Page 13 of Rope Burn

“More than he realizes. He identified his controller without prompting. Neil Vogt. According to Carrick, someone inside Torres’s office alerted Vogt to the scheduled appointment. That’s why Carrick didn’t appear. The meeting was compromised before Carrick ever reached the building.”

The line goes quiet. I let it stay quiet.

"What did he say?"

"He said Vogt had the address before he did. That's why he didn't show."

"Who knew the meeting location?"

"Torres, Carrick, and whoever had access to her scheduling or communications. Carrick believes the contact channel was compromised."

"Then you stop using routine channels with Torres until we know where the leak sits. What else?"

I hear the chair shift. "He knows there's a warrant," I say. "He's been hiding on a ranch with no communication because he expects to be arrested the moment he surfaces."

"The warrant is active and has been since he absconded. Months of unauthorized interstate travel and failure to report aren't a technical violation." The ASAC's voice levels out into the register he uses for decisions that will appear in a file. "I'll coordinate with the supervising authority to deprioritize service while we assess his cooperation value. The warrant stays valid. If he leaves the cooperation window, refuses contact or heads for the border, the hold-off ends and the fugitive team executes. You have through the next event."

"He's not running. He drove north and found me. Whatever the photograph unlocked, it pointed him toward the circuit, not away from it."

"Then we have a window. Use it. Get back to the circuit. If he tailed you to your motel without your backup marking him, he's already decided to engage. Let him do it on ground where you're covered."

The call ends. The operational logic is clean. The ethics are less so. We're offering time instead of freedom and calling it cooperation, but arresting him now could bury Sandy's case with him.

The next event is a few days out, farther up the corridor. I spend the gap running transport manifests against the circuit calendar on the encrypted laptop, refining the disappearance pattern.

The correlation between venue dates and the last-known-alive dates for the missing women is tightening. Two of the disappearances cluster near events where Thornton-era carriers were logged on the arrival manifests. The carriers themselves trace back through registrations that dead-end at post office boxes and dissolved LLCs.

The fairground smells like every other fairground on the circuit: diesel, livestock, sugar from the concession trailers. The vendor row runs along the fence line between the grandstand entrance and the contestant parking.

The familiar turquoise display catches my eye before the woman behind it opens her mouth.

"You came back," Penny Jenner says, holding up a pair of silver-and-turquoise drops that catch the afternoon light. "These are the ones I was telling you about. The artist in Gallup made six pairs and I've got the last two."

"Still a plain-stud girl," I tell her.

"That's what you said last time. I'm wearing you down." She grins, and the openness of it sits in my chest in a place where operational objectivity is supposed to live.

Penny is in her mid-twenties, traveling alone with a folding table and a wholesale jewelry inventory. She smiles at strangers like the world has given her no reason to stop.

I buy a bracelet. Fourteen dollars, hand-stamped silver and turquoise, thin enough to slide under a watch band.

The early events wind down while the evening card loads. I photograph manifests posted outside the livestock intake office and compare carrier numbers against the list on my drive.

Steve Hendricks's signature—APRA's Director of Livestock Transport and Compliance—sits on the approval column of every manifest, stamped in blue ink. His office certified these carriers. His signature approved these routes. The signatures are wallpaper, the administrative machinery of a legitimate operation.

Hendricks finds me outside the intake office, tablet in his hand, reading glasses still on his forehead. He's wearing the pressed shirt from the last event, carrying the settled confidence of a bureaucrat on home ground.

"Ms. Engel. The documentation you requested is ready. My staff pulled the carrier approval history for the past eighteen months, along with the compliance certifications and route exception filings."

He holds out a flash drive, the label written in handwriting I recognize from the logs. It goes into a signal-blocking evidence pouch from my bag, not my pocket beside the operational phone. Hendricks controls the transport compliance system. Assuming a device he provides is clean would be negligence. The data will be imaged on an isolated machine before anything touches the task-force network.

"You'll find everything in order," Hendricks says, and if the evidence pouch registered, his face doesn't show it. "We've tightened our certification process since my brother's situation came to light. Every carrier on this circuit has been re-vetted through my office, and we've added secondary verification for route exceptions."

"That's thorough," I say.

"It's necessary. The circuit's reputation depends on institutional credibility, and my office is where that credibility lives." He taps his tablet against his thigh. "If your claims department needs anything else, don't hesitate to ask."

I thank him and move on. Hendricks just handed me over a year of approvals from the office that certified all the carriers in this system. The question becomes whether his office created the approvals or inherited them from the Thornton era. The metadata may show when the files were built and which account last touched them. If it's been stripped or flattened, that tells me something too.