Suddenly a dark green Mercedes appeared from out of nowhere and caught the girl’s car broadside, flipping the vehicle with all the expertise of a movie stunt. Brakes squealed all around me like a chorus of squawking birds and I could hear the successive thumps of colliding cars piling up behind me in a drumroll of destruction. It was over in an instant, a cloud of dust roiling up from the shoulder where the girl’s car had finally come to rest, right side up, half-buried in the shrubbery. She had sheared off one of the support posts for the exit sign that now leaned crazily across her car roof. The ensuing silence was profound.
I pulled over and was out of my car like a shot, the fellow from the navy-blue pickup truck right behind me. There must have been five of us running toward the wreckage, spurred by the possibility of exploding gasoline, which mercifully did not ignite. The white car was accordion-folded, the door on the driver’s side jammed shut. Steam billowed out from under the hood with an alarming hiss. The impact had rammed the girl head first into the windshield, which had cracked in a star-burst effect. She was unconscious, her face bathed in blood. I willed myself to move toward her though my instinct was to turn away in horror.
The guy from the pickup truck nearly wrenched the car door off its hinges in one of those emergency-generated bursts of strength that can’t be duplicated under ordinary circumstances. As he reached for her, I caught his arm.
“Don’t move her,” I said. “Let the paramedics handle this.”
He gave me a startled look but drew back as he was told. I shed my windbreaker and we used it to form a compress, stanching the flow of blood from the worst of her cuts. The guy was in his twenties, with dark curly hair and dark eyes filled with anxiety.
Over my shoulder, someone was asking me if I knew first aid, and I realized that others had been hurt in the accident as well. The driver from the green Mercedes was already using the roadside emergency phone, presumably calling police and ambulance. I looked back at the guy from the pickup truck, who was pressing the girl’s neck, looking for a pulse.
“Is she alive?” I asked.
“Looks like it.”
I jerked my head at the people on the berm behind me. “Let me see what I can do down there until the ambulance comes,” I said. “Holler if you need me.”
He nodded in reply.
I left him with the girl and moved along the shoulder toward a writhing man whose leg was visibly broken. A woman was sobbing hysterically somewhere close by and her cries added an eerie counterpoint to the moans of those in pain. The fellow from the red Porsche simply stood there numb, immobilized by shock.
Meanwhile, traffic had slowed to a crawl and commuters were rubbernecking as if freeway accidents were some sort of spectator sport and this was the main event. Sirens approached. The next hour was a blur of police and emergency vehicles. I spotted my friend John Birkett, a photographer from the local paper, who’d reached the scene moments behind the paramedics. I remember marveling at the speed with which news of the pileup had spread. I watched as the girl was loaded into the ambulance. While flashbulbs went off, several of us gave our accounts of the accident to the highway patrol officer, conferring with one another compulsively as if repetition might relieve us of tension and distress. I didn’t get home until nearly seven and my hands were still shaking. The jumble of images made sleep a torment of sudden awakenings, my foot jerking in a dream sequence as I slammed on my brakes again and again.
When I read in the morning paper that the girl had died, I felt sick with regret. The article was brief. Caroline Spurrier was twenty-two, a senior psychology major at the University of California, Santa Teresa. She was a native of Denver, Colorado, just two months short of graduation at the time of her death. The photograph showed shoulder-length blond hair, bright eyes, and an impish grin. According to the paper, six other people had suffered injuries, none fatal. The weight of the young woman’s death settled in my chest like a cold I couldn’t shake.
My office in town was being repainted, so I worked at home that next week, catching up on reports. On Thursday, when the knock came, I’d just broken for lunch. I opened the door. At first glance, I thought the dead girl was miraculously alive, restored to health, and standing on my doorstep with all the solemnity of a ghost. The illusion was dispelled. A close look showed a blond woman in her midforties, her face etched with weariness.
“I’m Michelle Spurrier,” she said. “I understand you were a witness to my daughter’s accident.”
I stepped back. “Please come in. I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Spurrier. That was terrible.”
She moved past me like a sleepwalker as I closed the door.
“Please sit down. Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head, looking around with bewilderment as if she couldn’t quite remember what had brought her here. She set her purse aside and sank down on my couch, placing her cupped hands across her nose and mouth like an oxygen mask.
I sat down beside her, watching as she breathed deeply, struggling to speak. “Take your time,” I said.
When the words came, her voice was so low I had to lean closely to hear her. “The police examined Caroline’s car at the impound lot and found a bullet hole in the window on the passenger side. My daughter was shot.” She burst into tears.
I sat beside her while she poured out a grief tinged with rage and frustration. I brought her a glass of water and a fistful of tissues, small comfort, but all I could think to do. “What are the police telling you?” I asked when she’d composed herself.
She blew her nose and then took another deep breath. “The case has been transferred from traffic detail to homicide. The officer I talked to this morning says it looks like a random freeway shooting, but I don’t believe it.”
“God knows they’ve had enough of those down in Los Angeles,” I remarked.
“Well, I can’t accept that. For one thing, what was she doing speeding down the highway at that hour of the day? She was supposed to be at work, but they tell me she left abruptly without a word to anyone.”
“Where was she employed?”
“A restaurant out in Colgate. She’d been waiting tables there for a year. The shift manager told me a man had been harassing her. He thinks she might have left to try to get away from him.”
“Did he know who the guy was?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t sure. Some fellow she’d been dating. Apparently, he kept stopping by the restaurant, calling her at all hours, making a terrible pest of himself. Lieutenant Dolan tells me you’re a private detective, which is why I’m here. I want you to find out who’s responsible for this.”
“Mrs. Spurrier, the police here are very competent. I’m sure they’re doing everything possible.”
“Skip the public relations message,” she said with bitterness, “I have to fly back to Denver. Caroline’s stepfather is very ill and I need to get home, but I can’t go unless I know someone here is looking into this. Please.”
I thought about it briefly, but it didn’t take much to persuade me. As a witness to the accident, I felt more than a professional interest in the case. “I’ll need the names of her friends,” I said.
I made a note of Mrs. Spurrier’s address and phone number, along with the name of Caroline’s roommate and the restaurant where she’d worked. I drew up a standard contract, waiving the advance. I’d bill her later for whatever time I put in. Ordinarily I bypass police business in an attempt to stay out of Lieutenant Dolan’s way. As the officer in charge of homicide, he’s not crazy about private eyes. Though he’s fairly tolerant of me, I couldn’t imagine what she’d had to threaten to warrant the referral.