Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
MAREN
I've had my hands on this evidence for days and done nothing with it. That ends this morning.
The screenshots are still in my camera roll, buried under a folder I labeled receipts out of habit, the same instinct that makes me save everything and hand over nothing until I've decided what it's worth. I pull them up standing at my kitchen island.
The stable footage. The jacket. The tag number that came back to a man three years dead.
Knox has known about it since Monday of last week.
I've known about it a couple days when he decided to show me.
Neither of us has done a single thing with it because we've both been too busy falling into beds and sitting on whatever the other one hasn't handed over yet, pretending the investigation and the rest of it are two different things happening to two different people.
They're not. I'm done pretending they are.
The retraction ran this morning. Front page, above the fold, because Declan doesn't accept apologies printed anywhere he'd have to go looking for them.
FORGED DOCUMENT CONFIRMED: SULLIVAN SIGNATURE FAKED, ANALYSIS SHOWS — with Jennifer's quote about the loop on the M sitting in the second paragraph like a woman who has been waiting her entire life to be cited as a forensic expert.
Laney texted me a photo of it taped up in the window at Nell's an hour ago.
Rimrock corrects a record the same way it spreads one. Publicly, and with enthusiasm.
I text Tate before I've finished my coffee.
Need you to run something. Not through the office. Through you.
He responds in ninety seconds, which for Tate, at seven in the morning, is basically instantaneous. Always ominous when you specify "not through the office."
I have a jacket logo, a tag number, and a name that shouldn't still be opening doors. I need to know if it's opened any others.
Three dots. Then: Send it.
I send the screenshot. Not the Lodge tree line frame, not yet. Just the stable entry, the dead man's credentials walking into my horse's stall with the unhurried confidence of someone who's done this before and expects to do it again.
Tate calls instead of texting back.
"Where did you get this?" he asks. No hello. That's how I know he's already working it.
"Doesn't matter."
"It matters if I'm going to explain to Dawson why I'm running a dead Blackwater ranch hand's credentials through our access logs."
"Then don't explain it to Dawson." I pour the coffee I've been ignoring and drink it standing up. Sitting down feels like admitting I plan to stay in one place long enough to need a chair. "Tell me what you find first. We'll decide who else needs to know after."
A pause on his end. Tate doesn't like operating outside the family's clean lines any more than Dawson does, but he's spent his whole life being the brother nobody watches closely enough, which means he's also the brother who's had the most practice deciding for himself what counts as necessary.
"Give me an hour," he says and hangs up.
Knox calls at eight, before either the assessor or Tate.
I answer with the phone against my shoulder, still buttoning my shirt. "I thought you were letting Holt run the fourth name."
"He is." His voice comes through low, a little rough, the sound of a man who hasn't slept enough and isn't planning to fix that today. "I'm calling because I want to hear you're not doing anything stupid before I get pulled into a meeting I can't leave for three hours."
"I'm never stupid."
"You're reckless in a very competent way that terrifies me more than stupid would." A pause. Somewhere behind him, a door closes. "Tell me you're not chasing this alone."
"I'm not alone. I'm in my kitchen."
"Maren."
"Tate's helping." I stop buttoning. "Same way Holt's helping you. We're allowed to have our own hands, Knox."
Silence, the kind he uses instead of arguing, and I can picture exactly what his jaw is doing right now, the muscle at the corner of it working while he decides whether pushing is worth what it'll cost him.
"I don't like not being in the room," he says finally.
"You're not supposed to like it. You're supposed to survive it." I find my earring in the mirror and put it in one-handed. "I let you have your Holt calls. You let me have mine."
"That's not the same thing and you know it."
"It's exactly the same thing." I check the pendant is sitting straight. "You've decided to trust me completely, Knox. That means trusting what I do when you're not watching. Not just what I let you see."
Another silence, shorter this time. Then, quieter: "Fine. But you call me the second you have something. Not after you've already used it."
"I make no promises."
"Maren."
"I'll call," I say, which isn't quite a promise and we both know it.
Then I go to work.
The county assessor calls back at eight-fifteen.
I called in this favor before, back when I needed the McKenna filings traced through Pondera County. Warren Hess has never once let a Sullivan number go unanswered, for reasons that live somewhere between gratitude and a zoning variance Declan remembers better than he does.
"The dead employee," he says, without preamble, the way everyone in this county has apparently decided to answer their phones this week.
"Corbin Reyes. Termination date's clean on our side too.
Death certificate filed, everything by the book.
" A pause. "But his name's still active on two county access permissions.
Forest Service gate codes for the timber lease boundary.
Nobody's flagged it because nobody checks a dead man's permissions unless someone tells them to look. "
"Who would tell them to look?"
"Nobody." He says it flat. "That's the whole point of using a name nobody's watching."
I write it down. Forest Service gate codes. Timber lease boundary. That's not a stable in a fairground. That's federal land access, quiet and unglamorous and exactly the kind of door that doesn't announce itself when it opens.
I thank him. He tells me to give his best to my father, which means he wants me to remember he did this without being asked twice. I will, because that's how the ledger works and we both know it.
Tate calls back at eight-thirty.
"You're not going to like this," he says.
"I already don't like most of my week. Try me."
"The Reyes name shows up twice more that I can find in an hour, which means there's probably more I haven't found yet.
" His voice has the clipped, careful rhythm he gets when he's reading off a screen and doesn't want to editorialize before he's finished.
"Once on a vendor badge used to access the Blackwater equipment yard eight months ago.
Once on a visitor log at the Pondera County records office, four months ago, the same week two McKenna-adjacent filings got entered into the system that later disappeared. "
"So it's not a one-time thing," I say.
"It's not a person. It's a costume." Tate lets that sit a second. "Somebody keeps this jacket in a closet and puts it on whenever they need a name that won't raise questions. Blackwater ranch hand, dead three years, buried in a system nobody audits because grief makes people bad at paperwork."
"Somebody who worked around him." Tate's voice goes quiet in the way it does when he's arrived somewhere he doesn't like. "Or worked with whoever handled his termination paperwork and never flagged the loose threads."
I sit down now. The chair finds me instead of the other way around.
"That's not McKenna parachuting a stranger into Rimrock," I say. "That's someone who's been standing close enough to both families for years to know exactly which dead names are still useful."
"Yeah."
Neither of us says the rest of it. We don't have to. Inside the room. Not a long lens from a tree line. Inside. Trusted enough to be forgotten, which is the hardest kind of trust to earn and the easiest kind to weaponize once you have it.
"I need everything you've got in one file," I say. "Timeline, access points, the works."
"You're going to sit on this too," Tate says. Not accusing. Just naming it, flat and precise and entirely too observant for a man everyone in this family still half-treats like the quiet one.
"For now."
"Knox know any of this?"
I think about his voice an hour ago, rough and sleepless, asking me not to do anything stupid. I think about how easily I let him hang up without telling him I already had Tate on the line before he called.
"Knox is sitting on something too," I say. "We're both doing it. I'd rather know what I actually have before I hand him half a picture and let him decide what the rest of it means."
"That's not how partnerships work, Maren."
"We're not partners, Tate. We're two people from two families running parallel investigations who occasionally let each other see the same evidence." I hear how it sounds the second it's out of my mouth. I don't take it back. "Send me the file."
He does, twenty minutes later, no further commentary.
I spread it across my kitchen table. Three data points, three months apart, one recycled identity moving through both families' blind spots like it was built for exactly this. I photograph the whole spread and back it up in two places, because a Sullivan doesn't build a case she can lose.
My phone buzzes.
Knox: Ted's fourth name confirmed. Not McKenna hired muscle. Someone who's had ranch access for years. Holt's running it down.
I read it twice. Someone who's had ranch access for years. That's Knox's side of exactly the same shape I've been building all morning, and neither of us has said the word out loud because saying it out loud means admitting the enemy isn't outside either fence line.
It's inside both of them.
How long has this person had access, I text back.
Long enough that nobody thought to ask.
I set the phone down on Tate's file, the Corbin Reyes timeline face-up beside it.
Outside my kitchen window, a gust comes down off the Front, dry and cool for this early in August, rattling the aspen leaves against the glass.
Someone we already trust.
I touch the pendant at my throat, warm from my own skin. A gift from a man who is ten miles and one closed door away, working the same thread from the other end and not yet saying its name either.
Whoever this is has been close enough to touch both of us.
I just don't know yet whose hand they've been shaking the longest.