Free at First Sight (2008) by Stephen Cannell Page A

tire tread and scan them into a computer. If they found the car, they could match the tire tread to the unique identifiers found at the crime scene.
    There was also something called "paint fragment analysis." Tiny paint particles, so small you couldn't see them, could be left on skin or clothes. They could retrieve dust-sized samples from Chandler's body and tell what color and make of car the paint came from. I was starting to panic again.
    I got out of the car and walked around to the front. It was a mess. A broken headlight and frame. A caved-in right front fender. Some of the blue paint was scratched and scuffed. There was blood. Chandler's blood. Not much, but some. It had seeped into the broken headlight. Shit. I had to do something about this.
    I sat on the hard ground and leaned up against the car to think about it, trying to sort out my options. Without warning, I began to cry. Deep, soul-wrenching sobs choked my throat and constricted my breathing. It wasn't so much that I was feeling sorry for myself.
    Although, truth be told, there was some of that. It was more as if I was saying goodbye to the last remnants of who I thought I was.
    No longer could I accept myself as someone who had been put upon by life. No longer could I blame my emotional shortcomings on my dead father's fucked-up value system, or on my mother or grandma. In truth, they had all helped to form who I was, shallow and transparent as that man had become. But none of that mattered anymore. I now knew I was no longer struggling against the events of an unfair childhood. I was no longer a victim of my father's death, or my mother's low-income circumstances. I couldn't think of myself as someone put upon by the choices and actions of others. Chick Best, the victim, was gone.
    This new Chick had just committed murder. He had killed another man. This new Chick was an aggressor. A perpetrator. This new Chick had taken a human life, parked on a man's chest and waited for him to die. I'm telling you, it was an impossible idea to come to grips with.
    Being a victim is so much more satisfying. In failure, as a victim your excuse is built in. It's not my fault. I had no advantages growing up. My father was a cheap, slick asshole. When a victim succeeds, he has heroically overcome adversity, risen above cultural and sociological disadvantages to win bravely in the face of all odds.
    However, there is no heroic rationale for murder. Murder is pure aggression. Murderers are unredeemable psychotics. So I sat and cried for the loss of the man I had been. I cried until my throat was dry and my eyes were swollen. When I was cried out, I sat in silence, my mind aching, but no longer spinning.
    I knew that I had a lot of things to do, and I had to do them quickly. First I had to repair this fucking car. I couldn't destroy it or ditch it, because the Hertz Rent a Car in New York City would want to know where it was. If a blue Taurus went missing from Hertz and the police got blue Taurus paint off Chandler's body, a ten-minute computer run would find me and I would end up hosting a shower party in the North Carolina State Prison.
    I had to repair the car so no one would notice. I knelt down and studied the right front fender. It was bent. No large paint chips seemed to have been knocked loose, but the rim was scratched and the paint underneath scraped, so that would need to be straightened and repainted. I had driven over Chandler's chest with the right-side tires. Can skin and clothes be used to match treads? Did I leave tread marks on Chandler or on the pavement? I wasn't sure, but to be safe, I needed new rubber.
    How long before Chandler Ellis's death would become front-page news? With luck, it wouldn't make the papers until tomorrow evening. Of course, because he was related to the L . A . Times Chandlers, the electronic media would jump all over it, pending notification of kin. That meant it could make the TV news by sometime tomorrow, maybe sooner. So there wasn't