Your lawyer should get you a nice fat settlement, no problems.”
She took a deep breath, fighting frustration, and took a new tack. “We owe you our thanks for responding so quickly. If Faye has any hope of recovery, it’s because she got immediate treatment.”
“We all just hope she recovers,” he said, trying to sound humble, but clearly proud of himself for his heroic efforts.
She had to step carefully here. “It was lucky you were passing by, since my mother said you usually play poker with my father.”
“Wife was under the weather, so I missed the game. I was on my way into town to grab flu medicine and noticed the downed rail.” He’d put his hand to his face, scrubbing at his jaw, another sign of discomfort, possibly lying. He’d looked up and to the left, too, which typically meant the person was drawing on the right brain, the creative side, making up a tale. People remembering something looked right and down, engaging the left brain, where memories resided.
“The timing was a miracle,” she said, leading him to say more.
“Cop instincts. We’re always on duty. When you’ve been on the job as long as I have, you know what to look for.” He shifted in his seat. He seemed wary by nature, so the cues she was picking up could have been simply tension over being put on the spot.
“As I said, we feel so fortunate.” She attempted a smile, but felt her lips crack. Her mouth had gone dry as dust, anticipating the tougher questions to come. “When I drove by, I noticed the caution tape near some swerving tire marks. I’m no expert, but it looked like the driver tried to avoid something. The odd thing was how far away from the crash site the marks were. Nothing near the rail. The car had to be going fast to knock it down, right?”
He leaned back, as if to escape. “Like you said, you’re no expert. We’d need an accident reconstruction engineer to answer that question and those fellows are plenty pricey. Big police departments have them. Insurance companies hire them. Luckily we don’t need an expert to tell us they went over the rail and crashed.”
“What about the car? I imagine its condition and position would indicate if there’d been a collision, say, with another car or a large animal.”
“My concern was only for your injured family, not their car.”
“But you took pictures, right? That’s required, I believe. And don’t you have to sketch out the accident, describe what happened? For example, if the car was struck from behind, you’d need to look for the hit-and-run driver, right?”
He breathed harshly through his nose, clearly riled. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, but, out of respect to your family, let me lay out the facts. We don’t live in CSI land. We don’t use crash dummies to reenact wrecks. We don’t have fancy labs and if we did we wouldn’t use them on a cut-and-dried one-car accident on a dangerous curve.”
Dammit. He wasn’t going to help her. The emotions she’d struggled with over the past two hours balled up in her chest. “Except it’s not cut-and-dried, is it? People are saying that Faye was driving drunk.”
His hands shot up in twin stop signs. “You don’t need to worry about that. I told you we were clear with your insurance company. You’ll want to leave that alone for everyone’s sake.”
What was he saying? “Was my sister drunk? You were there. You checked them.” Or had her pills thrown off her reflexes? What could possibly have prevented Faye from slamming on her brakes?
“I look out for your family and I always have,” he said in a low voice, sounding eerily like her mother.
“What does that mean?”
“I’m saying leave it alone,” he snapped.
“I have a right to know what happened.” Her voice broke. Dammit, she would not cry in front of this Daddy-knows-best asshole. “Tell me what you saw, please.”
He glared at her for a long moment. “All right. I’ll spell it out. Was there a strong smell of whiskey in that car? Yes. Did I say that to the insurance adjuster? No, I did not. Will that appear in my report? No. Maybe it was gasoline fumes. Maybe I was mistaken. I could not say. And I refuse to guess. That’s how much respect I have for your family.”
“I can’t believe Faye would drink and drive. It could have been my father, right? And that’s why she was driving.