Chapter 20
MAGS
My phone rings before we hit the end of Main Street.
Viv.
I answer on speaker, phone balanced on my knee, and she doesn't say hello.
"Before you say anything, I want it on record that I had thirty dollars on spinster cowboy forever and I have never been happier to lose money in my life."
I take it off speaker so fast I nearly drop it.
Luke glances over, clocks the flush on my cheeks, and says nothing. His hand slides off the wheel and lands on my bare thigh and stays there.
"Viv," I say.
"The whole bar saw you dance and then saw him steer you out with his hand on your back like he'd already filed the deed. Benny is going to put it on the specials board. Lucy is texting Ellery as we speak and I give it twenty minutes before Claire knows."
"I'm aware."
"You didn't look aware. You looked like a woman who thought she was getting away with something." A beat. "You weren't."
Luke's thumb moves once on my thigh. Just once.
"The McAllister women look out for each other." Her voice shifts, still warm but with weight under it. "You're one of them now. I'm counting you in. And he doesn't know I know about Rachel. Lucy told me when I started dating Mason. That stays in the circle. Welcome to the circle."
The dark storefronts slide past outside. The Griddle. Benny's. The Rolling Pin, windows dark above the bakery, and then behind us, because he has driven straight past it and I am still on the phone and cannot say a single word about it.
I don't say anything for a moment. The thing she just handed me is too large and too warm.
I have been in this valley less than two months. I am sleeping with a man I arrived expecting to fight and who spent six weeks moving fences, bringing food, and working evidence in my kitchen instead.
Somewhere between the permits and the high country I apparently became one of the McAllister women. I don't know what to do with that.
"Viv," I say, and my voice comes out uncertain in a way I didn't plan for.
"I know," she says. Then she hangs up.
Luke drives. The road winds along the curves of Copper River, cottonwoods black against a low moon.
After a moment he says, "You going to tell me what she said?"
"No."
"Was it about me?"
He is looking at the road with the expression of a man who asks questions he already knows the answers to, a quality I recognize because I do it myself when I want the other person to say the thing out loud.
He turns off the main road onto the river track without signaling, cottonwoods closing in on both sides, a quiet pullout he had in mind before I hung up the phone. He cuts the engine.
The river is close, I can hear it. Somewhere in the cottonwoods an owl calls once and goes quiet.
He turns toward me and just looks. Like a man who said the hard thing and is still standing.
I get both hands in his shirt and kiss him. His forearms are corded and warm under my palms and he smells like faint cologne and leather and I have been noticing it since I walked into Duke's, since I clocked the shaved jaw and knew exactly what he was doing.
He comes back slow, his hand at the back of my neck, and there's none of the urgency of the kitchen table or the high country in it. Just him. Steady and certain and present.
We stay there a while. The river runs past in the dark.
When I pull back his eyes are locked on mine and his breathing is not entirely steady.
He looks at my hair loose around my shoulders, at the blue dress, at whatever is on my face right now, and something moves through his expression that he doesn't close off in time.
Not just the heat, though that's there too.
Something quieter. A man who didn't let himself want this for a long time and is still not entirely sure he's allowed.
His thumb traces my jaw once. Then he exhales.
"By morning the whole town's going to know," he says.
"I know."
His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up. "Okay," he says, quiet, like he's telling himself as much as me.
Then his hand finds the hem of the blue dress, slides underneath, and moves up my inner thigh without hurry. He watches my face the whole time.
His fingers push my underwear aside and find exactly what he was asking about on the dance floor.
"Christ." His voice drops low. "You're so fucking wet for me.
" His fingers press deeper. "Is it like this all the time now?
" His mouth finds my ear. "Because I can't keep my cock from thickening every time you walk into a room.
Every goddamn time, Mags. I've been hard since you came through that door in this dress. "
I moan, my eyes rolling back, and he growls low against my ear.
"Tell me, Red."
Instead of answering, my hips press into his hand and he growls, low and satisfied.
"Look at me."
I bring my head back up. His eyes lock on mine and his fingers have gone still and he is not moving until I give him what he wants.
"Yes," I breathe. "All the time. Every time I see you. Please, Luke." His name comes out wrecked and I don't care. "Please move."
Something moves across his face. Possession, pure and unguarded. His breath goes ragged and his fingers curl deep and I gasp and grab his forearm, that corded warm forearm, and hold on.
"Good." His mouth drags along my jaw. "I want your pussy wet for me all the time." A beat, low and deliberate. "We're going to finish this at your place. I'm going to peel this dress off you and take my time, until you beg me for my cock inside you.”
He withdraws his hand and I make an involuntary sound at the loss of him, cold air rushing in where he was warm.
His mouth curves. He puts the truck in drive.
By the time we hit Main Street I am flushed and unsteady and his hand is back on my thigh and the anticipation of what’s coming has me squeezing my legs together.
We pull into the alley behind The Rolling Pin at eleven-twenty.
The back of my field truck catches the headlights and I stop.
The driver's window is gone. Not rolled down.
Gone. Safety glass in the gravel, a bright scatter of it, lit in his headlights like something pretending to be pretty.
My equipment case is open on the tailgate and the interior tray is wrong, lifted and displaced, the kind of wrong that says someone was in a hurry and didn't bother to put it back.
I'm on the ground before I decide to be.
"Mags." Luke's door opens.
"Don't touch anything."
I get my phone light on the case. The portable drive is gone. Six weeks of collar data. Location logs. The tampered transmitter documentation I haven't filed copies of anywhere else because I was waiting until the evidence packet was complete and watertight.
Gone.
The anger comes up fast and clean and familiar. I know this shape. I have worn this shape before. I do not stand still and let it take me.
I photograph the case, the interior tray, the broken window frame, the glass scatter.
I photograph the door panel where two parallel scratches sit consistent with a slim jim and not consistent with smash-and-grab.
Someone wanted inside without triggering attention and broke the window on the way out to make it read as opportunistic.
Luke is at my shoulder. The tension in him is a physical thing, coiled and held.
"The drive," I say. "Six weeks of data."
He says one word under his breath that I would describe as accurate.
"Don't." I straighten. "Don't go wherever you're going with that. I need evidence, not a fight."
The muscle in his jaw moves. Then he exhales, one controlled breath, held and released, and looks at me.
"What do you need?"
It is the most useful thing anyone has said to me in two hours.
"Sheriff Briggs. Then Benny's camera." I point. "It covers the east end of the alley. And Gina. I need Gina."
He has his phone out before I finish the sentence. He makes both calls standing in the alley, back to me, voice low and flat. I hear him tell Briggs don't touch anything. I hear him tell Gina bring your bag. He hangs up and comes back and says nothing else, which is exactly right.
Briggs arrives in eight minutes, takes photographs, bags the glass, and crouches at the door panel for a long time with his flashlight. "Slim jim," he says, which I already knew. "Professional job. Someone who knew what they were after." He looks at me. "What was on the drive?"
I tell him. He writes it down without expression, which is what I need from a sheriff at midnight.
Gina arrives with her vet bag and flannel and takes my hand without asking. The cut on my palm from the door frame glass earns a look.
"Don't," I say.
"Steri-strips," she says. "Inside."
Willa appears at the back door of The Rolling Pin with cinnamon rolls. I don't ask how she knew because the cinnamon rolls are warm and I take one without being told to.
Viv gets there twenty minutes after Gina. She walks in and reads the room. Me at the kitchen table with Gina closing my palm and the evidence photos open on my laptop. She pulls out a chair and opens her own laptop.
"Tell me what's missing," she says.
I tell her.
"Walk me through what was on the drive. Any filed copies of anywhere else?"
"Some of it. Not the tampered transmitter documentation."
"The methodology notes you emailed me two weeks ago?"
"Those, yes."
"Then we have more than you think." She starts typing.
This is the thing about Viv. She does not perform shock. She does not comfort before she helps. She gets to work and both of those things are the same.
Willa makes the coffee.
I am not a woman who has had a lot of this, four women at a kitchen table at midnight, building something back together. I eat the cinnamon roll and keep working.
Luke is on the back porch. Through the window I can see him in a chair, forearms on his knees, jaw set, the thousand-yard look aimed at the alley.
Viv watches me watching him. She refills her coffee and takes it outside without a word.
I focus on the laptop. I rebuild the file tree from memory, dates and location codes I know the way I know my own name. Gina finishes the steri-strips and calls Lucy, who was at Duke's and whose memory for who was in a parking lot at what time would hold up in court.
After a few minutes the back door opens and they come in together, Viv sliding back to her chair, Luke stopping behind me. His hand settles on my shoulder, warm and steady.
"Need anything?" Low, just for me.
"Not yet," I say.
He squeezes once and steps back to lean against the counter, arms crossed and stays there.
Not hovering. Just present. Willa hands him a cinnamon roll without being asked and he takes it without looking at her and I don't know why that makes something loosen in my chest but it does. He walks back out to the porch.
Benny's camera. I pull out my phone.
"Willa," I say. "Benny's alley camera code."
She gives me a look that says this is a real question you are asking me, scrolls her phone for four seconds, and reads me the code.
I pull the footage. The alley camera covers the east end at a slight downward angle. I roll it back from nine p.m. Truck intact at nine-seventeen, we were all still at Duke's. At ten-forty-one a vehicle enters the east end of the alley with its headlights off.
I stop the frame.
The angle cuts the rear plate. Almost. Not quite. Last three characters clear, first two half-visible.
I call Briggs back inside and turn the laptop toward him. He looks at it, writes the partial in his notebook, and steps outside to run it.
Viv pulls her chair beside me. "Do you have access to Cal's perimeter vehicle logs? The ones from the ranch line since June?"
Luke put them in a shared folder three weeks ago, which at the time I called infrastructure and am now calling foresight.
We pull the logs together. Four minutes.
The partial matches. The vehicle appears twice in Cal's records: once at the east ridge pullout the week the transmitter was tampered with, and once on the access road to Cutter's north lease.
I sit with that.
He wasn't watching the parking lot tonight. He was watching me.
He counted the calendar, knew I was blind without the receiver, and came for the documentation while I was at Duke's in a blue dress with Luke McAllister's hand on my back through a crowd of forty people. He knew I'd be gone long enough.
He had the timing. He had the access. He had someone close enough to know my schedule.
Briggs steps back inside. "Plate comes back to a lease vehicle. Registered address is a property management company out of Billings." He holds my gaze. "The property management company lists Dale Cutter as a director."
The back door opens and Luke steps in. He reads the table, four women, two laptops, Briggs with his notebook, and stops. I turn the laptop toward him and watch him take in the plate, the log matches, Briggs's notation.
His face does something I don't have a name for yet. Not surprise. Something older than that. Something that costs him.
"That vehicle," I say. "You recognize it."
The room goes quiet.
He doesn't answer immediately. His eyes come up to mine and whatever is moving behind them, he is deciding how much of it to give me.
"Luke."
"I recognize it," he says.
Like a man who has just confirmed something he has been hoping was wrong.