Witness Hunting In Deliverance Land

By the time I finish this blog, half the planet will be asleep.
I suppose this is the price I pay for the commitment  I made... being, a post a day as long as I am physically able.

And in every "Day In The Life Of A Private Eye," there is, indeed, a tale of interest to tell.
For a private investigator, there is a seldom a dull day... surveillance aside... when the sun rises and nothing exciting, different, or unexpected happens.
There are always strange, intriguing calls and cases: like someone to find; something to discover or uncover; a secret to expose; a story to unravel.
And so I travel.
I go to to places full of anonymous and cautious faces that I turn into sources of information.

My last mission tonight was just before sunset.

I  am home now home, safe and sound. Just brewed  a small of pot of Seattle's finest coffee lest this blog turn to mental mush.

Tonight's story still is as fresh in my head as the deer reflected in my headlights just  before I turned right into the dirt road that led to my house this evening.
I was going way under the speed limit, I knew the cars behind me were P.O.' ed because I was going so slow and I didn't care.

The deer stopped in the road and looked at me.
I stopped and looked at it.
I turned my headlights down to parking lights and also set my flashers. The deer and I were locked  there for only a few seconds... until it jumped into to the woods on our left and disappeared. I turned  right, turned my lights back up.  And as I drove down the long dirt road to our home, I  considered both myself and that deer quite lucky. A Washington State police officer was killed last week after he hit a moose in the road and his car was bent in half.

Just before my deer encounter,  I was  returning from my attempt to locate a  witness to an accident that happened in June.
I blogged about that accident a while back. A semi-truck changed lanes near a naval base and ran into a Mazda Miata, convertible down. The small car,  which flew into the air, flipped a couple of times, then bounced off the concrete road divider/jersey barrier, bounced off the road and the car landed upside down on the crown of my client's head.

The trucker that hit him, plus a passing National Guard Solider,  and three men in a pick-up, all stopped and righted the upside down Miata.
All the men thought my client was dead. After all, he was hit by a semi,  drove a convertible, the top was down.
They were blown away, one of the men told me, that the guy was still alive and talking. Actually, one guy said, our client was babbling.

I spoke to all the witnesses on the police report except for one.
There was one woman, behind the Miata, who allegedly witnessed the whole thing.
The attorney who hired me wanted to know what that one witness saw. All he wanted was the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.

Even though the semi driver apologized and accepted liability... even thought the police ticketed the trucker... trucking insurance adjustors aren't typically the most pleasant and honest of people.
They figure everyone is out to screw them because they have such big policy limits.
So they can say whatever they want -- that our client changed lanes too, that our client did this or that, they could say anything  to contribute 10, 20 even 30% to our client's liability.
Therefore, the DEF's adjustor may demand our innocent client  pay 10, 20 or 30% of his medical bills. And that posture, lie, manipulation -- whatever you call it --   would lead to a trial.
Our client's medical bills were already close to 600k.

So I had to find this one missing female witness. All I had was a name, phone number and address in a town out here we will call "Port Something." 
You guessed it, it is near the water.

I called that witness based on a number in the police report for about two weeks. Morning, noon and night I tried. All I got was once of those automated anonymous  male voice machine messages that cite the number and no name.

I finally got lucky for just a beat last Sunday night.
A man answered the phone. Then he blew the wind out of my sails when he said  there was no one there by that name, never had been. He'd  lived there with his wife of 25 years. He knew of, or witnessed no accident, in the area I described.

That left me no choice. I had to make a cold call, a door knock.  And that was my last mission of today's long day. To go to the address of the witness on the police report.

To say the location was rural is an understatement.
To those of us old enough remember the movie "Deliverance,"  that would would be more the neighborhood this investigator was in.
I was grateful for my four wheel drive,  new rear tires and the front ones I just inflated. The dirt road was about a half mile long and rutted before it curved right along a more rutted dirt road.

Perfect place for a Meth lab, I thought, looking around the spotted lots of trailers, "keep out" signs  and log or prefab homes for tell-tale signs of Meth manufacture: the big plastic containers or metal cans outside; empty chemical bottles;  piles of trash;  unkempt yards; pitpulls tethered; darkened windows, shades and boarded up windows.

The road I was going down was a dead end that ended in a cul de sac.
There were two houses there, both were occupied.
One, with an older man stepped out his front door with a rifle as I drove up. His grandson followed out the front door with  a BBG Gun. There was one more kid with a fishing rods.
I stepped out of my car with my ID in hand and visible.

The other house had a small mutt run towards my car barking wildly as I stepped out of it. Two woman emerged from that house, one wearing an apron and wiping a kitchen knife. It was obivous they weren't use to strangers.

I flashed them my most convincing smile while displaying my state PI license. I explained I was P.I. from  Seattle. I said I was so sorry to intrude this way, I was looking for a witness.

"A witness to what?" the the old man with the rifle asked.

"A wreck by the naval base," I said and added, "Nice gun. Looks old."

He told me it was his father's as I stepped closer to take a look thereby diffuse any animosity.
"I"m an unarmed investigator" I said to him, "though if I did have a weapon with me, that would do."

"You betcha'," he laughed as the barriers between us crumbled.

Turned out the witness I was looking for was visiting one of the women next door from another state when the accident happened.
The witness went back to one of the Carolinas and no one would give me her name or number. I suspected the witness  had a warrant or something going down that made her keep a low profile.

I gave the woman this witness was allegedly visiting, my business card and asked her to tell the witness to call me. I told her to tell the witness I wanted nothing more than to talk to her, to hear what she saw. Her story would be enough for me to write a "Report  Of Interview" that we would include in the case file.

After some more small talk, I  said my good-byes and thanked the man with the gun for not blowing my head off.
He laughed and said, if it was night, I would've have looked down a few more gun barrels.
"Strangers  usually don't come out to these parts alone, " he said.
I smiled and said I knew why.

As I pulled out of Deliverance-land and made my way back to civilization, I  got a cell signal and called the law firm. I briefed the attorney who hired me on my encounter.
I also told him I wanted hazard pay. He laughed heartily and thought I was kidding.
I wasn't.

It wasn't 30 minutes after I encountered  the deer, walked in my door, ate some salmon caught fresh last night and downed some coffee, that the witness called me. The woman I gave my business card to, called her.

Yes indeed, she said, she was visiting Washington when she saw the accident. She could not get it out of her head she said. She now takes sleeping pills so she ahe doesn't dream about it.

The one story that she kept repeating to me was...  she was the one that called and talked to the 911 operator.
She said the guy's arm, our client's, was almost sliced off.
The men helping him needed a tourniquet.
Everyone was screaming for a tourniquet and she said, "I"m a big girl, I used to be a paramedic, so I offered them my bra."
So. she did that thing girls can do to take their bras off while still wearing their shirts, and they used her bra as the tourniquet for his arm. She wondered if the doctors saved his arm and his life.  

I told her her he survived and his arm was not amputated. I also told her our client was conscious the whole time, remembered this kind woman who gave him her bra and wondered who she was. She asked me to give him her phone number. I said I would give it to the attorneys and  they would take it from there.

I took her statement down by hand, word for word.
I will type up her words in the morning and  get it to the attorneys.
Whether they choose to turn it into a declaration is their choice.
My job for now is done.
Whether or not she testifies, I now can for her.
I am her voice should she choose not to return to Washington,  if this case proceeds to trial.

Still... given my druthers...  I'd rather face the kind of unknowns I encountered tonight, than the knowingness of the same old job, the same old commute, the same old faces, the same old wage, the same old thing, same old day...  day in and out. 

There is something to be said for waking up every day and wondering what adventure that day will bring.... and who you will meet.
Tomnorow is only about 9 hours away for me.
And tomorrow, a dog mauling awaits.