You don't have to tell me. You already told Mr. Caldwell and he believed you and that's what mattered. If you tell me, too, it will help us catch the man who did this and the man who paid him. But you get to decide. Take your time." Elijah looked up at her."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, "I'll tell you." "Thank you," Detective Marsh said. And she opened her notebook. While Elijah spoke in the same careful and exact way he had spoken to Richard, two members of the forensic team approached the black sedan. They did not touch it.
One of them dropped to his knees on a soft mat, he had unrolled from a bag, and lowered a small camera on a flexible cable beneath the chassis. The other stood by the front fender with a clipboard and a phone taking photographs of the dark smear that had pooled on the flagstones beneath the engine. The smear had been hidden from above by the body of the car. Richard had not seen it when he walked out of the front door. He had not been looking.
He had been thinking about the meeting he was driving to, the dinner with the chairman of the regional hospital board, the conversation he had planned about funding a new pediatric wing in his wife's name. The technician with the camera spoke quietly to the technician with the clipboard. The technician with the clipboard walked to Detective Marsh and bent down and murmured something in her ear that took perhaps 7 seconds. Detective Marsh nodded once. Her face did not change.
When the technician walked away, she turned to Richard. "Mr. Caldwell, the forensic team has confirmed what the young man told you." The brake line on the front driver's side has been cut. It's a clean cut, not a wear failure. There's also evidence of fluid drainage from the reservoir.
The damage was done in a manner specifically designed to delay the failure. The sabotage was designed to delay the failure until after you had left the driveway, when you would have had no effective brakes. They are also recovering tool marks. Whoever did this knew exactly what he was doing. This was not a kid with a wire cutter.
This was a trained mechanic, possibly someone with experience in commercial sabotage. We have seen this signature before. "How recently?" Richard asked. Three times in the past eighteen months. All three victims were wealthy men.