Chapter 19 #2
Brooks takes the financial angle. Brooks is the one who understands how money moves and where it leaves marks that don't disappear just because someone wants them to. If Dusty has been running an illegal betting operation for twenty years there are transactions somewhere that don't add up.
Accounts that received money they can't account for cleanly, a paper trail that exists because money always leaves a trail no matter how careful the man handling it thinks he's being.
Luke takes the circuit records, the legitimate ones, the draw sheets and the stock assignments. Also the ride results going back to the Caldwell run. Luke has the patience to go through years of data looking for the pattern that proves the outcomes weren't random.
He can find the kind of statistical impossibility that only shows up when you're looking for it. That a man like Dusty would never think to clean up because it lives in public records and public records feel safe.
Wade takes Ryker Vale.
That one surprises me until he explains it. Then it doesn't. Wade has always been the one who understands people the way Brooks understands numbers and Luke understands patterns.
Ryker is loud and reckless and has spent years being the most obvious suspect in any room he walks into.
Which means he's also spent years on the edges of things, watching, absorbing, knowing more than anyone gives him credit for.
Nobody thinks to guard their conversation around the man they've already written off as a problem instead of a person.
Ryker was at the Caldwell circuit too.
And unlike me, he understood exactly what he was seeing.
I take Dusty himself, because that's mine to carry.
A conversation that needs to happen face to face with the man who looked me in the eye and fed me a story calibrated to keep me pointed in the wrong direction.
I need to be the one sitting across from him when the careful architecture of that story starts unraveling.
I'm not going in without something solid in my hand when I do it.
After my brothers leave I spend the afternoon going back through everything I photographed before the physical evidence disappeared.
Every image I took on my phone of the gear, the records in the days after I first found them.
I go through them slowly and carefully the way I should have done at the start instead of letting the urgency of everything else pull my attention away from the detail.
It takes me three hours.
But it's there.
A name on one of the older financial records I had kept away from the other stuff with the intention of going through it. In the margin there is a handwritten name in a way that wasn't meant to be a signature but functions as one. Small and certain and entirely damning.
Dusty Rhodes, written in his own hand on a document that ties him directly to the Caldwell operation in a way that no amount of planted evidence or careful misdirection can explain away.
I photograph it from four different angles and send it to Brooks before I close the file.
Then I go find Riley.
Because before any of this moves forward, before I walk into whatever comes next, I need to see her face and Hadley's face and remind myself exactly what I'm preparing to fight for.
I find them in the back room.
Hadley is on the floor with her colored pencils spread around her in the particular organized chaos she creates wherever she settles.
She is working on something with the focused intensity she brings to anything she decides matters.
Riley is on the couch with her legs tucked under her and a book open in her lap that she isn't reading.
Her eyes are somewhere past the page, working through whatever she's working through in the quiet interior way she has.
She looks up when I come in. The question in her eyes is the same one it's been all morning, not afraid exactly, but alert, waiting for the next thing to happen. Braced for it the way you brace when you've learned that the next thing just keeps coming.
I sit beside her on the couch and she closes the book and turns toward me giving me her full attention.
"We have something," I tell her, keeping my voice low enough that Hadley stays in her own world on the floor. "Not everything, but enough to move forward with."
She searches my face. "And Dusty?"
"I'm going to be the one to talk to him."
Something tightens in her expression but she doesn't argue with it. She doesn't try to talk me out of it. Just nods once with the careful steadiness of a woman who has decided to trust the process even when the process scares her.
"When?" she asks.
"Soon," I answer. "But there's something else first."
I watch her face while I say the next part, because I need to see how it lands and I need to be honest with her about what it means before I commit to it.
"The regional rodeo is in four days," I tell her. "The big one. The one that draws every major name on the circuit including Dusty and Colt and every contractor and handler who was anywhere near the Caldwell run."
I pause, letting her catch up to where I'm going. "It's the last place all of them will be in the same location before the season ends, and it's the best chance we have to move on this while we still have the element of surprise."
Riley is very still beside me.
"You're going to ride," she says, and it isn't a question.
"I'm going to finish it," I answer. I mean I'm going to finish all of it. The investigation, the threat and the weeks of being two steps behind someone who has been running this game longer than I've been paying attention to it.
"On my terms, in my arena, in the one place where I've always known exactly who I am and what I'm capable of."
She looks at me for a long moment. Something moving behind her eyes that she lets me see instead of tucking away the way she used to.
"Then we'd better be ready," she says quietly.
And just like that, without ceremony or condition, she's in it with me all the way to the end.
Outside, four days feels like nothing and everything all at once.
The biggest rodeo of the season is coming.
And this time, everything is riding on it.