Chapter 36 #2
Within a couple of hours, two officers, Frog, Tommy, and Jeremiah, were at the shop looking at Joci’s bike.
It was a mess. Jeremiah’s stomach turned looking at the wreckage.
The largest part of her bike was standing up on a trailer.
The handlebars were twisted and scratched.
One of the mirrors listed on the side of the handlebar, and the other mirror lay on the floor of the trailer.
The parts that had flown off when she crashed had also been placed on the floor of the trailer, scattered here and there.
Some pieces had been broken into tiny pieces.
Others were scuffed from sliding across the road or from the impact.
They were so damn lucky she hadn’t been killed.
“Fuck!” Frog swore.
“What?” Jeremiah quickly asked.
Frog pulled his hands out of the bike wreckage. “Her brake lines were cut.”
Jeremiah looked at Frog in disbelief. One of the officers looked at the bike where Frog had been working.
“Show me why you think that,” he said.
Frog reached his hand into the mangled mess and pointed to the brake lines. The officer shined his flashlight into the area. Cuts were clearly visible across the top of each line. Frog cleared his throat.
“When the tops of the lines are cut, the fluid leaks out slowly and drips down the top of the lines. It falls into the bike somewhere and doesn’t leave a big mess on the floor.”
The officer then pointed with his index finger, following the path the brake lines took, and showed them spots on the bike frame and other parts where older, hardened brake fluid had settled.
Frog went on. “It has likely been slowly leaking over the past few days. We had the bike here at the shop and moved it around out of the way a couple of times. No one started it up to move it; we just pushed it around. But we would have used the brakes to stop it when we got it in place. Each time the brakes were pushed, fluid leaked out and dripped down the lines. The brakes would have worked for a little while.”
Jeremiah’s stunned face found his brother’s.
His voice cracked. “Someone cut her brake lines?” Everyone here loved Joci—except LuAnn.
She had been enraged the day she found out Jeremiah and Joci had gotten engaged.
“Deacon told me he sent LuAnn home from work the day our engagement was announced because she was throwing things around and being a bitch to everyone. Then the Milwaukee fiasco.”
Tommy cleared his throat. “You have security video here in the shop, don’t you, bro?”
Jeremiah slowly nodded his head. “I can take you to my office and show you the backup.”
Numb was the only word Jeremiah could come up with to explain his feelings right now. It had to have been LuAnn. No one else there hated Joci. LuAnn wouldn’t have known that Joci was pregnant. No one suspected except his parents, Jackie, Joci, and himself.
Tommy, Jeremiah, and one of the officers walked into Jeremiah’s office. He unlocked the closet where the computer system was housed and showed it to them.
The officer whistled. “Wow, you have a great system here.”
“My brother Dayton is a computer geek. He set me up with this system a couple of years ago. An employee was stealing from me. It backs up to the cloud, so I don’t have to change tapes. It saves perpetually.”
Jeremiah walked over to his computer, booted it up, and logged onto the Internet, then called up his cloud surveillance backup for the past week.
Based on Gunnar and Ryder’s conversation earlier, Jeremiah pulled up the backup video beginning with last Thursday.
They all sat and watched in silence. Jeremiah focused on Joci’s bike.
Based on the time stamp, it had been around 8:30 in the morning when Gunnar had taken off on the bike to test it.
He and Ryder then looked at it. Ryder took off the belt cover and loosened up the tension bolts on the back tire, then adjusted the tension on the belt.
He tightened the bolts on the back tire and put the belt cover back on.
Ryder left the shop on the bike. When he returned, they set the bike over to the side.
Around eleven thirty, the guys in the shop all went to lunch.
At eleven fifty-one, LuAnn walked up to the bike. She looked around, leaned in with a knife, and sliced the lines. She stood up with a smirk on her face and walked away.
Jeremiah sucked in a breath. “Goddammit, I’ll kill that fucking bitch.”
Tommy put a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Easy, bro, don’t make threats.”
They went back and re-watched the recording. The officer wrote down the times on the video.
“We’ll need access to this video,” he said.
Jeremiah nodded. He couldn’t look away. That smirk on LuAnn’s face enraged him. How fucking dare she? She hurt the one person in the world he loved the most. She had hurt Joci time and again. Why couldn’t he have seen it? Now, he might lose his baby—their baby—because of that fucking bitch.
Tommy put his hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. “Watching it over and over isn’t going to help, Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah scrubbed his face with his hands. He stood up and paced around the room a few times.
“How could I not see her escalating to this point? Jesus, I’m just as guilty for allowing that bitch to be within a thousand feet of Joci. God, I should have seen it.”
Jeremiah broke down. He had been holding back for so many hours. He was worried about Joci and the baby. He was worried about everything. He dropped into a chair, put his head in his hands, and cried.
Tommy walked over to Jeremiah and put his hand on his shoulders.
“It’s not your fault, Jeremiah. You can’t think you’re responsible for the actions of anyone else. LuAnn is responsible for herself.”
The other officer got on his phone and called the station. “Is LuAnn Mason still in custody? Then we’ll need a warrant for her arrest. I have a video of her cutting the brake lines on Joci James’ bike, which resulted in Ms. James being injured in an accident earlier today.”