Page 28 of Faultline

I set the maul against the wall and walk to the kitchen. "Nina Ballard?"

"Waitressed at the lodge up the highway. Last time I reached her, she was saving for a truck. Grounded. Practical. The kind of woman who keeps a go-bag in her closet because she learned the hard way what happens when you don't have one."

Tosh's hand is flat on the table beside her laptop, fingers spread, pressing into the wood with deliberate contact. The same pressure I use against bark when I'm reading the health of a tree.

"She gave notice at the lodge, worked her last shift, told the manager she'd taken a position with a relocation company. Everything looked voluntary. Clean departure, clean paperwork. She just never told me."

"Same as Della Pruitt."

"Same template. Same result." She pulls the phone toward her and dials again. This one she reaches.

The conversation lasts less than two minutes, and when she hangs up, the quality of her stillness has changed. It's the stillness of someone holding something heavy with both hands and deciding where to set it down.

"Nina's former neighbor," she says. "A woman came to the unit last week with a moving crew. Two men and a cargo van. They cleared the apartment in under an hour."

She pushes back from the table and stands. Her arms cross tight against her ribs, and her shoulders carry the rigid set of someone choosing control over violence.

"Nina kept a go-bag," she says again, quieter. "Cash, a prepaid phone, copies of her documents, a change of clothes. A woman who builds herself an escape kit doesn't leave without using it. She uses the bag or she stays. She doesn't hand her apartment keys to a stranger with corporate letterhead and walk into a van."

I pour coffee from the pot that's been sitting on the burner since six and set the mug on the counter beside her hip. Close enough that my forearm brushes hers when I pull back.

She takes the mug without acknowledging the contact, wraps both hands around it, and holds it against her sternum. But her breathing changes. I hear it.

Her voice when she talks about Nina's go-bag carries the weight of personal inventory. She knows the contents because she asked, but the knowing runs deeper than professional curiosity. She catalogs the items with the precision of someone who has packed a bag of her own. Someone who has measured the distance between the bedroom and the door and counted the seconds.

I don't ask. The answers live somewhere under her skin, and they’ll surface on her own schedule or not at all.

I check the dead bolt on the cabin door instead and remind myself that whatever stripped her down to that expression would have to come through me to do it again.

"How many calls left?" I ask.

"I finished the list. Three are unreachable. Four have been contacted by recruiters in the past month. Two declined, two are still considering it." She sets the mug down and turns back to the screen. "The ones thinking about it both described an identical pitch: a woman with a business card and a relocation package that covers housing, moving, and three months of rent. Generous enough to feel wrong. They know it. They're still thinking about it because the alternative is worse."

"The recruiter's name?"

"Denise Stahl. Same card, same pitch every time. She's rotating through the area on a schedule, Liam. My clients aren't random contacts. They're a target list."

The coffee is scorching on the burner. I pull the pot off the heat and set it on the cold side of the stove.

"I'm going to town," I say. "I want to check something at the borough assessor's office."

Tosh looks up. "What are you checking?"

"The Kessel property sold a few weeks back. Frank told me at the hardware store. He'd been holding out, turned down two offers, and then his wife got sick and the medical bills changed his mind. The buyer names are in the online records, but the assessor's office has the survey plat on the wall. I want to see how the sold parcels sit against mine."

"You think there's a pattern in the geography."

"I think three of my neighbors have sold in the past two months, and none of them sold to anyone I've met."

"You need backup at the records office?" The question has an edge that says she's not asking to be polite.

"I need you on those corporate filings. Your laptop does more damage than my truck."

"Flattery."

"Fact." I hold her gaze long enough that the word lands heavier than the conversation requires. She holds it right back, chin up.

The stubborn set of her jaw hits me somewhere property records have no business reaching.