“That, too.”
They were still laughing when Harry pulled in front of the barn.
“Why didn’t you take me?” Tucker asked as the two women disembarked. Harry leaned down to pick up the cigarette lighter, reminding herself to call Victor, since it must be his.
“ ’Cause you rolled in horse poop,” Pewter helpfully suggested.
“Do you know, Pewter, when you talk, your belly sways from side to side?”
“Do you know, Tucker, when I’m behind you, tailless thing, I see things I’d rather not?”
Harry and Susan had just set foot in the kitchen when the wall phone rang.
Harry picked it up. “Hello.”
“You’ll never guess,” Franny breathlessly spoke. “They found my tires.”
“Where?”
Susan helped herself to iced tea, then moved next to Harry to hear better.
“A warehouse at Zion Crossroads.”
At the junction of I-64 and Route 250 in Louisa County was Zion Crossroads. For so many years it had been sleepy and nondescript, but in the last ten, it had morphed into a hotbed of business, food, and gas. I-64 could carry one all the way to St. Louis if traveling west. Then it turned into I-70, rolling through until the Rockies. Even those drivers on a short hop to Richmond pulled in, grabbed a Coca-Cola or coffee, and stretched their legs.
The old lumberyard was still there, but to the locals it seemed yet another storage business appeared every day. Good for the coffers of Louisa County.
Susan offered Harry a sip as she got her ear close to the receiver.
“Susan’s with me. A real eavesdropper.” Harry smiled. “How did they find the goods?”
“Well, Rick put out a report, went all over. Computers really are amazing, and one of the girls at the cash register at McDonald’s remembered a semi stopping. Nothing unusual there, but she looked out as the driver pushed up the big door in the back and two men jumped out. She saw the tires. Didn’t think anything of it. An officer from the Louisa County Sheriff’s Department mentioned to her that the storage units popping up were great places for contraband. She’d read about the robbery in the paper, remembered it, and told the officer. Anyway, they managed to convince the U-Store-It owner to open the bigger units.”
“Thought they had a double lock. The storage key plus the unit owner’s key.”
“Harry, they do, but we all know those units aren’t that hard to break in to. The storage owner checked his books first, discounting anyone he personally knew, then cut the locks off the others. Presto! Bingo!”
“Isn’t that something? So whose name was on the unit?”
“That’s just it. False name. Paid cash. We can hope they come back at some point to remove the tires, when the contraband is not so hot, but that presupposes no one will talk. A big hope.”
“True.”
Susan said into the receiver, “When do you get your tires back?”
“Don’t know, but they’re in Albemarle County now, wherever Rick puts stolen goods. Bet he had to rent a big unit. I can’t imagine the sheriff’s department routinely has enough space for stolen goods as large as mine. But isn’t that something? One alert citizen. I’m going out there and giving that girl a new set of tires.”
“What a nice thing to do.” Harry was always impressed by Franny, who unfailingly did the right thing.
“Anyway, couldn’t help myself. Had to call my group support buddy.”
“We’ll celebrate after this week’s meeting.” Harry took another sip of Susan’s cold tea. “Franny, do you know where totaled cars go?”
“To auto heaven, where else?”
“Smarty. I assume that when a vehicle is written off as totaled by the insurance company, it’s towed to a salvage yard and the insurance company owns it.”
“Makes sense, but insurance isn’t my field. I just know I pay too damned much for all my policies.”
“It’s cheaper to die. Then again, maybe it isn’t. Isn’t the average cost of a funeral seven thousand dollars?”
“Now, why do you know that? Harry, you’re ghoulish. I don’t want to know the cost of the average wedding.”
“Twenty thousand,” Susan called into the phone.
“That can’t be right.” Franny was horrified.
“I think it is,” Susan replied. “ ’Course, in Albemarle, it’s probably more.”
“Is your daughter in love?” Franny asked.
Susan’s daughter, Brooks, was still in college.
“No, but Ned and I are planning ahead. We don’t want to be bankrupted when the time comes. Thank God our other child is a son.”
“More power to you.” Franny meant it. “I missed the reproduction boat.”
“There’s still time,” Susan teased her.
“I sincerely hope not.” Franny giggled, still buoyant over her good news.
“She’s right, Franny. A woman in England gave birth in her sixties,” Harry told her.
“You know,” Franny became thoughtful, “it’s wonderful. If a woman wants to do it, good for her. Used to be we only had but so much time, whereas men could go on and on. I wasn’t ready at twenty. I’d be a disaster now. Oops, someone at my door. Harry, I’ll see you at group.”
“Great news, girl.” Harry hung up.
“She’ll need to be peeled off the ceiling.” Susan reached into the fridge to refill her glass.
Three ice cubes clinked into a glass, tea over that, and Susan handed Harry her own glass.
“Susan, do me a favor. Call Vivien Bly and ask her where Safe and Sound takes totaled cars.”
Sitting down at the kitchen table, Pewter now in front of her at eye level, Susan bargained. “Tell me why I’m doing this.”
“Are you going to eat anything?” Pewter put on her sweetest puss face.
“Pewter, get off the table,” Harry ordered.
“She’s not going to listen to you.” Susan stared straight into Pewter’s gorgeous eyes.
“You really like me, don’t you? I like you, too. How about some tuna? I like turkey, too.”
“Fatty, fatty, two by four,” Tucker sang under the table. The gray cat pointedly ignored the corgi.
“Harry,” Susan demanded.
“All right.” Harry sat opposite Susan, whose pageboy haircut looked so good on her. “I expect everything is taken out or off squashed vehicles and sold. The hulk is then sold for scrap. Logical?”
“Well, if they do it to human bodies, I’m sure they do it to cars,” Susan agreed.
“I have a hunch. That’s why I want to find Tara Meola’s car. I looked at Herb’s radiator and I, um, have a hunch.”
“Tell me.”
“Not until I’m more sure. I don’t want to look stupid and I don’t want to point the finger.”
“I understand not pointing the finger, but looking stupid? You might want to revise that.”
“I love you, too.”
Smirking, Susan whipped out her cellphone, dialed. “Vivien, Susan here.”
“Still on for Friday?”
“I am. I sure hope the heat has cooled down by the time we go out.”
“Should. Well, that’s what coolers on your golf cart are for. I can taste one of my frozen daiquiris now.”
“I’ll sure want one when we’re done. Vivien, I was wondering if you could help me,” Susan asked.
“I can try,” she replied, a hint of eagerness in her voice.
“You and Latigo are still building Safe and Sound. You know auto insurance.”
“It interests me. It’s what brought Latigo and me together. His first wife, although she really did help start the business, wanted to spend his money. I want to make it,” she forthrightly said.
“As you know, Harry and I serve on the vestry board at St. Luke’s. Your husband kindly wrote the reverend’s 1994 Chevy off. What happens to that truck? I assume it’s stripped for anything of value.”
“Yes, it is. Sometimes we tow the vehicle to a salvage yard. If th
e motor and other parts are quite serviceable, we tow it to ReNu, where those parts are removed, sometimes refabricated, if you will, or simply put on the shelf until they can be used again.”
“So they’re rebuilt?”
“Sometimes they don’t even need that. They’re serviceable with a little fixing up. But what’s left if they’re not serviceable is always sold for salvage. As you know, those prices go up and down like waves in the ocean. Anything having to do with cars, steel, rubber, oil—the prices are volatile. Last year, metal salvage went through the roof. Our profit from that salvage shot up seventeen percent.”
“I’d throw a party.”
Vivien replied, “I bought a new set of clubs.”
“What salvage yard do you use?”
“Haldane’s Salvage in Stuarts Draft. There used to be yards on Avon and Avon Extended.” She cited a street in Charlottesville. “The congestion, traffic especially, made us switch to Stuarts Draft. Easier to get the vehicles in.”
Stuarts Draft is a small town between Charlottesville and Staunton.
“You’ve satisfied our curiosity. See you Friday.”
Harry walked over to the wall phone, pulled a phone book for Augusta County out of the drawer, located the salvage yard in the yellow pages, and dialed.
After ascertaining that Safe & Sound had dropped off fifteen vehicles at Haldane’s Salvage in the last two months, Harry asked, “Do you know who used to own those wrecks?”
“Most times we do,” said Mildred Haldane. “We have paperwork on everything—what’s been removed, what’s left,” the older woman replied with pride. “We’re environmentally concerned. No battery-acid leaks around here.”
“That’s a big job.”
“It is, but we’re the best.”
“Would you mind checking your records to see if you have a busted-up Explorer once owned by Tara Meola?”
“Pulling it up right now.” Silence followed. “Still here. Hasn’t been crushed yet. Now, that’s a process if you’ve never seen it. A big car reduced to a metal cube—a big cube, but it’s amazing.”
“Ma’am, that car was stripped down, right?”
“Oh, yes. Had two wheels left. Even the steering wheel was removed.”
“Why were two wheels left?”
“The other two cracked. These days, wheels are one unit. In the old days, they were steel. Now it’s all aluminum, one unit. They’re lighter, so it saves gas. That’s why it costs about four hundred dollars to replace them. Tires, easy. Wheels aren’t anymore.”
“Cracked?”
Happy to be knowledgeable, Mildred chirped, “See it all the time. Cheap stuff. You’d be surprised at what I see down here. Sometimes they’ve been welded, which changes the molecular structure. Makes it brittle. See copycats of the original wheels—you know, cheap replacements. People can’t tell the difference.”
“The two cracked wheels—could they have been replaced?”
“Cheap, cheap, cheap. Looks just like they came from Ford, though. The destroyed wheels were replacements from an earlier accident. I’d bet on it. Whoever originally owned this Explorer probably did that,” Mildred clucked.
“Ma’am, thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” Harry hung up the phone, stood leaning against the counter. “Susan, I’m getting the picture.”
Vivien was also getting the picture. Susan’s highly unusual questions alerted Vivien to something brewing. Miserable as Latigo’s philandering made Vivien, she loved him. She’d protect and stand by him.
He didn’t deserve it.
Mrs. Murphy slept behind Harry’s computer. Pewter sacked out on the tack trunk, while Tucker lay flat in the center aisle of the barn for the cooling breeze. Crickets chirped, and the peepers in the pond sang loudly, melodious songs punctuated by deep bullfrog calls. Flatface lifted off her nest, venturing out for one of her evening food runs.
Thin tendrils of charcoal clouds floated above the Blue Ridge, now looming and dark. All those thousands and thousands of miles away, white-hot stars sent down their light to shine over those once-mighty mountains. Flatface, flying low, never gave the history of the Blue Ridge Mountains a thought. This geographic phenomenon was all the huge owl knew. Most humans didn’t give the mountains a thought, either, but those who did knew that, before our species walked on earth, the Blue Ridge soared higher than the Alps and the Rockies. The Atlantic Ocean rolled much closer to them than today.
Harry sat glued to her computer. No T1 lines served her rural community, or most rural communities, for that matter. She had to use an ntelos Air Card, which, though better than nothing, could be slower than she wanted.
“Dammit, hurry up.”
Mrs. Murphy opened one golden eye. “Mama, you need to go to bed.”
Checking the bed-table clock, Fair thought the same thing. He’d fallen asleep reading The Utility of Force, which he’d been intending to read for years. A good read, but he was so tired he conked out, the book falling on his muscled chest.
Setting it aside, he rose and slipped his robe on. Harry wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room, where she’d sometimes fall asleep reading, especially in winter in front of a roaring fire. Walking to the screened-in porch, he spied a light spilling out onto the pasture. She was in the tack room.
Stepping out, he observed the ever-changing sky, the silver stars punctuating the late-June night. Somehow, those June and July nights never seemed as pitch black as a January night.
“Honey.”
Startled, she looked up. “You scared me.”
“It’s one in the morning. Come to bed,” Fair said.
“I lost track of time.”
He grinned devilishly. “Are you out here watching porn?”
“No. I leave that to our congressmen.” She laughed. “Come inside and pull up a chair for a minute.”
“I’m trying to sleep.” Pewter lifted her head.
“I got to thinking about Tara Meola’s Explorer and Herb’s truck being classified as totaled. Made no sense to me, since I knew the Chevy was still pretty good and, after talking to Coop, the Explorer had sustained damage but she thought a repair might be possible.”
“Uh-huh.” He had no idea where she was heading.
“I also knew that both vehicles had been repaired at ReNu for very minor infractions a few years before those later accidents.”
“Define ‘minor infraction.’ ” He pulled his robe tighter, for the night air had a little chill.
“Six months before she was killed, Tara Meola rolled over a concrete divider in a parking lot, screwing up a wheel. When Coop investigated the fatal crash, she also investigated Tara’s driving history, asking Safe and Sound to pull up her VIN number. Insurance companies can run a VIN number through for prior claim information. A dealer can’t. A dealer can run the title, get some idea of vehicle history. That’s it.”
Fair said, “So no one knows the true history of the car.”
“Kinda. I can’t figure it all out. What I do know is there are no rules or legislation concerning aftermarket prices and therefore no reliability statistics or safety information. Also, no one admits using aftermarket parts for repairs.”
“Yes.” He was still wondering when she was coming to bed.
“The other thing is if a car is totaled and the insurance company writes it off as totaled, there is no investigation. You don’t know what went wrong with the car.”
“Presumably there was a collision of some sort.”
She turned to him. “What if the collision was caused by a cheap remanufactured part? What if, say, you are hit like Tara by a deer and the part cracks, gives way, you name it? Also, that Explorer had a repair from a prior owner’s small accident—at least according to Mildred at the salvage yard. I’m onto something, but I don’t know exactly what yet. I think Safe and Sound is part of it. Why three men are dead from ReNu has got to be connected to the insurance company.”
“There’s no reason that Latigo Bly would murder or have murde
red three mechanics.”
“We don’t know that. Seems to me that old profit motive has reared its head up again.”
“How’d you find this aftermarket stuff?”
“Searched all over the Internet, using ‘cars,’ ‘collisions,’ ‘auto.’ Finally found the website for the Automotive Education & Policy Institute.” She had found incredibly useful information at www.autoepi.org.
“That’s what you’ve been reading all this time?”
“There’s a lot of fascinating stuff here, and I’m working hard to absorb it all. Kinda overwhelming, really, but what I get loud and clear is this: If someone smashes into our Ford dually, we’ll be directed by our insurance company to go where repairs are cheapest. The company may not pay the full repair at a shop not on their preferred list. And those ‘preferred’ shops are where they use copycat parts. But we’ll never know it. Wouldn’t you rather have the truck repaired with a genuine Ford part, even if it costs more?”
“Yes, but we aren’t paying. Well, I suppose we do pay with our premiums.”
“Right, and so does every other American paying those premiums. The insurance company wants to retain as much of that premium as possible, so they go with cheap repairs.”
“This makes my head swim. Come on, go to bed. You won’t be worth squat tomorrow if you don’t.”
“You’re right. I got carried away. Even if I had a year, I don’t think I could master all this.”
“It is disturbing.” He stood up, leaned over, and turned off her computer. “Now, look, you go to Cooper with this. Don’t go off half-cocked.”
“I won’t,” Harry promised.
Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker padded behind the humans. They felt quite sure that Harry would soon forget her promise and do something stupid.
Harry finished her farm chores. Hot and muggy, the late-June day would only grow more stifling in the later afternoon. She had spoken to Coop that morning, telling her what she’d found at the Automotive Education & Policy Institute website.
Coop vowed to pursue this further by checking other collision repair services, talking to other insurance agents.
The Big Cat Nap Page 18