Chapter 3 - The Lens on the Cab
The driver’s name was Jesse Vance, though he was no blood relation to the people who owned the four-hundred-acre apple orchards along the river bluff. He was fifty-four, had lost the tip of his left middle finger to a winch cable in the Baltimore rail yards thirty years earlier, and drove an independent rig leased through a regional gravel cooperative out of Port Jervis.
He sat on a low plastic stool in the corner of the small consultation room behind the nurses' station, holding his grease-stained canvas driving cap between his knees. The smell of cold diesel, road salt, and wet wool rolled off his quilted jacket in thick, humid waves, competing with the clinical reek of the antiseptic Kincaid had used to scrub his forearms.
On the laminate table between Jesse and the doctor sat a square piece of black molded plastic no larger than a deck of playing cards.
"It’s a BlackVue DR900," Jesse said, his voice flat and hoarse from forty-eight hours of straight hauling between the limestone quarries in Pennsylvania and the concrete plants along the Hudson. "Dual-channel. Four-K front-facing lens with a sixty-degree wide-angle cone, and a secondary seven-twenty sensor pointing out the back of the sleeper cab to monitor the load chains. It runs on a twelve-volt lithium auxiliary battery under the passenger seat so the fleet managers can't claim you were idling when you were sleeping off your fourteen-hour log."
Beside Kincaid stood Investigator Thomas Miller of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
Miller was forty, wore an unpressed charcoal suit that smelled of stale filter cigarettes and diner coffee, and carried his shield pinned to a black leather lanyard around his neck. He was not from the township; he had grown up in an iron-mining village in the Adirondacks, and he looked at the little plastic camera with the clinical, hungry detachment of an accountant examining an un-audited ledger.
"The truck was parked on the shoulder?" Miller asked, clicking the end of a black ballpoint pen against his notebook.
"Directly across from their south service gate," Jesse said, nodding toward the window that looked out over the hospital parking lot where the rain was beginning to turn into a thin, greasy sleet. "My steering box threw an oil seal at five o'clock yesterday afternoon. The drag link had about four inches of play in the teeth. I wasn't going to take sixty thousand pounds of lime down the mountain on a road that slick, so I pulled her off into the weeds, threw the four-ways on, and hitched a ride with the fuel tanker down to the diner by the interstate to wait for the road mechanic."
"You left the camera running?"
"The camera don't shut off, Trooper," Jesse said, his jaw working on a small piece of tobacco tucked behind his lower lip. "The company requires continuous twenty-four-hour loop recording to clear the insurance deductibles if someone tries to back an ATV into the rear pallets while you're away from the cab. It records thirty frames a second to an encrypted micro-SD card behind the side panel, and it’s got an external condenser mic mounted under the chrome air horn on the driver’s side to pick up the whistle on the turbocharger."
Miller reached out with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers from the hospital’s suture tray, picked up the micro-SD card that lay beside the camera body, and slid it into a yellow plastic evidence envelope.
"Did you hear anything while you were waiting for your ride?" Miller asked.
"I was gone by six-fifteen," Jesse said. "The fuel truck picked me up right as the rain started to freeze. But when I come back this morning with the lowboy to tow the rig down to the shop, the troopers had the lane yellow-taped from the orchard fence all the way down to the culvert."
He looked through the open door toward Trauma Three, where two nurses were wheeling a mobile ultrasound cart down the hall, their rubber soles squeaking against the wet wax.
"Is the girl going to live?" Jesse asked.
"The mother will," Kincaid said, his arms crossed over his chest, his lab coat still stained with my blood and the orange dust of the cayenne. "The child is still in question. We have an abnormal variability on the fetal heart rate, and the uterine wall is irritable from the peritonitis."
Jesse Vance spat into an empty paper coffee cup resting between his boots.
"Old woman Vance is an animal," the driver muttered, his eyes narrowing as he remembered thirty years of local history that never made the county gazette. "Her father was the county judge back in seventy-two. When the state took their bottom land for the reservoir, he shot four of his own milk cows in the front yard just so the state appraisers would have to smell the carcasses while they were walking the line. That whole family thinks the dirt between the river and the ridge is a private kingdom where the law stops at the cattle guard."
"The law didn't stop at the cattle guard last night, Mr. Vance," Investigator Miller said, sliding his notebook into his breast pocket and taking the yellow evidence envelope by the corner. "The law was sitting on your windshield."
Miller turned to the doctor.
"Where is she now?"
"We moved her to the intensive care unit on the fourth floor," Kincaid said. "We have two security guards outside the door, and I told the administrative desk that she is listed under a Jane Doe status until the warrants are signed. Warren and his mother are still in the main waiting room. They brought two of their church deacons with them, and they are currently telling the hospital ombudsman that Clara has a history of self-mutilation and severe prenatal hysteria."
Miller’s mouth curved into a thin, cold line that had no humor in it at all.
"Let them talk," the investigator said, walking toward the elevator banks with the yellow envelope held flat against his ribs. "Every syllable they put on paper is another thirty months in the state facility at Bedford Hills. I have a technical analyst from the regional forensic lab in Newburgh meeting me in the basement in twenty minutes. We’re going to run that audio through the spectral filter."
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He paused at the elevator call button, looking back over his shoulder at the old doctor.
"Tell her to keep her chin down, Dr. Kincaid. If she stays alive for forty-eight hours, I will have both of them in orange jumpsuits before the weekend whistle blows."
