“I’m sorry to hear that. How’s Jenny?”
“She got real shook up about it. We’re staying at a nice hotel near the Freightliner dealer while I’m getting my truck repaired.”
“Good. Pamper her, Hugh. She’s such a sweet kid.”
“Hey, Mom. Can you do me a favor?”
“What, hon?”
“Can somebody be free in about a week to make a run over to the Spokane airport?”
“Sure. What for?”
“Jenny doesn’t know it yet, but I’m sending her home when I get back on the road again.”
“Are you sure that’s the right thing to do?”
“Absolutely. No my choice. I just got off the phone with my fleet safety officer, and he basically made it a condition for my continued driving with them, while everything about this accident is sorted out.”
“And right now, until I know we can get back to a safe routine I need to know Jenny will be safe and staying with you guys.”
“No problem. She’s family, and we’ll love to have her. Good luck trying to persuade her, though,” Hugh’s mom said with a smile in her voice.
“OK, Mom. I gotta go. Love you.”
“Love you too, son. Bye.”
A final call was to James to tell him he’d been in an accident, and that he and Jenny were fine.
Hugh needed to get going. The drug test was urgent for insurance purposes. He understood.
Jake had offered him a ride back to his hotel in the dealership’s courtesy van. He had taken a cab there, and appreciated the convenience of getting the ride back. He went into the service department to tell them he was ready to leave, and to find the courtesy van and driver.
On the way up the freeway, Hugh asked the driver if they could make a quick stop over at the DOT testing clinic.
“No problem,” Sharon, the driver, said.
Hugh started to tell her the address, but she said she knew where it was.
“We get that a lot. Guy comes in here with a broken truck, he’s always got to go pee in the cup,” she said. “Happens all the time.”
When Hugh got to the clinic he learned he had to not only provide a urine sample, but they wanted to clip some hair off of the back of his neck as well. The hair follicle test. Nobody takes chances anymore.
That done, Sharon took him the rest of the way to the hotel.
Fishburn was pleased the phone call with Joe earlier that morning had finally gotten him to get his lazy ass out of bed and get to work on what he needed to do.
The attorney was on the phone with Joe that afternoon. Joe was telling him the husband had called the highway patrol and had fed them a sad story about how his wife had left with their two children and his sister-in-law to go shopping. The husband lied that his wife had told him they might end up staying late, and she might spend the night at her sister’s house.
That’s why the husband hadn’t suspected anything was wrong until he hadn’t heard from her in the morning either. The police were satisfied with that.
“Did he make a positive identification?” the attorney asked Joe.
“No. He couldn’t. Nothing was left. The husband told me he puked his guts out and couldn’t stop heaving when the morgue attendant zipped open the body bag.”
“Fuck!”
“Hold on,” Joe said. “The attendant said there is enough tissue among the charred remains that they could do a DNA test. They could identify the victims if they could get a sample to compare it with. The husband said he offered to get a hair sample from his wife’s hair brush.”
“Excellent. When is it going to happen?”
“It’s already done. So it will only take as long as it takes the lab to run the tests.”
“What about the children?”
“That could be a different problem,” Joe said. “Burned and melted remnants of car seats were found in the back of the car, but so far no evidence the kids were in the car.”
“We’ll have to deal with that later. Let me know the minute the gals are ID’d, and then have the husband call my office to officially get the settlement request started.”
The neighbor and her daughter, the ones who had taken the two children out of the mother’s car, had been watching with horror the coverage of last night’s car crash. They weren’t positive the car burned beyond recognition was the mother’s. But it wasn’t looking good. They had expected to have heard from her by now. Not a word so far.
The mother had told her neighbor what she was doing, that she was working with a guy who was going to pay her a lot of money to stage a little fender bender accident with a truck.
She had warned her neighbor not to breathe a word to anyone because this guy ran with a rough crowd, and it could ruin everything if he found out the mother had told anyone about their scheme.
Watching the news, the neighbor and her daughter went back and forth believing, then not believing, the accident was the fender bender the mother had told them they were going to stage. They concluded what had happened last night was definitely not a little fender bender. So, they decided to hang tight, and keep the children, hoping to still hear from the mother.
Chapter Twenty
Hugh had phoned Jenny to let her know he was on his way back. Her voicemail picked up, so he assumed she was enjoying herself at one of the spa amenities.
He sat in the living room waiting for her to return. It was already mid-afternoon, and he hadn’t had any particular plans for the
