Page 12 of Luck of the Devil

I shook my head. We’d had snow, rain, ice, and cold weather over the past week, but it wouldn’t account for this amount of fading. “They should still look fresher than this. Nevertheless, the skid marks insinuate a car could have gone off the road here. I need to look up recent accident reports.”

“I’ll get Carter on it.” He reached for his phone, which I was still holding, and used voice command to call Carter Hale.

I slipped my left hand into an armhole of the jacket, then the other, hoping Malcolm wouldn’t read anything into it. I needed to use my phone, and the jacket might fall if I didn’t wear it. Once it was on, I opened my phone and looked up my mother’s Lexus model and year so I could look up the tire width.

“I need you to do some diggin’,” Malcolm said when Carter presumably answered. He paused for a second, then said, “Pull any auto accidents that occurred on the bridge over the Red River over the last…” He gave me a questioning look, his gaze dropping for a slight second to my leather-clad arms, then back up to my face. “How long?”

“Make it six months.” That seemed too long, but it couldn’t hurt to check. Plus, this wasn’t a heavily traveled road. I suspected there wouldn’t be that many.

My search results popped up, showing me her tires were between 215 to 235 millimeters wide. Then I pulled up a chart to convert the inches on Malcolm’s tape measure to millimeters. My mother’s tires would have been nine and a quarter inches or less, but these marks were nearly ten and a quarter inches wide.

“Send them to my email when they’re available.” Malcolm said, then hung up.

“Would it hurt you to say ‘please’?” I asked sarcastically, inexplicitly feeling the need to be difficult. Was it because him giving me his jacket threw me off guard?

“In theory, no, but it’s his job to do what I ask, which makes the please unnecessary.”

“Still…”

His brow lifted with its trademark asshole look. “Did you typically say please and thank you to all your buddies on the Little Rock police force before they threw you out on your ass?”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine. Be shitty to your employees. What do I care?”

“I pay him well, so I wouldn’t call that treating him shitty.”

“Money isn’t everything, Malcolm.”

“But it’s a whole helluva lot.”

“Besides,” I said, still feeling salty, “they didn’t throw me out. I quit.”

“Right.”

I shot him a half-hearted sneer that he ignored.

“We were right about the marks,” I said grudgingly, then told him the results of my search.

He nodded grimly but didn’t respond.

I moved to the side of the bridge, staring down into the water. We’d had a lot of rain the week before, and I knew the water had been higher and rougher when they’d pulled her car out. Now it was deceptively calm, as though satisfied from purging its latest victim.

I was still struggling to believe someone had murdered my mother, let alone dumped her car into the river. “There are a lot easier ways to get away with murdering someone,” I said, thinking out loud, as I hugged my chest. A sudden wind gust hit hard, and I tugged the edges of the jacket closer—trying desperately to ignore the fact the jacket smelled so much like him it was like he was wrapped around me.

I nearly ripped it off and threw it on the ground from the thought pissing me off.

I was not going to fall for James Malcolm. I wasn’t that much of an idiot.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he countered, moving next to me.

Thank God, he seemed oblivious to my inner torment. I needed to get control before I made an even bigger ass of myself than I already had.

He continued, “Maybe the sheriff’s department found the skid marks and presumed they were hers, which sent them looking in the water. It stands to reason whoever did it pushed her car into the water from the south side. I suspect they hoped she wouldn’t be found for a long, long time. We got a lot of rain last week, but usually the water level doesn’t change that much, and they don’t dredge this river much either. It stands to reason they might not have expected her to be found for years. Or ever.”

“So, why did they find her?” I asked. It was crazy that they’d thought to look at all. No one had reported her missing and skid marks on the road wouldn’t necessarily motivate them to check the river. “I was in too much shock to ask.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It wasn’t in the report.” He turned to face me. “I can try to find out.”

“No,” I said, turning around with my back to the water. “I’ll ask Louise.”