Sight Unseen(4)

Finally, she saw a familiar face. Lieutenant Wallace Poole, a tall, gangly, bald man who seemed to be doing little other than positioning himself toward the bank of news cameras.

Poole …

Kendra tried to remember if she had pissed him off during the Petco Stadium case a couple years before. Not that much, apparently. He stepped closer and waved her through the police line while simultaneously quieting the walkie-talkie-wielding traffic cop. He smiled. “Why, Dr. Michaels, what brings you here?”

“The same thing that brings you. How many fatalities?”

“Four.” He gestured back to the three wrecked vehicles on the bridge. “A man and woman in the convertible, a man in the pickup truck, and a woman in the minivan.” Poole’s eyes narrowed on her face. “I thought you only helped out on murder cases. Who called you in?”

“I’m being rude.” Kendra motioned toward Halley. “This is Dean Halley. Care to walk us through it?”

Poole appeared more mystified than before, but he nodded. “Uh, sure.” He led them past a fire truck and a line of road flares.

Dean shot her a “what-in-the-hell-are-we-doing” glance, but Kendra was busy scanning the scene in front of her.

The pickup truck, charred and dripping with extinguisher foam, was still smoldering alongside the bridge’s right-hand railing. A gray tarp was thrown over the driver’s compartment, obviously to conceal a corpse. The convertible BMW was right behind, grill first into the granite railing. The minivan was on its side a few paces behind, also surrounded by mounds of extinguisher foam.

Poole motioned toward the pickup truck. “We figure the driver of the truck lost control and plowed into the bridge. It triggered a chain reaction. The Beamer swerved and hit the stone railing. The van swerved the other way, rolled, and ended on its side.”

Kendra nodded. “No one was wearing seat belts?”

“No. That’s probably why none of them survived.”

“And no air bags deployed?”

“No. The investigators say it’s not all that uncommon unfortunately. They get stolen, or if they’re deployed once, they’re expensive to replace, and some people just don’t do it. It’s also possible that the crash sensors were faulty, or the trigger wires can get severed early in the crash sequence.”

“That took four lives.” Kendra leaned toward the BMW 320 coupe. It was easily the most intact of the cars, with no fire and only damaged at the crumpled front end. Two bodies were slumped in the front seat. They were a man and a woman, late twenties, both dressed in buttoned-down business attire, as if they were on their way home from a Fortune 500 board meeting. Blood ran from their heads and was splattered across the windshield. There were two impact shatter points on the glass, one in front of each victim.

“Anything about this look strange to you?” Kendra asked Poole.

“It all looks strange to me. What are you getting at?”

“Look at the number of windshield cracks radiating out from the impact points. The number is proportional to impact speed. With the speed that would have been necessary for those skulls to cause these kind of cracks, there should have been much more damage to this car’s front end when it struck the railing. I could see that from a barroom TV on Fifth Street. That was the first thing I noticed.” She leaned over the windshield and examined it more closely. “May I borrow an evidence glove?”

Poole peeled off his right glove and gave it to her. Kendra slipped it on and rubbed her fingers across the cracks, both inside the windshield and outside. She occasionally closed her eyes, letting her sense of touch guide her in a way that was seldom necessary anymore.

She finally looked up and stepped away. “And, what’s more, the force of impact came from outside this windshield, not the inside.”

Poole leaned down to look. “Both sides are shattered. How can you tell?”

“There are two kinds of fractures here. Radial fractures, which jut out like the spokes of a wheel, and concentric fractures, which are like a series of circles radiating outward. The concentric fractures are always on the impact side. It’s difficult to see which side they’re actually on, but you can feel them.” She peeled off the glove and handed it to Poole. “Want to try?”

“No thanks. I’ll take your word for it.”

“Anyway, your forensics guys will back me up.” Kendra glanced around. “I take it no one actually saw the accident?”

“No. The zoo and botanical gardens had been closed for hours. There’s not a lot of traffic here after dark.”

“So what were the victims doing here?”