Chapter 3
Sera Bolland
Earlier That Day
My contractor badge was green. The ones that mattered were blue.
I shouldn't have cared. It was a rectangle of plastic on a lanyard, not a personality test. But the blue badges moved through the Spokane field office like they owned the hallways, which they did, and the green badges moved like guests who'd overstayed, which we had.
Almost three years I'd been swiping through these doors, and the security guard at the front desk still checked my ID every single morning like he'd never seen me before.
Maybe he hadn't. Green badges were easy to forget.
I'd been at my cubicle since seven, which was early even for me.
The assigned work—a financial pattern analysis for a mortgage fraud case that three agents were fighting over credit for—sat minimized in the corner of my screen.
I'd finish it by end of day. It would take me two hours.
I could do it in my sleep, and sometimes I thought I did.
The rest of my screen belonged to Lucian Kindt.
Two years of data, organized into a predictive model that nobody in this building had asked me to build and nobody in this building wanted to look at. Courier movements along the I-15 corridor, cross-referenced with fuel purchases, motel registrations, and vehicle rental patterns.
Timing intervals between movements that had started random and revealed themselves, over hundreds of data points, to be anything but random. Geographic clustering in towns small enough to be invisible and spaced just far enough apart to avoid pattern detection.
Unless you were looking. Unless looking was all you did.
Even then, the model had gaps I couldn't close.
Kindt's pipeline had been disrupted at least seven times in the past year by something I couldn't identify—not law enforcement, not a rival operation, nothing that left a signature I recognized.
I'd labeled it as an unresolved external variable and kept working.
I'd found a vehicle registration that had appeared in three separate towns along the corridor in a sixteen-day window. The kind of thing that looked like nothing until you saw it three times.
I was adjusting a new data point when the shadow fell across my desk. "Bolland."
I minimized the Kindt screen on reflex. Not fast enough.
"Is that the Kindt file?" Pratt leaned against the partition of my cubicle the way he always did, arms crossed, the posture of a man who'd stopped by to chat and not to listen. He was my direct supervisor, mid-forties, decent enough. He'd never been unkind to me.
He'd also never once acted on anything I'd brought him.
"I'm almost done with the fraud analysis. I'll have it to you by four."
"That's not what I asked."
I turned my chair to face him. "It was the communication node I flagged last week. I pulled coordination data from it. Real-time courier scheduling, Pratt. Not projections. Not estimates. The Kindt organization's actual route timing for the western corridor."
"Okay."
"It's not okay. It's a breakthrough. The corridor shift I flagged in January wasn't a one-off. They moved their entire western route sixty miles east, and I can show you the exact date they did it. I can tell you which towns they're going to hit next week."
"Sera—"
"Next week. Not next month, not in some hypothetical future when someone with a blue badge decides to look at this. Next week. Real children in real towns on a route I have mapped."
He let me finish. That was the worst part. He always let me finish.
"That's impressive work," he said.
"It's actionable work." I forced myself to say it calmly despite wanting to scream.
"It's work that came from a communication node you accessed on your own initiative, on your own time, using Bureau resources, in an active operational area that—"
"That nobody's operating in. That's my point. Whoever's supposedly handling this at whatever level above my clearance doesn't have this data. They can't, because I just pulled it two days ago."
"Sera." His voice dropped half a register.
The gentle version. The one I hated most. "Everyone in this office knows you lost your sister to this network.
Nobody faults you for wanting to see it taken down.
But your job evaluations are based on your assigned work, and I need that fraud analysis before end of day. "
He patted the top of the partition twice. The way you'd pat a dog that did a good trick but brought you the wrong ball.
"And Sera? I'd pull back from that communication node if I were you. That kind of access without authorization is the sort of thing that ends up in someone's incident report."
He walked away. I watched him stop two cubicles down and laugh at something Reynolds said. Easy. The kind of interaction between people who existed in the same ecosystem.
I turned back to the Kindt screen and stared at the vehicle registration I'd been adjusting before he interrupted. Three towns. Sixteen days. A pattern that fit my model like a key in a lock.
But nobody would freaking listen to me.
I couldn't provide proof, I could only provide patterns. Evidently from me that wasn't ever going to be enough.
The fraud analysis took me an hour and forty minutes. I sent it to Pratt at 3:52, eight minutes ahead of deadline, and he didn't respond.
I shut down my workstation at five. Walked through the lobby with my bag over my shoulder, green badge bouncing against my sternum. The security guard was chatting with a blue-badge agent about the Seahawks. Neither of them looked up as I passed.
My apartment was a one-bedroom in a building that advertised modern living and delivered functional plumbing. I kept it clean the way I kept everything: by system. Keys on the hook by the door. Badge on the table. Shoes on the mat. Bag on the chair.
I set my bag on the chair and stopped.
The kitchen drawer was open. The one next to the stove where I kept takeout menus and a flashlight and a box of matches I’d never used. Not open all the way. An inch, maybe less. The kind of thing most people wouldn’t register.
I registered it.
I stood very still and let my eyes move through the apartment the way they moved through data—looking for the thing that didn’t match the pattern.
The living room looked right. The couch, the coffee table with my laptop and a stack of printouts, the bookshelf organized by subject because organizing by author was chaos.
The chair at my desk was pulled out at a different angle. A few degrees off from where I’d left it that morning. Most people didn’t push their desk chairs in to a precise position before leaving for work.
I did.
I walked to the bedroom door. Opened it slowly, like the speed would change what was on the other side.
The closet was closed. It was always closed. But before I’d left for work that morning, I’d placed a piece of clear tape across the seam between the door and the frame, like I did every morning. Right at the height of the middle hinge, invisible unless you knew to look.
The tape was broken.
I sat down on the edge of my bed because my legs made the decision before my brain did.
My chest tightened, that familiar constriction that had nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with the lungs I’d been cursed with since childhood.
I reached into my bag on the nightstand and found my inhaler by feel, took two puffs, and waited for my airways to stop pretending they’d forgotten how to work.
It was a trick I’d learned from Travis Hale, at a barbecue at my parents’ house four years ago. The tape, not the breathing. The breathing I’d been managing my whole life.
He and Naomi had been dating for about a year. It was a Sunday, one of those family afternoons my parents orchestrated around Naomi’s schedule because her career at the agency made her time precious and everyone else’s flexible.
Travis had spent most of the day on the periphery, dry and quiet, nursing the same beer for two hours while my father talked about the Bolland family legacy of service and my mother found new ways to say how proud they were of Naomi’s career at the agency.
I’d been on the periphery too. The usual spot. Close enough to be present, far enough to be uncounted.
At some point, Travis had ended up beside me in the kitchen while I was pretending to be busy with dishes. He’d watched me rearrange the same three glasses for a minute, lining them up with their handles at the same angle, and said, “You always put things back exactly where they were?”
I’d been embarrassed. It was a small thing, a habit I didn’t think anyone noticed.
“Most people don’t,” he said. “That’s useful, actually. Means you’d know if someone moved something.” And then he’d told me about the tape trick. Low-tech countersurveillance. Old tradecraft, simple and reliable. If the tape breaks, someone opened the door while you were out.
I’d asked him why he was telling me. He’d shrugged and said everyone should know how to tell if someone had been in their space.
He’d looked right at me when he said it. Not through me. Not past me to find Naomi. At me.
I’d thought about that afternoon more than I should have. More than was appropriate, given that the man belonged to my sister. I’d filed it in the part of my brain where I kept things I wasn’t allowed to want, and I’d started using the tape trick, not for any reason in particular.
The tape was broken.
Someone had been in my apartment. Someone had opened my closet. The closet where I kept a fireproof lockbox with hard copies of my Kindt research. The printed timelines, route maps, the analytical framework I didn’t trust to digital storage alone.
The box was still there. I checked. It didn’t look disturbed. But whoever had been here was careful enough to close the closet and careful enough to close the kitchen drawer to almost the right position, and they’d had no way of knowing about the tape.
I’d accessed Kindt’s communication node from an FBI terminal two days ago. Now someone had been in my apartment, going through the closet where I kept my research on the same network.
I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
I thought about calling Pratt. But I could already play the conversation forward in my head.
Someone broke into my apartment.
How do you know?
Things were moved. A piece of tape I placed on my closet door was broken.
A piece of tape. Right. And you think this is connected to.
..? Let me guess. The Kindt case. The case you’ve been independently investigating without authorization.
And you want us to take all this seriously based on a piece of tape?
You probably need to turn in your badge and see about getting yourself checked into a looney bin.
I set the phone down.
And even if he believed me, even if he took it seriously and opened a case and assigned an agent, that would take weeks.
I couldn’t stay here, not knowing someone had been in here. What if they came back? I needed help. I needed someone to treat my intel as credible.
Travis was on my mind before I consciously put him there. The security tell had pulled him out of whatever locked drawer I kept him in and set him right in front of me.
He was former CIA. Had worked with my sister. He’d been part of the joint operation targeting Kindt’s pipeline, the one that killed Naomi.
He had the tech skills to do things with my data that I couldn’t do alone. And he had a personal stake in Kindt that went deeper than anyone else alive, because he’d been standing right there when Kindt’s operation took Naomi from both of us.
I’d tried calling him before. Three times in the past four months, as my model had started producing results that felt real enough to share. I’d never left detailed messages, just a request to call me back.
He never had.
I called now. The phone rang four times and went to a voicemail that was just a tone, no greeting, no name. I hung up.
Same result. Same silence. Same Travis, who’d dropped off the face of the earth after Naomi’s funeral and apparently had no intention of being found.
Except I was out of options. The FBI wouldn’t act on my data. Someone had been in my apartment. And the one person who might actually listen was in Montana not answering his phone.
So, damn it, I’d make him answer the door instead.
I called my mother.
She picked up on the third ring with the voice she used when she wasn’t sure the call was worth her time. “Sera. Hi.”
“Hi, Mom. I need Travis Hale’s address.”
A pause. “Travis? Naomi’s Travis?”
There it was. Two words and I was twelve years old again, asking to borrow something that belonged to my sister.
“Yes.”
“Why on earth would you need that?”
“It’s related to work. The trafficking case.”
Another pause, longer this time. “Sera, honey. I thought we’d talked about this. Your father and I worry that you’re—”
“I’m not spiraling, Mom. It’s a work question. I need to talk to Travis about operational details from when he was at the agency, and I can’t reach him by phone.”
“Well, he’s not exactly the sociable type, is he.
Not since...” She didn’t finish. She never finished that sentence.
Naomi’s death existed in my mother’s vocabulary as a trailing silence, a sentence that dissolved before it reached the part that hurt.
“I think I have it somewhere. He sent it when I offered to mail that box of his things that got mixed in with Naomi’s. ”
The sound of a drawer opening. Papers shifting. My mother’s house was full of drawers where the artifacts of Naomi’s life accumulated and were preserved like relics.
“Here. Garnet Bend, Montana.” She read me the address. I wrote it down. “I don’t know what you think he’s going to tell you that—”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Are you eating? You sound tired.”
“I’m fine. I have to go.”
“Your father says hello. We’re having the Petersons over Saturday if you want to—”
“Tell Dad I said hi. Thanks for the address.”
I hung up and sat with the paper in my hand and the broken tape on my closet door and the sure knowledge that I wasn’t sleeping here tonight.
Packing took ten minutes. A bag with two days of clothes, toiletries, my inhaler, the thumb drive with the full Kindt model, and the hard copies from the lockbox.
I wasn’t fleeing. I was driving to Montana to have a conversation that couldn’t happen over a phone he wouldn’t answer. I’d be back by Thursday.
I locked the apartment behind me. Checked the door twice.
Got in my car and pulled out of the lot and pointed myself east toward a man I hadn’t seen since I stood at my sister’s funeral and couldn’t look at him because looking at him would have told everyone in that room exactly how much of a monster I was.
I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind and drove.