4. Cole #2
Her breath changes — a slight, sharp intake she covers by leaning closer to the screen. “The feed store was ruled electrical.”
“The feed store had a fire investigator who retired six weeks later with a lake house in Florida on a county pension.” I pull up the secondary file, slide it adjacent to the map.
“I bought the feed store building. The previous owner needed to sell fast — motivated seller, cash offer, closing in ten days. I’ve been using it as storage. ”
She turns to look at me. We’re close enough that I have to make a choice about where to look — at her face or at the screen — and I choose the screen.
“You’re not buying these properties to develop them,” she says slowly. “You’re buying them to protect them. To keep whoever is behind this from getting them.”
“I’m buying them to preserve the evidence inside them,” I say. “And to remove them from the pool of available acquisitions so the pattern becomes harder to sustain.”
“That’s—” She stops. “That’s actually smart.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m recalibrating,” she says, which is more honest than most people would be, and I note it despite myself.
I click through to the camera archive and bring up the 6:47 footage — the figure in the reflective vest, the tree line walk, the unhurried boundary assessment. I let it play without commentary.
Madison watches it twice. Then a third time.
“That’s county utility gear,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Same as the vest on your dock camera two weeks ago.” She reaches past me and scrolls the archive without asking, finding the earlier footage with an efficiency that means she’s been thinking in terms of pattern recognition long enough that it’s become instinct.
“And the figure near the Garrett property the night before their equipment failed.”
I go still.
I have the dock footage from two weeks ago. I do not have the Garrett footage.
“You have footage from the Garrett property?” I ask.
“I have a photograph.” She straightens. “A neighbor took it on her phone. She didn’t think it was relevant until I started asking questions.” She holds my gaze. “I have things you don’t have.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And you have things I don’t have.”
“Also aware.”
The kitchen settles around us — the hum of the refrigerator, the distant sound of the lake moving against the dock, the security panel cycling through its feeds in the background with the steady patience of a system that doesn’t get tired.
On the screen, the footage loops back to the beginning.
The figure steps out of the tree line again.
“Someone is coordinating this,” Madison says. “The vest is a signature. Either they’re sloppy or they don’t think anyone’s connecting the dots across incidents.”
“Or they’re using it deliberately,” I say. “Establishing a pattern that points somewhere specific.”
She turns to look at me. “Points where?”
I close the laptop.
“That,” I say, “is what we need to figure out before we move.” I push back from the counter. “There’s food in the refrigerator. Eat something. I’ll set up the guest room with a charger — your phone should have enough power by morning to function.”
She looks at the closed laptop. At me. Back at the laptop.
“I want a copy of that map,” she says.
“I know you do.”
“Cole—”
“Tomorrow.” I say it the same way she says my name — flat, certain, a door held at exactly one inch open. “Get some sleep, Madison. The pattern will still be there in six hours.”
She holds my gaze for a beat that stretches past comfortable.
“You know what I think?” she says.
“I think you’re about to tell me.”
“I think whoever is doing this made a mistake tonight.” She picks up her notebook from the counter. “They wanted us scared. Instead they handed us a reason to work together.” She moves toward the guest wing door. “Don’t close that laptop permanently. I want everything on it.”
She disappears through the door.
I stand in the kitchen in the quiet she leaves behind, and look at the security panel, and think about the figure in the reflective vest walking my tree line like they owned it.
Then I open the laptop again.
She comes back twenty minutes later because of course she does.
I’m at the kitchen table with the map spread across three screens — laptop, tablet, and the printed version I’ve been annotating for months, red ink tracking what I know, blue ink tracking what I suspect, black ink for the names I haven’t said out loud to anyone yet.
I’ve got coffee going, I’ve got the Sig moved to the holster on my hip where it belongs rather than sitting on the counter as a conversation piece, and I’ve got the particular focused quiet of a man who works better at night when the noise of the world goes down.
The guest wing door opens.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, before I can say anything. “Don’t.”
I don’t.
She’s changed — or partially changed — into whatever she found in the guest room.
I keep a supply of basics in there: clean shirts, spare sweats, the practical infrastructure of a house that occasionally hosts people who arrive without luggage.
She’s wearing one of my shirts. Dark gray, cotton, sized for my shoulders, which means it falls to mid-thigh on her and the sleeves are rolled twice at the wrist. She’s kept her own jeans. Compromise, even in borrowed clothes.
I look at her for one second and then look back at my screens.
The shirt is not a problem.
The shirt is a perfectly neutral logistical outcome of the situation and I am treating it as such.
“There’s coffee,” I say.
“I see it.” She moves to the counter, pours a mug, and wraps both hands around it the way people do when they need something to hold.
Then she comes to the table and looks at the spread — the three screens, the annotated map, the stack of files I’ve been building since before I came back to Iron Hollow — and I watch her take it all in with the slow, comprehensive attention of someone reading a room rather than just seeing it.
“You’ve been carrying this alone,” she says. Not an accusation. An observation delivered quietly, like she’s not sure what to do with it yet.
“It’s not the kind of thing you share over coffee.”
“You’re sharing it now.”
“Circumstance,” I say. “Not a choice.”
She pulls out the chair across from me and sits, setting the mug on the table, and we exist in the same space without speaking for a moment — her looking at the map, me looking at the screen, both of us in the particular charged quiet of people who have too much to say and have agreed, temporarily, not to say it.
I’m aware of everything.
The damp ends of her hair where she’s toweled it but not dried it.
The way she tucks one foot under her on the chair without realizing she’s done it, going comfortable without meaning to.
The shirt — I am not thinking about the shirt — the way she holds the mug.
The small bruise on her shoulder, visible now at the edge of the collar, that she still hasn’t mentioned.
I should get her an ice pack.
I stay where I am.
“The names in black,” she says, pointing to the map without touching it. “Those are your confirmed connections?”
“Suspected,” I say. “Not confirmed.”
“How close?”
“Close enough that if I’m wrong, it’s expensive. Close enough that if I’m right—” I stop.
“If you’re right, it changes everything,” she finishes.
“Yes.”
She reaches across the table — not for the map, for the stack of files beside it. I put my hand on top of the stack before she reaches it, not pressing down, just present. She looks at my hand. Looks up at me.
“Not yet,” I say.
“Cole.”
“The files have names in them. People who trusted me with information they haven’t shared anywhere else. Before I hand that to a reporter, I need to know what she does with it.”
The word reporter lands between us with a slight edge that I didn’t fully intend but don’t entirely take back. I watch her decide how to receive it — the flicker of something in her eyes, displeasure or understanding or both.
“What she does with it,” Madison repeats. “As opposed to what you’d do with it.”
“As opposed to what we’d do with it,” I say. “Together. With a strategy that doesn’t get anyone killed.”
She holds my gaze across the table and the files and the annotated map and the coffee going warm between us.
Her hands are steady on the mug. Her eyes are not doing the thing I’ve seen them do all night — the quick calculation, the fast assembly of argument — they’re doing something quieter.
Something that looks, from this distance, like she’s deciding whether to trust me.
I don’t push it.
Pushing it will break it.
“Okay,” she says finally. Quiet. Real. Not the clipped, strategic okay of a woman conceding a point — the other kind.
I hold that for a moment, then reach past the file stack to the small basket near the wall and produce a phone charger, setting it on the table beside her mug without ceremony.
“For the morning,” I say.
She looks at it. Then at me. Something in the set of her face shifts — not softens, exactly, because Madison Wynn doesn’t soften in ways that are simple or clean. More like a layer of the armor goes quiet. Just for a second. Just enough to see something underneath it.
“Thank you,” she says. For the second time tonight.
I stand before the moment can do what moments do when you let them sit too long.
“Guest room has a good lock,” I say. “Use it.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep not doing it.”
She almost smiles. The almost-version is somehow more than the full version would be.
“I’ll think about it,” she says, and wraps both hands back around her mug like she’s staying exactly where she is.
I take my coffee to the other end of the kitchen.
Distance. Maintained.
For now.
She goes back to the guest room at half past midnight.