The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [58]
He handed her the screwdriver, and wordlessly they went to work. First they took off the trim piece of the B-pillar, exposing the plastic casing around the driver-side seat belt. Rainie tested the strap with her hand, and true to Amity’s report, it spooled toothlessly onto the floor. He held up the flashlight to provide better lighting and before they went any farther, she got out the magnifying glass. She held it up to the casing. Then she looked somberly at Amity. The plastic casing bore deep scratch marks: they were not the first to pry it open.
“I hereby do solemnly swear,” he murmured, “to disassemble all ‘nonoperative’ seat belts in all auto accidents to come.”
Rainie exchanged the magnifying glass for the penknife and cracked the mechanism open. Inside was a giant white plastic gear, with one main white plastic paw and one small back-up lever in case the primary failed. In theory, when the seat belt was pulled forward, it turned the gear, which then caught on the lever and froze. Except that in this case, the main paw had been filed down and the back-up lever clipped off. Rainie pulled on the seat belt again, and they both watched the white gear spin around and around and around.
“If she’d taken it in,” Amity said after a moment, “the mechanic guy would’ve caught it.”
“So our guy had to make sure she didn’t have the vehicle serviced.”
“Isn’t that risky, though? If you’re going to tamper with a seat belt, why do it a whole month before? Seems like you’d do it day of, or maybe I’ve just been watching too much Murder, She Wrote.”
“Prejudices,” Rainie said. “Yours, mine, any cop’s. She knows the seat belt is broken, so she doesn’t even put it on. And when you arrive at a scene where the driver is drunk and hasn’t even bothered to strap in . . .”
“You think she’s pretty stupid,” Amity said quietly. “You think, whether you mean to or not, that she got what she deserved. And then you don’t ask too many questions.”
“Nobody looks too closely,” Rainie agreed. She was frowning though, chewing on her bottom lip. “It still seems risky. I mean, if you wanted to kill someone and have it look like an accident, would you simply tamper with a seat belt and hope fate sooner or later takes its course?”
“Victim has a history of drinking and driving. Perp provides the alcohol, then lets her get behind the wheel. Chances are she won’t make it home.”
“Are they? A shocking number of people drink and drive every day without crashing. Look at Mandy, she’d already done it dozens of times before.”
“Maybe he wanted an out. Think of it this way: even if we’d caught on right away, how are you going to prove who tampered with the seat belt weeks before a collision? That just leaves us with looking at who got her drunk. Victim was of age. Serving her isn’t a crime, and letting her drive is back to being a civil matter, not criminal.”
“Someone who wanted to plan a murder, but wanted to be cautious,” Rainie murmured, then firmly determined, “no, I don’t buy it. If you’re going to go to this much trouble to kill someone, you’re going to see it through. You’re going to make sure you got the job done. Oh shit, we’re idiots!”
She grabbed the magnifying glass and before Amity could react she was around the mutilated hunk of metal to the passenger’s side. She pulled on the seat belt. It caught and held. Perfectly good, of course. It would need to be.
“You son of a bitch,” Rainie said. And then Amity was holding the flashlight and she was running over the tight weave of the strap with the magnifying glass. “There! Right there!”
The fabric buckled and warped, a two-inch span where the fibers had been stretched as the SUV hit the pole, the seat belt caught, and a body flew against the strap.
“Meet passenger number two!” Rainie cried triumphantly, and then a heartbeat later, “Oh, Quincy, I am so sorry.”
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