“This car cut him off. He just… he came to a dead stop, right there in the middle of the road. I barely had time to brake. And so I hit him! His c-car burst into flames!” she cried. “I got out and ran up to see if I could do anything but the flames had reached the front… someone pulled me away. I heard him screaming. I dream about it. I heard him… and then the car exploded.”
Nina looked down at her desk. “The police report says he had a five-gallon can of gasoline stored in the trunk of his Toyota. His wife said she didn't know he kept gasoline in the trunk, and if she'd known would have asked him to remove it.”
“What a horrible way to die.” Letting her head fall back, Emily screwed her eyes shut and covered her face, her shoulders clenching tightly. “My insurance company is negotiating with his wife. But my policy only covers two hundred fifty thousand, and she feels she should get much more because…” She stopped, and her arms fell down into her lap. “She lost her husband. I do understand. But I don't have that kind of money.”
Nina said, “You were drinking that night?”
“Wine with dinner,” Emily said. “Three miles home on a road I've driven a million times. Maybe I had one glass too many but I wasn't falling-down drunk. I went to a seminar on living trusts once and the lawyer mentioned that if you're ever picked up for drunk driving to refuse the Breathalyzer test, so I refused when they asked me. They took a urine test a couple of hours later.”
“The results on that won't be in for a few more days,” Nina said. “Refusing the Breathalyzer won't make any difference. They'll just extrapolate back to the time of the accident, using your weight and the elapsed time.”
Emily said, “I ought to just take my medicine, you know? Go to jail for reckless driving, file for bankruptcy. The guilt is horrible. I don't sleep. There can't be anything worse in this world than killing a person, an utterly innocent person who never dreamed his life would be cut short like that-it's a nightmare! It's over for me, I'm going to hate myself for the rest of my life. But…”
Nina listened. After several years of solo practice in her Tahoe office, it was something she was finally learning to do. She didn't offer words of comfort or false assurances. She waited to hear it all first. Emily opened her purse and her wallet and pulled out a small photo. Nina took it.
A little girl, Eurasian, bright-eyed and still with baby teeth. “She's deaf. What money I have from my husband's life insurance, I need for her education. I want her to have the best. Right now, she's in a wonderful school. They do whole language training, a mixture of signing, lipreading, and speaking. She's thriving there. I can't take her out. I can't!”
“What's her name?” Nina asked.
“Caitlin.” Emily returned the photo to her wallet.
“You saw the man-Neal Meurer-get cut off?”
“Another car cut right in front of him. I don't think the driver even knew what he did. He was long gone.”
“Do you remember anything about the car?”
“A sedan with ski racks,” she said promptly. “Wait a minute. I remember the license plate had three eights. I noticed that because my late husband was from Hong Kong. He told me how lucky the number eight is considered to be in China and I just had time to think, what a lucky license plate…”
“That's great.” Nina wrote that down and thought, Amazing. Nobody ever noticed license plates.
“I just thought of it.”
“Be sure to go to the police station on Johnson Boulevard tomorrow and tell them you want to add that to your statement.”
“I'm not positive. I'll think about it a little more.”
“What about the man in that car? You're sure it was a man?”
“Oh, yes. He had a mustache. They're out of fashion now, so I noticed.”
Nina wrote that down, too. After a few more minutes and settling the business of the retainer agreement, she followed Emily out to the parking lot of the Starlake Building. Then, buffeted by the storm, she fought her way down Pioneer Trail in the Bronco. At the corner of Golden Bear a pickup suddenly spun out in front of her. Pulling sharply to the right, she hit the snowbank. Behind her, brakes squealed.
But the car behind her didn't hit her, just honked savagely and continued on its way. Very cautiously she backed into the darkening street and drove home, teeth gritted, furious because sudden chance events that ruined lives weren't acceptable to her. Nina didn't believe in accidents.
A few days later, with light snow still falling, the lights were on in the middle of the day at Lake Tahoe Community College. Nina caught Juliette Meurer coming out of her poli sci class with a tall, bespectacled young man who had his arm around her and was kneading her shoulder.
“Oh,” she said when Nina introduced herself. “Am I allowed to talk to you?” Standing near Nina, who was on the small side, she towered. She was almost as tall as the man standing with her.
“It's not a lawsuit yet,” Nina said. “It might help.”
“This is my friend Don.”
Don shook hands, saying, “Juli's been through a lot.” He seemed cool and kept his distance. Without asking, he tagged along to the Bronco, climbing into the back seat behind Juliette. Nina drove them to the Pizza Hut near Ski Run and the three of them sat down in a booth and ordered coffee.
Nina started slow and easy, letting Juliette Meurer relive the moments after the Tahoe police called her, listening to her talk tearfully about Neal's incredible talent, his charm, how she missed him so much… In spite of the reports of frequent brawls at the house, a few of which resulted in calls from the neighbors to the police, she sounded very much in love with her husband. Don glowered next to her, saying nothing. The two of them went together very well, Nina couldn't help noticing, both handsome, athletic, blond, and long-haired.
“The gas can in the back,” Nina said. “It bothers me.”
“Neal was stupid about cars. The weather has been so bad, if you ran out of gas in the mountains you might freeze. Maybe that's what he was thinking. Poor Neal. But he would have been fine, except the woman-your client-she had been drinking, hadn't she?”
“Mmm,” Nina said. “But the thing about the gas can, you know, is that it had prints on it that weren't Neal's.”
“What?” Juliette looked stunned. “Why would the police take fingerprints?”
“Oh, to be thorough. What's amazing is that there were prints left to take. Luckily, they found a fairly large piece intact ten feet away in a drift.”
“Those prints probably came from the guy who sold Neal the gas,” said Don. “Where's the big mystery in that?”
“Well, at first I thought that, too, and it was hard to check because the can didn't have the store sticker on it or anything. But this is a small town. My investigator managed to locate the fellow who sold that gas can. They weren't his prints. He remembered selling one three days before Mr. Meurer's death, at the Chevron at the Y, and he recognized it by the bits of paint color left on the metal piece the police found. That can was the only one he could spare that day, a really old one.”
“So?” Juliette said.
“Well, the thing is, I showed him a picture of your husband just to confirm everything. And this fellow who pumps the gas says it wasn't Neal Meurer who bought it.”
“He's wrong.”