Page 63 of Forbidden Protector

"Wasn't going to." He's already turning for the workbench, but I catch the corner of his mouth going up where it has no business going three feet from a corpse.

The deputies bag the cash. Someone radios for the coroner, the second one this county's called in a month. I go through Calloway's paperwork with gloved hands while dawn finally commits to blue outside the hangar door.

Flight logs. A ledger in handwriting too careful to be casual, dates going back four years, cross-referenced against coordinates that match the north section Gideon told me the family has never surveyed.

And under all of it, tucked behind a bank statement I almost skip past, a routing number.

I've seen that string of digits before. I know I have. I flip back through my own files on my phone, fast, scrolling past six months of case notes until I find what I'm looking for.

Not a case file.

An expense reimbursement. Mine. Salt Lake, filed in September, the routing number the Bureau uses to process my per diem.

The last four digits match.

I stand very still in a cold hangar with a dead man twelve feet away and a valley full of people who think this morning closed something.

The screen in my hand says the same account touched a murdered informant's ledger and my own paycheck. I don't understand it yet. I'm going to.

Behind me, Knox is on his phone in the corner. Holt is crouched at the workbench, going through the duffel bag with the flat patience of a man who's done this before in places that don't show up on any map. Nobody is looking at me.

I don't say it loud. I don't say it to anyone.

I say it to the cold hangar air, to the dead man, to the sunrise finally breaking pink over the wind sock outside.

"I've seen this account before. On my own expense reimbursements."

NINETEEN

HOLT

She doesn't cry. I watch her not cry, and it's worse.

The kitchen windows stand open, screen door open to a valley that's stayed unseasonably warm since the Chinook took the snow off on the first.

Sun lands flat and gold across the table, where she's had three years of her own case notes spread out beside Knox's ledger for twenty minutes now, elbows on the wood, both hands pressed over her mouth, staring at a routing number like it might rearrange itself into something survivable if she looks at it long enough.

It doesn't.

"Say it," I tell her. "Out loud. Once."

"Salt Lake." Her voice comes out even, and that evenness is what worries me. Even is what she does instead of breaking.

"My supervisor. Tom." She drops her hands. Her eyes are dry, and the dryness is doing more damage in this kitchen than tears ever could. "He's not adjacent to the account. He's not compromised near it. He is it."

I don't say anything, because nothing true enough to say would also be kind.

She's traded the coat and the collar-to-throat armor for a plain grey T-shirt this morning, soft with enough washes that it's quit pretending to be new. It pulls snug across her when she leans over the table.

I've spent more of the last twenty minutes on the shape of her than on the numbers in front of either of us. I'm not sorry about it. I just don't say so.

She notices anyway.

Her eyes flick to where I've pushed my sleeves to the elbows, gone before either of us decides what to do with it. Neither of us says a word.

There's a dead man on a runway a few hours behind us and a live one somewhere ahead of us. Whatever this is between us this morning is going to wait its turn behind both.

"Five months," she says, and the number drops into the room like a glass hitting tile. "Tom sat on the referral five months. I thought that was budget season. I thought that was Montana being nobody's priority." Her jaw sets. "He didn't lose the file. He aged it on purpose and buried it in review until he couldn't bury it any longer. Then he made sure whoever finally got sent here got sent alone."