Chapter 10
MAGS
I'm four hours into the access log when someone knocks.
I open the door.
Luke McAllister is standing in my doorway holding a brown paper bag from the Rusty Spur and a manila folder I recognize because I sent it to him three days ago.
The smell that comes through ahead of him is grilled beef and something fried.
My stomach growls, audibly, and his eyes drop to it for one beat before coming back up.
"It's eight-thirty," I say.
"I know what time it is."
"I didn't invite you."
"No." He looks at the bag, then at me. "You eaten?"
He's in a worn blue t-shirt that has no business fitting him the way it does. Broad shoulders, tan arms, and a chest I am not looking at. The folder is in his other hand, my handwriting on the tab, and there are notes visible on the top page that were not there when I sent it.
I step back.
He comes inside and does what he does in every space: reads it first, moves second.
My apartment smells like the sourdough Willa baked at four this morning, which comes up through the floorboards whether I want it to or not.
It is not a large space. Kitchen table, two chairs, map pinned above the counter, laptop open, collar data spread across every flat surface I own.
He scans all of it in three seconds and sets the bag on the cleared corner of the table and the folder beside it, and then he looks at my map and goes very still.
"You've got the access log plotted," he says.
"Access log plotted, collar data overlaid, fence cut coordinates mapped against the tire track measurements from the ridge." I sit back down because it is my table and I am not going to hover in my own kitchen. "Cutter filed that review the same morning the first post was cut."
"I know." He pulls out the second chair without being asked. "I've been looking at that too."
He opens the folder and slides it across, and there are his notes in the margins. Tight, precise handwriting that takes up exactly the space it needs and not one inch more. He's cross-referenced the dates against ranch records and found something I missed.
"There." One finger on a date in early June. "That's the day the south pasture water line needed work. The access road up to the eastern ridge runs parallel. Any truck up there would have read on the county traffic log as maintenance."
I stare at that date. "He had cover."
"Every time."
I get up and go to the coffeemaker without thinking about it, pour what's left into a mug, set it in front of him. I'm back in my chair and reaching for my laptop before I register what I just did. Luke looks at the mug. Looks at me.
"Thank you," he says, quiet.
"I needed to stretch my legs."
The sound he makes is not quite a laugh. Something adjacent, low and brief, and it does something to the room that I am not cataloguing.
My stomach makes the same announcement it made at the door. He opens the bag and passes me a burger without asking. It's exactly what I would have ordered. "Thanks," I say, around the first bite. I eat half of it before I think to question this, and by then it seems beside the point.
We work.
Luke McAllister is useful to think beside.
He doesn't fill silence with noise. He doesn't offer a hypothesis until it's ready.
He reads the access log the way he reads land, with patience and no ego, looking for what the data is saying rather than what he wants it to say.
He asks two questions. Both are better than anything I've asked myself today.
"The soldering," I say. "That's been bothering me."
He looks up.
"The collar tamper required a fine-tipped iron and enough technical knowledge to identify the specific transmitter module, remove it without damaging the housing, and reseat it to factory spec.
That's not a general ranching skill." I pull up the image on my laptop.
"That is someone with electronics background. Specific to GPS or radio telemetry."
He goes still in the way I have learned means he is already at the answer and checking his work. Something moves behind his eyes, not quite recognition, closer to a number showing up in a column where you didn't want it.
"Jesse did contract work before he came to us," he says. "Wildlife survey outfit out of Bozeman. Two seasons running telemetry equipment in the Gallatin." He looks at the image. "GPS collars. Camera systems. The kind of work that teaches you exactly what you're looking at right there."
I go still.
Jesse. The McAllister foreman, long-tenured, trusted. That's the extent of what I know about him.
Luke sets the folder down, which he hasn't done since he sat. He looks at the access log for a long moment, then at the table, and I watch something move through him that has nothing to do with Cutter. His hands go flat on the table. He doesn't pick up his coffee.
"Jesse's been with us twenty years," he says. Quiet. Not to me.
I write it down and don't say anything. Some arithmetic you must let a person finish alone.
A beat. Then: "Does Cutter know Jesse's background?"
Luke picks up his coffee. Takes a drink. "Everybody who's worked a survey corridor in this valley knows everybody else who has. Small professional circle." He sets the mug down and picks up the folder. "What else have you got?"
"The camera positioning." I turn my laptop toward him. "Standard corridor protocol, staggered intervals to minimize redundancy. But look at this gap in the mid-June data. Sixteen hundred meters wide, centered directly above the south pasture boundary."
He leans in to see it and his shoulder comes against mine, the heat off him doing something unreasonable to my concentration.
"That's not random spacing," he says.
"No. It's a specific blind spot. Which means whoever planned the route up that ridge knew my survey design before I deployed it."
"Someone gave them your methodology."
"Cutter's review request came through the same permitting office that received my survey design.
He has an inside contact there." I sit back just enough to breathe.
"They knew where every camera was. Which access road was covered and which wasn't." I open a new document.
"I need to trace every piece of data they would have needed and map who had access to it. "
"That's a long list."
"Yes." I start typing. "Hand me the fries."
He hands me the fries without comment. I eat them and keep typing, and he goes back to the access log, and we sit like that while the Rusty Spur stays lit down Main Street, music drifting in through the open windows.
Then he reaches across the table to point at the overlay data and his shoulder is against mine again, and I lean in to follow his finger, and neither of us moves away.
"The marker post," he says. "The original one."
His fingers catch my wrist when I reach for my pen. Not grabbing. Three fingers below my palm, easy, stopping me from going anywhere.
My pulse does something he can absolutely feel.
"What about it," I say.
"Four weeks ago you asked why I hadn't moved the fence before you arrived. You said you were going to earn that answer."
"I remember."
He looks at me directly. "That post is original to the south pasture boundary survey. 1987. My father fought a property dispute with the Cutter family for eighteen months over where that line should fall. A county surveyor settled it. That post is the physical record of the settlement."
A pause, and something tightens at his jaw. "If it's removed or the boundary is successfully challenged, the south pasture could be claimed under adverse possession. Thirty years of contested use."
I sit with that.
The air goes out of the room. This whole operation, every cut wire and tampered collar and filed review, was never about stopping my wolves.
It was about getting to his land. It has always been about his land.
And I walked into this valley with my permits and my methodology and handed Dale Cutter the instrument he needed to do it.
"That's not just about the wolves," I say.
"No."
"It's the land." I look at my map. At the corridor.
At the blind spot sitting directly above the boundary line.
"If my data shows consistent wolf activity on disputed land, a federal corridor crossing an unresolved boundary becomes a legal mechanism for delaying McAllister ownership claims. And if the data shows nothing —"
"Corridor gets suspended. Federal protections lapse. Land question goes back to county court."
"Where his contact is already waiting." I look at him. "You came here tonight because you already had this."
"Most of it."
"You could have texted."
"I could have," he says, and that is not a denial of anything, and we both know it.
He is still holding my wrist.
I look at his hand. He looks at his hand. The music from the Rusty Spur moves through the open window and neither of us addresses the fact that neither of us has moved.
I lean in.
He meets me there like a man who decided this hours ago and has been patient enough to wait for the right moment. His hand slides from my wrist to my forearm and his mouth is on mine, soft and deliberate, and I had a theory about what this would be like. The theory was wrong.
I get my fist in the front of his t-shirt and his other hand comes to my jaw, and it is quiet in my kitchen except for the summer night coming in through the window, and I am kissing Luke McAllister over a table covered in wolf corridor maps and federal access logs.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, and his eyes are darker than the blue I know, the careful neutrality completely gone.
Then he leans in, his lips at my ear, and says something low and dirty, and his voice is so deep I feel it move through me all the way down, and I had a response ready, something sharp, and then it's gone.