Page 26 of Faultline
"The vegetation takes days to compress this deep. The wrappers aren't weathered enough to have been here more than a week or two."
I sit back on my heels and stare at the cabin through the opening in the tree cover. The distance is close enough to read a license plate with decent binoculars, close enough to photograph anyone who walks through the front door and document every pattern of movement that defines Liam's daily life.
This isn't surveillance. This is an operational dossier being built in real time.
"The recruiter who contacted Jeanine knew about her protective order," I say. "The order itself is public record, but knowing which bus stop to wait at, knowing her first name, knowing enough about her situation to build a pitch that specific? That takes access to files that aren't in any courthouse database. Or it takes someone who searched the right office and found the right file."
Liam is quiet. His jaw works once, a slow clench and release I've learned to read as the equivalent of a different man's full speech. He's connecting what I'm connecting.
"My office was searched," I continue. "Every drawer, every file. My laptop opened and closed. They put everything back because they weren't looking for something to take. They were assembling intelligence. Whoever lay in this position was doing the same thing to your property."
"Same methodology," he says.
"Same patience. Same willingness to spend weeks on groundwork before the pressure starts." I pick up one of the energy bar wrappers and turn it over. Standard brand, sold at every gas station and grocery store in Alaska. Rhys might be able to pull prints from these. "The recruiters don't rush, either. They contact a woman once, wait, contact her again with a better offer. They study the target, learn the vulnerabilities, and calibrate the approach. It's the same playbook, Liam. Your land and my clients are being worked by the same operation."
He looks at the site, then at me, then back at the cabin below us. "Cascade sends Ziegler with a buyout offer. When I refuse, they escalate to surveillance, sabotage, and intimidation. Cascade sends Denise Stahl with a relocation package. When the women refuse, they escalate to repeated contact, targeted intelligence, and social pressure."
"The difference is that you have resources to fight back. A property, a name people know, a sheriff who takes your calls. My clients have none of that. They're already vulnerable. The recruiters aren't offering them choices. They're offering the illusion of choice to women who've been conditioned to take whatever looks like an exit."
The words come out harder than I intend. The professional in me hears the edge and files it for later examination. The woman who spent her twenties learning what coercion looks like from the inside doesn't care about professional distance right now.
Liam watches me the way he watches his forest. Patient. Reading something beneath the surface that I didn't mean to show.
"We should document this and get it to Rhys," I say, pulling my phone out and photographing the observation post, the wrappers, the cigarette remnants, the sight line to the cabin. "This position, the cut fence, the boot prints, the office break-in. Put them next to the recruiter pattern and the corporate filings, and we've got enough documented evidence to justify Rhys requesting federal attention."
"You think the feds will move on this?"
"I think Rhys's department doesn't have the resources to investigate a corporate operation with this kind of reach. I think the Aurora Covenant network has contacts in the state attorney general's office who will take my call. And I think Cascade is operating on a timeline they haven't shared with us, which means every week we spend building a case is a week they spend strengthening their position."
Liam nods once. Something in his posture shifts, not softening but redistributing, the way a structure adjusts when it accepts additional weight.
He's decided to let me carry part of this. The concession costs him. I can see it in his hands staying flat on his thighs, the effort of keeping them there. A man who shares nothing just shared his war.
"You kept up," he says, without looking back.
"You sound surprised."
"I'm not." A beat. "Anymore."
"Keep that up and I'll start thinking you're impressed." I match his pace, and the trail widens enough for me to pull alongside him.
"I don't impress easy," he says, and the sideways glance he gives me carries the first unguarded warmth he's shown since the Ridgeline.
"Neither do I. And yet here we are."
He doesn't answer, but the tension in the back of his neck says he's deciding what to do with that. He keeps walking instead of turning around, and that tells me he doesn't trust what would happen if he looked at me right now.
We walk the rest of the boundary in a silence that's different from the one in the kitchen. This one is operational. Two people processing the same information through different lenses, building the same case from different materials.
He reads the fence posts, the game trails, the places where the brush has been disturbed. I read the patterns, the timelines, the institutional signatures that tell me who has the resources and the temperament to run an operation this disciplined.
The northern boundary takes us through old-growth spruce where the canopy closes overhead and the light drops to a green-gray twilight. The trunks are massive, spaced wide enough to drive a truck between them, and the forest floor is clean beneath the canopy.
Nothing has been disturbed here. Whatever Cascade has been doing on the eastern side hasn't reached this section yet. If the pattern holds, it will.
Liam runs his hand along the bark of a spruce that must be close to a century old, and the gesture carries the tenderness that he can't or won't direct at a person. His fingers trace a scar in the bark where a branch fell years ago and the wood healed over it.
The trees get what the people don't, and watching him touch one with that kind of reverence makes something tighten behind my sternum that I'm not going to examine right now.
