Page 89 of Forbidden Protector

Two hours in, I find the coordinator.

Not a name yet. A pattern first: a Great Falls post office box that receives exactly one certified letter a month, timed to the day, like clockwork built by somebody who's never once let deadline pressure make him sloppy.

I cross-reference the box against a business license filed eighteen months ago under a consulting firm that has no clients, no website, and a phone number that rings to a burner exchange.

"Got you," I say, out loud, to an empty kitchen. Gus lifts his head off my socks like he agrees.

The coordinator's name, when it finally surfaces out of a state licensing database I have no legal right to be searching without a badge, is Russell Hartigan. Forty-one, Great Falls, a consulting practice that's a shell wrapped around a shell. Underneath both of them is a routing structure that leads, patient and unbroken, up into Calgary.

My phone buzzes.

John, who got my number the week he called checking on Holt's hand and apparently decided that meant checking on me too.

Miles told his whole class he skied a black diamond. Technically true. Technically supervised. Don't ask about the supervision.

I laugh, short and wet and completely involuntary, right in the middle of a felony-adjacent database dive, and it's the first sound I've made in this house all morning that wasn't swearing at a spreadsheet. I type back proud of him and mean it more than the three words carry. Then I go back to killing McKenna's money, because Miles skiing a black diamond in Canada and a dead cyanide-swallower's paper trail are somehow both true at the same time this morning. That's just the shape of my experience in Rimrock now.

Hartigan's structure is a snare dressed up as a spreadsheet, patient wire, no wasted motion. Every dollar that moves through the coordinator's shell touches three jurisdictions before it lands, Montana, Alberta, a numbered account in a bank that specializes in not answering questions. I map it on the legal pad in a flowchart that grows arms the longer I work, arrows doubling back on themselves, and somewhere around hour four I understand I'm not looking at laundering anymore.

I'm looking at architecture. Somebody built this to last generations, not to survive one bad season.

That's when Gus goes rigid under the table.

Not a bark. The low sound in his chest, the one I've heard exactly twice now. Once on the porch with a rifle across Holt's knees and once at the front window in the dark. Both times it meant something was on the county road that shouldn't have been.

He doesn't move from my feet. His whole body just locks, ears up, eyes on the door, and I go still with him, one hand already drifting toward the sidearm on the counter.

Nothing. A truck passes on 89, a half mile off, engine note thinning into the distance, and Gus settles by degrees, chin back down on my feet, unconvinced but outvoted.

I sit there a second longer than I need to. Then I pull my own notebook out of my bag, the one I've been keeping since the Riverview, and flip back through it, because something about that engine note snagged on a hook I didn't know I'd hung.

I find it on the fourth page back. February. Porch, 11pm, Gus alerts, nothing visible. Then again, ten pages later. Window, front room, same low sound, county road.

Two dates. Two nights the dog went rigid at a sound nobody else caught, and both nights nobody in this house thought to write down what kind of engine it was, because a dog reacting to traffic isn't evidence, it's a Tuesday.

Except a dog doesn't do the same thing twice for two different reasons. That's not instinct. That's recognition.

I go back to Hartigan's paper, this time hunting something I wasn't hunting an hour ago, and I find it buried in a reimbursement line item so dull it might as well be camouflage: a fuel and maintenance expense, filed under "county contractor services," for a light-colored gas-engine crew cab. Newer model. The exact truck Earl Gunderson put on the timber road the night Jacob died, running dark, no plates readable through his binoculars.

I pull the dates on the reimbursements. Cross them against my notebook.

They match. Both of them.

The truck that killed Jacob Mercer has been driving this county road on a payroll somebody thought was boring enough that nobody would ever check it, and Gus caught it every single time.

"You knew." I say it down at him, quiet, and he thumps his tail once against the floor like he's been waiting all this time for somebody to catch up. "You knew before any of us. You've been right the whole time and everybody just thought you didn't like the sound of trucks."

His big brown eyes are looking up at me, and I get down on the floor with him, both arms around his neck. I kiss the top of his head like he just cracked the case himself, because as far as I'm concerned, he did.

I photograph the reimbursement line, the notebook pages, the whole ugly parallel laid out side by side, and I email it to an address that isn't Salt Lake, because Salt Lake burned that bridge and salted the ground under it. Then I keep going, because the coordinator's structure isn't finished bleeding yet and Friday isn't moving for anybody's feelings.

Three hours later, deep enough into Hartigan's Calgary paper that my eyes have started doing the thing where the numbers swim if I don't blink hard enough, I find the deposit that doesn't belong.

It's older than everything around it. Every other account in this structure traces back to McKenna's 2011 registration, clean as a birth certificate. This one doesn't. This one has a survey authorization attached, Broken Sky sector, funded out of an account that was already moving money close to five decades before McKenna Group existed on paper.

Nineteen sixty-two.

My pen stops moving. The fifteen-year-old who copied a dead man's notebook into her own hand wants to pull that thread right now, tonight, hard enough to see what unravels.