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He knew just about everyone in the growing Latino community around Moose Springs and hated the possibility that someone he knew—someone’s hija or hermana—might have been attacked.
“Thanks, Peg. Tell Dale I can be there in five minutes or so.”
“Right.”
He headed for the door, then stopped short when he realized Lauren was right on his heels, passing a medical kit from hand to hand as she shoved the opposite hand into her parka.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“I’m coming with you,” she said, that Lauren stubbornness in her voice. “Sounds like you’ve got a victim who will need medical care and if I go with you, I can be on scene faster than the volunteer paramedics.”
He didn’t want to take the time to argue with her—not when a few seconds consideration convinced him the idea was a good one. Lauren was more qualified to offer better medical care than anything the volunteer medics could provide.
“Let’s go then,” he said, leading the way out into the drizzling snow.
Daniel drove through the slushy roads with his lights flashing but his siren quiet, at a speed that had her hanging on to her medical kit with both hands.
She gritted her teeth as he hit one of the town’s famous potholes and her head slammed against the headrest.
“Sorry,” he said, though he barely looked at her.
Nothing new there. Daniel seldom looked at her, not if he could help himself. She was glad for it, she told herself. She didn’t want him looking too closely at her. He already knew too much about her, more than just about anyone else in town—she didn’t want him aiming those piercing brown eyes too far into her psyche.
She gripped her bag more tightly as he drove toward the scene, trying not to notice how big and hard and dangerous he seemed under these conditions.
Sheriff Daniel Galvez was not a man any sane person would want to mess with. He was six feet three inches and two hundred and ten pounds of pure muscle. Not that she made note of his vital statistics during the rare times she had treated him or anything—it was just hard to miss a man so big who was still as tough and physically imposing as the college football player he’d been a decade earlier.
Beside him, she always felt small and fragile, a feeling she wasn’t particularly crazy about. She wasn’t small, she was a respectable five feet six inches tall and a healthy one hundred and fifteen pounds. It was only his size that dwarfed her. And she wasn’t fragile, either. She had survived med school, a grueling residency and, just a few months later, crippling shock and disbelief at the chaos her father left in his wake.
She shoved away thoughts of her father as Daniel pulled the department’s Tahoe to a stop behind a battered old pickup she recognized as belonging to Dale Richins. The old rancher stood behind his camper shell, all but wringing his hands.
He hurried to them the moment Daniel shut off the engine. “The little girl is inside the camper shell of my truck. I had a horse blanket in there. I guess that’s what she was hiding under. Looks like you brought medical help. Good. From what I can see, she’s beat up something terrible.”
He looked at Lauren with a little less suspicion than normal, but she didn’t have time to be grateful as she headed for the back of the pickup. Daniel was right behind her and he didn’t wait for her to ask for help—he just lifted her up and over the tailgate and into the truck bed.
He aimed the heavy beam of his flashlight inside as she made her careful way to the still form lying motionless under a grimy blanket that smelled of livestock and heaven knows what else.
She pulled out her flashlight, barely able to make out the battered features of a Latina girl.
“She’s so young,” Lauren exclaimed as she immediately went to work examining her. Though it was hard to be sure with all the damage, she didn’t think the girl was much older than fourteen or fifteen.
“Do you know her?” Daniel asked, leaning in and taking a closer look.
“I don’t think so. You?”
“She doesn’t look familiar. I don’t think she’s from around here.”
“Whoever she is, she’s going to need transport to the hospital. This is beyond what I can handle at the clinic.”
“How urgent?” Daniel asked from outside the pickup. “Ambulance or LifeFlight to the University of Utah?”
She considered the situation. “Her vitals are stable and nothing seems life-threatening at this point. Send for an ambulance,” she decided.
She lifted the girl’s thin T-shirt, trying to look for anything unusual in the dim light. She certainly found it.
“Sheriff, she’s pregnant,” she exclaimed.
He leaned inside, his expression clearly shocked. “Pregnant?”
“I’d guess about five or six months along.”
She moved her stethoscope and was relieved to hear a steady fetal heartbeat. She started to palpate the girl’s abdomen when suddenly her patient’s eyes flickered open. Even in the dim light inside the camper shell, Lauren could see panic chase across those battered features. The girl cried out and flailed at Lauren as she tried to scramble up and away from her.
“Easy, sweetheart. Easy,” Lauren murmured. Her skills at Spanish were limited but she tried her best. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you and your baby.”
The girl’s breathing was harsh and labored, but her frantic efforts to fight Lauren off seemed to ease and she watched her warily.
“I’m Lauren. I’m a doctor,” she repeated in Spanish, holding up her stethoscope. “What’s your name?”
Through swollen, discolored eyes, the girl looked disoriented and suspicious, and didn’t answer for several seconds.
“Rosa,” she finally said, her voice raspy and strained. “Rosa Vallejo.”
Lauren smiled as calmly as if they were meeting for brunch. It was a skill she’d learned early in medical school—pretend you were calm and in control and your patients will assume you are. “Hello, Rosa Vallejo. I’m sorry you’re hurt but an ambulance is on the way for you, okay? We’re going to get you to the hospital.”
“No! No hospital. Please!”
The fear in the girl’s voice seemed to hitch up a notch and she tried to sit up again. Lauren touched her arm, for comfort and reassurance as much as to hold her in place. “You’ve been hurt. You need help. You need to make sure your baby is all right.”
“No. No. I’m fine. I must go.”
She lunged to climb out of the truck bed but Daniel stood blocking the way, looking huge and imposing, his badge glinting in the dim light. The girl froze, a whimper in her throat and a look of abject terror in her eyes. “No policía. No policía!”
She seemed incoherent with fear, struggling hysterically to break free of Lauren’s hold. Daniel finally reached in to help, which only seemed to upset the girl more.
“Hold her while I find something in my kit to calm her,” Lauren ordered. “She’s going to injure herself more if I don’t.”
A moment later, she found what she was looking for. Daniel held the girl while Lauren injected her with a sedative safe for pregnant women. A moment later, the medicine started to work its calming effect on her panicked patient and she sagged back against the horse blankets just as the wail of the ambulance sounded outside.
Lauren let out a sigh of relief and started to climb out of the truck bed. When Daniel reached to lift her out, she suddenly remembered his injury. She ignored his help and climbed out on her own.
“You’re going to break open all those lovely stitches if you don’t take it easy.”
“I’m fine,” he said firmly, just as the volunteer paramedics hurried over, medical bags slung over their shoulders.
“Hey, Mike, Pete,” Lauren greeted them with a smile.
“You trying to take over our business now, Doc?” Pete asked her with a wink.
“No way. You guys are the experts at triage here. I happened to be stitching up the sheriff at the clinic after the big brawl at Mickey’s bar. When he received this call, I rode along to see if I could help.”
“Busy night for all of us. What have we got?”
Daniel stepped closer to hear her report and Lauren tried not to react to his overwhelming physical presence.
She gave them Rosa’s vitals. “I have a young patient who appears to be approximately twenty weeks pregnant. It was tough to do a full assessment under these conditions, but she looks like she’s suffering multiple contusions and lacerations, probably the result of a beating. She appears to be suffering from exposure. I have no idea how long she’s been in the back of Dale’s pickup. Maybe an hour, maybe more. Whether that contributed to her hysteria, I can’t say, but I do know she’s not very crazy about authority figures right now. Seeing the sheriff set her off, so we may have to use restraints in the ambulance on our way to Salt Lake City.”
“You riding along?” Mike Halling asked.
“If I won’t be in the way.”
“You know we’ve always got room for you, Doc.”
She stood back while he and Pete Zabrisky quickly transferred the girl to the stretcher then lifted it into the ambulance.
“I’m guessing she must have climbed in the back of the truck in Park City, or wherever Dale might have stopped on the way. Though I’m pretty sure the attack didn’t happen here, I’m going to put one of my deputies to work processing the scene,” Daniel told her while they waited in the stinging sleet for the paramedics to finish loading Rosa into the bus.
“All right,” she answered.
“I won’t be far behind you. I’d like to question her once she’s been treated.” He paused. “I can give you a ride back to town when we’re done, if you need it.”
She nodded and climbed in after Mike and Pete. Maybe she had a problem with authority figures, too. That must be why her stomach fluttered and her heartbeat accelerated at the prospect of more time in the company of the unnerving Daniel Galvez.
Chapter 2
Watching Dr. Lauren Maxwell in action was more fascinating to him than the Final Four, the World Series and the Super Bowl combined. As long as she wasn’t working on him and he didn’t have to endure having her hands on him, Daniel wouldn’t mind watching her all day.
As he stepped back to let the ambulance pull past him, with its lights flashing through the drizzle of snow, he could see Lauren through the back windows as she talked to the paramedics in what he imagined was that brisk, efficient voice she used when directing patient care.
In trauma situations, Lauren always seemed completely in control. He never would have guessed back in the day that she would make such a wonderful physician.
He still found it amazing that the prim little girl on the school bus with her pink backpacks and her fake-fur-trimmed coats and her perfectly curled blond ringlets seemed to have no problem wading through blood and guts and could handle herself with such quiet but confident expertise, no matter the situation.
She loved her work. It was obvious every time Daniel had the chance to see her in action. Medicine wasn’t a job with Lauren Renee Maxwell, it was more like a sacred calling.
In the five years since she’d come back to Moose Springs and opened her clinic, he had watched her carefully. Like many others, at first he had expected her to fail. She was the spoiled, pampered daughter of the man who had been the town’s wealthiest citizen. How could she possibly have the stamina to cope with all the gritty realities of small-town doctoring?
Like almost everyone else, he had quickly figured out that there was more to Lauren than anybody might have guessed. Over the years, her clinic had become a strong, vital thread in the community fabric.
They were all lucky to have her—and so was that young girl in the back of the ambulance.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Dale Richins asked, his wide, grizzled features concerned.
“We’re going to need a statement from you. The address of your sister’s house in Park City, any place you might have stopped between there and here. That kind of thing.”
“I can tell you where LouAnn lives. She’s on the edge of town, the only part the old-timers can afford anymore, with all the developers trying to buy everybody out. But I can tell you right now, I didn’t stop a single place after I left her house. Headed straight home. I don’t know if I even would have known that girl was back there if I hadn’t stopped to fix the flat. She would have likely froze to death.”
“You did the right thing, trying to help her.”
“What else was I supposed to do? Little thing like that.” He shook his head. “Just makes me sick, someone could hurt her and leave her to find her own way in the cold. Especially if she’s pregnant like the doc said. It’s got to be only eight or nine degrees out here. I can’t imagine how cold it was in the back of that drafty old camper shell while I was going sixty-five miles an hour on the interstate. It’s a wonder that little girl didn’t freeze solid before I found her.”
“Yeah, it was lucky you found her when you did.”
“Who do you figure might have done this to her?”
“I couldn’t guess right now until I have a chance to talk to her. I imagine she was probably looking for some way to escape when she stumbled onto your truck and camper shell. The lock’s broken, I see.”
“That old thing’s been busted since before you quit your fancy job in the city and came home. But yeah, that makes sense that she was looking for a way out.”
“So either she was injured somewhere near your sister’s house or she stumbled on your truck sometime after the beating. I’ll know better after I can interview her.”
Dale cleared his throat. “You let me know if she needs anything, won’t you? I can’t afford much, but I could help some with her doctor bills and whatnot.”
He couldn’t help being touched at the crusty old rancher’s obvious concern for his stowaway. Most of the time, Dale was hard-edged and irascible, cranky to everyone. Maybe Rosa reminded him of his three granddaughters or something.
“Thanks,” he answered. “That’s real decent of you.”
“Least I can do.”
“There’s Deputy Hendricks,” Daniel said as another department SUV approached. “She’ll take a statement from you with the particulars of your sister’s address and all, and then she can drive you home when you’re finished.”
“What the hell for? I can drive myself home.”
“I’m sorry, Dale, but we’re going to have to take your truck to the garage down at the station to see if we can find any evidence in the back. It’s standard procedure in cases like this.”
The rancher didn’t look too thrilled with that piece of information. “Don’t I have any kind of choice here?”
“You want us to do everything we can to find out who hurt that girl, don’t you?”
“I suppose…”
“You’ll have it back by morning, I promise.”
That didn’t seem to ease Dale’s sour look, but the rancher seemed to accept the inevitable.
“You heading to the hospital now?” he asked.
At Daniel’s nod, he pointed a gnarled finger at him. “You make sure R.J.’s daughter treats that girl right.”
Though he knew it was a foolish reflex, Daniel couldn’t help but stiffen at the renewed animosity in the rancher’s voice. How did Lauren deal with it, day after day? he wondered. Dale wasn’t the only old-timer around here who carried a grudge as wide and strong as the Weber River. She must face this kind of thing on a daily basis.
It pissed him off and made him want to shake the other man. Instead, he pasted on a calm smile. “Dale, if you weren’t so stubborn, you would admit Lauren is a fine doctor. She’ll take care of the girl. You can bet your ranch on it.”
The other man made a harrumphing kind of sound but didn’t comment as Teresa Hendricks approached. Daniel turned his attention from defending Lauren—something she would probably neither appreciate nor understand—and focused on the business at hand.
“Thanks for coming in on your first night off in a week,” he said to his deputy. “Sorry to do this to you.”
“Not a problem. Sounds like you had some excitement.”
