“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 . . .

Best way to work an accident was backward, as in, start with the end point—the wreck—and work in reverse to pinpoint the cause—the braking that never happened or the fishtail that led to swerving into the guardrail. In this case, the vehicle appeared to have landed at a forty-five-degree angle, taking it on the nose, so to speak, with resulting distributed front-end damage: crumpled hood, shattered front and side windows, and other damage consistent with a massive front-end impact.

He didn’t see signs of paint chipping or scraping on the sides, implying the Audi had not rolled down the embankment through the tangle of bushes, but had rather sailed over them. Enough speed, then, for a nose dive off the proverbial cliff. Straight angle, at least by his dead reckoning; graphing it with the Total Station would certainly tell them more. But the vehicle appeared to have left the road at their coffee-drinking point above, then flew briefly through the air before it returned abruptly to earth, slamming nose first into the muck.

First question: Why had the vehicle left the road? Driver error, especially given the driver’s apparent state of intoxication? Or something else? Second question: At what speed and what rpm? In other words, had she sailed over the edge, pedal to the metal, a woman on a mission, or had the vehicle drifted into the abyss, passed-out driver waking up only to attempt too little too late?

Good news for Wyatt. All these modern computers with wheels were equipped with electronic data recorders that captured a car’s last moments much like an airplane’s little black box. The county sheriff’s department wasn’t considered cool enough to have their own data retriever, but the state would download the car’s data onto their computer and bada-bing, bada-boom, they’d have many of their questions answered.

For now, Wyatt kept himself focused on the matter at hand. A missing child, female, approximately nine to thirteen years of age.

Footprints currently surrounded the wreckage, but given the quantity and size, Wyatt already guessed they came from the first responders, on the hunt for a child, rather than the occupants of the vehicle, exiting through the front passenger’s side door. Just to be thorough, Wyatt pulled on a latex glove, stepped forward, and gave the passenger’s door an experimental tug. Sure enough. Stuck tight. He tested the rear passenger’s side door, found it compromised as well, the force of impact having warped the frame too much for the doors to function.

Which left him with the open rear hatch. He headed that way, inspecting the ground for more prints. Mostly, he just saw boot imprints, consistent with what most law enforcement officers wore.

“They inspect the ground first?” he asked Kevin. “Todd, any of the first responders? Check for footprints?”

“Todd said he swung his flashlight around. Couldn’t see a thing, given the conditions. But even without footprints, he figured the driver must’ve exited the Audi out the back; it’s the only working door.”

“So assuming the child’s conscious, she’d have to have gone out this way, too,” Wyatt filled in. “I wonder . . . Mom the driver probably felt the crash had just happened, right? She regained consciousness, looked for her kid, panicked when she couldn’t find her, then began her heroic journey for help. But maybe, factoring in the alcohol, the force of front-end impact . . . Maybe Mom was knocked out for a bit. Maybe, in fact, she didn’t regain consciousness until fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes after the wreck. During which time, her daughter tried to rouse her, panicked at not getting any response and set out on her own.”