Page 37 of Faultline

I pull on boots and grab my jacket from the hook. Tosh is already typing, her focus narrowed to the screen, her body leaning forward, coffee abandoned at her elbow.

The flannel has slipped further off her shoulder, baring skin I already know too well to look at and leave on schedule.

I stop behind her chair. My hand closes over exposed skin. She freezes under my grip, the typing suspended, her breath held at a depth that tells me her body remembers exactly what this hand did the last time it was on her. I don't squeeze. I hold. The contact is a statement, not a question, and the heat that builds under my palm belongs to a woman deciding whether to press back into the pressure or fight it.

She presses. Barely. A fraction of weight against my palm.

I let go before the pressure turns into something that could cost us the morning. My fingers drag across her collarbone as I pull away, and the sound she swallows is loud enough in the quiet cabin that it follows me to the door.

"Lock the door. Arm the sensor."

"You say that every time." Her voice is steady, but the typing hasn't resumed.

"Because it matters every time."

She turns in the chair, chin tilted, eyes already calculating how to take back the ground she just surrendered. "Bring me something useful."

"I'll do my best."

"Your best is annoyingly good," she says. "Don't let it go to your head."

I'm at the door. "Too late."

The typing starts again before I'm off the porch.

I take the truck down the access road and park at the junction where it meets the county highway.

Rhys is already there, one hip against the cruiser with his arms folded and a thermos of coffee dark enough to strip varnish. He's in civilian clothes. Off-duty posture, on-duty eyes.

"Morning," I say.

"You look different."

"Same face."

"Different something." He studies me for a beat longer than necessary, then lets it go. Rhys has the restraint to know the questions people answer voluntarily are the only ones worth hearing.

We start at the Harmon acreage. The property sits flat along the east side of the highway, gentle grade, road frontage wide enough for heavy equipment access.

The new owner has done nothing with it. No clearing, no building, no activity. The only evidence of the sale is a fresh No Trespassing sign wired to the fence post at the driveway entrance.

"Posted last week," Rhys says, reading the sign. "Hardware store sells these. Hank said someone bought a case of them."

"A case."

"Twelve signs. One property doesn't need twelve signs."

We walk the fence line. The fence is intact, the pasture overgrown with fireweed and wild rye gone to seed. The Harmons ran cattle here. The fencing is good, five-strand wire on treated posts, built to last. Nobody's maintaining it now, and the wild rye is already growing through the bottom strand.

The boundary with the Duggan lot is marked with orange flagging tied to the fence posts. New flagging. The kind surveyors use.

We cross into the Duggan lot and follow the creek drainage up the slope. The terrain changes fast, flat pasture giving way to the rocky drainage where the creek cuts through exposed granite. Birch and alder crowd the banks, and the footing gets tricky where the water has undermined the trail.

"This section is brutal for heavy equipment," Rhys says.

"It is. You'd have to bridge the drainage or build a road through the creek bed. Either way, it's expensive and it's conspicuous."

"So why buy it?"