Civil Twilight by Susan Dunlap Page B

car killed her? Was I a witness or a possible accessory after the fact? “I came to the scene because I saw the story on the news. John got us in. Now you: what’s the status?”
    “We’ve got the murder weapon. Your brother’s car.”
    “How do you know it’s the weapon?”
    “Scratch marks on the hood—”
    “It’s a police car! They’ve probably all got scratches.”
    He shrugged.
    There wouldn’t have been time to get lab results back. I sipped the coffee. What could I admit without making things worse? What could I conceal without ending up in jail? “She stole the car, you know that, right? After that it had nothing to do with John. Fifty people at Coit Tower were there. You could spend a week interviewing them.”
    He nodded.
    “So what’s her background? Her fingerprints have to be all over it. Have you matched them?”
    “No.”
    “Not yet?”
    “Not ever.”
    I stared.
    “The steering wheel’s been wiped clean. Also the dash, door handles on both sides, and every other surface in the front seat area. When the vehicle in question is one of ours, our techs go over every inch. She must have floated on air and driven it by magic, and wiped her wand clean.”
    “You’ve got her body, why don’t you print . . .” I read the answer in the look on his face. He didn’t try to hide it.
    “You don’t want to know how badly a body can be mashed. She could have run under a power mower and come out better. Jumping onto
a freeway was the worst way to die, for her, for the drivers on the road. How are those people going to live with it? A body flies out of the sky; they can’t avoid it, maybe if they could she’d be alive. Maybe they don’t kill her, just run over a hand, a leg, a shoe. One woman was hysterical. A guy was next to catatonic.”
    I lifted my cup to drink, realized it was empty and sat holding it. “I . . .”
    “I want you to be prepared.”
    “For?”
    “I need you to identify the body.”
    The cup was still in my hand, still in front of my mouth, empty. “No.” The word was barely audible. “I just can’t. I was with her; I talked to her. I liked her. I can’t look at her body so mashed up that she doesn’t have fingers! I just—”
    “Darcy, your brother’s a prick—”
    “A by-the-book prick.”
    “True, but guys like that, they’re wound tight and a single perfect-storm thing can send them spinning. So I’m not saying he could never be involved in this murder.”
    “Hey—”
    “But I am giving him the benefit of the doubt, which is more than many will. I’m sticking my neck out, not for him; I’m sticking it out for you. You understand that?” He stopped, waited till I nodded, watching me the whole time.
    I couldn’t think about that now, couldn’t let myself wonder. Any suspect who trusts a cop deserves to be in jail. Another John Lott maxim. I didn’t dare trust Korematsu, despite those yearning chocolate brown eyes, the sweet thatch of dark hair falling over them. He’d never deceived me before.
    But I couldn’t trust him, not now when what we were playing for was John.

    “Right now,” he insisted, as if inviting my reservations about him, “we have nothing on this case—no ID, no witnesses after the victim left the crash site. The only thing we know about the car is that your brother signed it out. He never reported it stolen, not when it happened, not when he was standing right beside it at the murder scene, not after he made his memorable exit. And now he’s gone to ground.”
    “But . . .” There was no but.
    “Unless some other lead turns up the whole focus is going to be on John. When the public learns that a detective’s car is being called the cause of death, the pressure on the department is going to be enormous, unrelenting. All stops will be pulled out and pressure put on every member of your family. Your phones will be tapped, you neighbors questioned, your mother’s neighbors, and a make will be run on everyone who walks into