Roll the Dice
“Asking for a friend,” said Tillotson.
He set his coffee cup down and told Diana it was time for business. She turned the gas range off and took her seat across from him in the kitchen of her rented Cape Cod.
“Did I ever mention Detective Hinckley in Nevada?” he asked.
“The one you met at that conference.”
“That’s him. We’ve been bouncing ideas off each other ever since.”
“And I guess he’s on that kidnap thing in the desert. It’s all over the news.”
“Right again.”
“And you told him about your pet hooker. You take the leash off, and I fetch the bad guy.”
He leaned back and met her eyes with his.
“Actually, I told him I’d give it some thought.”
She was already feeling ashamed of her outburst. Neither of them had a choice here. When another cop asked for help, Tillotson couldn’t say no. And if she refused to contribute her special expertise, he would have to stop speaking up for her with other cops in the area.
Her business was illegal, and that messed with everything.
“Run it by me,” she said.
By now he knew her well enough to take that the way she meant it, as an apology.
“Hinckley’s got a problem. The brass are leaning on him—the bad guy’s dead, close the case. But his gut is telling him there’s more to it.”
Tillotson reached into his briefcase on the floor and removed a thick folder, which he set on her wooden tabletop.
“He sent me the case file.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Enough to show he’s serious.”
He opened the folder and started spreading notepads and Manila envelopes on the tabletop.
“So, we have this couple living in the middle of nowhere,” he said as he worked.
“And Nevada knows how to do nowhere.”
Tillotson looked up.
“Am I hearing the voice of experience?”
“I went out there a couple of years ago. One of those times when things were getting hot for me here.”
His scrutiny was making her feel naked, which she found a little disconcerting. Their relationship didn’t involve taking her clothes off.
“You never told me about that,” he said.
“It never came up.”
“To do what—check out the legal brothels?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time. Keep me off the streets. But I met this girl just as she was leaving one of those places after a three-week shift. I picked her brain and ended up thinking I’d rather go to jail.”
“This is why I keep coming back,” he said. “You never run out of surprises.”
“You come back for my coffee.”
“Guilty,” said Tillotson. “Okay, we have this couple, Ralph and Christine. They have the bad luck to meet this convict, a real psycho. He’s escaped from Carson City and he stumbles across them while they’re making one of their expeditions to civilization. He holds them at gunpoint and makes them drive.”
“To Los Angeles, if I remember right.”
“According to Christine. He figured he could disappear there.”
“Which suggests he planned to kill them from the start,” said Diana. “They could tell the cops where he went.”
“And they figured that out. So the husband’s move was pretty gutsy. Roll the dice. Or the car, in this case.”
“And kill anybody who wasn’t belted in, which turned out to mean everybody but Christine. That much was in the papers. What else?”
“That top file is her statement.”
Diana started reading.
“That answers that,” she said after a moment. “I wondered why the bad guy didn’t just shoot them and take the car.”
“He practically grew up in prison. Never learned to do the most basic things, like drive a car.”
Tillotson thought for a moment.
“We’ll never know what made him think he wanted to try real life at this point. But the point is, he did.”
“The cops would have been looking for one man,” said Diana. “Ralph and Christine weren’t just transportation. They were camouflage.”
“Good point.”
She read some more.
“And Christine couldn’t drive either. Really?”
“They’re sixty-something, and they belong to this fundamentalist sect. That means they’re old school to a degree that you don’t see much anymore. It’s probably what kept Ralph alive. The dirtbag needed him.”
“But think about her,” Diana said. “She’s marooned on the ranch if her husband’s not available to drive. I couldn’t live like that.”
“Her religion said she should be dependent on her husband,” said Tillotson.
“I have to wonder how she felt about that at three in the morning, with him snoring next to her. And what happens now? What does her religion say about a woman without a husband?”
Silence took over, as neither of them found an answer. Diana sought refuge in the file.
“So they stop at a motel,” she said. “The bad guy ties Ralph up in the bathtub and well, we don’t need to spell out what happened to her.”
She looked up at Tillotson.
“Like that movie.”
“The Getaway. I thought of that too. Only, in the movie the wife went over to the bad guy’s side.”
“I doubt Christine did,” said Diana.
“We can reconstruct what’s going on in Ralph’s head the next day, while he’s driving. He’s thinking he might get one shot, and he’d better make it count. He’s seen that the bad guy isn’t wearing his seatbelt. And Ralph knows that road. So he picks his spot and goes into the curve too fast. Deliberately. Then he turns hard. The car flattens the guard rail and cartwheels down the hill. The two men get thrown from the car and killed.”
“Well, Hinckley is right,” she said. “There’s more.”
A smile spread across Tillotson’s lean, forty-something face. This was what he came for.
“Ralph sounds like a cautious, law-abiding kind of guy,” she said. “Not the kind to leave his seatbelt off.”
“Maybe the bad guy wouldn’t let him wear it. As a precaution against the kind of thing he actually did.”
“Then why let Christine wear hers? It’s too much thinking for a guy like that. You have any pics?”
He pushed another envelope across the table. Diana started thumbing through photographs. Two broken bodies snagged on tough scrub brush made an appointment with her nightmares. She kept looking.
“Here.”
One photo showed the driver’s seatbelt. The buckle was the shiny metallic lift-the-flap kind.
Diana gestured toward the rest of the file.
“You know what to look for. Did they fingerprint the buckle?”
He flipped a lot of pages before he looked up and said, “Nothing here about that. What are you thinking?”
Now she wondered how to start.
“If I’m an expert on anything, it’s married men. And wives, by extension.”
“Okay.”
“Think about Ralph and Christine, together all the time. Talk about a pressure cooker.”
“Even before this happened.”
“Now think about her with the bad guy in a motel room. Her husband’s not doing anything. He couldn’t, but I doubt she’s cutting him any slack about that. And if they survive this, she’s looking at the rest of her life alone with the man who let it happen.”
“So where is this going?”
“Tell Hinckley to fingerprint the release on the belt buckle, underneath, where you’d hook your fingers. Her prints shouldn’t be there, because she never drove the car. If they are …”
She pictured it for a moment.
“They’ve been married for how many years? They finish each other’s sentences. They read each other’s minds, even if they don’t like each other much.”
“I know something about that,” said Tillotson.
That was already more than he had ever told her about his personal life. She gave his comment a respectful moment and went on.
“She feels him speed up into the curve, and she knows what he’s doing, maybe even before he does. Just as he’s about to flip the car, she reaches across and releases his seatbelt.”
Tillotson was already packing his briefcase.
“I’ll let you know.”
And he would. Sometimes she wondered what other cops would think of him reporting to a civilian, and not just any civilian.
She expected to wait days or even weeks for Hinckley to plod through his investigation, but the next morning she was brewing more coffee for Tillotson. He drank it at all hours, and he never turned down a refill.
“That was quick,” she said.
“Hinckley asked Christine about her print on the buckle, and she gave it up like she was just waiting for someone to ask. You called it. Every detail.”
He paused.
“That’s ruthless.”
“That’s marriage.”
Albert Tucher is the creator of suburban sex worker Diana Andrews, who has appeared in more than 100 stories in venues including THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2010. Her first longer case, the novella THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE, was published in 2013. In 2017 Albert Tucher launched a second series of police procedurals set on the Big Island of Hawaii, in which PELE’S PREROGATIVE is the latest entry. He lives in New Jersey
