Page 29 of Branded

I keep working. My hands are steady. That feels like a victory.

Twenty-three minutes later, Garrett walks into the lobby.

My body knows he’s there before I look up. I hate that. It isn’t legally significant, and it’s still the loudest thing in the room.

He’s carrying a sealed envelope. Cole stops by the outer door. Garrett hands the envelope to Mercer where the clerk’s camera can see it, says in a flat voice that the export is complete and unfiltered, and gives the name of the person who pulled it.

He doesn’t come toward the review room.

The deputy watches him from the far wall. Garrett looks at the uniform once, then at the plainclothes man outside, then at each exit. His eyes come to me last.

He looks like hell. He hasn’t shaved. There are shadows under his eyes that weren’t there yesterday, and he keeps his mouth closed tight. He looks at me through the glass for maybe three seconds, and he doesn’t lift a hand, doesn’t mouth my name, doesn’t ask with his face whether I’m all right.

He just looks. Like a man checking that something is still where he left it, knowing he isn’t allowed to touch it anymore.

Then he turns and goes back to the lobby wall and stands there with his arms folded, facing the deputy, and doesn’t look at me again.

I have to put my pen down.

Restraint can’t repay what he took. Watching his back, I understand it costs him more than the tracker ever gave him. I wanted him to look again. I’m angry he didn’t, though I have no right to be.

Mercer brings the envelope in. I verify the drive on a clean laptop. The hash matches.

Garrett’s account created the mirror. Cole’s pulled this morning’s export. Between those two events, exactly one person opened it.

Travis Mott. From the private terminal in the sale office. He opened DORMANT CONSIGNORS, TAG BATCH, and COUNSEL INDEX, then cleared the recent-files list.

I check the time against my departure.

Mott opened Garrett’s copy of my work thirty-seven minutes after I drove out the gate.

I tell Mercer. He calls it in. Through the glass, Mercer speaks to Garrett in the lobby. Garrett’s face hardly moves. His jaw does. His hand, hanging at his side, closes slowly into a fist and stays that way.

He understands exactly what he did. I can see him understanding it. He built a door into my work and the man I was investigating walked through it before my truck reached the highway.

I don’t feel vindicated. I thought I would.

When I finally leave the building, the deputy is gone and so is the man at the street door. Counsel’s car waits at the curb. Across the street, parked under a live oak with its engine off, is Garrett’s truck.

He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at the road in both directions, the way he looked at the exits inside.

He doesn’t get out. He doesn’t roll down the window. He waits until my door is shut and the driver pulls away, and in the side mirror I watch his truck stay exactly where it is until we turn the corner.

He didn’t follow. He just made sure nothing else did.

That night the apartment is so quiet I can hear the refrigerator cycle. I lie on top of the covers in the clean shirt with my phone on my chest.

His number is in it. Counsel gave it to me for emergencies.

I look at it for a long time. I think about the water tank, and the radio, and his fist closing in the lobby. I think about his hand at the back of my head in the kitchen, careful of my throat even when he was shaking.

I don’t call.

I put the phone face down on the nightstand, and I lie there until three in the morning being angry that I wanted to.

Chapter 10

Garrett