Chapter 3 - The Search for Evidence
"Is that yours?"
Trooper Reyes had inched his way closer to the edge, ignoring my father’s frantic protests. He was shining his heavy-duty flashlight through the shattered side window, tracking the small, intermittent red glow coming from beneath the passenger seat where my hand lay limp.
I blinked once, my vision swimming at the edges from blood loss and pain. "My... phone," I wheezed, the words catching in my dry throat.
Dad lunged forward, his face turning an ugly, mottled purple. "It’s just junk! Leave it down there! Get my daughter out of that ambulance, we're leaving this madhouse right now!"
Reyes held up a gloved hand, signaling for my father to stay back. The trooper stepped firmly into the path between Dad and the vehicle. "I told you twice to step back, Mr. Miller. Do not interfere with an active rescue scene."
Above us, the mechanical strain grew louder. A heavy steel cable anchoring the winch snapped tight with a metallic ping that sounded like a gunshot, and the entire SUV dropped another terrifying six inches into empty space. I screamed, the dashboard digging deeper into my mutilated leg as the weight shifted violently.
Chloe covered her ears in the back of the ambulance, sobbing uncontrollably.
Dad didn't look down at me. He was staring exclusively at Trooper Reyes’s hand, which was now reaching through the broken window frame.
The firefighters were working with frantic, superhuman speed. One of them had chainsawed through the rear door frame while another crawled into the back cabin, wrapping a heavy-duty extraction harness around my chest.
"When I say pull, we pull hard," the firefighter whispered into my ear, his eyes full of grim determination. "It’s going to hurt, Maya. Hold on to me."
Metal shrieked as hydraulic jaws tore the passenger door away from its hinges. The sudden release of tension allowed them to haul me backward out of the crushed cabin just as the rear tires completely lost their last remaining grip on the rock shelf.
With a sickening roar of sliding stone and tearing metal, the SUV tipped forward and vanished into the darkness of the gorge.
I hit the solid earth of the highway shoulder just as the vehicle disappeared below, gasping for air as paramedics swarmed over me with oxygen masks and trauma shears. But even as the cold oxygen hit my lungs and the pain medication began to numb my shattered leg, my eyes remained fixed on Trooper Reyes.
He hadn't let go of my phone.
He had reached through the window just a microsecond before the vehicle fell, snagging the device off the floorboard. Now, standing beside the smoking remains of the guardrail, he held the black rectangle in his palm, watching the red audio waveform still moving across the active screen.
Dad’s expression went completely blank, the color draining from his face until he looked like a corpse standing in the sunlight.
"That’s private property," Dad said, his voice dropping an octave, laced with sudden, palpable panic. "You have no right to search personal effects without a warrant."
Reyes didn't answer immediately. He stared down at the screen, tapping the play icon with his thumb. The progress bar sat right at the timestamp corresponding to the minutes before the crash—right when we were driving away from Aunt Eleanor’s house.
"Looks like it may be evidence in a vehicular accident investigation," Reyes replied coolly, his thumb hovering over the speaker icon.
Dad’s voice sharpened into a shrill bark. "My daughter is confused! She’s in shock, she’s medicated, she’s prone to hysterical episodes! She caused this crash herself!"
"I haven’t administered any medication yet, sir," the paramedic treating my leg spoke up clearly from the ground, his voice carrying across the quieted stretch of highway.
May you like
The wind died down for a fraction of a second, leaving an absolute, tomb-like silence over the mountain pass.
Dad took two aggressive steps forward, reaching out to snatch the phone from the trooper's hand. "Give me that!"
