Page 45 of Raven's Mark
Pritchard turns toward the truck. His posture stays relaxed. He lifts a hand in greeting, the easy wave of a man who recognizes the driver and has no reason to be afraid of him.
My stomach drops.
The truck door opens. A figure steps out, tall, wearing a light-colored shirt and dark pants. The star badge on his chest catches the dawn light.
Sheriff Wade Harlan walks up to Tom Pritchard and extends his hand. Pritchard shakes it without hesitation, his body language open and trusting. The two men exchange words the camera can't capture, and then they walk together through the barn doors and out of frame.
"Pull up the interior camera." My voice comes out controlled despite the adrenaline flooding my system.
Cipher switches to the second file. The interior camera is mounted high in the barn's far corner, angled to cover the main floor and the tractor parked to the left of the doors. The footage picks up as Pritchard and Harlan enter the frame from the left, walking side by side.
They're talking. Pritchard gestures toward the far wall, and Harlan nods. The conversation continues for roughly five minutes, and the body language between them reads as cordial. Neighborly, even. Two men who know each other discussing county business on an ordinary morning.
Then Pritchard's posture changes. He shakes his head and backs away from Harlan, his hands coming up in front of him. Even without audio, the shock on his face is visible from across the barn.
Harlan follows him. The sheriff's stance shifts in the same breath, shoulders squaring, weight rocking forward onto the balls of his feet. Every line of his body says the conversation is over and what comes next isn't going to involve words.
Harlan reaches behind his back and pulls a compact dark object from his belt. A taser. He raises it and fires.
The probes hit Pritchard in the torso. His body locks rigid, arms jerking to his sides, and he goes down hard on the concrete floor. His limbs twitch and spasm while Harlan stands over him, watching.
Cold floods through me. I've seen people go down before, seen bodies hit the ground when the fight leaves them, but this is different. Pritchard isn't fighting. He's helpless, incapacitated on his own barn floor, and Harlan is watching him seize on the concrete with the patience of a man waiting for a process to complete.
Then Harlan grabs Pritchard by the ankles and drags him across the barn floor to the front of the tractor. Pritchard's body offers no resistance as Harlan positions him on the ground in front of the left front tire. Harlan climbs into the tractor cab, starts the engine, and rolls the machine forward.
The tractor passes over Tom Pritchard's body.
Bile rises in my throat and I swallow it down hard, force my breathing steady, but my hands have gone cold against the granite and the coffee I drank earlier is threatening to come back up. Beside me, Cipher has gone pale, though his eyes haven't left the screen.
Harlan climbs down from the cab and spends the next several minutes staging the scene. He moves tools, repositions Pritchard's limbs, adjusts the tractor's final position. His movements are methodical and practiced, the work of a man who has either done this before or rehearsed it thoroughly enough that the difference doesn't matter.
I've killed people on the job. I've put rounds in targets who were shooting back, made the call, and lived with it after. But watching Harlan arrange a dead man's body with the same care another person would use to set a table turns my stomach. Thisisn't a firefight. This isn't even murder committed in the heat of rage. This is practiced, calculated butchery performed by a man who's comfortable with the work, and the comfort is the worst part.
When he's finished, Harlan pulls out a cloth and wipes down every surface he touched. He retrieves the stun gun probes from Pritchard's shirt, pockets them, and walks out of the barn without looking back.
The kitchen is silent except for the distant call of a bird outside the window. The timestamp on the footage reads 5:14 a.m. Twelve minutes from arrival to murder to staged accident. Twelve minutes to erase a man's life and make it look like carelessness.
My hands are shaking. The nausea sits heavy and low, and I have to breathe through my nose for several seconds before I trust myself to speak.
"I’ve seen some barbaric things, but that… He walked in there, shook the man's hand, and killed him." Cipher's voice is barely audible.
"Yes." My own voice comes out steady, which surprises me.
Putting Harlan away in a courtroom isn't enough. Watching him kill Pritchard with that level of methodical patience makes me want a resolution that involves my Glock and a shallow grave. I let the thought exist for exactly one breath, then I push it down beside the nausea and turn back to the laptop.
I pull the footage closer and replay the critical sequence. Harlan drawing the taser. The probes hitting Pritchard. The drag across the concrete. The tractor rolling forward. Every second of it is timestamped, dated, and preserved on a cloud server that Harlan never knew existed.
Cipher is already working before I ask. "It’s saved to our encrypted drive with three redundant backups on separate servers. Nobody's deleting this twice."
I pull out my phone and text Jesse before I reach the window. My fingers are steadier now, the adrenaline converting to cold focus.
We've got Harlan on video killing Pritchard. Concrete proof. Get back when you can.
But one murder on camera isn't enough to dismantle a pipeline. Harlan is a single node in a network that runs through Alvarez, through the cartel, through a weapons corridor that's been operating across Texas for years.
The footage proves Harlan killed Pritchard and staged the scene. What it doesn't prove is who told him to do it, or who benefits from the rancher's death, or how the order traveled from the cartel's leadership to a county sheriff's hands. We need the connection between Harlan and Alvarez documented in a way no defense attorney can explain away.
I want that connection. Not just for the case, but because watching that footage woke a hunger in me that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with making sure every person who had a hand in Tom Pritchard's death answers for it. The image of him shaking Harlan's hand in his own barn at five in the morning, trusting the man who'd come to kill him, is going to stay with me.
