Leo slowed the 450 thumper down as he came up on the clearing that he and Crash used long ago as staging area. He knew it was the place, after a few more yards, because of the yellow police tape all over the place.
Then he saw her, sitting against her deputy car, on the other side of the street. She was looking at him with searching eyes. She hadn’t changed much in four years, either.
She motioned with her hand to come to her. Leo thought about running for it, but he decided that just sounded like a lot of energy wasted. So he got of the bike, turned off the motor, and took off his dirt helmet.
She was walking toward him by the time he had the helmet on the seat.
“I think I know you,” she said.
“Nope, you don’t,” he lied.
“I’m not often wrong with that,” she told him.
“Well, you’re probably wrong this time, at least a little,” he told her.
“His body was found in there. Near the middle of the clearing. Do you want to take a look?” she asked.
“If that would be alright,” Leo said.
“CSI is done, and so is everyone else, so you can’t hurt anything,” she said. “He was involved in a robbery about four years ago,” she added.
Leo went under the tape and began to scan the area with practiced eyes. “I think I might have read something about that,” Leo said. “Looks like his car came in, circled, and parked there. He gets out, waits about fifteen minutes. He’s nervous. Then he’s shot here and falls flat, his head hitting here. The attacker takes something from him. A box, maybe. It was sitting here, but it was gone before the cops show up.
“After that, another car comes in — oh.” He stopped, looking at the tire tracks of the second car.
“How can you tell all that?” she asked.
“Tire tracks and foot prints, obviously. One and a half cigarettes. Chain smoked. He didn’t smoke unless he was really nervous or seriously up on meth. Which he was probably both. The box print is there, but I don’t see one of those marker prints, so it was gone before you guys showed up or you would have marked it for photos.”
Leo looked around again. “What I don’t get is how he is shot in the back of the head when he’s looking at the entrance to the clearing.
“This truck,” he offered, “pulls in here, and stops. So, that has him facing Crash when he gets out of the cab. The man arriving in the truck is going to kill him. He knows that already. So, why wait? No witnesses out here, no house close enough to tell were the gun shot came from. He doesn’t put Crash on his knees to execute him, so … it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Crash had a partner four years ago,” she told him.
“Yeah, kind of a stupid guy back then. I remember him well,” Leo told her.
“What’s he like now?” she asked.
“Older, wiser, slowing down, choosing friends more carefully. You might like him, but would probably not want to, since you’re a cop and all.”
“He’s still a criminal?”
“Well, yes and no, but from your point of view, right now? Yes. He did a lot of diplomacy work, though, spent a lot of time on the road. You could have liked him then without feeling all weird about it.”
She was quiet for a moment and then asked softly, “Did he ever tell you why he didn’t take the shot?”
Leo turned and looked her in the eye. “Yes, because he’s not a murderer. And that would have been murder. You have two kids, probably a single mom, at least statistics suggest it is likely. So, really, how could he take the shot?”
She looked away, trying to blink away tears that were threatening to fall. “He must have caught hell from his club, though. I hear that it’s like one of the worst things a guy can do, to leave his partner like that.”
“He thought so. That’s why it took him so long to decide. As it turned out, when he showed up to quit his club, he was told that if he had taken the shot, he would have been asked to leave.”
Leo looked over at the dark spot that was Crash’s blood. “If Crash would have just kept his mouth shut, he would have been out that day and never seen prison. That’s all he had to do, was shut his mouth.”
He met her eyes again. “It was a defining moment for him, because he really did believe that — what you said about not leaving your partner. You cops have that too, though, right? Back each other, never leave him if things get heavy?”
She nodded and looked at her shoes. “Yes. We do.”
“What would you have done?” he asked.
She looked up at him and thought about it. “I would have rode away. I’m not a murderer, either, though Crash, well, he certainly brought the capacity to the surface.” Her face cracked a smile, just a little.
Leo smiled. “That makes you a member of a very large club.”
“You in that club?”
“Me? No. That’s why Crash was able to remain in the MC so long after he got out. He changed in there, in prison. He was much worse. Something broke in him, and his partner, well, for years, he couldn’t get past the guilt of leaving him.”
“You make it sound like Crash wasn’t in the Sinners any longer,” she observed.
“He wasn’t. This isn’t a club thing. I know whose truck that is. But I’m not sure that he killed him either. Though, it would be easy to set him up for it.” Leo grimaced.
“Who?” she said, all cop now.
He looked her over. She was quite good looking. “I’m not going to tell you, because then you’ll have to write my name down to say where you got the information, and for the next few weeks, I have to be a ghost in this. A lot of good lives are at stake. So, I can’t. But…”
“Yes?” she asked, watching him walk back over to the tracks.
“If you called around, and asked, perhaps in the El Cajon area, or nearby, you’d find someone who knows who drives a pickup truck — see the wide base and distance between the marks? — a truck with racing slick tires on it. You’ll find it’s a very short list. Not many are wealthy enough, stupid enough, and so hooked on themselves that they use racing slicks as day-to-day driving tires. They cost something like five hundred each and they wear out really fast.”
She pulled out her pad of paper and wrote that down. “Can you tell … what kind of truck that is? I mean, from looking at the tracks, of course.”
“Not really into cars that much, but it looks like it might be a silver ’67 Chevy with a modified chassis, Dart Pro-1 header with Crane rockers, custom stainless headers, a Tremec, T56 Magnum transmission, and some custom three-inch stainless exhaust pipes, with a 730hp, 434ci Chevrolet Gen1, 4.155-inch bore / 4-inch stroke engine — but that’s just a guess.”
She smiled that time and didn’t try to hide it. “That’s pretty good. I mean, from just tire tracks.”
“Well, with the turn radius and tire depth and all that stuff,” he said, and then shrugged. “But while it is fun to think about the hassle I can envision coming his way, he’s not the killer. He would have been, I’m sure of it. But … he didn’t get here first.”
“So you think Crash was going to meet the guy in the truck.”
“Yes, and I’ll bet my Lowrider that the box Crash had was gone when the guy in the truck showed up, and what was in that box was what the guy in the truck came to buy. He never would have bought it. Crash would be just as dead, only his body would have fallen backwards, not forwards.”
Leo looked around again, memorizing what he could, and then he spotted a broken branch. “So that’s what that is,” he said, walking over to the branch, which had dirty but fresh cotton wool leaves.
“What’s that?”
“In movies and stuff, you see the cowboys cover up their tracks with a makeshift broom. See over here, these scratching, smearing marks back and forth. That’s your killer, who watches TV, covering his tracks with this. Except, he only wiped out his tracks, he didn’t blanket the area, so he makes a path for us that comes around the back of the car here and right up behind Crash. Just walked up and shot him.”
“A partner?”
“I would start there,” he agreed. “You know? You are going to make a great detective someday.” Leo smiled and started walking back to his thumper.
“If you run into that partner of his, again, tell him thanks. I mean that,” she told him.
He gave her a thin smile and then got on the bike. He put his helmet back on and started the engine. He gave her a long look, then a nod, and gunned the motor, rocketing out and down the road.