Gregor walked back and forth along the sidewalk. One of the pictures Stewart had shown him on Cavanaugh Street was of the truck on these rocks, on its side. The good thing about cell phone photographs was that they were available in an emergency. The bad thing was that the image quality often sucked, and Gregor hadn’t realized, from that particular photograph, just how steep and ragged the outcropping was. It didn’t matter that it had no sharp edges. There were so many thrusts of rock going in so many different directions, any vehicle that landed on them would be totaled by definition.
“He was lying against the door, wasn’t he,” Gregor said. “I’m trying to remember this from Stewart’s photographs. He was lying against the door, and the door must have been lying against the rocks. He was in the front passenger seat.”
“Right,” Jerry Young said.
“Was he wearing a seat belt?” Gregor asked.
“No, I don’t think he was,” Jerry Young said. “But does that matter? He didn’t die in the crash. He died of a gunshot wound. Why would you care if he was wearing one or not?”
“I don’t care if he wasn’t wearing one,” Gregor said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Lots of people don’t wear seat belts when they should. If he was wearing one, though, it would mean he’d gotten into the car intending to go somewhere. Which would have been useful information.”
“Ah,” Jerry Young said, but he still looked confused.
“Okay,” Gregor said. “Let’s see if I can get this straight. He was in the truck, and the truck was coming from the center of town when it went off the road. Is there any way you can know if he was in the passenger seat when the truck left town? I assume it had to have been coming from there, right, because he was with Arrow Normand and she would have been on the set of this movie they’re making.”
“I don’t think so,” Clara Walsh said. “I mean, they don’t always shoot everybody every day, but Mark Anderman would have had to be on the set that morning because he had some kind of technical job.”
“And they did film that morning?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, yes, in the beginning,” Clara Walsh said. “We checked into that. It made the people in town laugh their heads off, but what are you going to do? If we’d said there was a good chance of a major earthquake, they probably would have taken us seriously. But nobody knows what a nor’easter is really like unless they live here.”
“So,” Gregor said. “Mark Anderman was at work, and then work stopped sometime that morning—”
“About one in the afternoon,” Jerry Young said. “I was sitting in Cuddy’s when Marcey Mandret came in and started drinking champagne cocktails like they were water. I guess by then the snow had gotten so bad they’d just given up.”
“Huh,” Gregor said again. He walked back and forth, back and forth, but there was nothing to see, and he had never understood fictional detectives who seemed to be able to bring insights out of obsessive behavior. There were the rocks, and the sea, and the picture in his mind of the truck crashed on them. He wanted to establish a sequence. His major problem was that he wasn’t sure a sequence of what.
He tried one more time. “Mark Anderman was riding in the passenger seat,” he said, “and who was driving? Arrow Normand was driving?”
“She told Dr. Falmer she was,” Jerry Young said. “At least, that’s what Dr. Falmer reported. Arrow Normand came to her door and started babbling about how there had been an accident, and it was her fault. I figure she wouldn’t have said it was her fault if she hadn’t been driving.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s assume that for the moment, for the sake of argument. They came along this road. Arrow Normand was driving. Mark Anderman was in the passenger seat. The truck went off the road. Here’s the first question: why did the truck go off the road? Yes, I know there was a nor’easter. I know a lot of vehicles were going off the road. But why did this one go off the road? The first possibility is that somebody shot Mark Anderman in the head. Assuming he was shot in the car, it would have to have been somebody sitting next to him, not behind him. Again, assuming Stewart’s pictures are correct—”
“Do you mean you think he doctored them?” Clara Walsh said.
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t. So it would have to have been somebody in the car, and then the chances are good that the person who did shoot him was not Arrow Normand.”
Now all three of them looked surprised. “How could you know that?” Bram Winder demanded. “If she was driving the car, and he was in the car—”