Page 10 of Rope Burn

No explanation. No name, no question. She places it like a dealer placing a card: face up, deliberate, and then watches what happens to the table.

The image sits on the metal in the last of the daylight. It's a missing-person file photo, taken months before Lubbock, and the face in it belongs to Sandy Canutson.

I know her before my eyes finish focusing. My hands settle on the tailgate before the recognition reaches my expression, but I'm half a second too late. Engel's attention sharpens. She saw it.

Sandy Canutson stares up from the truck bed, wearing a smile from before I ever knew her name. The woman standing across from me just watched my cover crack open in real time.

I've been interrogated before. County lockup, state processing, parole review. Every one of those rooms had a cop or a counselor reading my face for leverage.

This woman is better than any of them because she didn't need a room or a badge or a table between us. She used a picture and the last light of the day and let my own guilt do the rest.

"Where did you get this?" My voice comes through rough.

"It was in a file that was given to my department."

She lets the word land cleanly. Department. Not a slip. Another layer of the cover peeled back on her own schedule, and she wants me to see her do it.

"Who are you?"

She meets my eyes and doesn't answer.

"Is she alive?"

The question changes something in her face. Not softness. A decision.

"No."

The word lands clean. No apology wrapped around it. No explanation designed to make the hearing easier.

"Where?"

"Outside Santa Rosa."

"When?"

"Weeks after Lubbock."

I look at Sandy's picture once and then back at the woman who brought it. "What condition?"

"Carrick—"

"You drove onto my ground, used a dead woman to test my face and let me identify your connection to federal law enforcement. You don't get to decide I've had enough truth now."

Her chin rises slightly. "She'd been restrained. She was held for several days before she died."

The rage arrives cold. Useful. It settles into the same place the adrenaline used to settle after a run, below my ribs, concentrated and steady.

"Who was the last person seen with her?"

"Clint Wilson."

"Then why are you standing in front of me?"

"Because you introduced them."

The accuracy of that hits home. She came here with Sandy's picture, and she already knows the shape of my guilt. She knows I was the introduction. She came to see whether I was a participant or a witness, and my face told her the answer before I opened my mouth.

"Clint wasn't the one watching her leave."