Playing Dead_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [13]
The vic wore jeans, sneakers, and a lined jacket. Under the jacket appeared to be a turtleneck. No one in the Valley had been wearing turtlenecks since early March.
The vic was the same general size and build as Oliver Maddox. Mitch’s preliminary conversations with the Davis Police Department shortly after the earthquake had given him little—the detective assigned to the missing person case said there had been no physical evidence of foul play. Mitch would have followed up with friends, teachers, neighbors—except that he’d been pulled from the case.
Oliver Maddox had gone missing in late January—about the same time that Tom O’Brien had been moved from a safe area of San Quentin into the general prison population.
Mitch didn’t buy into the coincidence. Maddox had probably been working on something related to O’Brien’s conviction, but the only person who knew what was the fugitive himself. Still, how both events connected eluded him.
When Mitch looked inside the car, he was certain he had a homicide on his hands. The car was in neutral.
He photographed the interior, the control panel, and the buckled seat belt. He mentally walked through different scenarios, including suicide, but kept coming back to murder.
Mitch decided to leave the body in the vehicle, suspecting that the corpse would fall apart if they tried to extract it. They had special waterproof body bags for the floaters that could be sealed to prevent evidence loss. He pulled plastic evidence bags from his equipment belt and strapped them to what remained of the vic’s hands and head to prevent not only trace evidence but body parts from washing away when the vehicle was raised.
Mitch and Young bagged as much loose evidence in the Explorer as they could for fear it would disappear or disintegrate. Then Mitch caught Young’s eye and pointed upstream to indicate where he was heading to search for potential evidence. He used his underwater light to illuminate the depths.
The bridge pillars were only forty or so feet from where the vehicle had come to rest. Mitch pictured the damage on the passenger side and inspected the left side of the pillars extensively. There was no evidence that the vehicle had collided with the pillars either above or below the surface, but with the rise and fall of the water level, paint chips would have been rubbed away. Still Mitch took a lot of pictures—perhaps a collision expert could match up the unique marks on the door with these pillars.
Cars submerged quickly in water, but not instantaneously. Inside air needed to be displaced, and the current of the river would move the vehicle as it filled with water. Maybe a minute or two. Still, forty feet from the bridge, windows down, Mitch figured the car had gone in relatively close to the bridge. Most likely not more than a hundred feet upstream, probably less. If they could pinpoint the entry point, they could use the known water currents from January to estimate what day the vehicle had gone in.
He surfaced and floated. Though there would be seasonal variations, and in a storm the current would be completely different, today was clear, windless, and gave him a good sense of the natural flow of the river.
It was a hunch, but Mitch suspected that the Explorer had gone in approximately eighty feet from the resting spot. He swam upstream, draining his energy. Agent Duncan saw him, but didn’t approach. Mitch wasn’t surprised.
He hadn’t made a lot of friends in the two years he’d been with the Sacramento regional FBI office. Everyone knew that he and Supervisory Special Agent Megan Elliott used to be married. It wasn’t like he had announced it, but Meg insisted that everything be on the up-and-up when Mitch came on board.
It was no one’s damn business, as far as Mitch was concerned. They’d made a mistake, it was over, no one needed to know anything more. But Meg insisted that someone would find out anyway, and then it could make both of their jobs more difficult, especially since they were both