Chapter 9
KENNA
"This is a terrible idea," I say, for the third time in twenty minutes.
"You said that." Colt kills the truck lights and lets the engine idle to a stop. We're parked behind a stand of cottonwoods off the access road to Thornton Livestock's ranch, and the darkness out here is absolute.
"I keep saying it because it's still true. We should get Rainey's evidence first. We go to Creede, we find her, we build the case from the outside in. We don't break into the headquarters of the man who's been killing people."
"Thornton's hauling stock to the Tucson event.
He left this afternoon, and his main crew went with him.
The ranch will be skeleton staffed, and the office is a stand-alone building behind the main barn.
" He pulls a flashlight from under the seat.
"We're not here to confront anyone. We're here to photograph what we can find and leave before anyone knows we were here. "
"You rehearsed that."
"I drove four hours rehearsing it. Are you going to argue, or are you going to bring the camera?"
The dashboard light catches the line of his jaw and the cords of muscle in his neck, and my body reminds me unhelpfully that those muscles flexed the same way when he had me pinned against the motel door.
I shut that down fast. We're about to break into a building owned by a man who kills people. Now is not the time to be distracted by Colt's neck.
I bring the camera, which is my phone camera since the actual camera equipment was taken with everything else. That's another reason this timeline is compressing: without my data, we're trying to rebuild from scratch, and the clock Merrick started when he sent that photograph is ticking.
The Thornton ranch sits in a shallow valley south of Albuquerque, accessible by a county road that hasn't been graded in years. The main house is dark. The stock barn is dark. The only light comes from a security lamp on the barn's exterior, throwing a cone of yellow across the gravel lot.
The office building is exactly where Colt said it would be: a prefab metal structure behind the barn, used for paperwork and scheduling. It has one door and two windows. There's no visible security beyond the barn's exterior light.
We move fast. Colt tries the door and finds it locked. He checks the windows. The second one slides up with a metallic groan, the latch rusted enough that a firm push pops it loose.
"Ranch offices," he says, boosting me through the frame. "Nobody maintains what they don't think anyone's looking at."
He follows me through, and we're inside. Colt clicks on the flashlight, keeping the beam low and angled toward the floor.
The office is small and cluttered. A metal desk is buried under paper, and two filing cabinets stand against the far wall alongside a wall calendar marked with event dates and stock assignments and a coffee maker with a brown ring inside the pot.
The air smells stale and trapped, like the door hasn't been opened in days.
Colt takes the filing cabinets. I take the desk.
The top drawer holds invoices and vendor contacts: feed suppliers, veterinary services, and transport companies. There's nothing unusual.
The second drawer holds event contracts, standard circuit paperwork, and stock assignments for the last two seasons. Thornton files his livestock transport receipts in the same cabinet where he keeps evidence of murder. I wonder if he alphabetizes those too.
The third drawer is locked.
"I've got a locked drawer," I say.
I grab a paperclip from the desk tray and straighten it out. The lock is cheap, the kind that keeps honest people honest, and it takes me less than a minute to work the tumbler until it catches and turns.
Inside, I find a leather-bound ledger. It's handwritten, the kind of recordkeeping that stays deliberately analog because the person writing in it doesn't want the contents anywhere near a computer.
There's something almost quaint about it, a man who runs a criminal enterprise and keeps his kill list in a leather journal like a Victorian gentleman tracking his fox hunts.
I open it, and my throat closes.
The pages are organized in columns of names, dates, event locations, and notations. The left column lists rider names. The middle column lists events. The right column has single-word entries that read like instructions.
MONITORED. CLEARED. WARNED. HANDLED.
My thumbnail finds my index finger before I register doing it, the tic that's been with me since the funeral, the one I use to anchor myself when the grief hits hard enough to knock me sideways.
My fingers trace down the list. I recognize names from the circuit standings.
These are riders who sustained injuries at Thornton events, riders who withdrew from competition after receiving unnamed "warnings. "
Two-thirds of the way down the page, a name stops me cold.
TYLER brENNAN. Fort Worth. HANDLED.
Below it, in the same careful handwriting:
GRANT CORBIN. Las Cruces. HANDLED.
My brother's name written in the hand of the man who helped kill him, written in the same column with the same clinical notation, as if ending a human life were an operational task to be checked off and filed away.
My hands are shaking. I photograph the page, then both pages, then every page in the ledger, front and back. I work fast, keeping the camera steady despite the tremor running through my body.
Then I move to the filing cabinets where Colt is pulling folders.
"I've got altered prize records," he says, his voice tight and controlled. "Payments to bull handlers, with cash amounts, dates, and handler initials. And this."
He holds up a manila envelope. Inside is a list of shell company names, account numbers, and transfer dates. It's the financial architecture of the fraud, laid out in Thornton's handwriting.
"Photograph everything," I say. "We take nothing physical. If they know someone was here, they'll destroy the originals. If they don't notice, the originals stay in place for the FBI to seize with a warrant."
Colt nods. We work, taking photograph after photograph, page after page, the phone's flash lighting the small office in rapid strobe bursts. My internal clock is screaming that we've been here too long.
"Colt. We need to go."
"I know." He slides the bottom drawer shut and straightens. "I've got everything from the cabinet."
"You should have let me photograph the second cabinet," I say, and even as the words come out I can hear the fight starting. Not now. We don't have time for this now.
"You were at the desk for too long. We needed to move."
"I was at the desk for exactly as long as the desk took. You pulled me off the cabinets because you decided we were done."
"I decided we were about to get caught."
"You decided for both of us. That's what you do, Colt. You make the call and I follow, and we pretend that's a partnership."
His face goes blank. The dangerous blank. "This isn't the time."
"It's never the time. That's convenient."
Headlights sweep across the office windows.
Colt is on his feet before the light passes. He kills the flashlight, and the office drops into darkness.
Through the window, I can see a truck pulling into the gravel lot. There are two vehicles, actually. The lead truck parks by the barn, and doors open. Voices carry across the gravel, too far to make out words.
Then the second truck parks closer to the office, and Dale Thornton climbs out.
I recognize him from the circuit programs: he has a stocky build, a salt-and-pepper beard, and the Thornton Livestock logo on his jacket. He pulls a phone to his ear, and his voice is audible through the thin prefab walls.
"...journalist is asking too many questions.
Same one who's at the Albuquerque event.
" There is a pause. "No, I don't have a name yet.
McEnroe, maybe. Freelance credentials. She's been talking to riders, pulling financial records.
" Another pause follows, this one longer. "I understand. I'll take care of it."
Thornton is talking about me.
The casual phrasing, "take care of it," carries the same weight as "handled" in the ledger. It's the same administrative language for ending a person's life that these men use for scheduling livestock transport.
Colt's hand closes around my wrist. The grip isn't gentle. It's a command transmitted through pressure.
He's already moving toward the back of the office, toward the window on the far wall.
The window is small, a utility-sized ventilation opening hinged at the top. Colt pops the latch and pushes it open, and the night air rushes in smelling of sage and cooling desert.
"Go," he says. His voice is barely a breath.
I go through the window shoulder-first, catching myself on the exterior wall as I drop to the ground. The landing is graceless and loud enough to make me wince.
Colt follows, his larger frame barely clearing the frame. He reaches back and pulls the window shut behind him, and we press flat against the building's exterior wall.
Dale Thornton is still talking, just on the other side of the wall, wrapping up his phone call with whoever ordered him to take care of me.
We move along the back of the office building, around the far side of the barn, and across the open ground between the barn and the tree line. My boots crunch on dry grass, and every footstep sounds like a gunshot in the silence.
We're close to the truck when a shout goes up behind us.
Someone has spotted us moving across the open ground, or maybe someone heard boots on dry grass in a place where nobody should be walking. The shout becomes two voices, then the slam of a truck door, then the spit of gravel under tires.
Colt yanks the truck door open. "Get in."
The engine roars to life, and we tear down the access road without headlights. Colt navigates by starlight and instinct, and the truck bounces over ruts and washboard gravel at speeds that would be reckless in daylight.
Behind us, headlights appear at the ranch entrance.
"They're following," I say. My voice comes out calmer than the rest of me.