Chapter 8 #2
My vision tunnels. The parking lot, the busted light, the last departing rigs, all of it drops away.
The rage hits my bloodstream like a chemical spill, a white-hot reaction that bypasses my brain entirely and goes straight to my hands.
I'm standing between Kenna and the open lot before I've made a conscious decision to move, my body angled to shield hers, my eyes scanning the shadows between the rigs and the tree line beyond the lot. Looking for movement. Looking for the person who did this and might still be watching.
"Get behind me," I say, and my voice comes out low and flat and nothing like a request.
"I'm not going to—"
"Kenna. Behind me. Now."
She goes quiet. Not compliant, because Kenna doesn't do compliant, but smart enough to recognize that this isn't possessiveness. This is threat assessment from a man whose body has already decided that anyone who comes out of those shadows is going to have to go through him first.
After a full sixty seconds of scanning, the lot is empty. No movement, no engines, no figures. Whoever did this is long gone.
I turn back to the car. There's a cold, still place opening up behind my sternum that I recognize from the chute. The place where fear gets compressed into focus. Someone put a death threat six inches from where Kenna would have been sitting.
She picks up the photograph. Her hands are steady, which tells me more about her than anything she's said since the night we met. She studies the image, flips it over, and examines the paper.
"It's a standard inkjet print. Widely available. There's no watermark and no printer identification." Her voice is clinical and detached. The journalist is processing evidence while the person behind the journalist is holding herself together with both hands.
"They took everything," I say.
She nods, her teeth set together. "The laptop. The printed files. The financial data. My interview recordings with Quinn. My notes on the Thornton pattern. All of it."
"Is any of it backed up?"
"Some of it. I emailed copies of the spreadsheets to a secure account, so the raw financial data is mostly safe. But the interview recordings, my notes, and the cross-reference work are gone."
I stare at the photograph in her hands. It shows Grant in the dirt, the last image of my best friend alive, weaponized into a threat.
"Merrick knows," I say.
"Merrick knows exactly who's asking questions. They found my car in a restaurant parking lot an hour from the circuit. That's not a coincidence. Someone has been following me."
"The note says stop. They're not asking."
"I'm not stopping." She says it without hesitation and without bravado, just as a fact, the way she'd say the sky is blue or the circuit moves to the next town next week.
"I know you're not."
"Are you?"
"What do you think?"
She steps up beside me and meets my gaze. There's no fear in her face. Just cold, quiet fury and the kind of resolve that doesn't bend.
"We need to move faster," she says. "This changes the timeline. If they know someone is investigating, they'll start cleaning up, destroying evidence, and pressuring witnesses."
"Rainey."
"Rainey. If Merrick's people are looking for who's been digging, Rainey is the biggest loose end they haven't tied off. She's the one with the original evidence, and she's been hiding since Las Cruces. If they find her before we do, everything Grant built disappears."
I pull out my phone. "Your journalism contact, the one who traced the photography studio. How solid is the lead?"
"Solid enough. The forum handle match isn't coincidental."
"Then we go to Creede tomorrow."
"After we find Rainey, we take everything to Torres."
I pull the photograph from her hands. For a second, my thumb traces the edge of the image, the grainy outline of Grant's body in the dirt, and the rage that lives in my sternum flares hot enough to taste.
I fold the photograph and slide it into my jacket pocket. Later, when this is over, I'll burn it. But for now, it's fuel.
"Leave the car," I say. "You're riding with me from here on out."
"I just got that rental."
"And somebody found it, smashed it, and left a death threat in the passenger seat. They know what you're driving, and they know your face."
I take the step that puts me close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold my gaze. "You're with me. That's not up for negotiation."
She studies me for a beat, and I can see her running the calculation behind those sharp eyes, weighing independence against safety, measuring whether this is strategy or possession.
It's both. And I don't care which one she lands on as long as she gets in my truck.
"Fine," she says. "But I pick the music this time."
"I don't play music."
"Exactly the problem."
We spend the next hour dealing with the fallout.
Kenna calls the local police to file a report, keeping her statement limited to a break-in and theft, no mention of the photograph or what was on the laptop.
The responding officer takes notes, gives her a case number, and doesn't ask the kind of questions that would complicate things.
Then she calls the rental agency to report the damage and close out the agreement.
For once, she's glad she paid for the additional insurance.
A tow truck will collect the car in the morning.
I keep the photograph. The police don't need to see it, and neither does the rental company.
I grab her press bag from where she dropped it by the rear tire and toss it in the truck.
She takes the passenger seat like she's been sitting in it her whole life, and the familiarity of that, the ease with which she folds herself into my space, sends a jolt through me that I don't examine too closely.
We drive to the motel in silence, stopping briefly to pick up a new laptop to replace the one stolen. The Santa Fe night presses against the windows, city lights giving way to darkness as we move toward the outskirts.
"They used Grant's death photo," Kenna says. Her voice is quiet, the analytical distance stripped back, and what's underneath is raw. "They printed a picture of a man dying in the dirt and used it as a warning, like his death is a marketing tool."