They walked in silence, flashlights slicing through the twisted heaps. Every few feet they'd come to an SUV, check for make and model, then keep on moving. One dozen down, five hundred to go. They stumbled upon one particularly crushed compact car and Rainie recoiled at the stench of dried blood.

"Jesus!" she cried, then stuffed a fist into her mouth to keep from saying more.

Vince swept his flashlight over a four-door sedan that had forcefully become a convertible. The cloth seats had once been blue; now they were stained with ugly splotches of brown.

"I'm guessing car versus semi," he said.

"I'm guessing decapitation," Rainie moaned and quickly moved on.

The sound of an approaching engine rumbled through the silence. Rent-a-Cop. They ducked swiftly behind a mountain of twisted chassis, still too close to the bloody convertible and Rainie pinched her nose with her fingers to block out the smell. She was thinking of the medical report now, the one Quincy had no doubt read time after time after time. How Amanda Quincy had struck the telephone pole at approximately 35 miles per hour. How the force of that impact pushed the front bumper down and the rear bumper up, launching her unsecured body into the air. Her body had hit the steering wheel first. The column had crumpled as it was designed to do, sparing her internal organs but doing nothing to halt her flight. Next had come the dashboard, bending her body like a rag doll at the waist. Finally came the metal frame of the windshield, not designed to crumple on impact, and now driving deep into Mandy's brain while the unyielding glass crushed all the bones in her face.

The security guard finally moved on. Amity and Rainie stood. She said, "I know how to find the Explorer."

"The windshield?"

"Yeah." And maybe it was horrible, but things moved much faster from there.

They finally found the dark green remnant at the very edge of the salvage yard; Rainie called it a remnant because it certainly didn't resemble a vehicle anymore. The entire back end had been clipped off, no doubt soldered together with some rear-ended SUV's front end by the auto world's equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein. The runners were gone. Both doors and the front seats stripped. The tires shed. What was left looked like a gutted fish head, lying on the gaping back hole where its body used to be while its crushed bumper smiled obscenely in the dark.

"Spooky," Amity muttered.

"Let's not linger."

"I'll second that."

Officer Amity opened up his fanny pack and spread out his wares. He was the proud owner of two pairs of latex gloves – a little late to protect the evidence now, Rainie thought, but what the hell. He'd also brought a penknife, a screwdriver, a wrench, four Baggies, and interestingly enough, a magnifying glass.

He handed her the screwdriver, and wordlessly they went to work. First they took off the trim piece of the B-pillar, exposing the plastic casing around the driver-side seat belt. Rainie tested the strap with her hand, and true to Amity's report, it spooled toothlessly onto the floor. He held up the flashlight to provide better lighting and before they went any farther, she got out the magnifying glass. She held it up to the casing. Then she looked somberly at Amity. The plastic casing bore deep scratch marks: they were not the first to pry it open.

"I hereby do solemnly swear," he murmured, "to disassemble all 'nonoperative' seat belts in all auto accidents to come."

Rainie exchanged the magnifying glass for the penknife and cracked the mechanism open. Inside was a giant white plastic gear, with one main white plastic paw and one small back-up lever in case the primary failed. In theory, when the seat belt was pulled forward, it turned the gear, which then caught on the lever and froze. Except that in this case, the main paw had been filed down and the back-up lever clipped off. Rainie pulled on the seat belt again, and they both watched the white gear spin around and around and around.

"If she'd taken it in," Amity said after a moment, "the mechanic guy would've caught it."

"So our guy had to make sure she didn't have the vehicle serviced."

"Isn't that risky, though? If you're going to tamper with a seat belt, why do it a whole month before? Seems like you'd do it day of, or maybe I've just been watching too much Murder, She Wrote."

"Prejudices," Rainie said. "Yours, mine, any cop's. She knows the seat belt is broken, so she doesn't even put it on. And when you arrive at a scene where the driver is drunk and hasn't even bothered to strap in…"

"You think she's pretty stupid," Amity said quietly. "You think, whether you mean to or not, that she got what she deserved. And then you don't ask too many questions."

"Nobody looks too closely," Rainie agreed. She was frowning though, chewing on her bottom lip. "It still seems risky. I mean, if you wanted to kill someone and have it look like an accident, would you simply tamper with a seat belt and hope fate sooner or later takes its course?"

"Victim has a history of drinking and driving. Perp provides the alcohol, then lets her get behind the wheel. Chances are she won't make it home."

"Are they? A shocking number of people drink and drive every day without crashing. Look at Mandy, she'd already done it dozens of times before."

"Maybe he wanted an out. Think of it this way: even if we'd caught on right away, how are you going to prove who tampered with the seat belt weeks before a collision? That just leaves us with looking at who got her drunk. Victim was of age. Serving her isn't a crime, and letting her drive is back to being a civil matter, not criminal."

"Someone who wanted to plan a murder, but wanted to be cautious," Rainie murmured, then firmly determined, "no, I don't buy it. If you're going to go to this much trouble to kill someone, you're going to see it through. You're going to make sure you got the job done. Oh shit, we're idiots!"

She grabbed the magnifying glass and before Amity could react she was around the mutilated hunk of metal to the passenger's side. She pulled on the seat belt. It caught and held. Perfectly good, of course. It would need to be.

"You son of a bitch," Rainie said. And then Amity was holding the flashlight and she was running over the tight weave of the strap with the magnifying glass. "There! Right there!"

The fabric buckled and warped, a two-inch span where the fibers had been stretched as the SUV hit the pole, the seat belt caught, and a body flew against the strap.

"Meet passenger number two!" Rainie cried triumphantly, and then a heartbeat later, "Oh, Quincy, I am so sorry."

SocietyHill, Pennsylvania

The minute Bethie opened her front door, her security system sounded a warning beep. She crossed the threshold and worked the keypad. As was her custom, she entered in the disarm code first, then requested a survey of the various security zones. All quiet on the western front.

Tristan shut the front door behind her. Then locked it.

"Nice system," he commented.

"Believe it or not, as part of our divorce decree, my ex-husband must provide basic security for the girls and me for the rest of our lives. Not that he minds. Quincy has been at his job a little too long; he sees homicidal maniacs everywhere."

"You can never be too sure," Tristan said.

"Perhaps." Bethie set down the picnic basket next to the entry table. It needed to be cleaned out, but that could wait until morning. She started humming, thinking about waking up with Tristan and the various possibilities for breakfast in bed. When was the last time she'd made omelets or biscuits or crepes suzette? When was the last time she'd started her day with anything more than black coffee and a boring piece of toast? She was so happy she'd gone out with Tristan today. And she was even happier that she'd taken these first few baby steps back into the land of the living.