Chapter 8
COLT
Kenna works the way a rodeo vet works a sick animal: methodical, relentless, and completely indifferent to how much time has passed since she last ate or slept.
After Flint's ranch, we spent the next several days in Albuquerque between events, working leads from the motel room and the press office.
But the circuit is a fishbowl, and Kenna didn't want to spread sensitive documents where someone with Thornton's logo on their jacket might glance over her shoulder.
So we drove an hour to Santa Fe in separate vehicles, found a diner where nobody knows us, and she turned a booth into a war room.
She's been at it for three hours. She's commandeered the entire table surface with printed spreadsheets, her backup laptop, a notebook covered in handwriting so precise it looks typed, and a coffee cup she keeps refilling without looking up.
The waitress stopped checking on us an hour ago. Even she can tell this table doesn't want small talk.
I should be studying the spreadsheets. Instead I'm watching Kenna's fingers trace the columns, remembering where those fingers were at two in the morning when she woke me up by dragging her nails down my stomach.
She's wearing a tank top, and every time she leans forward to tap a number, the neckline shifts and I can see the edge of the mark I left on her collarbone. She hasn't covered it. I don't know if that's carelessness or a choice, but either way, it's making concentration difficult.
"You're not looking at the spreadsheet," she says without looking up.
"I'm looking at the spreadsheet."
"You're looking at my boobs—not the same thing."
"True, but your boobs are closer and far more appealing."
"Move the spreadsheet closer and stop being useless." She slides a page across the table and taps it with her pen. "Every single one. Every event where Thornton Livestock supplied stock for the past two seasons. At least one top-ten rider sustained an injury. Every time."
I drag my attention to the numbers because she's right, I'm being useless.
She's cross-referenced event schedules with stock contractor assignments and injury reports, then layered in the financial data from the circuit's payout records. The pattern is undeniable once you see it laid out.
"Could be coincidence," I say, because someone has to pressure-test this before we take it any further. "Thornton runs some of the rankest bulls on the circuit. Rank bulls produce more wrecks."
"I accounted for that." She flips to another page. "I pulled injury rates for every stock contractor with bulls ranked in the top twenty. Red Creek Rodeo Company runs bulls just as rank, and their events produce significantly fewer rider injuries. So does Bar T Stock."
"Red Creek and Bar T don't drug their animals."
"That's my point." She circles a cluster of numbers with her pen.
"And look at the financial side. There are fake rider registrations at Thornton events.
Names entered for competition who never showed, entry fees paid, and prize money collected through shell accounts.
Grant spotted the pattern and told you. No one wanted to hear it, but now we can prove it. "
She pulls up a separate file on the laptop that shows corporate registry data, including Nevada shell companies with registered agents that trace back to an investment group.
"That's Merrick's group," I say. "Rusty Spur Capital Partners is the registered agent for the LLC that owns Thornton Livestock. Grant told me that on the phone the night before Las Cruces."
"The bull handlers are the weak link," Kenna says. "They're paid off the books. Nobody on the Thornton payroll matches the faces working the pens. If Thornton keeps records of those payments, they'll be on-site at his ranch, not in any digital system."
"Then we go to the ranch."
"We go to the ranch after we find Rainey and build the case from the outside in. We don't kick in the door of the man who's been killing people until we have enough evidence to put him away."
"Waiting is how people end up dead."
"Rushing in is how people end up dead. Ask me how I know." Her voice doesn't waver, but the pen in her hand stops moving.
We both know she's talking about Grant. He had the evidence, the contacts, the plan. He rushed the ride at Las Cruces instead of waiting for a stronger position, and it killed him.
I sit back in the booth and let the point land.
She's right. I hate that she's right. The part of me that wants to drive to Thornton's ranch right now and put my fist through his office door is the same part that got me hauled off the arena floor in Tucson.
I went after Merrick in front of cameras, and all it earned me was a reputation as a man who'd lost his grip. Reckless doesn't win cases.
"Fine. We build the case. But we build it fast."
"Fast is the only speed I have." She meets my eyes, and the challenge in them makes the back of my neck prickle. "I didn't walk away from my life and embed on a rodeo circuit to take this slowly, Colt. I'm just not going to waste what we've built by moving before we're ready."
The other lead is Rainey. Kenna's journalism contacts have been working the trace, and the picture is getting clearer.
A circuit photographer left the Southwest Circuit abruptly after Las Cruces. She closed every social media account and stopped using the cell phone number that other circuit photographers had for her.
One of Kenna's old journalism school contacts specializes in open-source research.
She found a trail through a photography forum where Rainey had been active for years under a handle tied to her circuit work.
Two months ago, the same handle resurfaced on a different forum, posting from a new location.
The IP geolocation and a few careless metadata tags in uploaded sample photos pointed to a small mountain town in southern Colorado. A photography studio had opened there around the same time, and the portfolio work on its website matched Rainey's style down to the composition and color grading.
Either Rainey slipped, or she wanted to be found by someone who knew where to look.
"Creede, Colorado," Kenna says. "One main street, one grocery store, and one photography studio that didn't exist four months ago."
"How far?"
"About six hours from Santa Fe. We could go after the event tomorrow."
"We should go now."
"We should go after I confirm the studio is still operating. If Rainey's spooked enough to run once, she'll run again if she sees us coming without warning. I want to verify the location and plan the approach."
"You and your approaches."
"My approaches get results. Your approach is to show up and scowl until people talk.
" She closes the laptop and leans back in the booth, stretching her neck in a way that pulls her tank top tight across her shoulders.
"Give me twenty-four hours to confirm the location and build an angle. Then we go."
I rein it in. One of us has to be the steady hand, and it's clearly not going to be me.
"Twenty-four hours," I say. "Then we're in the truck whether the angle is built or not."
"Deal." She stacks the spreadsheets and slides them into her bag. "Now buy me dinner. I've been working for three hours and you've been staring at my boobs for two of them."
"One and a half."
"Charming."
I wave the waitress over. Kenna orders a burger and a beer, then stacks her spreadsheets, laptop, and notebook into her messenger bag.
"I'm putting this in the car before the food comes," she says.
"I am not getting grease on three weeks of financial data.
" She's back in two minutes, sliding into the booth with her back against the wall and her eyes on the door, and I wonder when I started finding operational awareness so attractive.
We leave the diner around eight. The sun is already down, and the parking lot behind the restaurant is nearly empty, just a few cars belonging to the kitchen staff and the last couple finishing their meals inside.
Kenna's rental is parked at the far end of the lot, under a light that's been out long enough for moths to stop circling it. My truck is two rows closer.
"Meet you back at the motel?" she asks, and the question carries a charge that has nothing to do with lodging.
"Right behind you."
She walks toward her car. I watch her go because I've developed a habit of watching her go, tracking the slow roll of her hips and the way she moves through space with the constant, low-grade alertness of someone who knows the ground beneath her isn't solid.
The alertness is what drew me in. The hips are what keep me looking.
My phone buzzes with a text from a rider I've been trying to reach about Las Cruces. I pull it up, read the message, and I'm composing a reply when Kenna's voice cuts through the parking lot.
"Colt."
One word, but the pitch is wrong. It's flat and tight in the way that voices go when the body is processing fear faster than the brain can frame it.
I'm moving before I finish the thought. I cross the gravel, pass between the parked vehicles, and reach the spot where she's standing at the driver's side of her rental car with the door open and her body locked rigid.
The window is smashed. It's not cracked but truly smashed, with glass pebbled across the driver's seat and the floorboard.
Inside, the car has been gutted. Her laptop is gone, along with the leather messenger bag where she kept her printed spreadsheets, her interview recordings, and her backup files. The glove box is open and empty. The center console has been pried apart.
And on the passenger seat, placed carefully in the center like a calling card, sits a photograph.
The photo shows Grant in the Las Cruces arena dirt, face down, with the bull looming behind him and the scene frozen in the instant before Slade Carrick cleared the fence. It's printed on plain white paper, the kind you'd run through a home office printer.
One word is written across the bottom in black marker.
STOP.