Crash & Burn (2 page)

T
HE
CALL
CAME
in shortly after 5
A.M
.
: single MVA, off the road, unknown injuries. Given that the town in question didn't have a nighttime duty officer—welcome to the wilds of New Hampshire—county patrol was dispatched to handle the situation. That officer, Todd Reynes, arrived fifteen minutes later—again, welcome to the wilds of New Hampshire, or more accurately, long, windy back roads that never lead directly from here to there—just as the EMTs were struggling to strap a single muddy, bloody woman onto a backboard. The driver, he was told, had definitely suffered extensive injuries and reeked of enough alcohol to make standing next to her a risk for a contact high.

A second motorist lingered nearby, the old guy who'd found the woman and placed the initial call. He was keeping away from the action but acknowledged Officer Reynes with a short nod, clearly prepared to make a statement or sign on the dotted line or do whatever it was you did to officially end your part of something you never wanted to be involved with in the first place.

Officer Reynes returned the nod, already thinking this was pretty straightforward. One drunk driver, about to be hauled away by the EMTs. One smashed-up car, soon to be towed by the next available wrecker. That would be that.

At which point, the rain-soaked, mud-covered, blood-spattered
woman got a hand on the first Velcro restraint, yanked it back with an ominous rasp, then sat bolt upright and declared wildly: “Vero! I can't find her. She's just a little girl.
Help.
Please, someone, God.
Help!
”

Which is how Sergeant Wyatt Foster of the North Country Sheriff's Criminal Investigations Division came to be standing roadside shortly after 7
A.M.
, pavement finally drying out, but now covered by every available law enforcement unit between Concord and Canada. Well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but not by much, he thought.

Wyatt exited his vehicle, wincing against the raw bite of a late fall morning only just now lightening up. It had been pouring solid for days, enough to spur flash-flood warnings while encouraging the random construction of arks. Good news was that the weather was finally drying out. Bad news was that the strong storm, which had continued through most of the night, had probably obliterated most of the useful evidence that might have helped them find a missing girl.

Dogs, he thought. This was a job beyond mere men; they needed canines.

He spotted one of his detectives, Kevin Santos, standing fifty feet ahead, peering over the edge of the road. Kevin had on his thickest field coat, even though it wasn't winter yet, with one hand jammed deep into a pocket, the other clutching a large white Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Wyatt walked on over.

“Any chance you have two of those?” He gestured to the coffee.

Kevin arched a brow. Younger than Wyatt by ten years, he possessed a nearly encyclopedic memory that had earned him the nickname the Brain. Now he once more proved his powers of greatness.

“Bought four. Situation like this, you can never have too much coffee.”

He gestured to his vehicle, where, sure enough, a cardboard cup
holder rested on the front hood, holding three remaining cups of java. Wyatt didn't ask twice.

“Catch me up?” he said, after the second sip had started warming his blood.

Kevin pointed ahead, or really down, as the edge of the road gave way to a fairly significant ravine. Not a lot of trees, but shrubs, downed logs, rocks and other general woodsiness that finally, one hundred, two hundred feet down, seemed to give way to what was usually a babbling brook, but this morning, by virtue of Mother Nature's bounty, was a rushing stream.

Right in front of the brook/stream, Wyatt could just make out the rear end of a dark SUV, hitched up at a funny angle, rear cargo door flung open.

“Audi Q5,” Kevin supplied.

Wyatt arched a brow, suitably impressed. Luxury car, new to the market. Told him a lot of things right there, none of which he particularly cared for. In the old days, you could count on your DWIs to be drunk old men or stupid teenage kids. Now most under-the-influences seemed to be well-to-do soccer moms as high as kites on various prescription medications and deep in denial. In other words, not the kind to go down without a fight.

“Vehicle appears to have exited the road right about here,” Kevin said, gesturing to the ground with his coffee-cup hand.

Wyatt looked down. Sure enough, right where the pavement surrendered to muddy earth, tire tracks became clearly visible, battered by the rain but deep enough to hold their own.

“Seems like a pretty straight shot down,” Wyatt murmured, eyeing the Q5's final resting place.

“Working theory is that she missed the curve.”

This time, Kevin gestured down the road, where the pavement bent to the left, while the Audi had definitely gone right. “Must have already been drifting,” Wyatt said, eyeing the angle of the
roadway behind him, then once more checking ahead. “Otherwise, car should've made it farther along before going off.”

“Might've already been asleep. Passed out. That sort of thing. Todd knows his DWIs.”

Wyatt nodded. Officer Todd Reynes was an experienced patrolman who'd spent time on the DARE task force. He had a nose for drunks, could spot 'em driving from miles away, he liked to say. He was also a helluva hockey player. Two useful skills in the mountains of New Hampshire.

“Todd said he'd never smelled anyone in such a state. She must've had an open container in the vehicle that shattered on impact, because her clothes were drenched in whiskey.”

“Whiskey?”

“Actually, turned out to be scotch—Glenlivet. Eighteen-year-old single malt. The good stuff. But I'm cheating—already saw the remains of the bottle.”

Wyatt rolled his eyes. “So our driver drinks a little scotch, pours on even more scotch and misses the corner. Maybe too drunk to see it. Maybe already passed out. Either way, goes sailing off into the night.”

“Sounds about right.” The Technical Accident Reconstruction team would sort it out, of course. They'd shoot the scene with a Total Station, which worked much like the surveyor's tool used by road crews, mapping angles, trajectories, point A and point B. Then the computer would spit out a complete guide to what, where, why and how. For example, an unconscious driver would've gone off the edge at low rpms, or even no rpms—foot off the accelerator. Whereas a woman driving erratically, fishtailing here, overbraking there, would leave other evidence behind. Both Wyatt and Kevin were qualified TAR team members. Had done it before. Would do it again.

But that was not this morning's task. This morning they, not to
mention the dozens of other local, county and state uniformed officers, were swarming the cold, muddy scene with one goal in mind: find a missing girl.

“So,” Wyatt spoke up briskly, “assuming the vehicle vacated the road here, and shot through the air to land on the ground there . . .”

“First patrol officers started searching within fifty feet of the vehicle. We're now backtracking all the way up the ravine to the road, obviously. Terrain is steep, but not too dense, and yet, as you can see . . .”

Their view from this vantage point was nearly bird's-eye. Granted, a few hours ago, in the middle of the night, in the midst of a storm, it would've been one dark mess. But now—Wyatt glanced at his watch—at 7:25
A.M.
, with dawn breaking and a damp gray daylight filling the muddy, shrubby space . . .

They could visually scan a significant part of the ravine without ever taking a step. And everywhere Wyatt looked . . . he saw nothing but mud.

“Dogs,” he said.

Kevin smiled. “Already called them.”

They stepped off the road and headed down into the muck.

“What do we know about the girl?” Wyatt asked as they trudged their way down to the wreck. Mud was still very soft, making footing difficult. He kept his eyes focused on the terrain, partly to keep from breaking his neck and partly to keep from destroying anything that might be useful. His coffee sloshed out of the small hole in the top of the cup and ran down the side of his hand. Sad waste of an essential beverage.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing? How's that even possible?”

“Driver was out of her mind. Alcohol, injuries, God only knows. Todd says she went from stony-faced shock to near hysteria in a
span of seconds. EMTs finally strapped her down and carted her away before she hurt anyone.”

“But she mentioned a daughter?”

“Vero. She couldn't find her. She's just a little girl. Please help.”

Wyatt frowned, not liking this. “Approximate age?”

“Didn't find a car seat or booster in the rear seat of the vehicle. Neither was the passenger side airbag deployed in the front. Put that together, and we're talking about a kid too old for safety seats, but too young to call shotgun.”

“So probably between the ages of nine and thirteen. One of those so-called tweens.”

“You'd know more about that than me, my friend.”

Wyatt rolled his eyes, didn't take the bait. “Blood trail?” he asked.

“Please. Inside of the vehicle looks like a slaughterhouse. Female driver suffered a number of lacerations, before the accident, afterward, who knows. But by the time she untangled herself from the wreckage, then crawled through shattered glass to the rear of the vehicle . . . It's a miracle she had enough strength left to hike back up the ravine, let alone flag down a passing motorist—”

“Hike back up the ravine?” Wyatt stopped walking.

Kevin did as well. Both of them cast looks to the roadway, now very high above them. “How else would she have been found?” Kevin asked in a reasonable voice. “Nobody was going to notice a car smashed into a ravine in the middle of the night. Hell, you and I could barely see the vehicle in daylight, peering directly down at it.”

“Shit,” Wyatt said quietly, because . . . Well, because. He was an able-bodied man, reasonably physically fit, he liked to think, and not just due to being a cop, but because his other passion was carpentry and there was nothing like a few hours with a hammer every week to keep the bis and tris solid. But even with all that, he was
finding
descending
the ravine, fighting his way through sucking mud while combating dense, prickling bushes, hard enough. He couldn't imagine coming
up
all that distance, let alone in the pouring rain, let alone after having just survived what was obviously a serious accident.

“She flagged down a man by the name of Daniel Ledo,” Kevin said now. “Guy said she never spoke a word. He's a vet, spent some time in Korea. According to him, she looked shell-shocked, as in the literal definition of the word. Didn't really snap to it until the EMTs were loading her up. Then she spotted Todd, and boom, she's off and running about this girl, Vero, she couldn't find Vero, we gotta help Vero.”

“She couldn't find Vero, seems to imply she'd been looking.”

“Sure,” Kevin said.

“Plowing her way through the mud and muck. It's why she tore herself out of the car. Why she made it up to the road. Because she was trying to find help for her missing child.”

“Fair enough.”

“And we . . . ?”

“Still got nothing. Two hours of solid searching later by over a dozen uniformed patrol officers, not to mention our even more qualified friends from Fish and Game. I got here thirty minutes before you, Wyatt. Guys were already on site, on task. Started with a search grid of fifty feet out from the wreckage. Are now working a five-mile radius. I have no issues with our search efforts thus far.”

Wyatt understood what his detective was trying to say. A body thrown from the vehicle should've been easy to recover. A scared girl hunkered down for the night, waiting for help, should've responded to the coaxing calls. Which left them with . . .

Wyatt gazed around him at the tangle of underbrush an injured, disoriented kid could roam for hours. He looked ahead of him, to
the former brook, now fast-flowing stream, that could carry away an unconscious form.

“Dogs,” he said again.

They moved on to the car.

The Audi Q5 premium SUV should've been a thing of beauty. Charcoal-gray exterior paint with equal parts black and silver sheen. A two-tone interior, boasting silver-gray leather seats, jet-black inlays and chrome accents. One of those vehicles designed to haul groceries, half of a soccer team plus the family dog, and look damned good doing it.

Now it sat, ass cocked up, front end buried deep into the muddy earth, rear cargo door ajar. It looked like a sleek urban missile that had misfired into the woods of New Hampshire and was now stuck there.

“Twenty-inch titanium-finish wheels,” Kevin muttered, voice half awe, half longing. “Sport steering wheel. Eight-speed tiptronic automatic transmission. This is the 3.0 edition; means it has the six-liter engine that can go from zero to sixty in under six seconds. All that power and you can bring along your golf clubs, too!”

Wyatt didn't share Kevin's love for automobiles or statistics. “But does it have all-wheel drive?” was all he wanted to know.

“Standard issue for all Audis.”

“Stability control? Antilock brakes? Anything else that should've helped a driver navigate a rainy night?”

“Sure. Not to mention xenon headlights, LED taillight technology and about half a dozen airbags.”

“Meaning the vehicle should've been able to handle the conditions? A dark and stormy night?”

“Unless there was some kind of unexpected mechanical or computer error . . . absolutely.”

Wyatt grunted, not surprised. Cars these days were less a box
for transport, more a computer on wheels. And a fancy-looking Audi like this . . .

Hell, the car had about a dozen different built-in controls designed for its own self-protection, let alone the safety of its driver. So, for it to have ended up in this condition . . .