The Sheriff’s Betrayal (The Wives of Snake Canyon #5)

CHAPTER ONE

MAEVE

I’ve directed rescues in whiteout blizzards, talked a drunk rancher down off a grain silo, and once spent six hours coaxing a gelding out of a sinkhole with nothing but rope and a bag of carrots. I am good in a crisis. Everybody in Snake Canyon will tell you that.

Nobody warned me the worst crisis of my life would be waiting in Interview Room Two.

The missing ranch hand is called Delgado, twenty-two, walked away from the line camp after a fight with his foreman and didn’t come back.

Two days now. Wade has the county search maps, the good ones with the updated fire roads, and I need them before my teams head out at first light.

So here I am, pushing through the back door of the sheriff’s office at close to midnight, because that’s the kind of marriage we have.

Or had.

The building is quiet in that humming, after-hours way. One deputy at the front desk with his boots up, watching a rodeo highlight reel with the sound off. He waves me through without looking up. Everyone waves me through. I’m the sheriff’s wife. I practically have mail delivered here.

I know these corridors as well as I know the canyon trails, every corner, every door. Which is why I hear it. The interrogation wing should be silent this late, and it isn’t.

Interview Room Two.

I stop walking. My body knows the room before my brain catches up, the same animal reflex that puts a foot on the brake before the eye has found the deer.

Seven months ago I sat in that room in handcuffs while my husband asked me if stress might have made me lose control.

If I might have blacked out. If I was sure, really sure, that I hadn’t put my hands on Harper Sloan after the county fundraiser.

I cried in that room. I begged. I watched the booking camera flash while Harper, a woman I sat with through her divorce while she sobbed into my good wine, told anyone who would listen that I’d attacked her.

The charge collapsed. Wade told me to forget it. I tried. God, I tried.

The door to Interview Room Two is open a few inches, and there is a sound coming through the gap that my brain keeps trying to rename. Wind in the ventilation. A chair scraping. Anything.

I push the door open.

Harper Sloan is bent over the interrogation table, the same table I sat at in cuffs, and my husband is behind her, and there is no version of this my brain can rename.

His uniform shirt is open. Her dress is shoved up around her waist. And the thing underneath it—the wine-red silk and lace, the straps, the little bow at the small of her back—I know that set better than I know my own hands, because Wade bought it for me for our tenth anniversary and it vanished from my drawer last spring.

I actually thought I’d lost it. I tore the closet apart. I accused the dry cleaner in my head and felt guilty about it.

Harper sees me first.

She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t cover herself. She arches, slow and deliberate, so the silk pulls tight across her shoulders, so I get the full view of my own anniversary present on another woman’s body, and she smiles at me over her shoulder, slow and satisfied.

“Told you it looked better on me,” she says, and laughs, and Wade makes a sound I have heard across our bedroom for eighteen years and keeps going. Actually keeps going while Harper holds my eyes the whole time.

Wade’s wedding ring is sitting on the interrogation table.

His duty belt is hanging over the back of the chair, the chair where I sat with cuffs cutting my wrists while he asked me if I’d maybe lost control.

He took his ring off for this. He planned enough to take his ring off, and he did it in the room where he broke me.

That detail is the one that does it. Not the sex. The ring, placed neat and careful on the laminate, like a man setting down reading glasses.

Wade follows Harper’s gaze. I watch his face go through about four different people in one second, and none of them is a man I recognize.

“Maeve.”

I back into the corridor. Behind me there’s a scramble, a belt buckle, Harper still laughing, and Wade’s voice, low and fast, and then louder.

“Maeve. Stop.”

I run.

I run past the booking desk where they photographed me, past the holding cells, past the community barbecue flyer.

Wade comes after me with his shirt half tucked, doing up his pants in the corridor of his own station, and the rest of me is just gone, out the door, across the parking lot, gravel spitting under my boots.

“Maeve Valentine, stop right there.”

Command voice. The one he uses on drunk cowboys and belligerent teenagers, the voice that ends arguments at crime scenes. It hits me between the shoulders and my whole body wants to obey it, eighteen years of obeying it, and that wanting makes me so much angrier than the voice itself.

I turn around. “Don’t you use that voice on me.”

He stops a few yards off, breathing hard, one hand out like I’m a spooked horse. “Let me explain.”

“Explain.” I laugh, and it comes out wrong, cracked down the middle. “She was wearing my lingerie, Wade.”

“That’s not, listen.” He drags a hand over his face. “It got away from me. That’s all it was. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

Behind him the door opens and a deputy steps out, young, holding a coffee, freezing mid-step at the sight of the sheriff half dressed in his own parking lot at midnight.

And I watch it happen in real time. Wade’s shoulders drop.

His voice goes warm and rueful and faintly embarrassed, a man managing a scene.

“Marital disagreement,” he says, easy as ordering lunch. “Go on back inside.”

The deputy goes, because Wade said the words in the right tone of voice, and I understand with a clarity that feels like ice water down my spine that the story of tonight is already being written, and I am not the one holding the pen.

I get in the truck and drive.

The patrol SUV pulls out behind me before I’ve cleared the lot.

I tell myself he’s just following, and then the lights come on behind me.

Red and blue washing over my dashboard, over my hands on the wheel, and my heart does something I’ve only felt once before, on the day he put the cuffs on me himself.

The sick, bottomless terror of being chased by the authority you’re supposed to be able to trust. My husband is pulling me over. My husband is using his lights on me.

I don’t pull over.

I take the turn onto the old Dry Creek rescue route without signaling, the one we use for canyon calls, washboard dirt and switchbacks, and I know every foot of it.

Wade has never driven this road without me navigating.

Two miles in, a livestock truck comes grinding around the bend toward us, and the patrol SUV has to brake hard and swing wide.

I take the narrow track off to the left, the one his vehicle can’t clear.

In the mirror the red and blue lights shrink, stop, sit there flashing alone in the dark.

I drive up to the fire lookout above Snake Canyon, and I park facing the town.

The valley is lit up and calm and oblivious, the radio murmuring about a missing ranch hand, and I understand that tomorrow I will have to go back down there and run a search and pretend none of this happened, because that’s the job.

My phone buzzes. A voice message, from a number I know too well, and some part of me, stupid, trained, hopeful, thinks it might be Wade with something that makes this survivable.

It’s Harper. Her voice is lazy, satisfied, faintly out of breath.

“You always were bad at knowing when something was over.”

I listen to it then sit very still while the night presses in around the truck and the last seven months rearrange themselves into a new shape.

The arrest. The interrogation. The way Wade insisted on handling it personally, all that talk about fairness, about how nobody is above the law, not even the sheriff’s wife.

I defended him. To my friends, to my own mother, to myself at three in the morning.

He’s just that honorable, I said. It nearly broke him too, I said.

He let Harper Sloan watch me get fingerprinted.

He was sleeping with her while he did it.

I don’t cry. I expected to cry, but what I feel instead is colder and much more valuable, a stillness like the moment before a rope goes taut.

Down in the valley a patrol SUV’s lights finally stop flashing.

Tomorrow I will find Delgado. Tomorrow I will stand in front of my teams and be the most competent woman in Snake Canyon, because I am.

And then I am going to take apart everything Wade Valentine built on the back of that badge.

Starting with the truth about what he did to me.