Deadly Revenge (Pearl River #3)

Chapter 2

2

Jenna Hart sighed. The second week of June should smell like sunshine and honeysuckle, not gas fumes and death.

“What do you think happened?”

Jenna turned to Wayne Porter, the grizzled deputy assigned to work the accident with her. “Good question.”

It was one Jenna intended to answer.

Wayne pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his brow. “Has to be driver error—Slater took better care of that Hummer than he did his wife.”

Jenna wished she was carrying a handkerchief. After four hours in the heat, several strands of wilted hair stuck to the back of her neck. While they waited for the wrecker attendant to attach the winch to the Hummer at the bottom of the gorge, Jenna removed her ball cap identifying her with the Russell County Sheriff’s Office and fanned herself with it. “What if it wasn’t an accident?”

He snorted. “Don’t try making more of it than it is—this isn’t Chattanooga.”

Jenna swallowed the defensive words on the tip of her tongue. She was still the newbie here, and Wayne had been her field supervisor after Alex Stone, Russell County’s chief deputy, hired her.

Instead she gathered her hair, redid her ponytail, and returned the cap to her head. The visor didn’t offer much protection from the sun, but maybe it would be enough to keep more freckles from peppering her nose. Not that she had many—freckles were a rare combination with black hair. The black hair came from her dad and the freckles and her blue eyes from her mother. The mother Jenna lost when she was six.

“Rained last night.” Wayne pointed toward the road. “But I don’t think that had anything to do with what happened.”

She didn’t either. According to the victim’s sister who’d just left the scene, the roads were dry when Joe Slater and his wife Katherine left for the airport in Chattanooga around seven.

The blacktop showed no sign he’d braked, only a scrape where the Hummer plunged off the road. What sent the sixtysomething Slater over the side of the mountain? Heart attack, maybe?

They should know soon enough if it was medical since the local coroner had sent the bodies of Slater and his wife to the Hamilton County Medical Examiner in Chattanooga for autopsy. Jenna turned as Chief Deputy Alexis Stone approached accompanied by ...

Her heart froze. No. It couldn’t be ... Maxwell Anderson?

“What’s the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation doing here?” she muttered.

“I think he’s friends with the chief deputy,” Wayne replied.

She barely had time to collect her thoughts before the two reached them.

“Jenna, you remember Max, don’t you?” Alex asked.

She put her game face on, even as the memory of their one shared kiss sent heat to her cheeks. “Sure. Good to see you again.”

That was the way to keep it. Cool and professional. She just hoped he did the same.

Max’s lopsided smile didn’t fool her. He wasn’t happy to see her either, not with the way red was creeping up his neck—that’d always been the sign he was unhappy when someone messed up in their robbery division.

“Good to see you too.” He turned to Alex. “Jenna was one of the best detectives I worked with in Chattanooga.”

Ha! She certainly hadn’t gotten that impression. If anyone had asked Jenna, which they never did, she would’ve told them he’d been harder on her than anyone else in the department. And if he thought that much of her, why had he kissed her at his going-away party and then ghosted her?

“So why do you think Slater tried to straighten a curve?” Alex asked. “Mechanical problem or driver error?”

Jenna shook her head. “Given this is a late-model Hummer, I doubt it was mechanical.”

“Yeah,” Wayne agreed. “Like I told Jenna, he babied that thing.”

The whine of the winch made conversation impossible. They all turned toward the gorge as the front of the SUV came into sight, the right front wheel jutted at an odd angle.

Beside her, Max whistled and nodded toward the vehicle. “I think that’s your answer. It appears the tie-rod came loose.”

Jenna’s eye twitched. It looked like Max hadn’t changed—still Mr. Know-It-All. “That could’ve happened when the car went down the gorge.”

“But if it happened before the accident, when Slater entered the curve, he wouldn’t have had any control over the wheels,” Max said.

Was he still a know-it-all if he turned out to be right? “Maybe someone loosened the nut assembly?”

“That’s a big jump,” he said.

Jenna cringed. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “The vehicle is less than two years old. Why else would a castle nut come off?”

Max didn’t say anything, just raised his eyebrows, a gesture she’d seen a hundred times while he waited for one of his detectives to remove their foot from their mouth. Well, she wasn’t backing off her opinion, at least not until she heard from Alex.

Max looked toward the road. “If the nut that holds the tie-rod assembly in place came off before the accident, it should be around here somewhere.”

“That sounds reasonable.” Alex nodded to Jenna. “See if you and Wayne can find it.”

The chief deputy’s phone beeped, and Jenna waited while Alex glanced at the screen. Jenna wanted to be lead deputy in this case— if someone tampered with the car. It would be her first real case since joining the Russell County Sheriff’s Office.

Alex looked up at Max. “Nathan is waiting for us.” Then she turned to Jenna. “Max is here regarding threats made to Harrison Carter and the political rally he’s holding at the Founders Day picnic on Saturday. There’ll be a briefing at one. We’ll go over anything you find here then.”

Jenna nodded. “If it turns out to be more than an accident—”

“We’ll talk about that if it happens.” Alex turned, and she and Max strode to an SUV similar to the one Jenna had been assigned.

She’d wanted to ask about being assigned lead in the case if it turned out to be foul play, but now wasn’t the time. “You ready?” she asked Wayne, tamping down the urge to give Max one last glance.

“Give me a minute to grab my hat.”

“Sure.” She felt someone watching her and glanced over her shoulder, her gaze colliding with Max’s. He lifted his hand in a jaunty half salute. She gave him a nod and then turned and quickly walked to the wrecked Hummer as the tow truck operator prepared to lift it onto the flatbed truck.

“Hold up a sec.” Sweat dripped from her brow, and she knuckled it away, then knelt beside the right tire and examined the tie-rod. Intact, and even with the dirt and debris the two-year-old vehicle picked up when it went down the gorge, everything about it was new looking—Slater must’ve hosed the SUV off every time he took it out, even the undercarriage.

She walked to the other side and checked it. Since only the left tie-rod assembly had broken away from the steering rack on the wheel, they were searching for one castle nut.

A quick check of the threads on the bolt showed the threads were clean rather than damaged. If the nut had worked its way off over a period of time, wear and tear would show on the threads ... on the other hand, if someone removed the nut—

“You ready?” Wayne asked.

Jenna jumped. She hadn’t heard him come up. “Let me grab a couple of waters first.”

She opened the cooler in her SUV, pulled out the water, and tossed him a bottle as they backtracked on the path the Hummer had taken. The deputy didn’t look good—probably the heat. “Look, you don’t have to help. I can look for the nut by myself.”

Wayne hesitated then shook his head. “No, I’ll help. That way we can get through quicker.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. You take the right and I’ll take the left. And pray we find it soon so we don’t have to walk all the way to the house.”

Jenna laughed. She’d liked Wayne Porter from the start. He had a work ethic like her dad’s—do your job so someone else doesn’t have to do it. He would never shirk his duty, even if it killed him.

She noted several potholes on the road as she walked toward the Slater house—it’d been a bad winter and the county hadn’t gotten around to repairing the lesser-traveled roads. Jenna kept her gaze glued to the blacktop and shoulder.

When they were halfway to the house, they stopped under the shade of an oak on the side of the road. It was a welcome relief from the sun, and she uncapped the bottle of water and tipped it to her lips. “What can you tell me about the Slaters? I don’t remember much about them.”

He took a deep draw from his bottle and put the cap back on. “Well, they’re good people. Katherine is always doing something with the Garden Club—my wife’s a member.” He shook his head. “She’s going to be awful upset when she hears about this. And Joe ... everybody likes him, at least most everybody.”

She noticed Wayne talked as though they were still alive. “Why do you say ‘most’?”

“Joe was on the city council when the dam project went through. Almost everyone in town either had kin or knew somebody who had their land taken by the state to build it. A lot of hard feelings at the time.”

She vaguely remembered something about the dam. “Do you know anyone who is still unhappy with him about what happened?”

“Could be anyone—this is a small county, and people tend to view everyone as family. But that doesn’t mean they don’t hold grudges.”

Jenna agreed with him. It’d been that way when she was a kid, and evidently it was still that way. Could someone who’d had their land taken have sabotaged Slater’s SUV? It was something to keep in mind. “You ready to look some more?”

“Sure.” Wayne took off his cap and used his handkerchief to wipe his brow again. “It’s hot for June.”

Jenna started walking again, and Wayne followed suit, but they didn’t find a castle nut. When they reached the drive, she walked toward the attached garage and found it locked. “I wonder if there’s a key hidden outside somewhere?”

She approached the back of the two-story house and felt along the top of the door. Nothing. Maybe the Slaters had hidden one under a rock or—she glanced around the flower bed—a brick.

“What are you doing?” Wayne called.

“Looking for a key.”

“We don’t have a search warrant,” he said.

“Why do we need one? The people who live here are dead.”

Wayne eyed her like she should know why they needed one. “But they didn’t die here, so we have no right to poke around in their private property,” he said patiently.

How had she forgotten that? Maybe because she already viewed the accident as a crime, and somehow the legal ramifications had slipped her mind. “Let me text Alex and see what she wants us to do.”

She quickly sent her boss a text, explaining they needed a warrant to get inside the garage.

The chief deputy’s response was a quick text back. “Not if Slater’s sister will let us in . She lives up the road. I’ll call and see if she’ll meet you there, although it might be a minute. ”

Jenna pocketed her phone. “Alex is getting in touch with the sister to let us in. You want to wait here or walk back to the accident site?”

Wayne glanced toward the road. “Let’s go back and sit in air-conditioning.”

Jenna grinned at him and followed him down the hill to the road. Sweat ran down the side of her face as she continued to search the road and shoulder. After half a mile, they reached the oak tree again. She glanced at Wayne. His uniform shirt stuck to his body. “We need to cool off a minute,” she said.

“I thought you’d never suggest it.”

“You know, you could’ve said something.”

“And have you think I can’t take the heat? No way.”

That was exactly what she was thinking, but instead of saying anything, she took a swig of water. “Look, there’s no need for both of us to look for the nut. When we reach our vehicles, why don’t you sit in the air-conditioning and write up the report for the accident? And I’ll keep looking.”

“You sure?”

“I am. I’d rather do just about anything than paperwork.” Plus she could look around Slater’s garage to her heart’s content.