smashed.
“If I had to guess,” Hugo says, “the Toyota hit the other car at an angle, coming from the left. The force from the collision crushed the fender, and that headlight went right into the door.” He shakes his head at the photos. “Strange no one caught this at the time.”
“They were a little busy with the LeBlanc murder. It was a few days later.” Karen says this with no small amount of disdain.
“Ah.” Hugo nods. No further explanation necessary. “Well, it’s impossible to be one hundred percent sure it was a 4Runner with just the photos. What I really need is the measurements.”
“Measurements?”
“Exactly how high up this dent on the car was made. Compare that to the height of the headlight on the 4Runner. At least then you can confirm it’s the right make and model of car.”
She pulls the file out of her bag and hands it to him. “I bet they’re in here.”
“Perfect.” Hugo snaps his fingers and goes back to his iPad. “With this much detail, I bet it can be re-created.”
“The accident?”
“It’s a computer program,” he says. “We had them when I was working, but they’re a lot better now. Between the tire tracks on the street and the pictures of these cars, I bet someone can put it all together and get an accurate visual. Or as accurate as possible, given that you don’t have the cars.”
A visual re-creation of the accident would be very helpful. Juries love them.
43
Marcus and some of the guys invite Wes to go out tonight. He says yes before he says no. Bad idea. The last thing he wants to do is run into Ivy at one of the bars. She could be out with Milo. Or another guy. And she would definitely ignore him.
No desire to experience that again.
But he doesn’t want to go home, either. Being by himself, trying to work or watch TV, is another bad idea. His mind will wander, and he’ll think about Ivy. Where she is, who she’s with, and, worst of all, what she is doing. Once he reaches that point, his imagination can’t be stopped.
This is the hardest part of their breakups. Just as he gets used to their life together, it’s gone. Ripped away.