Page 34 of Broken Ride

"It gets worse." He crosses to the bed and studies the corridor laid out in highlighter ink across four states. "Show me where to start."

We work until the ice machine down the walkway stops cycling. He knows the roads and I know the blood, and between us the corridor stops being a shape and starts being a schedule.

He falls asleep with a route log on his chest. I stand over my maps a while longer, and then I do what all my practice tells me to do, which is nothing at all like what I want. I go back to my own room because separate rooms are my rule, the one he hates and honors. I check under my truck on the way, and I hate every step.

The next two days belong to the work. Building a case has the rhythm of a long treatment protocol. Mornings I work the pens under a name that isn't mine, running the pleasant professional voice that keeps anyone from looking at me twice.

Afternoons the motel room becomes a war office. Wade drives the routes in his head and marks every pull-off where a rig could sit unseen. I match his geography to my exposure timeline, and between us Pruitt's numbers become a map of a crime. The ledgers and the payment records go to Kenna off my copy of the drive, because money confesses to her.

Amy Perez calls from College Station on the second afternoon with the panels from the mare's bloodwork, and her voice has the particular flatness that scientists use when the data scares them.

"It's your compound," she says. "Same norfentanyl signature as the quiet cases, same analog profile. The difference is concentration. Laney, the quiet cases were trace exposure, an animal standing next to contaminated cargo. This mare's levels were high enough to drop her mid-performance, and there's no environmental pathway that gets you there.

"Somebody should look very hard at how it got into her. You watch your own six, because whatever your hauler is moving kills in quantity, and you're the face on the video asking about it."

I thank her and update the monitoring notes for Sidewinder's follow-up draws, because the mare is recovering a couple of towns back.

Then I sit with what the numbers mean. The quiet cases were carelessness. The mare was a dose. Carelessness doesn't escalate, and messages do.

Kenna is the evening's second call, catching us elbow-deep in the payment sheet, and her voice comes off the speaker with the specific energy of a journalist who has found a thread and pulled it.

"B. Hendricks," she says, skipping hello. "You want the short version or the version with footnotes?"

"She always like this?" I ask Wade.

"You should see her fiancé," Wade says. "He proposed just to get a word in."

"I heard that, Ashcroft." Paper shuffles down the line. "Burl Hendricks. Director of Operations for Thornton Livestock, and he's held the job for over twenty years, and as far as the public record is concerned the man barely exists. He's never given an interview or turned up in a company photograph, and his name stays out of every trade archive I could open on short notice.

"A man works livestock logistics that long, he ends up in convention coverage somewhere, a grip-and-grin, a panel, something. Hendricks is a blank, and that kind of blank costs money to maintain."

"But you found something," I say.

"I found one photograph. Stock contractors' association newsletter, years old, a banquet nobody important attended. He's at the edge of somebody else's award, and the caption lists the head table left to right. His is the last name on it. Check your phones."

The image arrives grainy and yellowed, old newsprint run through an office scanner, a banquet hall full of western hats and cocktail napkins. There behind the smiling award winner stands a man whose face gives the camera exactly nothing, hands folded, hat brim level.

The cold starts at the base of my skull and works down.

"I've seen him," I say.

Wade's head lifts from the payment sheet. "Where?"

"The night the mare went down. After we got her stable, I was drawing blood in the vet pens, and there was a man on the walkway above the stock gate."

I turn the phone so Wade can see the photograph, and my voice stays in its clinical register. "Everything back there was moving, and he was the one still thing in it. I remember thinking his face looked like a ledger. He stood there while a half-ton animal fought for her life below him, and he never once looked at the horse."

"What was he looking at?" Kenna's voice has gone gentle. She got there before I did.

"Me."

"A nighttime look across a stock gate and a grainy scan won't convict anybody," I say. "But the stillness is the same, and the face fits it. I'd stake my license on the stillness."

Wade takes the phone from me and studies it a long moment, and when he sets it down his voice has dropped into the flat even register he keeps for frightened animals and other emergencies.

"His name runs down that approval column, sign-off after sign-off, and I've ridden this circuit half my life without hearing it once," he says. "Now he's standing on walkways watching my vet work. Kenna, what else?"

"Money, and lots of it, moving through the shell companies on a repeating calendar. Run the calendar against your route logs, because I'd bet my byline they were printed together."