The Game by Vi Keeland by Vi Keeland

“Don’t forget your wallet. Dinner’s on you.”

I smiled. “You bet.”



***



The unexpected loss today didn’t help my mood. My focus just hadn’t been on the game. It was yet another reason I needed to get this shit with John’s car sorted out.

Later in the evening, I made the hour drive to meet my brother after the game. He was already inside the Harvest Moon Diner when I walked in.

Tyler stood as I approached and gave me a hug. “Good to see you.”

“You too, bro.” I slid into the booth.

“Tough loss. Sorry, man. I listened on my phone while I was at work. A few guys driving eighty on the highway are going home without speeding tickets thanks to that last drive. I didn’t want to be interrupted while I bit my nails.”

I smiled halfheartedly. “This one hurt. I’m just glad it didn’t knock us out of playoff contention since Dallas lost, too.”

The waitress came over. She went to hand us menus, but Tyler waved her off. “You make Reubens?”

“We do. They’re really good, too.”

He looked over at me, and I nodded. “We’ll take two and two Cokes.”

“You got it. Coming right up.”

Tyler waited until she was gone to lift a manila folder off the seat next to him. He slid it over to my side of the table. “I took a look at the file this afternoon. Not too much to go on. But you take a look. Maybe something will jump out at you.”

I opened the envelope and scanned through all the paperwork. There were photocopies of notes, some typed forms, and a bunch of photos with labels on them. My brother pointed to one marked A12.

“I’d have to sign out the actual evidence. But the case file has photos of everything in the box. I figured if you found something that helped, we can decide where to go from there.”

“Got it.” I took my time, examining every page. When I got to a photo of what looked like pieces of a broken headlight on the street, I stopped. “Were they able to get a component number off the headlight?”

Tyler shook his head. “Nope. There were only a few small pieces, none of which had the ID number on it. That would’ve helped narrow things down a lot, seeing as the eyewitnesses couldn’t even pinpoint the type of car. Their descriptions were pretty different. But the forensics report confirms that it was a classic car and places the type and make of the broken glass in an eight-year period of the fifties.”

I nodded and kept going.

“I took out the graphic photos of the body—wasn’t sure you’d want to see that. They weren’t pretty. There weren’t any skid marks on the street to indicate the driver attempted to stop before impact, so she got hit pretty hard—head was cracked open and stuff. But I have them, if you want. I just figured I’d ask rather than leave them in the file. You learn fast on the job that you can’t unsee shit.”

I nodded. “I’m not sure that would help any. Thanks.”

I kept going through the file until I got to what looked like tire marks, only they were on a white surface and not the blacktop of the street that was in other pictures. “These are tire marks?”

“Yep. It’s a blow-up to see the detail.”

I pulled the photo closer to examine it. “Did the car jump the curb and these were taken on the sidewalk or something? Why is the background white?”

Tyler frowned. “That’s skin. From the victim’s leg. She had a skirt on.”

I felt a little sick staring down at it.

My brother smiled sadly. “Think I made the right decision taking out the other victim photos, considering how pale you just turned.”

I shook my head. “Someone ran the woman over and kept going like she was roadkill. What the fuck is wrong with people?”

“People leave the scene of a crime for two reasons. The most common is because they get scared. Often that’s fueled by knowing they did something wrong—maybe they were on their cell phone or drinking.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“It was done intentionally.”

“Jesus Christ.” I raked a hand through my hair. “People are so fucked up.”

“You don’t have to tell me that. I see it every day. Just when you think you’ve seen it all and nothing could surprise you anymore, some perp goes and shows you you’re wrong. The other day, I caught a case where a father had chopped off four of his three-year-old’s fingers. She’d dropped a glass and broke it. That was her punishment.”

“Don’t tell me any more. I have no idea how you do your job.”

I went through the rest of the file slowly. Nothing but the tire marks stuck out at me as something that could potentially help to rule out what I’d hoped to.

“Can tire marks be matched to a car years after an accident?”

“I’m no expert, but it probably depends on how much the tires have been driven. If you impound a vehicle soon after the accident, tire marks can be like fingerprints. The wear on them is unique, created from a combination of a car’s alignment, the roads it’s driven on, how it’s driven, and a bunch of other factors. But if you keep driving that car for years, the fingerprint changes over time.”

“This particular car is a collectible, so it sits in a garage most of the time. Though I have no idea if the tire has been changed.”