Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
The industrial corridor thinned into a mix of warehouses, repair businesses, and trade suppliers.
Cascadia Equipment Services occupied a corner lot, with a small office and visitor lot facing the main street.
The warehouse was in the back. Along the west side of the property, a fenced drive ran back toward the loading yard.
Nothing about it looked like a place traffickers would hang out.
Three employee cars occupied the visitor lot, and a man in coveralls crossed from the office to a service truck with a clipboard tucked beneath his arm.
She wanted the familiar address to be a coincidence and the van to belong to a driver whose route happened to overlap hers.
Ryder continued past. “Looks like there’s a front camera covering the visitor lot and another on the freight gate.”
The sliding gate stood open for a box truck waiting to turn onto the street.
Dark mesh screened the fence around the gate motor, but farther back the chain link was bare, giving them broken views into the loading yard.
Nell glimpsed parked trailers, sections of the dock, and the west wall of the warehouse.
Ryder turned onto the narrower street running along that side of the property. Across from the loading yard, a plumbing and electrical supplier occupied the opposite corner. Contractors moved between the store and their trucks with boxes of fittings, lengths of pipe, and coils of wire.
Ryder glanced across at the supplier’s lot. “We can park over there.”
He drove into the lot and parked in a space near the side of the building. There were several work vans blocking his truck from the view of the warehouse cameras. They got out, and Ryder opened the hard drone case in the back of the Suburban. Nell stood with him at the open hatch.
“Once the drone is above the buildings, we’ll be able to see most of the yard,” he said.
He set the drone on the pavement behind the Suburban and powered it up.
He started the flight recording, and the rotors spun.
Once it cleared the roofline, the warehouse loading yard came into view on the screen.
Several trailers were backed against the warehouse, leaving a narrow drive between the docks and the fence.
One of the trailers blocked part of the southern end of the yard from view.
A forklift carried a pallet between two trailers. A mechanic worked beside a raised hood near the warehouse wall. Nothing in the feed looked different from the equipment yards Ryder had shown her around Fate Mountain.
“Looks normal,” Ryder said.
Relief loosened something in Nell. “Yeah.”
“That’s the freight gate,” Ryder said.
The drone camera shifted south. A flatbed entered from the public street while the gate remained open. A red logo covered the door. Nell leaned toward the screen for a better look.
“That’s one of Northline’s vendors!” she said. She had reviewed enough of its invoices to remember the red logo and company name. “But why?”
“They could bring their equipment here for service,” Ryder said.
That was what Cascadia claimed to do. The flatbed carried a compact excavator behind its cab, and nothing about a construction vendor bringing a machine into an equipment yard required another explanation.
Ryder followed it through the gate. A man in an orange vest directed the driver toward the covered loading area along the warehouse. The flatbed disappeared beneath the overhang.
“Can you find the van that followed us this morning?” Nell asked.
Ryder widened the view and traced the rows along the warehouse. Service trucks, cargo vans, and two pickups filled the spaces between the office and the loading yard. The drone camera paused over a dark cargo van backed against the east wall.
“Same color and body,” Ryder said.
He lowered the angle until the rear plate came into view. Nell read the number from the photograph on her phone while Ryder enlarged the recorded image.
The numbers matched. For a moment, the confirmation made the situation feel less alarming. The van was registered to Cascadia, and it was parked at Cascadia. That was exactly where it belonged.
“So that’s the van that followed us this morning,” Nell said. “But it’s still weird that a Northline vendor’s flatbed is here.” She knew she was reaching. She’d been freaked out since moving to Portland alone, and this entire thing was probably just her paranoia taking them on a wild goose chase.
“It is kind of weird,” Ryder said. He’d been so cool about the whole thing. Believing her even when she was making meaningless stuff way bigger in her head. She appreciated that he hadn’t once told her she was crazy or overreacting. “Let’s keep watching for a few minutes before we pack it up.”
Ryder widened the view as the flatbed traveled north through the yard. Two workers unloaded a compressor and then loaded it into a Cascadia truck. The Northline vendor had brought equipment in for service, and Cascadia was moving it where it needed to go.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” Nell said.
As Ryder began bringing the drone back, the man in the orange vest caught the lower edge of the Cascadia logo on the truck’s door. The blue surface bowed away from the white metal.
“Wait,” Ryder said.
Ryder lowered the camera, but the feed showed only the truck’s tires and the workers’ boots.
“He pulled the logo off.”
Nell looked at him. “The whole logo?”
“It looked like a magnetic panel.”
The compressor had entered the yard on the Northline vendor’s flatbed. Now it sat in a Cascadia truck while someone removed Cascadia’s name from the door.
“Why are they doing that? Seems suspicious.”
Nell looked toward the warehouse. “I can get in there and look.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a tiny little bird, remember?”
“Nell.” Ryder lowered the controller. “That’s a bad idea. I don’t want you going in there.”
“Ryder, I need to get this out of my system. I need to know for sure that this is all in my head. Please, let me just do this.”
He let out a long, irritated sigh. He’d been so supportive until now that Nell almost thought this might be his limit. “Fine,” he finally said. “But if you get crushed to death in there, don’t blame me that you died before we could claim each other.”
She kissed his cheek. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
They worked out a route that would keep Nell out of sight for most of the crossing. Ryder would watch the yard with the drone and leave the Suburban’s rear window open. Nell climbed into the back seat, stripped, and shifted.
Wind struck her the moment she launched. She beat her wings upward beside the supply building, fighting the air that rolled from its roof, then landed beneath the lip of the awning. Her claws clicked against the metal.
The warehouse stood across the road. From the Suburban, the distance had looked negligible. From here, it was a stretch of open air with nothing between her and the warehouse windows.
The air tumbling over its roof shoved her sideways.
Nell corrected, wings beating hard, and aimed for the dark space beneath a trailer inside the warehouse fence.
She passed through the chain link, dropped onto a steel brace, and flew low along the parked trailers until she reached the loading cover.
The truck Ryder had been watching stood beside the dock, its doors now plain white. The blue Cascadia panels rested on a rack against the wall. A man in an orange vest took two black panels from the rack. Nell recognized the yellow name of the electrical subcontractor from Northline’s records.
He pressed one panel onto the driver’s door while another worker carried its match around the truck. The men pressed the new signs onto the truck’s doors and smoothed the corners. It had entered the covered area as Cascadia. It would leave as a different company.
Nell stared at the rack of alternate names. The overlapping workers and equipment in Northline’s records weren’t errors. The companies weren’t operating separately at all.
A shout came from the open yard. One of the men stepped beyond the cover and looked up. Another pointed above the warehouse.
They had spotted Ryder’s drone.
A dark SUV started near the office and turned toward the freight gate as the drone climbed away from the warehouse. She passed through the fence, reached the supply building, and followed the wall back to the Suburban.
Ryder stood behind it, guiding the drone down while searching the sky for her. Beyond him, the SUV emerged from the warehouse gate and slowed at the first side road.
Nell dropped through the open rear window and shifted. She dragged on her clothes as Ryder secured the drone. He climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. He was just about to pull out when his phone vibrated in the console. He picked up his phone and read the screen.
“It’s a text from Axel.” He read it aloud.
Cascadia’s corporate filing and the ownership records for the warehouse both lead to Marla Pike. Northline lists her on its executive team. Photo attached.