Tanner came and stood beside him. She looked as worried and grim as he felt.

“I hope she shot that asshole somewhere it hurts,” she muttered.

“I hope he dies from it.”

“We let her down,” she said, her voice cracking a little. “Goddamnit.”

“If she could have held out for us just a little longer,” Mendez said, fully aware he was talking about Lauren Lawton in the past tense.

Tanner shook her head. “She needed to do it. She never wanted it to be up to us. She needed to force his hand. We were just the excuse she needed to give herself permission to do it.”

Leah had never driven a car so fast in her life. Her mother’s BMW was too big for her and too strong for her and too powerful. It made Leah think of the first time she had snuck a ride on one of Daddy’s horses when she had only ever ridden a pony. She had been so scared. She was ten times as scared now. A million times more scared.

“Mommy,” she said loudly, glancing at her mother slumped in the passenger’s seat. “Mommy!! Mommy, talk to me!”

The steering wheel jerked in her hand and she shrieked and put her eyes back on the twisty road, turning the wheel the last second before running the car up on the rocks on the steep side.

Her mother was so pale she almost glowed in the darkening light of the car.

“Mommy, please don’t die,” Leah chanted. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

As if it would matter. As if chanting without stopping would make it so. She cursed herself for a stupid child.

Her mother’s left hand reached over toward her. The first sign of life Leah had seen in her in what seemed like hours.

It felt like forever because Leah didn’t know where they were. She had only known enough to point the car downhill and keep going. The rough path had joined with a narrow paved road. The narrow paved road finally came to a stop sign and a wider paved road.

And then she could see lights in the distance, and a place on the side of the road with chain saw totem poles and a gas pump, and a sign that read Canyon Café.

Chapter 62

62

It was Leah Lawton who told them what happened. Leah, not quite sixteen, still more little girl than woman, who had put her injured mother into the car and managed to find her way out of the wilderness to get help.

Mendez called Anne Leone on his way to the hospital and she met him there in the ER not five minutes behind the ambulance. In full mother tigress mode, Anne had taken charge of Leah, seeing to her emotional needs and overseeing her medical needs, putting the needs of law enforcement at bay for hours.