was careful like always, and I parked in one of the café’s twenty-minute spots right in front. I took my eyes off your car only for a minute or two inside.” Her lip was trembling.
“It can’t be that bad, because you drove back here, right? What happened, did somebody hit Red?” If so, they would have come out the worse for wear unless they were driving the biggest truck or SUV on the market. He couldn’t see what Holly was this worked up about.
“Worse. Somebody scratched the paint all the way down the passenger side. It wasn’t a little thing like an accidental door ding, either, Jake. Looked like a screwdriver blade or a key, drawn all the way from front to back.” She covered her face with her hands, and Jake thought the usually calm and reserved Holly Vance was going to sob on him. “It’s all my fault. I should have just taken my old Jeep. Nobody’d even notice if that happened to it.”
“Hey, it isn’t your fault. It was probably some thoughtless kid, or somebody with a kid’s intelligence anyway, just looking for a little stupid fun. Could have happened anywhere, no matter who was driving.”
Holly seemed to calm down a little. “I still feel bad. You drive such nice cars, and keep them up so well. It isn’t fair that somebody would do this to one of them.”
Jake shrugged. “A whole lot of life isn’t fair. Now let’s have lunch and afterward I’ll go down to the parking garage and take a look. It might not be as bad as you’re making it out to be.”
Her dubious expression said that it was going to be bad, but Jake still wasn’t prepared for the depth of the damage when he stood in the garage half an hour later. The gouge was deep, and ran an easy eight feet across the front fender and both passenger side doors. There was no way this could have been anything but a deliberate, malicious act.
He went back up to the office where Holly was still cleaning up the remains of their lunch. She hadn’t done more than pick at hers, even though Jake had tried to reassure her that this was no big deal. He tried to stay nonchalant even as he asked her questions now.
“Anybody parked next to you on the passenger side when you went in?”
“Nobody. I remember, because there was still snow in the space as if no one had been in it for a while. Even when I came out, there were no fresh tracks over there.”
“Did you happen to see any vehicles peel out in a hurry?” Jake was forming a picture in his mind, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Hard to tell. In this kind of weather there’s always somebody seeing what their truck or SUV will do, the old man against machine thing.” Holly had lived here for most of her life, Jake knew. She was familiar with the macho contests that seemed to go on every time it snowed. “I don’t know, maybe…”
“Go on. It doesn’t hurt to be wrong once in a while.”
Her brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure. There might have been a dark-blue SUV pulling out across the street. If I didn’t know better, I would have said the driver of that one didn’t want me to see him.”
“It’s something. Not anything I’d bring to the police, or even put on the insurance report I’m going to file, but it’s something.” It was the kind of something, Jake decided, that made him want to talk to Rose D’Arcy again. And this time he’d tell her that her suspicions that somebody might be out to get him could be on the money after all.
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