Free Too Close to the Edge by Susan Dunlap

“What could Liz Goldenstern have been doing here?”
    Murakawa shook his head.
    “And how did she get here?”
    He glanced across the inlet to the freeway. “I wondered that too. But you know, in spite of motor neuron lesions, people with spinal cord injuries can navigate in power chairs surprisingly well. Most of us don’t realize how much potential each muscle has, and how much variety there is in the effects of the injuries. After some injuries, patients have some feeling in their trunk and extremities, but no control of movement. In other cases the spinal cord is diffusely injured and some nerve tracts still function, so there’s only weakness, not paralysis. With the Brown-Sequard syndrome, for instance, one side of the spinal cord is functional and the other isn’t. And there’s the anterior spinal artery syndrome, where only the posterior third of the cord functions. And—”
    “Liz was as capable as they come,” I snapped. Some time I might need to know these physiological possibilities, but now they only made the cruelty of Liz’s murder seem all the greater.
    Murakawa hesitated. It was his first murder; he wasn’t used to overlooking the short fuses that were as much a part of investigations as paperwork. “Telegraph is two miles over the freeway. That’s a long way to come in a power chair, in the cold.”
    “It wasn’t that cold five or six hours ago, Paul.”
    “But Smith, people with spinal injuries don’t have good circulation. They feel the cold a lot more than the rest of us.”
    I recalled Liz Goldenstern picketing the Caliban Café during last winter’s rain. Had she had better circulation than Murakawa thought? Or for her had the iciness of the hours on the line been just one more thing to endure? Compared to those hours, the forty-five minutes it would have taken to drive to the marina in her chair would have been a snap.
    Murakawa leaned toward me with excitement. “She wouldn’t have had to come on University, if she didn’t want to be noticed. She could have taken side streets all the way to the overpass.”
    I nodded slowly. “It’s possible, but not likely.”
    “Why not?”
    “There’s no sidewalk on the freeway overpass. Even with a tail light of sorts on her chair, she’d have had a fifty-fifty chance of being killed.” I stopped abruptly.
    Murakawa finished the thought. “Whatever made her come here must have been worth taking that chance.”
    We both looked toward the freeway lights. “Or maybe someone brought her here to kill her,” I said. The ambulance crew had agreed that the settling of the blood in her face and body made it one in a thousand she had died anywhere but where we found her.
    “The killer would have needed a truck or van, some vehicle big enough to handle a power chair, something with a ramp to drive it up. Those chairs aren’t light.”
    That I knew only too well. “We’re going to have to find that vehicle and the driver.”
    Murakawa nodded slowly. I had never heard him complain about overwork, no matter how much time was demanded—unless he thought it was bureaucratic nonsense. And even then he had more patience than most. Maybe because he didn’t see himself doing it for the next thirty years of his life. Murakawa’s future lay not with dead bodies but with ones who could still be helped. “So you want us to go over every vehicle here?”
    “Every one this side of the freeway. Call me if you find anything. Leave word if you don’t. And you can take some comfort in the fact that you’re not doing the worst of the jobs.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “I’m going to Liz Goldenstern’s house. If she had a friend living with her, I’m going to wake them up and tell them she’s dead.”
    I parked in the driveway of Liz Goldenstern’s triplex and walked up the redwood ramp to the two doors in front. In the early morning stillness, my footsteps resounded on the boards.
    Liz hadn’t said she lived with anyone. In the brief time I had been in