CHAPTER THREE
MAEVE
The call comes in on the third day, in the middle of a hard, flat rain, the sort that turns Snake Canyon’s back roads into brown water.
Horse trailer off the grade above Dry Creek, through the guardrail, twenty feet down the slope, driver trapped, horses loose.
Of course it’s Dry Creek. The canyon has a sense of humor I’ve never appreciated.
By the time I get there, the scene is already in full motion, everyone moving fast in different directions.
A deputy’s SUV parked sideways with its lights going.
Two ranch hands waving traffic through the rain.
Below the rail, a stock trailer lying on its side against a boulder like a dropped toy, cab crushed in on the driver’s side, and somewhere out of sight, screaming.
A horse. That sound goes through me every single time, and I’ve heard it more than anyone should.
I take the clipboard off the dash of my truck and start doing my job.
“Nobody else goes near that edge until I’ve got eyes on the slope,” I tell the deputy, a kid I’ve trained with, who looks relieved to be told anything at all.
I get my team leads around the hood of my truck, ropes, rigging, medics staged, and I’m on the radio to Luke Mercer, who is already overhead in the county helicopter, circling wide in weather he clearly hates.
“Can’t set down, Maeve,” he says in my ear. “Wind shear off the rim and nothing flat that isn’t mud. I can hold position and spot for you, that’s about it.”
“That’s what I need. Tell me what’s under that trailer.”
He drops lower, holds, talks me through it. Two horses out, one tangled in the trailer wreckage, one loose uphill and panicking. Driver alive, pinned by the legs, conscious enough to be screaming back at the horse, which is either a good sign or a terrible one.
Then the patrol SUVs start arriving, plural, and Wade gets out of the lead one with his rain jacket zipped to the badge, surveying my scene like a man inspecting a rental car for dents.
He takes one long look over the edge and starts giving orders to my scene, because that’s what he does. “Nobody goes down there. That slope is saturated, it could take the trailer the rest of the way down with a person on it. We wait for a heavy wrecker and state crew.”
“State crew is ninety minutes out in this.” I don’t look up from the rigging I’m checking. “The driver’s footwell is filling with runoff. He doesn’t have ninety minutes.”
“Then he’ll have what’s left of them, because I’m not putting bodies on that slope.” Wade raises his voice so the deputies and half my volunteers hear it. “This scene is under sheriff’s department authority. Hold position.”
It’s a good speech. Responsible, sober, exactly what a man campaigning on safety would say. It’s also wrong, and he has to know it’s wrong, because I taught him how to read a slope on our third date and he’s been stealing my lines ever since.
“Deputies, hold the road,” I say, stepping into my harness. “Search and Rescue has the recovery. Slope’s stable on the north line, rock face, not soil. We’re rigging off the boulder, not the bank. Luke, keep me posted on the mud.”
“You’re not serious,” Wade says, low, at my shoulder. “Maeve, I gave an order.”
“You gave an order to your deputies. My volunteers answer to their director.” I clip in, and someone in my team, God bless Carlos, is already running the rope without being told.
“You want to explain to that driver’s kids why we watched him drown in a ditch because waiting looked better on the evening news, you go right ahead. ”
I go over the edge.
The first thirty feet are fine, rope work I could do in my sleep, boots on wet rock, Luke’s voice steady in my ear.
The screaming horse is the problem. She’s loose now, thrashing in the wreckage, a thousand pounds of pure panic, and panicked horses kill more rescuers than cliffs do.
I send Tito and Ramona after her with a rope halter and a feed bucket, the oldest trick we have, while I get down to the cab.
The driver is a ranch kid, maybe nineteen, white as paper, leg pinned under the folded dash.
I talk to him the whole time, name, where’s the pain, hold my hand, squeeze, and while I’m working the dash lift with the spreader, the second horse, the one uphill, decides he’s had enough of standing still and bolts straight down the slope at us.
Luke calls it half a second before I hear the hooves. “Maeve, loose horse, your two o’clock!”
We get the kid flat and ourselves against the cab, and the horse goes past us close enough that I feel the air move, and then he hits the scree below and the whole slope lets go in a sheet of mud and rock.
I’m on rope, so it takes my boots out and leaves me swinging, one hand on the spreader, one on the line, and for about three seconds the only things in the world are the rope and the kid’s hand crushed in mine.
“Still here,” Luke says in my ear, calm as church. “You’re good, Maeve. Line’s holding. Take your time.”
We get the kid out. It takes everything my team has, but we cut him free, package him, haul him up the north line one muddy yard at a time, and when the medics take over at the top, his vitals are better than half the people watching.
Tito and Ramona have the mare haltered and humming to her by then, and the runaway gelding is standing in a fence line down the canyon, done with his attitude.
I come over the rail last, soaked through, shaking with the adrenaline dump, and the first thing I see is Wade standing dry under an umbrella somebody is holding for him, telling a deputy, just loud enough, that it was a reckless call that happened to work out.
Whatever. The driver is alive. Wade can have the narrative; I’ll take the outcome.
I’m coiling rope in the truck bed an hour later when Deputy Tessa Ward comes up the gravel, slow, her hat in her hands, which is never a good sign in a cop.
“Ma’am. Can I talk to you? Off the record.”
Tessa was there the night of the fundraiser. Young, sharp, the one who took Harper’s initial statement while I was being walked past in cuffs. I’ve been careful not to look too hard at her since.
“Talk.”
“That night.” She stares at the rope in my hands instead of at me. “Harper Sloan wasn’t hurt when she first got there. I saw her by her car before she ever came up to anyone. No blood, nothing torn. She was fine.”
The rain has stopped and the canyon is dripping, and neither of us says anything for a while.
“My body camera was running,” Tessa goes on.
“It caught some of it. And the clip got pulled out of the incident file. Officially excluded. The order came from Sheriff Valentine, personally, and I was told the footage didn’t exist anymore.
” She finally looks at me, and she looks about twelve years old and a hundred.
“It does exist. The system archives everything automatically before anyone can pull it. I found it last month, and I’ve been carrying it around since, and after what I just watched you do down that slope, I can’t carry it anymore. ”
“You’ve seen what’s on it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Her jaw tightens. “There’s something on it the sheriff can’t explain away. Not to anyone.”
I should be shocked. Some part of me registers that a decent person would be shocked. But I watched my husband spin ‘marital disagreement’ out of thin air in his own parking lot, and mostly what I feel is recognition, the last puzzle piece sliding in with an ugly little click.
“Tessa.” I keep my voice level, because she’s shaking. “Two nights ago I walked into Interview Room Two and found my husband having sex with Harper Sloan on the table where he interrogated me. She was wearing my lingerie. He’d taken his wedding ring off and set it on the table first.”
Her face does something complicated, and whatever doubt she had left about coming to me dies right there.
“Then you need to see it,” she says. “Tonight.”
I finish coiling the rope and stow it, and check the emergency beacon on my gear bag out of habit, charge good, the same check I run every single time, because the one time you don’t is the time the canyon asks for it.
“Tonight,” I agree.
Wade has spent a week telling Snake Canyon I’m coming apart. Tomorrow the whole county is going to hear about the reckless sheriff’s wife who went over the rail in a storm. Let them talk. I know exactly how steady my hands are, and after tonight, I’ll know how steady his aren’t.