Read Online Dead Weight by Steven F. Havill - Free Book Online

about six inches long.”
    “So the tire fell against the wall and then slid down, and just as it stopped sliding downward, it kicked sideways. All right. Maybe. I can think of several explanations for that.” I reached across for the other photos. “What do these tell us?”
    “The most instructive set are these,” Linda said. The first was a grisly photo of Jim Sisson crushed under the tire. The weight of the tire had smashed him into the small space beside the wall, his skull crushed against the metal flange that made up the frame for the massive overhead door. The tire was resting diagonally across his back.
    Linda took a second copy of the same print and with a grease pencil circled the portion of the photo that included all that could be seen of the actual contact point between the tire tread and Sisson’s back.
    “See these tire treads?”
    “Cleats, I think they’re called.”
    “Yes. Now, they’re about four inches apart, and each one is roughly two inches wide. That’s what Tom measured. Here’s one resting on Sisson’s right shoulder, digging into his neck and head.
    Going to the left, here’s another, just past his spine and down a little bit.”
    “OK,” I said, feeling uneasy.
    “Now this.” Linda slid one of the photos of Sisson’s corpse across for me to look at.
    Sisson had been a wiry little guy, the sort who could work ten or fifteen hours without a pause. That he hadn’t been able to scramble out of the way indicated that the chain had snapped loose so fast he hadn’t had time to even say, “Oh, shit.”
    “Here’s a bruise, here’s the second, and here’s a third,” Linda said. “One, two, three, in an arc that we could extend from top right shoulder down to lower left flank.”
    I blinked and straightened up, grimacing at the kinks in my back. I took off my glasses, pulled a lens-cleaning tissue from the box by the enlarger, and polished them. Tom and Linda waited for me to mull whatever it was that didn’t click.
    “There’s no way that we can predict with one hundred percent certainty how that tire struck him,” I said finally. “But he had to have been crouching down when that tire hit him…maybe groping for a bolt or something—some tool maybe. That tire’s big, but it’s not like it’s off one of those giant earthmovers or something.”
    “But there’s a clear match between how the tire is resting on Mr. Sisson in this photo,” she pulled the first enlargement out of the pile and put it beside the photo of the corpse, “and the two upper bruises here and here.”
    “True.”
    “In this photo, the tire isn’t in contact with his body at this point, where the lower, third bruise is.”
    “Also true.” I didn’t add that there could be several explanations for that, because I couldn’t think of a single one. “Anything else?”
    Linda shook her head. “Bob’s out there now. I guess Mrs. Sisson went to Las Cruces with the kids to stay with some relatives. He wasn’t too happy about that, but…” She shrugged. “He said he was going to hang around until light. He wants me back out there then.”
    “All right. Get some rest before that.” I looked at the photos again and frowned. “It doesn’t quite add up, does it?” I said.
    As I turned to go, Tom Pasquale asked, “Did you want to talk to me about something, sir?”
    I stopped short and frowned. “If I did, I’m damned if I remember what it was. Couldn’t have been too important.” I grinned at both of them. “You guys keep after this.”
    I had no doubt that Undersheriff Robert Torrez was sitting over at the Sissons’, deep in thought, the same thing bothering him that now bothered me. Somehow, a heavy tire had fallen on Jim Sisson, crushed him to death, and then been jerked sideways.
    Maybe Sisson’s death throes had been enough to do that, even with a two-thousand-pound, fifty-four-inch-diameter, nineteen-inch-wide tractor tire on top of him. If there had been a spark of life in