Page 52 of Rope Burn

"Understood."

A sedan pulls to the curb. The victim specialist, a soft-spoken woman in a cardigan, climbs out of the driver's seat and circles to the passenger door.

Penny unfolds from the car slowly, one hand braced on the roof, a gray sweatshirt swallowing her to the knuckles and gauze wrapping both wrists beneath the cuffs. Somebody combed her wet hair straight back, and without the bandana, her face looks younger than mid-twenties and older than anything a person should earn in a week.

She reaches the bottom step and looks up, and her mouth moves before the rest of her catches up. "Hey, insurance lady."

"Hey, Penny."

Inside, the living room smells like lemon cleaner. Penny takes the sofa and pulls her knees up. Through the kitchen doorway, Penny's sister, who has the same jaw, is making toast for someone who won't eat it.

"They told me you're FBI," Penny says.

"I am." I sit on the far end of the sofa, close enough for her to reach, far enough that she doesn't have to. "My name is Morgan Carroll."

She studies me with the look she gave every stranger who passed her display on the vendor row, deciding which pair would close the sale. "So you were never going to buy the earrings," she says.

"I bought a bracelet."

I turn my wrist over. The thin band of hand-stamped silver has been riding under my watch strap since the day she sold it to me. The turquoise chips catch the lamplight when I slide the watch back.

Penny stares at the bracelet. Then she laughs, one short crack of sound, and the laugh breaks apart halfway through. She presses the heel of her hand to her lips, and the victim specialist passes a box of tissues across without comment.

"Fourteen dollars," Penny says through her fingers. "I overcharged you."

"You did. I let you."

Torres takes the straight chair across from her and sets a legal pad on her knee. The victim specialist confirms that Penny wants to talk now and understands she can stop whenever she chooses, and Penny nods. She agrees to the recorder, and it goes on the coffee table.

I fold my hands in my lap. My training strains toward the next question, and today the next question belongs to someone else.

"Just the beginning today," Torres says. "Tell me about leaving the last event."

Penny tells it in pieces. She loaded out after dark and drove toward the interstate with her cases in the back of the Tahoe and a podcast playing.

Clint called her before she reached the on-ramp. A gallery owner from Santa Fe had seen her booth, he said, and wanted to look at her whole inventory before she drove off. The man was already waiting at the truck stop off the next exit.

"I thought it was the best news I'd had all year," Penny says. "Clint was at the fuel island when I pulled in. He had coffee in a thermos. He said the guy was running late and we should wait in his truck because it had better air."

"Had you been in his truck before?" Torres asks.

"Once. He drove me to get a tire patched in Prescott." Penny's fingers find the cuff of the sweatshirt and twist it. "He was nice about it. He's nice about everything. He's got this grin like the whole world's in on the same joke and you're his favorite part."

"How sure are you that it was Clint?" Torres asks.

"His number's been in my phone for months. I've known him around the circuit since before Morgan ever walked past my booth." Penny's mouth twists. "It was Clint. Same stupid hat."

The coffee tasted wrong, she says, and then nothing tasted like anything. She woke in the dark on plywood with her wrists strapped in front of her and the smell of cattle soaked into the walls.

There were other women. Men came with water jugs on no schedule she could count on, and they never said their names. Sometimes a truck backed up to the building and idled until the exhaust seeped through the siding.

"There was a girl named Delilah," Penny says. "She'd been there longest. She scratched the days into the plywood with her thumbnail, and she stopped counting after a while because the number made the new girls cry."

Torres's pen keeps moving. When the victim specialist offers to stop, Penny says she wants to finish this part.

"Delilah was there with Sandy," Penny says.

At the name, I go still enough to catch the hum of the refrigerator.