Page 4 of Deadly Revenge

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’dalways 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.

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