I open the folder.
There she is, and my heart drops. Twenty-three. Brown eyes. A shy smile in her driver’s license photo.
Single-car accident. Drunk driving. Speed consistent with losing control.
Case closed.
I know I’ll need to get used to this feeling. This won’t be the first young person’s fatality I’ll have to process.
I’ll come across it a lot in this line of work, but as I sift through the documents, and the toxicology finally comes in today after five months, the thought of such a young person losing their life to drunk driving saddens me.
I remember with myself, and even with a few friends back in LA, where it was a constant battle to be out and drink and be smart enough to get a cab instead of thinking you’re okay to drive. It’s so easy—so stupid—but so easy to make that mistake and get behind the wheel.
My brain stalls thinking back on those times.
Yes, in LA, it was easy to be stupid. The city was impossible to get around without cars, but there’s only one bar in Echo Valley. The Wild Cantina. And it’s miles from the quarry. Not to mention, the quarry has no houses around it—just a protected national park. I wonder why she was out there. Drunk? On her own and driving recklessly?
It’s an old, bleak, rundown, disused hole in the ground. Teens don’t hang out there. Couples don’t hook up there. It’s not a place people go unless they have a reason.
It’s not the typical drunk-driving stupidity of a twenty-three-year-old. Usually, they risk it to get to and from somewhere fun, not somewhere isolated.
My nervous system sets off, and there’s an unsettlingheaviness in my gut. Instinct. I learned what mine feels like when my mom trained me to recognize it. She said everyone gets a specific feeling. Shivers down your spine. A rock in the gut. She said:Listen. It’s here to speak.
I flip through the photos from the scene. The coroner’s report. Everything waits there for me and the administrative closure. I suppose this was the one “exciting” thing Callum could give to me.
I know it’s been sitting here, gathering dust, waiting for the final reports, and someone already did the dirty work. But I owe Zoe a good, hard look at it, especially when my instincts are flaring.
There are a lot of photos of her vehicle, which incurred a huge amount of damage falling such a distance. Photos of barriers at the quarry, photos of…her… I imagine her mom having to identify her remains, and my insides knot with sadness.
My hand drifts to my belly. I can’t even imagine a day like that. It’s not the order of life. Parents aren’t supposed to say goodbye to their kids. Not like that.
Tension fills my shoulders. There are photos of tire tracks with measurements next to them. I look closely to see if I can even understand what that means. I’m no expert…but…wait…
I grab a magnifying glass from my desk drawer and look closer.
Are there two sets of tracks?
A soft knock taps my desk and jolts me out of my skin.
Officer Ingram stands there with a lopsided smile and a coffee that smells like burnt chicory. One thing that’s the same as LA is the crappy instant coffee. When I lived here, I didn’t see Ingram around town apart from once at the postoffice when I was picking up a package and we said a stranger’s hello.
He’s late thirties maybe, and has a full head of close-cropped, auburn hair and a matching beard. His amber eyes have crinkle lines at the corners even when he’s not smiling and he’s one of those people who has so many freckles on his face and neck, you just know they are everywhere. Despite pushing forty, he has a boyish look about him.
I know he has two young kids and a wife from the picture on his desk that sits next to a signed baseball. He must use the baseball to get his brain moving because he was tossing it up and down with his feet kicked up when I came in this morning.
“Thought you might want this,” he says, setting it down. He laughs lightly. “Or not. Chief refuses to upgrade the coffee. I’ll grab you one from Café Luna next time, but I didn’t want to leave you here alone on your first shift.”
I glance around. “Yeah,” I joke sarcastically. “Not sure I can handle it.”
He chuckles. “It’s not LA, but I’ve been surprised by a few cases over the years.” He taps the photo with a knuckle, gentle, like he’s remembering. “Like that one.” He shakes his head solemnly. “Not fun. I just thought of my own daughter the whole time…” he trails off.
My energy shifts to my belly, where I don’t even feel so much as a peanut, but I already hope he or she gets more from this world than Zoe.
I furrow my brow. “Her parents must have been devastated.”
He gives a tight nod. “She’d been back home since college about a year, and it was hard to find work, so she’d taken up some gardening jobs around Echo Valley and surroundingtowns.” He scratches his head and twists his mouth. “She’d just asked her parents for a loan to open a flower shop… Just had her whole life ahead of her, you know?”
Ingram stares down at the file, his eyebrows pinched together.
