Amanda.
There was a cut on her forehead, and her left eye was swollen. Her nose looked as if it had been broken, and there was some general bruising on the right side of her face, but it was her. Of that he had no doubt.
“That’s Amanda,” he whispered as the tears came. “That’s my wife.”
Dr. Nestor closed the folder and took it back. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“So what now?” he asked. “What happens now?”
“We need to determine what caused her to run off the road, so we’ll need to do an autopsy. Once that’s complete, we can return her body to you. If you can let us know what funeral home you’d like to use, we can send her there. Shouldn’t take more than two days.”
He nodded, and Dr. Nestor got up from her seat, leaving the room at the same time the inspector/investigator woman who was sitting behind him got up and took the medical examiner’s place at the table. She looked at him, and he stared back at her. Her skin wasn’t as white as his, but she still had that Irish paleness with tiny freckles dotting the bridge of her nose and under her green eyes. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore no jewelry and hardly any makeup.
“My condolences to you and your family,” she said. “Do you have any children?”
“No. We’ve only been married for two years. Got a late start. Kids were never really a consideration.”
“Anyone we can call for you?”
“No. I’ll be okay.”
The woman paused for a moment. “Dr. Brock, I’m going to need to ask you a few questions about last night so I can complete my report. I know this is sudden for you, and I don’t want to seem callous. We just need information so we can put this all together. Is that okay?”
Randall looked at her, trying to place her name. He was totally blank. It was the stress. His hippocampus was drowning in stress hormones. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but who did you say you were again?”
“Investigator Adler of the New York State Troopers,” she replied. “I’m in charge of the case involving Amanda’s accident.”
“Right.”
Adler leaned forward. “Can you tell me about last night?”
Randall sighed and struggled to think through the events of the previous day. “We were at the Bear Mountain Inn. She was being given an award for her philanthropic work. Amanda runs a large nonprofit organization that funds a bunch of smaller charities. They were giving her a humanitarian award.”
“Who was?”
Randall chuckled. “I can’t even remember. The board, I think. Through the national chapter of her organization. It’s called Glass Hearts.”
“Were you with Amanda the entire night?”
“No. I left early because I had to work on some things back at the campus where you found me this morning.”
“What time did you leave the event?”
“Around ten, I think. Got to the campus about a half hour later.”
“And what time did the ceremony end?”
“It was scheduled to go until midnight. I’m sure people hung around at the bar afterward.”
“Did you hear from Amanda after you left?”
“No. I called her on her cell to see if she got home, but it went to voice mail. I left her a message to call me, but she never did. I guess I fell asleep after that and didn’t wake up until you and Peter came for me this morning.”
“What time did you call her?”
“Probably around twelve thirty? One, maybe?”
“Is there a chance she could’ve been drinking before she got behind the wheel?”
“I doubt it. I’m sure she had a glass or two of wine or champagne, but Amanda was adamantly against drinking and driving. If she was too tipsy, she would’ve gotten a lift or called a cab. She takes that stuff very seriously.”
“Was she on any medication?”
“No.”
Adler finished writing in her notepad, then stood from her seat. “I think that’s all I have right now. This appears to be an unfortunate accident. I truly am sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll take you back to your office so you can get your car. I’m sure you have a lot to take care of.”
Randall pulled himself up from his chair. He looked around the plain white room one last time and wondered how many people before him had been forced to open that folder when all they wanted to do was keep it shut. How many people would have to do it after he left? How many lives were irrevocably changed the moment they stepped through that door and sat with nothing but the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds?
Life as you know it will end in one . . . two . . . three . . .
6
The sky was a brilliant crystal blue—the kind of blue that only came with cold weather in the Northeast. The light snow that had fallen overnight was gone. The temperature on Susan’s dashboard had said it was thirty-eight degrees, and although the sun was shining, with the wind coming off the river from the west, it felt ten to fifteen degrees cooler.
She made her way to where Tommy was standing, looking out over the cliff. He’d stayed behind and supervised the scene while she’d made the next-of-kin notification. While she’d been gone, a construction crew had set up large plastic barriers topped with yellow strobe lights to act as a temporary substitute for the fencing. A trooper car remained, its lights and hazards still flashing, warning those traveling south to lower their speed and heed the curves.
Tommy spun around when he heard her approaching, the loose gravel crunching under her feet.
“You know you’re going to have to get down to HR one of these days,” she said, smiling. “Hiding out at an accident scene isn’t going to make the paperwork go away.”
Tommy laughed. “My supervisor ordered me to stay on. It wasn’t my place to refuse that order.”
She joined him on the far shoulder, pointing at the barriers. “Road crew set things up pretty fast.”
“Yeah, they were in and out. Left about fifteen minutes ago. You get the positive ID?”
“Yup, it’s her. Husband confirmed. I just dropped him back at his office. He’s a professor up at Quarim. About a half hour north of here.”
“This is a helluva thing to have to deal with right before the holidays.”
“It’s a helluva thing to have to deal with at any point in the year.” Susan walked to the edge of the road and looked over. Troopers and fire personnel were still below, working in and around the car, breaking it up into smaller pieces so they could haul it out. The Collision Reconstruction Crew also remained. They’d taken out their total workstation and cameras and were in the process of trying to reconstruct the second half of the accident, after the Mercedes had driven off the cliff. She could hear their voices echoing in the canyon but couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying. “My mother lives in the next town over. Cold Spring. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken this road. Scary to think about going over like that.”
Tommy joined her at the edge. “Look how far she landed. I mean she must’ve been doing sixty, seventy miles an hour to get that kind of distance. It’s impossible to go that fast on these roads. They’re too windy. You could never get up enough speed without having to downshift at the next curve.”
“Doesn’t look like she did downshift at the next curve.”
“It’s still crazy to think how fast she must’ve been going.”
Susan leaned over and looked straight down. “Anyone rappel down the cliff yet?”
“No, not yet. Now that there’s daylight, I’ll get someone moving. The other guys are cleaning up the primary scene now; then we can take a look around the perimeter.”
“Excellent. I put in a request for her cell phone records. I’d be interested to know if she was talking on the phone when she went off the road. Could’ve been distracted.”
“Maybe.” Tommy pointed toward the orange mesh fence. “I think I found something and need a second opinion.”
“Show me.�
�
Susan followed him back toward the road. He stopped when they got to the section of the fencing that Amanda Brock had crashed through. He bent down and motioned for her to come closer.
“I was looking at the fence before when I was waiting for the road-crew guys to set up the new barriers,” he explained. “Didn’t make sense that a sedan could just plow through specialized reinforced fencing like this. It wasn’t like it was a half-ton pickup or commercial vehicle. It was just a car. So I started poking around at the impact point. Look at this.”
Susan knelt next to him and examined the edge of the fence that had been breached.
“You’re in your car going, let’s say, sixty miles an hour. You lose control, run off the road, and slam through the fence so hard and get so much distance that I’m guessing you didn’t have time to apply the brakes.”
“Okay.”
“How do you think the fence is going to bend at its breaking point?”
Susan thought for a moment. “I guess the metal would stretch a bit, then break outward, toward the river. Toward the direction it was being torn.”
Tommy nodded. “Exactly. Now look.”
Susan bent down closer. The edge of the chain link where the car had burst through was flat. The metal wasn’t stretched at all, and the edges weren’t torn or bent either way.
“That’s odd,” she said. “It’s like they’ve been cut.”
“Pretty much what I was thinking. Both sides of the hole are like that. The only part that’s bent the way you think it should be is the top. Otherwise, this thing flapped out like a doggy door. No resistance whatsoever. Drove right through it.”
Susan stood back up. She made her way across to the other side of the hole and examined the fence. The point at which the chain link had given way there was also straight. “You think someone cut it to gain access to the cliff? Maybe do some hiking or rope climbing? This could’ve been cut months before last night happened.”
“If that’s the case, Mrs. Brock is the unluckiest person on earth. You mean to tell me she hits the fence at the exact spot it was cut so there’s no reinforcement to save her from going over the edge?”
“Unlikely.”
“Yeah. Unlikely for sure.”
“Okay,” Susan said. “Have a couple of guys walk the rest of this fence, and let’s see if there are any other breaches. Any cuts through the steel of any kind. And let’s find out what kind of tool you’d need to cut through something like this.”
“Ten-four.”
The wind picked up, and Susan had to turn her face away from the loose gravel and dirt flying around. As she turned, she looked at the road. Drivers passed them on their way down the mountain, staring to try and see what was going on.
“No skid marks or treads of any kind,” she said. “She never stopped.”
“CRU came up last night with the drag sleds, but they had nothing to compare it to because she didn’t brake.”
“Why wouldn’t you instinctively brake?”
Tommy shrugged. “Either it was suicide, she was asleep, or she was dead. Any other explanation just doesn’t make sense.”
7
Amanda had fallen into his life by way of a half-empty bar, twenty-five cents, and the magnificence of Ray Charles.
Randall had been sitting on one of the stools at the bar, watching sports highlights on a television perched in the corner. The place was tiny, tucked away mostly for San Francisco locals, and the usual crowd wasn’t due for another hour. A small group of well-dressed men and women caught his eye when they walked in. He could see them reflected in the mirror that stretched behind the bar. Three women and six men. They were laughing and happy and seemed glad to be in each other’s company. They pushed two tables together in the corner, away from everyone else. Randall watched them until they sat down, then turned his attention back to the television, pulling his beer closer and gripping it as if it might run away.
“Your turn,” the old man next to him slurred.
Randall looked up to find the old man pointing at the jukebox that had been set up next to the restrooms. He hadn’t noticed the song finish. He got up and made his way toward it, fishing in his pocket for his last quarter of the day.
“Make it a good one,” the man called out.
Randall ignored him. He leaned over the glass display, reading from a never-ending list of songs that seemed to cover every genre ever constructed. He slid his quarter into the coin slot and traced his finger to make sure he had the right number for his selection.
“So what are you thinking?”
One of the women from the group was standing next to him, peering over his shoulder at the song list. His breath caught in his throat for a moment, and he found himself unable to reply. She was dressed in a tailored blue sweater and black slacks. Heels and a red scarf tied around her neck completed the outfit. Her hair was pulled back with a headband, accentuating her eyes. When she looked at him, it was as if everything else in the world stopped.
“I’m always good for a classic eighties song,” she said. “But no techno. Brings back too many memories I like to keep buried.”
“I was going for ‘Georgia on My Mind.’”
She smiled. “Ray Charles? Yeah, that could work. But how about something more upbeat? ‘I Got a Woman’ or ‘Leave My Woman Alone’? Those would work.”
“You know your Ray Charles.”
“Indeed I do. So how about it? Upbeat?”
Randall shook his head and looked away. “I’m not really in an upbeat mood.”
“Oh. Well, then.” She nudged him out of the way, found the track, and plugged in the associated number. The strings of the orchestra began, followed by Ray’s sultry voice streaming through the speakers. “There you go.”
“Thanks.”
“I hope you find a better mood soon because I have a purse full of quarters and I’m not afraid to use them.”
“I’ll try and adjust.”
She paused for a moment, then held up a laminated name badge that was hanging around her neck. “I’m Amanda, by the way.”
“Randall.” He extended his hand, and she shook it. He could feel her smooth skin and wanted desperately to hang on and pull her close. He didn’t know why, but there was something about her that made him want to lose himself when he looked at her. Her eyes. That smile.
“You don’t sound like you’re from around here, Randall. East Coast?”
“Jersey.”
Amanda’s smile grew larger, and she clapped her hands. “I’m from New York. Just in on business. You?”
“Been out here for a few years. Planning to stay.”
“I see.” She began swaying to the music, lip-synching some of the lines, watching him. “You know we can’t tell anyone we met at a bar, right? It’s too cliché.”
“Who would we tell?”
“People.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know. People.”
Randall nodded. “So then if we can’t tell them the truth, what should we tell them?”
Amanda let her head rock back on her shoulders to think. “How about we say we met while listening to Ray Charles? They’ll assume it was a concert, and we won’t correct them.”
“Ray Charles died in ninety-four.”
“Oh.” Amanda laughed, then placed a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. How about we just say we met in San Francisco and leave it at that?”
Flurries began to float from the sky as Randall navigated his BMW around the curves of the North Salem farm roads, heading toward home. He passed miles of fenced land, the green acres slowly turning white as the snow dusted the area. In the distance, beyond the second hill where the horse stalls were kept, he could see the large red barn and old rusted weathervane that marked the center of his gated community. If Norman Rockwell had an image of an America that would never cease to exist, North Salem farm country was it. It didn’t get much prettier.
Randall passed the two stone columns at the e
ntrance to his development and turned in. The houses here—part of an eight-acre working farm—were massive. Five to seven bedrooms, three to five bathrooms, square footage that started at over three thousand and topped out at six. Four-car garages, in-ground pools, private tennis courts, wraparound porches. There was no end to the bravado of these homes, and there was no way he could be living here without the help of his beautiful and talented wife. Now she was gone. He couldn’t believe it.
He pulled into the garage and shut off the engine, sitting in the silence of his car, thinking about the picture of Amanda the medical examiner had shown him and comparing that to the woman he’d met at that bar. Amanda had always been so full of life. Her carefree nature was what he’d loved most about her. How would he be able to go on living without her by his side? He didn’t want to go back to the man he’d been before they’d met. He couldn’t be that person again.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder next to the gearshift. He picked it up and read the screen.
Incoming Call: Peter Reems
Randall declined the call and slid his phone into his coat pocket. After a few moments, the device buzzed one final time. Peter had left a voice mail. His third of the day.
The driver’s door opening and closing was the only sound in the three-car garage. In the bay next to him was the two-seater convertible she’d gotten him on their one-year anniversary. Just something to play around in. The third bay was empty. Randall suddenly realized that Amanda’s silver Mercedes would never be parked in that space again. No one else was coming home.
He shut the garage door and made his way inside the house, leaving his bag and briefcase in the back seat of the BMW. The house was bigger than they needed, but he loved it like it was a one-bedroom cottage in the middle of the woods. Something about it just made it feel like home. The smells, the warmth, the furniture that didn’t really match but somehow worked together. Kind of like the two of them. It had been perfect. But now everything seemed different. In fact, everything was.
He walked down the same hall he’d walked down the night before and turned into the same kitchen. Nothing was out of place. A plate and empty glass sat in the sink. The flowers he’d gotten Amanda to congratulate her on the award remained in a vase in the center of the kitchen island. Their calendar was still pinned to the corkboard near the pantry, all of their plans meticulously laid out over the next few months. But now those plans would never come to fruition.
I Know Everything Page 4