Killer Pancake by Diane Mott Davidson Page A

system?"
    "Look, it was a fluke... I was in the middle of un- doing the dead bolt, and the phone rang, and he hollered that there was some bad news... and before I knew it, he was right beside me... I just wasn't careful."
    "Are you all right?" He glanced up from the recipe card, his mouth in a thin line.
    When I said I was, he frowned disbelievingly. "Sorry," I amended, "it won't happen again." And there went my summer breeze through the unsecured up- stairs windows, I thought. "What did the hospital say about Julian? Is there any special treatment?"
    He dropped ingredients into the melted butter. The delectable scent of crabmeat and garlic rose from the pan. "He just needs to rest. We probably shouldn't talk about the accident around him. Not just yet, anyway, although we'll have to eventually."
    He reached for a wooden spoon and stirred in flour to make a roux.
    "Why not talk to him about it? And why will you have to eventually?"
    Tom exhaled deeply. "Goldy, he looked god-awful coming home from the hospital. I just don't want to upset him anymore.
    He cried off and on all the way up the interstate. I don't think I've ever seen that kid in tears."
    "Maybe if he talks about it he'll feel better."
    Tom stopped stirring and gave me a half-grin. "Well, Miss Psych Major, I know that's true. But we've got a lot of unknowns right now, and I'm not sure Julian should hear about them just yet."
    "Unknowns?"
    He whisked broth into the sauce, set it to simmer, and then trundled over to the walk-in refrigerator. A moment later fie emerged with two bottles of carbonated apple cider, one of Arch's favorites. He opened a bottle and poured us each a glass full of spritzy gold bubbles. The icy drink was heavenly after the heat of the day.
    Tom said, "This mess with Claire Satterfield looks real bad. I'm going to be tied up with it for the foreseeable future."
    "But I thought the state patrol handled traffic accidents - "
    "It wasn't an accident," he said curtly. He drained his glass. His deep green eyes regarded me grimly. "The patrolman and
    I saw acceleration marks on the garage floor. They're very different from deceleration marks. That's what you get when somebody's trying to stop."
    "You mean you can - wait! Acceleration? Somebody saw her? Somebody saw her and... sped up? Oh, my Lord - "
    He nodded. "And our one eyewitness," he said, "or the one person who thinks he might be an eyewitness, observed a dark green truck veer out of the garage." He stood up to check on his sauce. "We found an eighty-seven green Ford pickup parked by the outside entrance of Prince & Grogan. Stolen. Dented on the grille where it could have hit someone. Coroner's office will match that up with impact marks on the victim."
    I said weakly, "Impact marks? You mean bruises? And wasn't there any blood on the grille?"
    "The body doesn't have time to bruise." I closed my eyes. "Sometimes there's blood on the vehicle, sometimes there isn't," he went on. "This time there wasn't. The only blood was on the garage floor, from when her head hit the pavement.
    Unfortunately, there's not a single discernible hair or fingerprint inside the truck. At least so far. Our guys are working on it. We're grasping for anything." He paused. "But here's something. You were the closest person that we know of to the scene of the crime.
    Relatively near the body, you found that flower."
    "You don't think - "
    "I have no idea, it's probably nothing. But every now and then you get a hunch. When a flower so perfectly fresh is found by the scene of what we're now realizing was a homicide, we have to get it analyzed. So I took a picture of it and sent it to the
    American Rose Association."
    "Sheesh, that is grasping for straws. What do you mean, our guys are working on the truck?"
    He measured out white wine and stirred it into the bubbling crabmeat mixture. "As I said, we're now treating Miss
    Satterfield's death as a homicide. State patrol's out, we're in." His big body sighed. "So. Now all we