Chapter 15
JEREMIAH
“Got a minute?”
I looked up from the photo of Lennon in a purple pantsuit, sitting on a desk with one long leg crossed over the other, to find Sheriff Sherwood leaning in my office doorway. Since that was never a good thing, I shut my laptop. “I can spare some time. What can I do for you?”
Sherwood stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “Miguel López. He works here?”
“He’s in the kitchen most mornings,” I allowed.
Nodding, Sherwood took a seat across from me and crossed his ankle over his knee. He pulled a pen and spiral notepad from his breast pocket and flipped to a blank page. “When was the last time you saw him?”
I laughed and leaned back in my chair. “Now, Sheriff, you know that’s not how this relationship works. Miguel is a good kid. So how about you tell me what this is all about, and I’ll determine what information is pertinent?”
Sherwood’s jaw worked. A man like him didn’t cede control easily. But we had history, and that history was a point in my favor. He trusted me. I was still making up my mind about him.
“Miguel is in the hospital,” the sheriff said finally. “Car accident. He missed the curve where Hideaway Road follows the river—you know the one—and went right over the edge. He was pretty disoriented when they brought him in We’re trying to put together a timeline of what happened.”
“Shit. Is he going to be all right?”
“The doctors expect him to make a full recovery. But I won’t lie, the kid is in rough shape. Broken clavicle, broken ribs, broken ankle. Concussion. He dragged himself up the embankment to flag down help. He doesn’t know how long he was out there. Thinks maybe a full day and night.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, tugging at my hair. “Miguel was in Mexico for a week visiting family. He was supposed to be back Monday, but he never showed up for work.”
Two full days ago. Two days and two nights. Shit. I should have called to check on him. It wasn’t like me to let one of mine slip through the cracks like that. I had let myself get distracted, my head muddled over Lennon, and Miguel had paid the price for that.
“Talk to Amos Tallbull. He runs the kitchen and handles the staff schedule. He might know something I don’t.” The words tasted rancid in my mouth. I should have known something. My employee, my responsibility. Two fucking days on the side of a hill with broken bones? Fuck.
Sherwood jotted down the note. “Cecily Shepherd works in the kitchen, too? She’s the one who found him this morning. Said it was her day off and she was worried about him because it wasn’t like him not to call—”
“It’s not,” I confirmed. “Like I said, he’s a good kid. Clean driving record. But you know that bend. This isn’t the first accident there.”
Sherwood grunted noncommittally.
I studied him. “You don’t think this was an accident.” It wasn’t a question.
Sherwood twirled his pen between his fingers.
“Miguel says there was another car that forced him off the road. He remembers bright lights coming out of nowhere and he swerved. We got a call that morning from a driver claiming she saw a car go over the edge. Sent out a patrol car but didn’t see anything.
Miguel was down there the whole time.” He rubbed his index finger over his bottom lip, brows pinched.
“Something isn’t adding up. You want to come take a look at the scene? ”
“I’m not a cop. I doubt I’d have much to add.”
“We’ll see.” He tucked his notepad back into his pocket and rolled to his feet. “You have an interesting way of finding things that don’t want to be found.”
Hideaway Road had come by its name honestly—through dishonest people.
Two hundred years ago, Mercy River wasn’t much more than a train station, trading post, and hotel with rooms by the hour.
Hideaway Road back then was an elk migration trail used by Mercy River’s less savory citizens to hide out after relieving weary travelers of their valuables.
The road was paved now, but it could still be treacherous, particularly where it curved around the river.
Yellow signs warned drivers to take the bend at thirty-five miles per hour.
Three drivers in the last ten years had ignored that warning—twice with drunk drivers, and once with a showoff teenager—and with no guardrail to catch them, they went right over the edge. All three had died.
The county responded by putting up another sign.
Miguel’s truck was fifty feet down the embankment.
He had gone rear first over the edge and collided with a tree, which had probably saved his life, even as it had broken his bones and left him with a concussion.
The airbag had deployed, and the seatbelt had kept him from flying through the windshield.
“You can see from the tire tracks here that Miguel hit the brakes. The front tires locked up and the back tires kept spinning, sending him into a skid. Went tail first.” Sherwood pointed to the deep black marks in the gray asphalt.
“So he must have been going faster than thirty-five,” I noted.
“Most locals do. You take this road long enough, you tend to get comfortable with it. You’ll see.”
I had been in Mercy River for eight years now, but to people who had been here for two or three generations, I was still a newcomer.
“He was heading to the ranch?” I asked, ignoring his dig.
Sherwood nodded. “That’s what he told us.”
“It was dark. They start cooking at four-thirty, feeding the ranch hands first, then the lodge staff, then the guests. He drives in Monday mornings, stays the week at the bunkhouse, then drives back home to his folks’ house on Friday.
” I rubbed my chin. “He said the bright light came out of nowhere?”
“That’s right.”
I considered. The drop-off to the river was on one side of the road, and the other side was a copse of trees that bordered pastureland. But standing here, where Miguel’s truck left the road, I could see cars along the road beyond the bend. “Miguel should have seen the headlights coming.”
“Maybe he dozed off, and the headlights woke him up.” But I knew the sheriff doubted his own hypothesis, or he wouldn’t have brought me out here.
I frowned. What were we missing? Monday morning. “It was raining. Miguel wouldn’t have fallen asleep at the wheel. Not in a storm like that. He would have been paying attention.” I looked past the bend again. “Visibility would have been worse, though.”
“So, an accident.”
“Then why didn’t the other car stop? Why didn’t someone call for help?”
Sherwood shrugged. “Drunk. High. Scared. Asshole. Pick your motive, and I’ve seen it. You know as well as I do that there are all kinds of people in this world, and even good people make shitty choices from time to time.”
If Sherwood had known exactly how that statement applied to me, he wouldn’t be standing next to me now, debating the finer points of humanity as it applied to a crime scene. He’d arrest me.
I said nothing as I surveyed the stretch of road. “No skid marks from the other driver? He didn’t even try to brake?” Asshole.
Two short, dark marks caught my eye by the edge of the road. They couldn’t have been more than a yard in length. I squatted down to get a closer look.
Sherwood folded his arms. “I saw that, too. Probably from a different incident. The angle is all wrong for it to have been another driver coming around the bend.”
I turned my head, following the angle. If the vehicle that made this mark had kept going in a straight line, it would have gone straight into the oncoming lane at the top of the bend and then over the edge.
I looked the other way, toward the trees. The vehicle that left those marks would have come from there, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But neither did the broken grass and weeds, in two sections six feet apart.
I straightened. “A vehicle was parked there under the trees. Can’t say for sure that it was there Monday morning, but it couldn’t have been too long ago.”
Sherwood came to stand next to me. His expression didn’t change as he stared at the faint marks with his hands on his hips. “Dammit,” he swore softly. “Someone was waiting for him. Someone who knew he’d be coming this way at this time.”
“That’s a big jump from some broken weeds.” But my gut was telling me the same thing. Someone had been waiting for him that stormy morning. This wasn’t an accident.
With a sigh, Sherwood pulled out his notepad and pen again. “All right. I’ll have to wait until Miguel is out of surgery to ask him questions, but I can start with you right now. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary lately? With Miguel, or at the ranch?”
Lennon.
It had only taken fifteen minutes to verify what my gut had been telling me all along: Lennon Graves had no business being at Mercy River Ranch. No good business, anyway. Shady business? Yeah, I could see more than one pathway that might have led her straight to our doorstep.
She wasn’t military or a first responder. She was a cam girl.
Her account had been paused a couple days before she landed in Wyoming and she hadn’t streamed since.
But there were still photos of her up. Lingerie and a pot roast. Lingerie and a bouquet of flowers.
Even with the black lace mask and blue contact lenses, I recognized her mouth and the shape of her jaw. It was her.
I hadn’t had time for more than a cursory glance into her subscribers before the sheriff showed up in my office. Going any deeper would require Mateo’s skills. Maybe he could determine if one of her subs had a link to the ranch.
But what the hell would any of this have to do with Miguel? I knew for damn sure Lennon was nowhere near this road Monday morning. The image of her was seared into my brain.
Even if I hadn’t been her alibi, I knew in my gut she wouldn’t knowingly have hurt another person. Not like that.
Maybe it was nothing more than a coincidence that Lennon was here at Mercy River under false pretenses at the same time Miguel was forced off the road.
But in my experience, too many coincidences weren’t a coincidence at all.
It was a trap.