2. Chapter 2
Crowe
The scale-house log says nothing came through here Tuesday night. I’ve been sitting across this desk for eleven minutes, and the man behind it has told me that four different ways.
“Truck’s not in the book,” he says again. Same hitch before “truck” every time. “I told you.”
“You did.”
“So we’re done here.”
“Not yet.”
He’s mid-fifties, soft and heavy from years of night-shift work.
There’s a space heater in the corner that isn’t keeping up.
The walls smell of diesel, and they probably have for years.
There’s a calendar behind him, three months out of date, and a coffee ring on every page of the log he’s shown me. None on the pages he hasn’t shown me.
“Here’s what happens if your answers don’t change,” I say.
“Weighbridge tickets get filed twice. Once here. Once at the terminal that billed the mileage. I find that copy, and it’s got your signature on an empty return that wasn’t empty.
That’s not a missing entry anymore. That’s a false one.
I come back here. Different conversation. Worse for you.”
He doesn’t answer that.
“You get to pick which conversation we have,” I say. “Pick smart.”
He stares at the log a while longer before he moves. Then he opens the bottom drawer, takes out a second book, and turns it around so I can read it without taking it from his hands. They’re shaking enough that I hear the pages before I touch them.
Two trucks out of the quarry that night.
One’s sitting in an empty warehouse outside Coeur d’Alene, plates pulled, nobody’s claimed it in a week.
The second changed plates twice before the Montana line, then split into two vans on a service road nobody runs freight on.
This scale logged one of them light. Decoy.
The other logged heavy. Heavier than a load that size should run. About one person heavier than the manifest says.
That’s our target. I know it. It should feel like progress. It doesn’t.
Four days behind that van now. Closing slower than I want.
I write the numbers into my own book, thank him for his time, and leave him with the drawer still open.
Outside, the cold hits before the door’s shut behind me. Odile’s leaning against the truck with her arms crossed, black coat down to her ankles, gray silk at the collar. In a gravel lot in Idaho. She watched two hundred years of fashion come and go and kept what suited her.
Small, straight-backed, dark hair pinned up off a long neck. A face that was called striking back when she still had a country to be called anything in. Her eyes are silver in the floodlights, and they’re on the door. She knows exactly how long I’ve been in there.
“Eleven minutes,” she says. “You’re slowing down, monsieur.”
“He had a second book.”
“They usually do.” She pushes off the truck. “Faine’s best chased four truckloads of blood-stock across two continents last year. Now she’s got you working gas-station scale houses in Idaho at midnight. If she knew how this actually looked, she’d laugh.”
“She knows.”
“Knowing and approving aren’t the same thing.”
Odile held the ramp for me at the quarry the night we went in for Val-Serein. I don’t forget that, and neither does she, which is likely why Faine sent her with me.
“You could tell me why,” Odile says.
“Why what?” I say.
“Why this? Why you?”
I don’t answer.
She watches me not answer. She’s been doing that since we started, and she lets it go again. Behind her, the other three are loading gear into the second vehicle, quick and quiet. Most crews take months to get that good.
Kent is the broad one, a kid with a torn earlobe I haven’t asked about. Big through the shoulders, sandy hair that won’t lie down, and a face that hasn’t learned to hide anything yet.
He catches me looking, gives the tire iron in his hand a short spin, and goes back to work. Three weeks in. A lot of crews would be sloppy by now. These three aren’t. But Faine assigned them to me for a month, and our time’s running out.
I hand Odile my notes. She reads them walking, without slowing down.
“Two vans,” she says. “One of them carrying a passenger nobody wrote on the manifest.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
Halfway across the lot, my boot lands wrong.
Heat. Scale, gold catching light that isn’t there.
I pause, reaching for it.
Gone.
Half a second, maybe less. My hand’s already on the truck door. I’ve barely broken stride.
Nothing happened.
I don’t dwell on it. Whatever that was, it isn’t evidence, and I don’t work with anything else.
Odile’s watching me over the hood when I look up. She doesn’t say anything for longer than she usually manages. Odile de Rosemonde has something to say about everything.
I get in the truck.
“Mm,” she says, to nobody, and gets in after me.
I spread my notes across my knees and start filling in the route I’ve been building since the quarry.
The pattern’s wrong.
Every trade route out of that quarry runs toward a depot, a buyer corridor, someplace freight like that gets sold. This one bends wide around all of it, past every known crossing, every terminal on Odile’s list. Whoever’s driving has a list of places to avoid, not a place to reach.
Nobody builds a route like that unless they don’t want anyone to see it move.
Odile leans over the seat and traces the bend with one finger, same line I just drew.
“That’s not a route to any processing center on the maps we were given,” she says.
“No.”
“That’s a route away from everything we’ve tracked so far.”
I shrug. “Could be something we missed.”
“Don’t say that too loud. Bastien would have your testicles if you questioned his intel.”
“Really,” I deadpan.
“What?” Her eyes are wide, guileless. “You do have testicles, don’t you, Crowe? Fine man like you.” She bobs her brows. “Would be a shame if you didn’t.”
“Comtesse de Rosemonde.” There’s a hint of warning in my tone.
“Gideon Crowe,” she huffs back. “Weeks on the road and not a single moment of impropriety.” She stretches and rolls her shoulders. “I should have brought one of my pretty boys along.”
I ignore her and dig the compound file out of the case behind my seat, copies Faine’s people lifted before Aurora sealed the quarry building. Intake records, page after page, names and numbers in the same clerk’s flat hand.
Something’s nagging at me.
I run through the records again until I find it.
“Odd,” I mutter.
Odile reads the page over my shoulder. “What is?”
“All of these records show regular incoming amounts,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “Payments for blood.”
“Right.” I tap one entry that doesn’t follow the pattern. “Except this one.”
“Just one large sum, and then nothing.” She frowns. “What do you suppose that means?”
“Not sure.” My finger is still on the number. “But that asset is on this truck. I saw the same number under the log entry.”
Odile’s eyebrows lift. “You think that’s our girl?”
“Could be,” I say. “And if it is, we have a number to track.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.” She settles back into her seat.
I stare out the windshield. One large sum over a year ago. Probably when she was brought into the pipeline.
Dragons don’t get caught. Nobody pulls one off a mountain and walks away breathing. She was delivered. Somebody she knew handed her over quietly, or the Cravens would have heard about a fight on a mountain by now.
Fuck.
Nobody sold her to the trade. Somebody paid to put her in it.
I’m not hunting a trafficker anymore.
I’m hunting whoever she trusted.
I rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. Two trails now. The van ahead of me, and whoever sold her, a year back down the road. I can only follow one at a time.
The van’s still moving. I fold the intake record into my coat.
“Drive,” I tell the kid with the torn ear.
The truck lurches. We move.