The Reconstructionist Read Free Page B

avalanche.’
    Ellis meant it as a joke, but Boggs only shook his head, as if he had encountered avalanche-struck vehicles from time to time, but this was not one. Looking at the vehicle again – the terrible dents and tears and missing windows and lamps – Ellis didn’t know how to begin to make an intelligent guess. He said, ‘Um –’
    ‘Rollover damage,’ Boggs said, ‘at highway speeds. Happens every day, more or less. The left rear tyre blew out, and the causes of that are being argued, but whatever the reason, it blew out and induced a leftward drift. The driver attempted to steer back to the right but over-corrected, and very quickly the vehicle had turned almost sideways. The left-side wheel rims bit into the roadway, the right-side wheels lifted, and the whole thing vaulted. After that, it spun and bounced along like a punted football.’
    ‘How many people were inside?’
    ‘Five occupants. Two fully ejected, three partially ejected. Five fatalities.’
    ‘All of them?’
    ‘Dead before the vehicle stopped moving. A matter of seconds.’
    ‘That’s horrible.’
    ‘It is. It really is. And now it’s part of a very expensive lawsuit.’ He put a hand back through his hair, and it stood out yet more from his head. ‘So. Let’s say that you are a reconstructionist. You’ve been asked by an attorney involved in a very expensive lawsuit to examine this vehicle. Could you tell him how many times it rolled over?’ After a second he amended, ‘At least how many times.’
    Ellis touched a scarred door, the metal cold and abrasive. He stepped back and examined the forms of the damage, the denting, scraping and tearing. It looked as if it might have been spun inside a concrete mixer. He admitted, ‘I really have no idea.’
    ‘Look at the scratch patterns,’ Boggs said.
    Ellis wasn’t sure what he meant by patterns. Random scratches seemed to be everywhere – single long scratches, scratches in pairs and threesomes, groups of light scratches and areas that looked as if they had been attacked with a power sander. Boggs pointed to a location on the passenger-side fender. ‘Like these.’
    Here was some scratching of the power-sander variety, gouged deep into the sheet metal, while above and coming down into the deeper ones at a slight angle ran a second set of scratches, longer, less deep. Ellis moved a finger over them. He crouched to get out of the sun’s glare and saw that almost perpendicular to the longer scratches lay yet a third set, very light, little more than minor disruptions in the paint.
    ‘Three?’ he said.
    ‘Three?’ echoed Boggs.
    ‘Three rolls?’
    ‘Three rolls? Why three?’
    Three sets of scratches. Could that mean three rolls? Why?
    ‘Think about it,’ Boggs said. ‘Let me know.’
    Stacks of cardboard banker’s boxes filled the corners of Boggs’s office and paperwork sprawled over the desk. Littered among the papers, as if stranded in snow banks, were toy cars – a Ferrari, a Land Rover, a GTO, a milk truck. Beside the banker’s boxes stood a shelf lined with textbooks, technical manuals, collections of conference papers. They talked through Ellis’s résumé in about fifteen minutes – college engineering classes and projects, and the supervisory job at the axle plant, which Ellis tried to gloss. He ticked through other jobs: a lawn service, a coffee shop, running deliveries, selling appliances. The conversation began to wallow, Boggs seemed subdued, and Ellis grew embarrassed. He had an engineering degree that he’d hardly applied and no useful skills. He sat here only because years ago his now-dead half-brother had been the boyfriend of a girl who was now this man’s wife. Absurd.
    Yet he wanted this job. He saw an opportunity to set his life on a new path. He felt he badly needed a new path.
    From the clutter on the desk he picked out the toy Land Rover and turned it. Like a bouncing football. A thought came. ‘At least three times,’ he said. He moved the