There was another knot of people just to the right of the driveway, none of them speaking. Carver set the tip of his cane on firm concrete and limped over to see what they were staring at.
Something in him knew even before he saw the woman sprawled on the gravel shoulder. Dread jogged his memory and he glanced toward the parking lot to see again a barely noticed gray LeBaron convertible with its door hanging open, a straw purse visible on the front seat.
“. . . thought I saw her earlier in the restaurant,” a woman’s quavering voice said as Carver found an opening in the crowd and pushed his way to where he’d have a clear view.
He’d seen the woman earlier in the restaurant, too.
Donna Winship lay on her side with one arm pinned beneath her body, the other flung above her head as if she were making a dramatic gesture. Her modest blue dress was torn and bloody and worked by the rolling of her body up around her hips, revealing lacerated legs and ripped panty hose that hung like strips of flesh. Maybe some of it was strips of flesh. She was shoeless, and one of the panty hose feet was loose and yanked to form a point about six inches beyond her toes, as if she’d tugged it that way as she’d begun to undress. Her wildly tumbled hair concealed most of her face, but Carver could see that beneath the cuts and dirt her expression was peaceful.
A highway patrol car reached the jackknifed trailer first, followed within seconds by another that arrived from the opposite direction and cut across the grassy median.
One of the troopers began setting out flares along the highway while the other talked to the truck driver, who now had his legs drawn up and his face resting on his knees. Someone pointed toward the people around Donna Winship, and the trooper looked grim and began jogging toward the newly discovered accident victim.
People moved aside, but when the trooper, a young guy with a deep tan and close-cut black hair, got to within twenty feet of Donna he saw that she was obviously dead. He came the rest of the way at a walk. Behind him, more emergency vehicles were arriving, including an ambulance. Two attendants were talking to the truck driver now, bending over him with their hands on their knees.
The young trooper knelt down and looked at Donna but didn’t touch her, then he straightened up and hitched a thumb in his belt. He looked suddenly older, and sad and tired. His job was a weight.
“Anyone know who she is?” he asked.
Carver said he did. He took a few steps forward and leaned on his cane. The trooper looked him up and down, then politely asked him to accompany him to the patrol car. Carver walked alongside him, glancing out to sea, thinking of the peaceful expression on Donna’s face and for some reason remembering the gulls that had taken wing immediately after the accident. The trooper who’d laid out the flares approached, nodded with an unfathomable look at his colleague, then continued past them on his way to make sure no one disturbed the body.
A plainclothes cop from the Sheriff’s Department joined Carver and the trooper in the car, introducing himself as Sergeant Dave Belquest. He sat in the back and laid a tiny tape recorder on the top of the front seat-back, near Carver. He was a beefy man of about fifty, stuffed into a wrinkled and perspiration-stained light gray suit. He had bushy gray eyebrows, gray tufts of hair protruding from his ears and nostrils. As soon as he’d entered the car, the interior smelled strongly of stale tobacco. Carver smoked an occasional after-dinner cigar himself and hoped he never smelled like that.
Carver acknowledged that he was aware the conversation was being taped, then gave them his statement. He described everything that had occurred between himself and Donna Winship inside the Happy Lobster. Everything other than her affair with Enrico Thomas; this was, after all, Beth’s friend, and he owed her something for her thousand dollars. Ethics had gotten him into trouble before, and he knew they might this time, too. But the daughter, Megan, had lost her mother and deserved a memory unblemished by Carver.
“You say she left the restaurant about ten minutes before you heard the crash?” Belquest asked in a hoarse, death-wish smoker’s voice. The tobacco stench came at Carver even stronger, like a warning.
“That’d be my guess,” Carver said. Beside him, the trooper was jotting things on a leather-bound notepad.
“Any more guesses?” Belquest asked.
“I think she was driving the gray LeBaron convertible in the parking lot. Its door is hanging open, and what looks like the purse she had in the restaurant is on the front seat.”
Belquest’s right hand moved to the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket and touched them. Withdrew. He wanted to light up but knew he couldn’t in the close confines of the patrol car. It was almost as warm in there as outside; the engine was idling but the trooper must not have set the air conditioner on high. “The parking valet said the victim sat in her car for a while, then got out and walked over to the highway. He thought she might be having car trouble and was going to flag down someone to give her a ride to a station. He noticed she’d left her car door open, and he was walking over to close it before seeing if he could help her, when he heard the truck’s brakes. Didn’t even see her get hit, is what he said. He was watching the truck skid down the highway, then hit the shoulder and turn over.”
“You’d think if she had car trouble, she would have come back in the restaurant and phoned. Or maybe asked me for a lift.”
“I’d think that,” Belquest said. “But the valet didn’t. He’s a sixteen-year-old kid and was probably thinking of girls or surfing or the new Paula Abdul record.” He sounded irritated.
“What’s the truck driver say?” Carver asked.
“That she stepped out in front of the truck. Looked to him like it was on purpose.” Belquest’s right hand feinted toward his cigarettes again, then rested on the back of the front seat near the recorder. Nicotine had him in too tight a grip to let go easily. “You think she was in that kind of a mood when she left the restaurant?”
Carver thought about that. What kind of a mood was it that prompted someone to step deliberately in front of twenty tons of truck?
“You said she was tense,” Belquest pointed out. “Was she that tense, do you think?”
“There’s no way to be sure,” Carver said, “but she might have been. She had plenty of reason.”
Belquest looked out the car window at Donna’s body being loaded into a second ambulance that had arrived after the first had carted away the driver for examination and possible treatment. Two tow trucks were parked near the overturned truck now, their drivers standing and apparently discussing how to right the behemoth. Traffic was moving again, crushing oranges, waved on by the first trooper on the scene.
“People do things on impulse,” Belquest said. “Suicides don’t always seem in the mood when they commit the act. I knew a cop once, just got married, got a promotion, then ate his gun. Seemed happy only an hour before, on his way to living out the American dream.”
Carver said, “Something must have changed for him. He found himself in some other country and some other dream.”
“Odd she’d hire you to follow her,” Belquest said. “Didn’t that make you curious?”
“Sure. I tried to get her to tell me her reason, but she refused.”
“How come you’d accept a case like that?”
“Donna Winship was a friend of a friend who was worried about her.”
“Good friend?”
“To both of us.”
“What’s this good friend’s name?”
Carver gave him Beth Jackson’s name, then the address he wanted to give him.