He hadn’t worried about it too much at the time. Really, what could that woman, watching from the porch of a house fifty yards away, have actually seen? It was old Agnes Barlow, pushing eighty if she was a day, who once managed a bakery on the island. Made Whoopie Pies to die for, Joe could attest. These days she used a walker to get around. She’d heard the crash, and called it in, but never ventured out into the night to see the accident up close. She’d have seen the flashing lights of his car when he got to the scene. And eventually, she’d have observed the ambulance’s arrival.

It had made him a little nervous when he encountered her, hobbling her way out of the pharmacy, two days later. Spotted him and said, “Oh, Chief, it sure did take the ambulance a long time to get there the other night, didn’t it?”

Think fast.

“Got there as fast as they could,” he said. “They were on another call.”

That seemed to satisfy old Agnes and off she went.

Kyle’s people must have found her, talked to her. Okay, he could have done more. But the way Joe saw it was, the guy was going to die, anyway. Wouldn’t have mattered if he’d called the ambulance the moment he got there.

Probably.

Joe knew the truck as soon as he’d come upon it. He knew Adam Montrose, and he certainly knew who his wife was.

Joe’d had his eye on Sandra for a very long time. Such a looker. Bright, polished, with real smarts. She’d be running this island one day, he bet. Made a point of stopping to talk to her every chance he got. Stopped her for speeding once but let her off with a friendly warning, made a little joke. “You can buy me a cup of coffee one day,” he’d said.

And she was married to a grease monkey who fixed motorcycles for a living. She could do so much better.

When Joe got to the pickup truck window and saw what kind of condition Adam was in, the way he was choking on his own blood, those shards of windshield glass sticking out of the man’s throat, he knew it was only a matter of time.

Adam had managed to gargle out the words, “Fell asleep.”

Joe placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Hang in there. Help’s coming.”

Except it wasn’t.

Adam’s head tilted forward until it was resting on the twisted steering wheel. It was an old truck, produced before airbags became standard equipment and, admittedly, a testament to Adam’s skills as a mechanic that it was still running. It was cancered with rust, missing a passenger side mirror; odds were it wouldn’t have passed a safety check, but the son of a bitch ran.