Holt
Sage catches me in my own mudroom before I get the first boot off.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You always say that when you don't want to answer a question." She smiles, small and unbothered, and I hear our father's word come back at me out of my sister's mouth like a debt collector. "Want to try telling me it's containment again?"
I get the second boot off instead of answering, because a man who doesn't answer hasn't lied yet.
"That's what I thought." She pushes off the door frame.
"For what it's worth, I like her. She's got that cat's whole pattern figured out faster than you did in two years.
" Then she pushes through the door and is gone, coffee still full, and I'm standing in my socks with nothing to argue and nobody left to argue it with.
I find the tabby's latest gift on the porch an hour later, headed out to the barn. A vole, again, laid out with the same ceremony as the first one, like the cat has a template it's working from and intends to see through to the end of the world.
Mackenzie crouches over it with her hands on her knees, studying the thing like it's evidence.
"That's the second one he's left you since I got here."
"Every week for two years, near enough." I step around the vole, same as always. "Long before you."
"He needs a name."
"He's a barn cat."
"He's a serial killer with a doorbell." She looks up at me, those liquid gold eyes narrowed against the afternoon light, dead serious.
Serious enough that I already know this is not a conversation I'm going to win.
"Hoover."
"No."
"That's a hard no, Blackwater," she says, throwing my own deadpan back at me so precisely it lands somewhere between an insult and a compliment.
My jaw almost gives up the fight before it starts, which it hasn't done in about two years.
"He's paranoid, he leaves bodies where people will find them, and he thinks he runs this place." She stands, dusting her palms off on her jeans. "Hoover."
"You can't name my cat after the head of the FBI."
"I can name your cat whatever I want. That's the whole privilege of not owning him." She crouches again and holds her hand out.
The cat, who has never once let me touch him in two years of dead things on my porch, walks straight into her palm like he's been waiting for the introduction.
"Hoover. See. He likes it."
"He likes you. That's not the same thing as liking his own name."
"With men like you, it usually is."
I don't have an answer for that, so I let the cat keep the name, and tell myself it's because arguing over a barn cat is beneath both of us. Not because there isn't much else on this ranch I'd hand her that easily, if she asked.
Knox finds me at the fence an hour after that, radio in one hand, phone in the other, checking the second one more than the job requires.
"Anything on the truck?"
"White or silver, gas engine, crew cab, newer than anything we run." I watch him thumb the phone screen dark without reading whatever's on it, twice, which for Knox is the same as pacing a room. "Gunderson's word against a hundred miles of highway. Could be a rancher's hand. Could be Dane Voss."
Knox's head comes up. "Who's Dane Voss?"
"Counter-sniper. Contract work, most of it overseas, some of it closer than anybody likes to say out loud.
" I haven't said the name since John first put it in my ear, a voice out of Butte telling me to remember it in case a rifle ever turned up in this state doing something too clean to be luck.
"John flagged him for me a while back. Said if this ever got that far, that'd be the name on it. "
"Voss." Knox says it like he's tasting something gone bad. "He's good, then."
"Better than good."
"Better than you?"
"Ask me from cover," I say, and he snorts once, which is the nearest thing to real amusement Knox allows himself in front of me.
His phone buzzes again. He looks at it, doesn't answer it, and puts it face-down on the fence post like that solves something.
"Maren's people are running the Calgary routing from their end too," he says, too casual, looking at the mountains instead of me.
"Sullivan books cross McKenna paper in three places her father's accountant found last week.
Declan's furious. Says somebody's been laundering through his cattle same as they've been laundering through ours. "
"Since when do you know what Declan Sullivan's furious about?"
"Since Maren texts me about it," Knox says, in the exact tone of a man who has decided that sentence sounds less damning than it is. "For the case."
"For the case?"
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You've got a face that says plenty." He pockets the phone. "Point is, it's not just us hunting this thing anymore. The Sullivans want McKenna's head on a fence post as bad as we do. Whatever this is, it's bigger than one family's books."
I mark that and don't ask him what he means to do about the phone he keeps not answering.
A man doesn't get to interrogate his brother about a woman when he's spent the last two weeks failing at the exact same discipline himself.
I find Mackenzie at the dining room table that evening, laptop open, papers fanned across two chairs and a spreadsheet running longer than my arm.
"Feedlot transfers, the Calgary account, and now a shell company registered eight months before Jacob died.
" She turns the screen toward me without looking up, still working the next column.
"Whoever's moving this money set up the structure before anybody in this county knew there was a reason to hide anything. "
I read the number on her screen twice.
Nothing moves. Not my hands, not my face. That's the kind of stop a man trains into himself.
I know that account.
Knox burned the page it came from two years ago, in his own office at the main house, two doors down from Gideon's study. Told me it never happened. I let it not happen, same as any man does for a brother who asks with his eyes instead of his mouth.
I know whose signature sits behind that routing number. It isn't McKenna's. It isn't Voss's. And handing it to her isn't mine to do.
"You've gone quiet," she says.
"I do that."
"You do that when there's one thing you're hiding, not just being tired." Her eyes come up off the screen, sharp. "Which one is it?"
"Long day."
She holds my face with that stare another two seconds.
It’s the exact length of time it takes a good interviewer to decide whether pushing again buys more than it spends.
Then she lets it go, because she's better at this than almost anyone I've ever sat across from, including men paid to lie professionally.
"Fine," she says. "Keep your secrets, Blackwater. I'll find them anyway. I always do."
"I have no doubt," I respond, and mean it as a warning as much as a compliment, and don't say the rest.
Gus starts it a little after midnight.
Our surveillance cameras cover the driveway gate, the house, the barns, and the outbuildings, and nothing past them.
I've said as much to my father for two years, that a lens is only as good as the ground somebody bothers to point it at, and the back fence line has never made anybody's list.
So we sit the porch ourselves. Her sidearm reloaded, mine across my knees, watching the tree line like you watch a tree line when somebody's already put a truck through your family once and tied a flag on your fence to prove they can do it again.
Gus has been asleep against the rail for an hour. Then a vehicle passes a half mile out on the county road, engine note carrying thin and clean across the cold, and the dog comes up off the boards like he's been shot.
Ears forward. Every muscle locked. A low sound in his chest that isn't a bark and isn't a growl, but something older than both.
The truck passes. Taillights, then nothing. Gus doesn't settle for a long five minutes.
"That's new," Mackenzie says, watching him instead of the road.
"He does that sometimes." I don't tell her it's the second time. I don't tell her the first time was the morning Wyatt dropped him off, right after we put Jacob in the ground. That's a problem I'm not ready to hand her yet. Not until I know what it adds up to.
She lets it sit, same as she let the Calgary account sit, tucking it away for later.
She notices everything I don't say. She just chooses her moment.
"Cold out," she says instead, after a while, shifting closer on the step without making a production of it. Her shoulder finds mine and neither of us moves off the contact.
"You want to go in?"
"I want to sit right here." Her voice has dropped, quiet, pitched for the two of us and nobody the dark might be hiding. "Somebody's out there working this same case from a different angle. Maybe more than one somebody."
Voss, I think, and don't say it.
"Whoever it is, and whoever's behind him," she adds, "and unless I misread what I saw at that funeral, the Sullivans want him found as bad as you do.
" A ghost of a smile. "A family doesn't cross a church aisle over a body for nothing, Blackwater.
This whole county's chasing the same ghost. We're just the only two doing it half-dressed on a porch at midnight. "
"I've got a coat on."
"You've got a coat unbuttoned to the sternum, which around here counts as half-dressed." Her hand finds the inside of my forearm, over the old scar, thumb tracing it slow, thinking with her hands instead of her mouth. "I like you dangerous. I don't love you freezing to prove a point."
I turn my head. Close enough now that I can feel the heat coming off her skin instead of mine.
For a second, the rifle, the dog gone rigid twice in a week, the account number I'm never going to explain, all of it goes quiet.
Crowded out by the one thing in this county I've never once managed to treat like a threat, no matter how hard I try.
"Say that again," I tell her.
"Which part?" Her mouth curves, like she already knows exactly which part and wants to make me ask for it plainly.
"You know which part."
"Make me." Two words, and I feel them land somewhere no threat like that has any business landing on a man holding a loaded rifle.
"I'm not a patient man tonight, Tatum."
"You're the most patient man I've ever met. You told me so yourself." Her hand tightens on my arm.
Her mouth is an inch off mine, and neither of us moves to close it. Closing it means admitting the rifle isn't the only thing either of us is guarding tonight.
That's when I hear it.
Not an engine. A footstep in frozen grass thirty yards off the fence line, careful, and wrong. Nothing on this ranch walks that careful except something that doesn't want to be heard.
She has her sidearm clearing leather before I get the rifle up off my knees, and I put myself between her and the dark anyway, because old instinct doesn't ask permission.
We find it twenty minutes later, after a sweep that turns up nothing but the shape of somebody's boots in the frost and a gate latched wrong.
Wedged under a fence post at the property line, wrapped in a sandwich bag gone brittle with cold: a burner phone, dead battery, the kind you buy for cash and throw in a ditch when you're done.
Mackenzie crouches over it with a gloved hand and a flashlight cupped low.
This isn't a drop made in a hurry. The frost under the post is packed flatter than one visit would leave it, boot-worn enough to mean somebody has stood this exact spot more than once.
Close enough to the house to watch it and far enough to be nothing but a shadow past the barn lights.
Gus has caught the sound of him twice now and been right both times.
"Somebody's been standing right here before tonight." She turns it, careful, reading the case for prints she isn't going to find out here in the dark. "This wasn't a one-time thing. Somebody wanted a place to watch from, and this was it."
She gets the SIM out with the patience of a woman who's done this before, in weather worse than this, and reads what little the dead screen gives up before the battery quits for good.
One photo, timestamped, metadata intact.
Her, walking out of the Riverview office with her coffee, the day before the flue got packed.
Before the room ever turned into a threat. Before anybody had a reason, that she knows of, to be watching her that close.
She goes very still. It’s the kind of stillness I recognize because it's the same one I do.
When she looks up at me, her face has gone the color of the frost on the grass.
"Somebody was on me before Room 6 ever happened," she says. "Before there was a case anybody could explain."
My hand finds the small of her back without asking permission. The same place it landed twenty minutes ago during the sweep.
This time neither of us pretends it's tactical.
Neither of us has an answer for what the photo means. The cold coming up off the ground doesn't care that we don't.
Somewhere behind us, Gus lets out that same low sound again, aimed at nothing either of us can see.
We haven't moved from the phone when the sun comes up flat and grey across the rolling fields to the east.
I call Knox before I call anybody else, because a burner with her picture on it needs a name on it fast.
Knox takes it like Knox takes everything that matters, quiet, then gone to make calls of his own.
Mackenzie catches two hours of sleep on the couch with her boots still on. I don't try.
I head to the barn. By the time the ranch wakes up around me, chores done, I've told myself the day has a shape to it that doesn't involve a dead man's dog reading engines nobody else can hear.
I don't get that far.
I'm halfway across the yard at noon, with the burner still bagged in my coat, pocket when I hear tires on gravel. Wrong tires, too far up the road for anybody who belongs here. Coming on steady and slow in full daylight like whoever's driving has nothing in the world to hide.
Out-of-county plates. A vehicle I don't know, turning straight in through my own gate at noon like it's been invited.
I go for the rifle.