Page 6 of Luck of the Devil (Harper Adams Mystery #3)

I studied the bank. “Do you happen to have any photos or diagrams of how her car landed in the water?”

He slipped his phone out of his front jeans pocket and swiped the screen a few times, then handed it to me.

Of course he had photos of the crime scene.

The first photo showed a huge wrecker with an extendable crane was parked on the bank, the arm hanging over the murky water.

A thick cable was attached to the bumper of my mother’s Lexus, the front end of the vehicle still submerged in the water.

The next photo showed the car being pulled toward the river bank, the water inside the interior barely visible through her tinted windows.

I looked up at him. “How did you get these?”

“I have my sources.”

“Like, seriously, Malcolm. This is a huge breach.”

He gave me a sardonic look, then said, “Does that mean you don’t want to look at the evidence?”

“I never said that. I just asked how you got them and you refused to answer.” My head was pounding, and I decided it wasn’t my problem that the sheriff’s department had a breech.

Especially if it worked to my advantage.

I studied the images again, then compared them to the river, the northern river bank, and the direction my mother’s car had supposedly traveled.

I was even more convinced.

“This doesn’t line up,” I said. “The car was more in the middle of the river, not close to the bank. And for argument’s sake, let’s say it hit the bank, then rolled into the river, it would have gone in back end first.” I studied the photos, then moved onto a drawing of the car in the river.

“I think it went in from the other side.”

“Which doesn’t line up with the skid marks at all.”

“Exactly. Because they didn’t come from my mother’s car.” I took out my phone and checked for traffic before walking out into the road and taking multiple photos. “Happen to have a tape measurer?” I asked.

He didn’t respond; instead, he walked to the driver’s door and leaned over.

Shivering, I turned back to the road and studied the marks. I’d guess them to be a few weeks old, maybe a month. How had the sheriff’s department gotten them wrong?

I felt something slip onto my shoulders and felt the warm weight of Malcolm’s leather jacket settle over me. I stared up at him in surprise, unsure what to say, but he held out a metal tape measure. “This work?”

So, we were pretending he hadn’t just done something nice? I was good with that.

“Perfect. Can you extend it and hold it up to the skid marks there?” I pointed to a mark in the road.

A car was approaching from the Jackson Creek side, so we both moved to the shoulder. I ignored the curious stare of the man driving past, trying to ignore the smell of Malcolm’s jacket, a mixture of leather and cedar.

Malcolm moved back onto the road and held the extended measuring tape over the first skid mark while I took a photo.

“You gonna compare the width to the tires on your mother’s car?” he asked, glancing up at me while he squatted next to the markings.

I had to stop thinking about what he’d just done, and I definitely had to stop thinking about how much the jacket smelled like him. “Yep. I need to prove her tires didn’t make these marks.” I walked down the road and motioned for him to follow so I could take more measurements. “They’re not fresh.”

“The preliminary report says they faded due to weather.”

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.”

“Are you gonna tell her you suspect your mother was murdered?”

“No.” I drew in a breath. “I’m still struggling to believe someone killed her.”

“Why?”

I turned to face him. My cold detective facade slipped, allowing my grief to rush in, coming out in the form of anger.

“Because, if I accept that she was killed, I have to wonder if she was murdered because of me !” I shouted.

“What if I turned up something in Hugo Burton’s case that made people worried enough to try and stop me? ”

“You thinkin’ they murdered your mother to interfere with your investigation?” he asked in disbelief.

“It wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened,” I insisted.

Sympathy filled his eyes as he shook his head. “Harper, we already determined it didn’t have anything to do with Burton. You hadn’t even started investigatin’.”

Right. I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to get my shit together.

His reaction only made me even angrier, or at least that was what I told myself.

Because what else could I be pissed about?

“She seemed anxious when I talked to her last Tuesday afternoon.” I ran my hand through my hair, trying to remember how the conversation had gone down.

“She was upset that I wasn’t taking her to her historical society luncheon.

” I shook my head. “Dammit, why can’t I remember what she said? Why did I just blow her off?”

He studied me for a moment. “Take a moment, and let’s?—”

“Fuck you, Malcolm!” I shouted, then pointed my finger at him. “Don’t you fucking try to placate me!”

“Placate you?” he scoffed. “You’re hysterical, and I’m trying to get you to calm down and think rationally.”

“Hysterical?” I screamed, realizing that I was hysterical, but I was also past the point of caring.

He took a step back and gave me a patronizing look.

“Fuck you!”

“You already said that.”

“Arg!” I shouted into the air.

“There you go again, losing control. I thought you were some kind of hot-shot detective,” he sneered. “When you were in Little Rock and things didn’t go your way on an investigation, did you just shout at your partner and throw fits?”

“It’s my fucking mother, Malcolm!” I shouted. “My mother was murdered !” I said, choking on the word, and then the anger was replaced with an overwhelming grief that stole my breath and made me dizzy.

I stared up at him, whispering, “Someone murdered my mother.”

“I know,” he said, lowering his voice as his face softened.

I’d spent the past five days trying to accept that she was gone. That it was over.

But it wasn’t over. It had only just begun.

I took a deep breath, subduing my grief, and shoving it back into the box where it belonged. Grief had no place in an investigation. I needed to be cold and calculated, and the truth was, I was very good at both.

“I’m going to find out who did this,” I said, my voice as hard as steel.

Malcolm’s eyes darkened. “Then let’s get started.”