Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill Page B

trying to understand.” She positioned half a dozen eight-by-tens in front of me. I could smell her perfume or shampoo or whatever the source of the fragrance was—light, fresh, appealing even at that hour and in that morbid place of red lights, chemicals, and time-frozen tragedy.
    “This is a tread mark on the outside wall of the shop.” She touched a photo with the tip of her pen. “The way the siding’s dented, that might be the point of first impact.”
    “It would have to be,” I said. “It’s the farthest point up on the wall.”
    Linda nodded. “From there to this mark on the concrete apron is fifty-four inches, give or take.”
    “And that would be the height of the tire,” I said, and turned to Tom. “Did you measure it yet?”
    “Yes, sir. It matches that.”
    “So the tire dropped off the chain, or whatever, and crashed against the side of the building. Jim Sisson happened to be there, for what reason we don’t know. If the chain had started to slip, I would have thought he would have just lowered the thing to the ground.”
    “It caught him somehow,” Linda said. “And I guess they’re pretty heavy?”
    “Loaded, with weights and all, I would guess close to a ton,” I said. “Somewhere in that ballpark, anyway. More than he could manage, that’s for sure.”
    I looked at the photo. “And these?”
    Linda pointed. “You can see where the tread slid down the wall. In order to do that, the bottom has to kick out, too.”
    “Sure. That’s not surprising. And it looks like it did.” The black marks on the concrete scrubbed away from the building as the tire slid down, with Jim Sisson pinned underneath.
    I frowned and leaned close, trying to bring the marks into the right portion of my bifocals. “On that concrete, though, I would have predicted that the tire would just have leaned against the building and stayed there. Or maybe rolled off to one side. It’d have to hit it absolutely square.”
    “Sir?”
    “I’m surprised that it slid down in the first place. That’s all I’m saying. The concrete isn’t slick, and the rubber tire would have had a pretty good grip. It must have dropped hard, maybe with even a little bounce to it.”
    “And then there’s this,” Linda said, “and you have to look close. But I made an enlargement.” She pulled another photo closer. “See the last set of black marks on the concrete? They’re the farthest out from the building, right?”
    “Right.”
    “The tire would have been almost horizontal by then, propped up by Jim’s body.”
    “Yep.”
    “Now look at this.”
    I folded my arms on the counter to act as a brace, relieving my protesting back. Linda bent the goosenecked drafting lamp closer. “What am I seeing?” I asked.
    “The scrub marks are darker, more pronounced, and abruptly change direction. They look like a comma, with the tail off to the left.”
    “Huh.”
    “The tire had to jig sideways,” Tom said.
    “I can see that.” I looked at the marks for a long time, then turned my head to gaze at Linda. She was a fetching kid, a little heavy from too much fast food at odd hours, but with raven black hair that she kept cut short, framing a wide, intelligent face. She looked like she could be Tom Pasquale’s younger sister.
    “You do good work,” I said, and she grinned. The late hour was costing her, though. When the fatigue started to win, her left eye wandered a bit. She had been blinded in that eye during a shotgun assault a couple years before that also had taken the life of one of our deputies.
    The harsh light from the table lamp played on her features, and the scars on the left side of her face were just faint pale tracks against her olive skin. She could have covered them with makeup if she had been the sort to worry about such things.
    “So tell me what you think,” I said to them both.
    “The tire had to kick sideways some,” Tom replied. He reached across and tapped the enlargement. “That sideways mark is