After spending the last few minutes in the police station squinting at a photocopy of a photograph of a crumpled, bloody photograph, I couldn't tell you with confidence what the hell I was even looking at. Maybe it was a truck? Frankly I have no idea. If it was up to me, I'd say there's a good chance our main suspect in the case is Optimus Prime.
Fortunately, Mary knows exactly which truck it was. It's this:
This is the Navistar International Lonestar semi-truck. It's very new and quite expensive. The grill actually does kind've look like a cow-catcher on the front of a train, though I doubt the Navistar executives would be all that thrilled with the comparison. They'd probably be even less thrilled with their truck being used as a murder weapon.Now the trick is to somehow cross-reference this truck with deadly crashes around the state and even the country, but without telling law enforcement exactly how we got the information. Detective Ward is going to want to keep as much as he can under wraps for as long as he can so as not to tip off the killer as to what he knows and also to keep copycats from popping up.
Mary thinks we should go to the FBI, which sounds like a long, tedious, red-tape strewn nightmare just tailor-made for the one of us in this car who's actually getting paid.
I think that since it's such a new truck, we should go around to the dealerships and mechanics and get a list of who has purchased one of these things in the area this year. Mary informs me that we'd need to have law enforcement do that, and of course we can't tell how we know what we know so that leaves us in a bind. Hrm.
Doing some checking... okay, the Lonestar is so new that it only just went on sale in February of this year. Seeing as how gas prices went through the roof and the trucking industry is getting absolutely crushed economically, I can't imagine that they sold millions of these things.
Detective Randazzo is the officer in charge of my parents' case (remember him? He's the cop my Mother described as "polite and sympathetic". In a stunning coincidence, my Mother was hooked up to enormous IV bags full of painkillers when she met him. I remember him more as the gigantic dumbass who said that it was a random, freak, hit-and-run accident, and was absolutely, totally wrong about everything. It's just like that Kurosawa movie "Rashomon" where all the witnesses remember things differently and you never know who's right, except in this case I'm right and she's wrong). Despite his obvious failings thus far, Detective Randazzo is actually in prime position to help out in convincing the truck dealerships to provide information on their buyers. Then we can cross-reference the buyer's list with a list of known felons and maybe we get lucky with a match.Really, at this point it should be up to law enforcement from here. The FBI should step in and see if one of those Lonestar trucks has been involved in any deadly crashes in the region. Polite, sympathetic Detective Randazzo should contact those truck dealerships and flag anyone who has bought one of those trucks. Frankly, though, I don't trust that to happen, and the events of this morning were just... I don't feel angry like Mary does, but this does somehow make things even more personal.
I'm still a bit shell shocked and trying to sort things through here, so forgive me if I sound like Captain Obvious, but I find it impossible to believe that the driver of that truck and Mrs. Walentowicz's murderer are different people. With that assumption, he (or she) found out that Mrs. Walentowicz was talking to us and murdered her. But-and this is the part I don't get-after killing her he leaves the photograph of his truck at the crime scene? In her mouth, of all places? And how did he know that Mary was talking to her at all? He had to have been watching-
Me: He was watching you. With Mrs. Walentowicz, when you interviewed her.
Mary: Yes.
Me: So he knows what you look like.
Mary: Yes.
Me: Mary, he could be following us right now.
Mary: I know. I've been watching for a tail, though, and I think we're clean.
Me: Good. Good.
Mary: Still, I'm the one usually doing the following. I'm not typically in this position. They could be right behind us and I might not know it.
Me: Oh. Can I look around and see?
Mary: No.
Me: Oh. (long pause) Can I pee my pants?
Mary: (shrugs) It's a rental. And it might distract from the smell of that shirt.
Mom, I'm a bit worried that the murderer might have followed Mary the other night without her realizing it. He might have tracked her back home to you. We're going to make absolutely certain that we aren't being tailed, then come over to make sure you're all right.
Actually, as soon as you read this, please put up a post just telling us that you're okay.
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