Page 22 of Broken Ride

The pause is brief, professional. "Mr. Ashcroft. Colt mentioned you might reach out. What have you got?"

I tell her about the corridor. The transit time anomalies. The contamination pattern. Laney's veterinary evidence tying the fentanyl exposure to Thornton's routes through the border country south of Deming.

I keep it tight, facts only, the way I'd describe a bronc to a contractor: what it does, how it moves, where the danger sits.

Then I tell her about the photograph.

"Someone sent an image of the circuit veterinarian's truck to her personal phone last night. Taken from inside another vehicle at the fairground. Timestamped during working hours. She didn't recognize the number."

"Forward it to me." She gives me a secure email. "I'll run the metadata. Anything else about the phone it came from?"

"She had two calls before the text. Unknown numbers, Oklahoma area code. She didn't answer either one."

Torres is quiet for a beat. The kind of quiet that means she's writing. "Oklahoma. Same area code both times?"

"Same area code. Different numbers."

"I need to see you in person. Can you get to the Pilot station off I-25 south of Socorro? I can be there by noon."

The Pilot station is a truck stop an hour north of the fairground. I tell her I'll be there and hang up.

The drive gives me time I don't want. Time to think about last night, and not just the part where I spread her across my desk and buried myself inside her while our investigation notes scattered across the carpet. The part before that. The part where she flinched.

My arm passing close to her face. A fast, involuntary contraction that pulled her whole body sideways. She straightened immediately, took the receipt from my hand, set it down between us like the movement hadn't happened.

But it happened. And I've spent enough time around animals who've been handled wrong to recognize what that flinch means.

Somebody hit her. Not once. Not an accident. Repeated, calculated violence that rewires a body's threat response until the flinch becomes permanent. Hard-coded. A woman doesn't flinch at an arm reaching past her face unless she's been conditioned to expect the impact.

The Oklahoma calls. Her thumb on the power button, practiced and automatic, killing the phone before the second ring finished. Her flat refusal to name who was calling. The nightly check under her truck.

I grip the steering wheel hard enough to feel the seams in the leather. The fury is familiar. I've carried it into the chute on bad nights, a rage so total that an eight-second ride feels like it's happening to somebody else because the man on the horse is somewhere darker, past the point where pain registers.

It's not a useful emotion. It makes you stupid. It makes you swing at targets you can't hit.

I loosen my grip and breathe.

Torres is already at the Pilot when I pull in. She's parked away from the diesel pumps, a dark sedan that looks government even without the plates.

When she steps out, she’s shorter than I expected, dark hair pulled back, a face that gives away exactly nothing. She's wearing a field jacket over a button-down, no jewelry, no badge visible.

"Mr. Ashcroft." She shakes my hand with a grip that doesn't match her size. "Let's talk inside."

We take a booth in the diner section, far corner, her back to the wall. She orders black coffee without looking at the menu. I do the same.

"Thornton Livestock has been on a watch list since the Merrick case closed," she says, opening a tablet and pulling up a file. "We knew the infrastructure Merrick built didn't disappear with his arrest. It adapted. Those in charge of the company are keeping the name, but getting new hauling contracts, using the same routes probably for the same purpose. We've been building a case, but building and proving are different things."

"How close are you?"

"We know the corridor exists. We don't have the evidence to prove what's inside the trailers, and without that, we've got suspicious transit patterns and not much else." She looks at me. "Your veterinarian's contamination data changes that equation. If she can prove fentanyl is migrating from a hidden load into the livestock environment, that gives us probable cause for a search warrant."

"She can prove it. She's already documented the cases and the mechanism."

"Then I need to talk to her directly. But first." Torres turns her tablet toward me. "I ran the metadata on the photograph you forwarded. The image was taken with a phone registered to a prepaid account purchased in Oklahoma City. The EXIF data embeds the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, and those coordinates match the fairground. I've filed an emergency disclosure request with the carrier for the phone's location history. When that comes back, I expect it'll show this device has been following the rodeo circuit."

The coffee arrives. I don't touch it. "Someone's been following the circuit with a burner phone from Oklahoma."

"That's one piece. Here's the other." Torres taps a folder on her screen. "Earlier this year, we flagged an unusual pattern in NCIC database queries. Someone with law enforcement credentials has been running background searches on a woman matching your veterinarian's general description. Height, approximate age, professional occupation. The searches have been active for over a year."