"That's it."
"This is about the judge's murder, isn't it?"
"Three deaths in one family raise interesting questions," Kerney replied.
"That accident was a clear-cut hit and run."
"You're probably right," Kerney said. "But I'd love to know who was behind the wheel of the car."
Kerney toured the Roswell furniture stores looking for an elderly salesman with gray hair and a mustache. At a downtown family-owned establishment he met up with Harry Bodecker, a part-time employee who matched Waxman's description. Bodecker nodded his head vigorously when Kerney asked about the hit-and-run accident.
"How could I forget that," Bodecker said. "It was just awful. Seeing that young man with his brains splattered on the pavement."
"Not a pretty sight," Kerney said. "You told the deputy you didn't recall a vehicle passing in the opposite direction just before you came upon the accident."
Clearly nervous for some reason, Bodecker cast a glance at the back office, looked around the empty showroom, and fiddled with the cuff of his shirt. "Let me ask the boss if I can take a break. He wouldn't want me talking to you on company time, and I don't want to lose my job. It's hard to get by on Social Security."
"No problem," Kerney said.
"I'll wait."
Bodecker made a short trip to talk to someone in the office and then beckoned Kerney to follow him through double swinging doors into a storage room.
Outside on the loading dock, Bodecker smiled and lit a cigarette. "Too addicted to stop and too old to care," he said, as he sucked in the smoke. "I didn't see a car pass me."
"Are you positive?" Kerney asked.
"Almost certain. There wasn't a lot of traffic on the road. I think the snowstorm in the mountains may have had something to do with it. It was coming down really heavy when I left Ruidoso."
"Didn't you tell the deputy the sun was setting when you got to the accident?"
"It was. You know how it goes out here. Snowing in one place and clear twenty miles away."
"No clouds?"
"Sure, but the sun broke through for a little while right around dusk."
"For how long?"
"About the time I found the bicyclist on the road."
"Did you give this information to the deputy?"
"The only thing he asked me is what time I got there and what the weather was like when I arrived. Then he got busy setting up things so people wouldn't pile into each other."
"You directed traffic until the deputy arrived."
"On the eastbound lane. Another driver stopped and did the same in the opposite lane."
"Did you let cars go through before the deputy arrived?" Kerney asked, wondering if any evidence could have been scattered or destroyed by vehicles passing by.
Bodecker nodded and took another drag. "On the shoulders. It wasn't my place to stop them."
"About how many cars went by?"
"Maybe ten or twelve."
"Did you see anything in the road? A hazard, any litter?"
"Not in the road. There were some cardboard boxes off to one side. I moved them so the cars could get by."
"Where were the cardboard boxes before you moved them?"
"When I first got there? Near the dead man. Then the wind picked up and blew them across the highway."
"Into the eastbound lane?"
"Did you tell that to the deputy?"
"No," Bodecker replied. "Like I said, he was real busy. As soon as the first firefighters showed up I left."
"What about the other driver who stopped?"
"He drove away the same time I did." Bodecker brushed ashes off his jacket, ground out his smoke with the toe of his shoe, and kicked it off the loading dock. "I've gotta get back. I work only the slowest sales days of the week, so I don't earn much in commissions. And the salary isn't all that great, either."
"That doesn't sound fair."
Bodecker smiled ruefully and shrugged his slightly stooped shoulders. "Old geezers like me don't get the gravy jobs. But it beats eating canned pork and beans for a week before my Social Security check arrives."
Kerney sat in the newsroom with the meteorologist of a local television station and asked him to confirm weather conditions on the day of Arthur Langsford's death. Round-faced, with a toothy smile and a swept-back stylish haircut, the man swung his attention to his computer punched up data from the National Weather Service, pointed a stubby finger at the monitor, and traced a series of contour lines.
"A fast-moving low pressure front from the Gulf of Mexico entered the state that morning, crossed the southwest quadrant, stalled over the Sacramento Mountains, dumped eight inches of snow on Ruidoso, and then petered out," he said.
"Did it move east toward Roswell at all?" Kerney asked.
The man shook his head. "It was dry as a bone on the plains. Compared to Ruidoso we had a twenty-degree difference in our high temperature that day. Warm and sunny."
"What about the cloud cover around sunset in the foothills?"
"By the ten o'clock news that night, Roswell was mostly cloudy with a sharp drop in temperature. I'd say we probably had the same conditions in the foothills at sunset. The front slowed as it broke up."
"So with the winter sun low in the sky, it's likely there wouldn't have been a problem with glare or blinding sunshine in late afternoon."
"That would be my bet," the meteorologist said, as he swung the task chair to face Kerney, his television-camera smile firmly in place.
"This is a first for me. I've never been asked by the police to verify weather conditions. It must be important. What kind of case is it?"
The man's interest put Kerney's guard up. He didn't need a TV weatherman passing along a hot tip to the newsroom staff. "It's an internal matter."
Recognition showed on the man's face. "Wait a minute, aren't you the officer who shot the state police sergeant in Alamogordo? Yeah, you are. Deputy Chief Kerney. Now I've got it."
"I'll let you get back to work," Kerney said, as he crossed to the door.
"Thanks for your help."
Behind him, Kerney heard footsteps. At the door, he glanced back and saw the man whispering to a young female reporter at a nearby desk. She looked at Kerney with blatant curiosity, reached for a notebook, and dogged him out of the building, calling his name and firing questions.
He made it to his unit without comment, waved, cranked the engine, and drove off. She trotted alongside the unit shouting questions as he picked up speed. In the rearview mirror he watched her slap the notebook against a leg in frustration and hurry back inside. He doubted that her interest in pursuing the story had cooled.
Senior Patrol Officer Tim Dwyer had a brisk, intelligent look, a self-confident manner, and a straightforward style. Had he been wearing a business suit instead of his state police uniform, Kerney would have pegged him as an up-and-coming corporate executive. One of a handful of accident reconstruction experts in the department, Dwyer was frequently used to handle complex vehicular investigations.
In a small office at the Roswell district headquarters, where Dwyer was assigned, Kerney laid out the facts and his suspicions surrounding Arthur Langsford's death.
Dwyer had greeted him with guarded detachment, which Kerney figured to be directly related to the Shockley incident and the back channel gossip about it circulating within the department. When he finished telling Dwyer want he wanted, the officer nodded curtly, asked for the accident report, and read it without comment. Kerney watched in silence as Dwyer spread Waxman's photographs, field sketch, and his field reconstruction drawing on the desk, and gave them a close look.
When he was done he stacked the paperwork in a neat pile and looked up.
"Ninety percent of all vehicle accidents are caused by driver error," he said. "This one fits the profile, but what made the driver swerve is anybody's guess. If those cardboard boxes were empty, the wind could have been blowing them back and forth across the road between the fence lines like Ping-Pong balls. Or maybe the driver was daydreaming or changing stations on the car radio."