Kerney scanned the book. It would be impossible to attempt contact with everyone who'd been by to pay their respects. 'When is the service?' he asked.
'Tomorrow morning at nine, with interment to follow,' Bishop said, noting the name of the church.
'Has Ms. Langsford given you a preferred seating list for family and friends?'
'I'd like a copy.'
Bishop's eyes stopped smiling. 'Surely, you're joking.'
'I can get a court order, if need be,' Kerney said.
'That's not necessary. I'll get it for you.' Bishop stalked into a office, returned with a typed piece of paper, and handed it over.
Twenty names were on the list. Kerney didn't recognize any of them.
'Do you know any of these people?' he asked. 'Those who are local, I do,' Bishop replied.
'Run them down for me,' Kerney said.
'People are grieving,' Bishop said stiffly. 'I don't think this is an appropriate time to be conducting police interviews.'
'Would you rather have me stop them for questioning outside the church?' Kerney asked.
Bishop blanched at the thought, and Kerney left with the lowdown on twelve of Linda Langsford's preferred guests.
Rather than wait for the evidence officer at the sheriff's department to find the film negatives and call him back, Tim Dwyer decided to use his time at the accident scene. The state highway was a major east-west artery and big trucks and motorists roared by in both directions, only marginally slowing down when they caught sight of the warning lights flashing on Dwyer's unit.
He parked at the bottom of the hill and walked up the asphalt shoulder.
At the top of the incline he looked down the road in the direction Arthur Langsford had been traveling. Even at top speed on a bicycle, coming out of the curve, the rider should have been able to stay on the shoulder, see the oncoming car, and make an adjustment. Waxman had made no mention of bike skid marks in his report, which Dwyer found interesting. The most common panic reaction to avoid a crash is to hit the brakes.
At the bottom of the curve, Tim located the culvert and the county line sign Waxman has used as his reference points. As traffic allowed, he ran measurements to verify Waxman's distances and found the spot Waxman had identified as the point of impact. He sprayed the location with orange paint, and photographed it from various angles.
Back at his unit, he punched in numbers on a pocket calculator, entered the formulas, and checked Waxman's math. Waxman had been right on, if he'd found the true point of impact.
Tim looked back up the hill. What was the first point where the driver could spot a hazard in the road? He popped the trunk of his unit, grabbed his metal file case, carried it up to the impact point, and placed it on the shoulder. At the bottom of the hill, he could see the case clearly, and it was less than half the size of one of the three cardboard boxes.
Figuring driver distraction, Tim cut the distance in half, and found himself thinking there was still time to slow and veer to avoid hitting the boxes or Langsford.
He returned his file case to his unit just as his call sign came over the radio. The sheriff's office had found the negatives and still had the pieces of the bicycle in evidence.
'Good deal,' Tim said to the dispatcher. 'I'm on my way.'
In the sheriff's department evidence room, Tim sifted through the box containing the mangled parts of Arthur Langsford's mountain bike. The struts, front wheel, and handlebars were crumpled, and the control levers connected to the brake and gear shift cables dangled from the handlebars. Deep scratches in the metal showed that the bike had skidded across the pavement for a considerable distance before coming to a stop.
Tim opened the manila envelope attached to the lid and read through Waxman's forensic analysis request and the lab's results. Waxman had asked only for the identification of any foreign paint, and none had been found.
The back wheel, tire, and the support piece that anchored the rear brakes to the frame were intact. Tim took a closer look. The brake pads were frozen in a closed position against the sidewall of the tire, which was pretty good proof that Langsford saw the car coming and reacted.
That, coupled with the fact that most of the road damage to the handlebars was concentrated on one side, made it very likely that Langsford had both braked and turned to avoid the collision.
Coming down that hill at thirty-five or forty miles a hour, Langsford must have put skid marks on the pavement. Waxman had flat-out missed them.
Tim's interest in the negatives jumped several notches. He dumped the bike parts in the box, resealed the lid, signed the evidence slip, and got back to district headquarters in a hurry. At the computer terminal, he scanned in the negatives and punched them up on the screen one at a time. He played with background colors until he had the right mix that highlighted the vehicle skid marks.
He looked, and looked again. The tread marks were thick and conspicuous on the outer side of the left front tire, and on the inner side of the right front tire, but otherwise barely discernible. What Waxman had taken to be skid marks was clearly a hard turn of the front wheels. But at what speed?
He punched up another image and the slender lines of the bicycle skid marks jumped out at him. He put the two photographs side-by-side on the screen, leaned back in his chair, and studied them intently before thumbing through the autopsy report. Then he factored in the new information and reworked Waxman's original calculations.
The new figures didn't work. He checked his wristwatch, printed hard copies of the negatives, and headed for the door. He needed to take new measurements at the site and visit with Marcos Narvaiz, the first volunteer firefighter on the scene, to see if he could fill in any of the remaining blanks.
Working the list of locals for preferred seating at the funeral services didn't yield anything of value. Death had cleansed Vernon Langsford of all human frailties, and Kerney found himself listening to cliched eulogies that gave no true sense of the man, the most notable ones coming from a sitting district court judge, a former district attorney, and a retired city police chief.
He called around to motels and bed and breakfast inns and located six of the eight out-of-town guests who were on Linda Langsford's list. He got to the Bitter Lake Bed and Breakfast just as Leonora Wister was leaving her Santa Fe-style cottage accommodations.
'Vernon was my first cousin,' Leonora said, as she stood next to a late-model white Cadillac with Texas plates. 'We grew up together.'
'Were you close as children?' Kerney asked, trying not to stare at Leonora's blue gray curly hair. She clutched a large purse against her stomach in an attempt to hide her thick waist from view.
'Yes, until high school, when my family moved to San Antonio. After that, I would see him during occasional visits to Roswell.'
'What kind of kid was he?'
'Wild,' Leonora replied.
'In what way?'
'He became interested in girls at a very early age.'
'Can you give me specifics?'
'Not really. Maybe Danny Hobeck can. He was Vernon's best friend all through school.'
Kerney scanned his list. Hobeck was one of the out-of-town guests he'd been unable to locate. 'Do you know where he's staying?'
'With his sister,' Leonora replied.
Kerney asked for and got a name and address.
'How can prying into Vernon's childhood possibly help you catch his killer?' Leonora asked.
'I'm not sure it will,' Kerney said.
