Chapter 017 The Search
"Franklin Prescott," I muttered, staring at the list of search results that scrolled endlessly down my screen. "Why does this name lead absolutely nowhere?"
Thokk stood behind me, his massive presence a wall of heat against the drafty office air. He leaned in, one hand resting on the back of my chair, effectively boxing me in. A week ago, that posture would have made me check my escape routes. Now, I just leaned back, soaking up the contact.
"Too many of them?" he asked, his voice a low rumble in his chest.
"Way too many," I said. "Lawyers, doctors, retired teachers, college students. There’s a Franklin Prescott who runs a bakery in Ohio and another who’s a retired gynecologist in Silver Ridge."
"Silver Ridge is close," Thokk noted.
"He’s eighty-two," I countered. "Unless he’s coordinating a high-tech biological smuggling ring between bingo nights, I don’t think he’s our guy."
I rubbed my temples. The name on the crate—Box 437, Franklin Prescott—felt like a taunt. It was generic enough to be a fake identity, or common enough to be a needle in a haystack of needles.
"We need another angle," I said. "The digital footprint is a wash. I need to talk to people who actually have eyes on the street."
Thokk shifted, his arm brushing against my shoulder. The scent of him—pine, leather, and that crisp, clean smell of mountain air—filled my senses. It was grounding. "The tourists?"
"Exactly. Locals are used to the luminooks; they tune them out like background noise. But tourists? They’re here specifically to stare at things. They notice when the picture doesn't match the brochure."
I stood up, my back sliding against his chest as I rose. He didn't step away. He stayed right there, solid and immovable, letting me use his space. I turned in the circle of his arms, looking up at him. His tusks were gleaming under the office lights, his amber eyes soft despite the tension of the investigation.
"I'll take Main Street," I said. "You keep digging into the Mary Pickens angle? Her resume history felt... thin."
"I will," he said. His large hand came up, thumb brushing my cheekbone. "Be careful, breela."
The Orcish endearment made my stomach do a slow, pleasant roll. Breela. My heart.
"Always," I promised.
I grabbed my hat and headed out into the afternoon sun.
Dusty Gulch was putting on a show today. The sky was a piercing, cloudless blue, and the air smelled of cinnamon pretzels from the bakery and the dry, dusty scent of the clay earth. It was the kind of day that made you want to buy a souvenir mug and forget that corporate paramilitaries might be hunting you.
I moved through the crowds near the luminook viewing pens, keeping my badge visible but my demeanor casual. I wasn't Deputy Cassidy James right now; I was just someone curious.
I spent twenty minutes striking out with a group of hikers who had been too busy arguing over a map to notice anything, and a couple from Idaho who had only arrived an hour ago.
Then I spotted a man and a teenage girl sitting on a bench near the ice cream parlor. The girl, maybe fifteen, had her hair in intricate braids woven with plastic luminook clips that glowed faintly in the daylight.
"Cute clips," I said, stopping near their bench.
The girl looked up, beaming. "Thanks! I got them at the gift shop."
"I'm Deputy James," I said, nodding to her father, who had straightened up protectively at my approach. "Just doing some routine checks on the wildlife viewing areas. You folks see anything unusual around the pens today or yesterday?"
"No, ma'am," the father, whose name turned out to be Bill Morgan, said. "Just the little glowing critters. Pretty quiet."
The girl, Jamie, hesitated. She was scraping the last of her chocolate ice cream from a cup, her brow furrowed.
"What about you, Jamie?" I asked gently. "Notice anyone getting too close to the animals?"
"Well," she started, glancing at her dad. "There was that lady doing the health check."
My internal radar pinged. "A health check?"
"Yeah. Yesterday afternoon. Over by the south pen, near the pottery place." Jamie gestured vaguely down the street. "She was inside the fence."
"What did she look like?" I pulled out my notepad.
"She had a baseball cap on, pulled down low. Jeans. And she was wearing one of those smock aprons everyone wears in the Pottery Barn when they're taking a class. Covered in gray clay."
"Did you see what she was doing?"
Jamie mimed a brushing motion near her own lower back. "She had this tool. It looked like metal? Like a... like a silver hairbrush, but sharper. She was running it along the luminook's spine."
I stopped writing. The pen dug into the paper. Luminooks communicated through their spines; the bioluminescent nodes were sensitive, packed with nerve endings.
"Did the luminook react?" I asked, keeping my voice even.
"Kind of," Jamie said. "It was making this weird humming sound. High-pitched. Not like the happy purring ones. But when I asked the lady, she said that was normal. Said she was checking for mites or something."
"Did she have a badge?" I asked. "Like mine?"
Jamie shook her head. "No. Just the apron."
"Thank you, Jamie," I said, closing my notebook. "That’s very helpful."
"Is something wrong?" Bill asked, eyeing my expression.
"Just a procedure clarification," I lied smoothly. "Enjoy your ice cream."
I walked away calmly until I turned the corner, then I picked up the pace. A metal tool on the spine. That wasn't a health check. That was data harvesting. Or torture.
When I got back to the office, the blinds were drawn against the late afternoon glare, casting the room in cool, striped shadows. Thokk was standing at the far wall, which he had transformed into a masterpiece of deductive organization.
He had taped up a large sheet of butcher paper. On it, color-coded index cards were arranged in a precise grid. Red for threats, blue for suspects, green for confirmed facts. Timelines ran horizontally; suspect connections ran vertically. It was beautiful. It was obsessive. It was exactly what I needed.
"I got something," I said, tossing my hat on my desk.
Thokk turned, marker in hand. "Tell me."
"Witness account. Teenage girl saw a woman inside the pen yesterday." I walked up to the board, grabbing a blue marker. "Woman was wearing a Pottery Barn smock. Clay stains. Baseball cap."
Thokk frowned. "The Pottery Barn provides those aprons to students, but the instructors wear them too. Joyce. Mary."
"Exactly." I wrote Suspect: Smock Woman on a card and pinned it to the board. "But here's the kicker. She was using a metal tool on the luminook's spine. The witness said the animal was making a high-pitched hum."
Thokk’s jaw tightened. "Pain," he rumbled. "Or distress. The spines are their primary sensory organ. Scraping them with metal..."
"It would be like running a wire brush over an exposed nerve," I finished. "She told the kid it was a mite check."
I picked up another card. I needed to link this to the timeline. I glanced at Thokk's layout. He had exactly two inches between each card. The lines connecting them were drawn with a ruler.
Without thinking, I measured the distance with my knuckles—two inches—and pinned the new card perfectly in line with his. I drew a connecting line to the Tuesday Timeline, keeping my hand steady so it matched the straightness of his previous lines.
I stepped back, looking at our handiwork.
"You're doing it," Thokk said softly.
"Doing what?"
"Organizing like me."
I looked at the board. My messy, chaotic scrawl usually looked like a doctor's prescription pad after a caffeine overdose. But this... this was neat. Aligned. Structured.
A few months ago, I would have panicked. I would have felt like I was losing my edge, my identity, dissolving into someone else’s life. I’d learned not to trust safe. Safe made you soft. Safe made you forget to check the locks.
But looking at the symmetrical grid, I didn't feel erased. I felt... supported.
"It makes sense," I said, capping the marker. "Chaos hides things. Structure exposes them."
Thokk moved up behind me, his chest pressing lightly against my back. "We fit," he murmured. "Some people fit together without needing to change who they are. They just... align."
"Like puzzle pieces?" I asked, leaning back into him.
"Like structural supports," he corrected, ever the builder.
I smiled, but the investigation pulled me back. "Okay, structural support. Let's look at the structure of our suspects. Mary Pickens. Joyce. Ava."
"I pulled Mary's file again," Thokk said, stepping around to his desk. "Her employment history stops ten years ago. Before that? Nothing. No tax records, no previous addresses. She just appeared in Dusty Gulch a decade ago."
"Like she was running from something," I said. "Takes one to know one."
"Or hiding something," Thokk added.
"What about Ava?" I asked. "The photographer. She was in that huddle with Mary and Joyce by the shed. And she wears hiking gear, like the description of the khaki hiker."
I pulled up my laptop and typed in Ava Nature Photography.
"Most nature photographers maintain websites or blogs to showcase their portfolios," I said, clicking on the first result. "If she's a pro, she should have galleries from all over."
The page loaded. It was slick, professional. Ava’s Wild World.
I clicked on the gallery tab.
"Thokk," I said. "Look at this."
He leaned over my shoulder.
Thumbnail after thumbnail filled the screen. A luminook perched on a rock. A rare blue-crested lizard found only in the canyon. The nocturnal glimmer-moths that nested near the mines.
"It's all here," Thokk said.
"It's only here," I corrected. "There are no photos of Yellowstone. No Yosemite. No generic birds from a backyard in Seattle. Every single photo in her portfolio is of a species unique to the Dusty Gulch ecosystem."
I clicked on a photo of a luminook. The caption didn't say Beautiful morning light. It listed the estimated weight, the luminosity index, and the precise coordinates of where the photo was taken.
"This isn't an art portfolio," I said, a chill running down my spine. "It's a catalog."
"She's shopping them," Thokk growled.
"Or she's the scout," I said. "She finds them, documents them, and tags the location. Then someone else comes in with a box."
"And a metal tool," Thokk added grimly.
I looked back at the board, at the neat, orderly lines we had drawn together. The web was tightening. We had a fake name, a woman in a smock torturing animals, and a photographer building a shopping list for biological thieves.
"We need to talk to Ava," I said. "Now."