Sight Unseen Read Free

bridge’s two-lane roadway. She motioned for him to join her.
    The traffic officer glared at him and raised her walkie-talkie as she would a lethal weapon. “Sir, don’t even think of leaving your car there. I have a tow truck on speed dial.”
    Kendra waved him over again. Dean hesitated, then climbed out of the car.
    The stocky cop shouted something that was lost in the roar of the circling news’copters. Kendra surveyed the scene behind her. There had to be someone she knew here. She had assisted in a few police investigations in the past few years, but none of them involved the accident-investigations cops now on the bridge snapping photos and taping off the scene.
    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