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“Yeah, I do.”
“Is this just a courtesy call, then?”
“No,” Annie said. “The vehicle he was pursuing might belong to a missing person I’ve been looking for. An older blue Toyota Corolla. The plates came back to a different vehicle, but I believe the officer knew the car. So what do you think happened here?”
The trooper drew breath to answer, then stopped, his focus going over Annie’s shoulder. She turned to see Dewey Rivette running toward them, his hair sticking up like he’d just rolled out of bed. He stopped five feet short of them, puffing like a steam engine.
“I—just—heard,” he gasped, bending over, holding his side. “What—the hell—happened?”
“Sergeant Grant, this is Detective Rivette from the PD,” Annie said. To Dewey she said, “Dude, you need to start working out. Or did you run all the way from town?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “This—isn’t—funny.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Dewey straightened with his hands jammed at his waist and stared at the wreck, looking like he might get sick.
“I was told—he was in pursuit—and—the guy—wouldn’t pull over.”
“Where was he supposed to pull over on this road?” Annie asked.
“He could have—just stopped,” Dewey said, still gasping. “Was it—Fontenot’s car?”
“Sounds like it,” Annie said. “But the tags came back to a Ford Taurus.”
She turned to the trooper. “You were about to explain what you think happened, Sergeant.”
Grant nodded. “This is just preliminary, you understand. I have a lot of questions, but come look at these skid marks.”
He led them to a cluster of evidence markers on the pavement.
“It looks to me like the two vehicles made contact here,” he said, pointing. “The lead car skidded sideways. You can see the arc of the skid marks as the rear end of the vehicle slid away going toward thewater, then straightened and kept going. The police vehicle veered to the right and went off the road at a high rate of speed and ended up where it did.”
A chill ran through Annie that had nothing to do with the temperature as the trooper’s words sank in. “You’re saying the officer tried to run the other car off the road?”
“I’m just telling you the story the evidence is telling me.”
“That can’t be right,” Dewey said. “Danny was just trying to pull him over. Maybe he was trying to pass and get ahead of him. Maybe the Toyota swerved into him.”
“If that was the case, the police vehicle would have more likely been diverted to the left,” Grant said. “He would have gone off the other side of the road. Or he wouldn’t have gone off the road at all. He should have hit the brakes, but there’s no evidence of that. I believe he was accelerating, not trying to slow down. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but it looks like he might have been attempting a pit maneuver.”
“There’s no way you’d do that here,” Dewey said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”
“Exactly,” Annie said. “One or both cars would end up in the swamp.”
If a pit maneuver was executed properly, the target vehicle generally spun sideways off the road. If executed at too high a rate of speed, there was too great a chance of rolling the target vehicle. No cop in his right mind would have tried it on this narrow, winding road, heading into a tight curve to the left, no less…unless rolling that vehicle into the swamp had been his goal.
“You can’t say that’s what happened,” Dewey protested.
“I have more investigating to do,” Grant admitted. “I’m just telling you how it looks at a glance. Those skid marks tell a story.”
“Well, it’s ridiculous,” Dewey argued.
“That’s beside the point. The evidence is the evidence,” Grant said. “I’ll sit down with the measurements and do the calculations. He should have had his dash cam on. Once we get the vehicle, that’lltell the whole story. And that video should have uploaded to your server at the police station, anyway, so there it is.”
“If he had the camera on,” Annie said.
“Why wouldn’t he have the camera on?” Dewey asked aggressively. “Of course he did.”
