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'You did the right thing,' she said to him. 'If the driver's got a spinal injury, you could have done more damage than good trying to bring them down.' She didn't add that if the driver was dead there was nothing to be done except locate the next of kin.

'Thanks, Sheriff,' Mark Crews said, his voice shaky. 'That was—'

Emotion cut off the man's words. He reached for his son and pulled him close. The boy didn't resist, but he also didn't hug his father back. Bet considered checking the boy for shock, but guessed he was just a teen being a teen.

She gave Mark a nod and hoped the accident victim survived the wait otherwise Mark Crews would always wonder if he should have made a different choice.

The father got his emotions under control and turned his attention back to Bet. 'Please get my wife Julia down safely.'

Jeremy might be shocky, but the two people up on the ridge were her priority.

'Always prioritize,' Maggie said to Bet on a regular basis. 'Don't get caught up trying to fix everything at once. Fix the big things first.'

Her father would have agreed. His voice no longer took precedence in her mind, but his teachings never left her.

Bet promised to take care of Julia Crews and walked over to straddle the closest snowmobile. Pulling on the helmet she'd brought, she tucked her auburn curls out of the way before closing the face shield. Bet admired the Crews family for helping a stranger as the ominous storm bore down on the area. It must be terrifying to know Mrs Crews waited up on the ridge as the weather closed in. Bet was impressed the family put their own safety in jeopardy for someone they didn't know. Not everyone would do that. It would have been easy enough to pretend they never found the accident, leaving the driver alone in the snow.

Jeb hopped on the other snowmobile, which was already set up to tow the Snowbulance a small, enclosed trailer with a stretcher mounted inside. Bet made eye contact with Jeb to confirm she was ready, and they took off with him in the lead. Search-and-rescue was Jeb's specialty, and he knew the terrain better than she did.

Her father Earle always said a good leader knew when to follow. Like most of her father's advice, Bet knew it was true even if her instinct was never to admit someone else was the right person for a job she could do. In her defense, her father never faced life in law enforcement as a woman.

Maggie always said, 'Never let a man think he's got control. If you hand control over, he'll never give it up.'

Bet wasn't her father, but she wasn't a patrol officer in LA, either. Sometimes neither Maggie's nor her father's advice was any help to her at all.

Not far from the ranch, Jeb turned off the main road and started up a forest service road that went west and north into the mountains. The turnoff wasn't obvious, so it was interesting that the Crews had found that particular trail.

Snowmobiling was a popular sport in Collier and a lot of people used these forest service roads for trails, even the ones that were officially closed to traffic because there were no funds for maintenance. Without anyone to police the extensive system, the locals used them as their own private playground.

The roads connected in a complex web throughout the area. The injured teen could have arrived at the ridge from any direction. The forest was riddled with paths that the forest service no longer had the money or workforce to keep up, but people and animals kept cleared. In a lot of ways, the community benefited from the interlopers who cleared the roads, because that provided fire access into their local forest, which would otherwise become impassable through neglect.

If the brunt of the storm held off long enough for them to locate the scene of the accident and get the injured teen down the mountain before the conditions worsened, everything should still be all right.

Bet kept her focus on Jeb's sled as they rode up the hill. The road turned dark as they got farther into the trees and the cloud cover grew almost black. She was glad for the headlight and someone she trusted to follow. At least in this moment, her father's advice was right.

If only the injured rider survived the wait.

CHAPTER TWO

Thirty minutes later, they reached the top of Iron Horse Ridge, a spine of rock stretched between mountaintops. Trees grew sparse, and the ground fell away on either side of the trail. A figure waved to them at the sound of their approach. Julia Crews. Her bright orange safety vest made it easy to spot her against the snow.

Bet and Jeb parked and forced their way through the drifts to reach the prone figure on the ground. A bent and twisted snowmobile lay smashed against a nearby tree. The Crews had covered the victim with an emergency Mylar blanket, which Bet and Jeb peeled away. Underneath, the boy was still and cold.