Page 51 of Rope Burn

"It's her face," I say. "She also tried to sell me that pair of earrings twice. I'm certain."

Torres relays the identification to someone beside her without covering the phone. "Two more women in a back stall, conscious and talking. Jenner will go to the hospital in Deming, and now I can make the call to her sister."

The link on my screen has already gone blank, and the line goes dead a moment later. Torres never says goodbye on a call, and today I'm grateful for it. When I sit down on the edge of the mattress, the sound that comes out of me is one I'd rather keep to myself.

The deadbolt turns. Slade comes in with a draft of cold desert air behind him, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He takes one look at my face and stops inside the door.

"Bad?"

"Good," I say. "I think it's good."

"You can't tell me."

"No."

He nods once and sets his phone face-down on the dresser beside my keys. Sometime in the night, his low voice came through the wall from the walkway, and I chose sleep over listening. He offers no explanation now, and I ask for none.

"Then we've both been on the phone with people we can't talk about," he says. "Before coffee."

"Welcome to my entire career."

"Former career."

"Career under review," I tell him. "Try to keep up."

His gaze goes to the shirt and settles there. The bruising along his ribs has darkened overnight into an ugly purple sprawl, and he moves around it as though pain gets no vote in his posture.

"That's mine," he says.

"I'm aware."

"You planning to give it back?"

I pull it over my head and toss it at him. He catches it one-handed without taking his eyes off me.

He keeps to the door. His attention carries enough weight to pin me where I stand, and I dress under it without fumbling a single button.

"I'm on the schedule for tomorrow night," he says. "Find me after."

"I know your schedule."

His mouth tightens at one corner. "That's still the problem."

When I reach for my keys, he tosses the shirt on the bed and steps onto the walkway ahead of me. He sweeps the lot, the parked cars, and the frontage road beyond them before he holds the door. He says nothing about Neil's photograph, and he doesn't need to.

I leave him on the concrete with his arms folded and drive toward Deming. The hospital sits low and tan off the highway. I pull into the back row of its parking lot and kill the engine. Penny is inside with an IV in her arm and a torn ear, and a recused agent has no business walking through the emergency doors.

I sit in the lot until the sun clears the Floridas and the gas station coffee goes cold in the cup holder. The emergency doors slide open and shut for strangers all day, and I keep my hand off the door handle.

At dark, I take a room at a motel off the interstate. Torres's text arrives the next afternoon.

Jenner medically cleared after extended observation. Released to victim services, Las Cruces. She is asking for "the insurance lady with the plain studs." You attend as a support person at the victim's request. You ask nothing. You write nothing. Address follows.

Of course, the address is in Las Cruces. It leads me through streets I learned from my mother's bus route, past the turn for a restaurant off Main that closed the winter she died.

The house is a two-story stucco on a quiet block on the east side of town, with oleander crowding the walk and a porch swing hanging still on its chains. There's no sign. Torres meets me on the porch, and she looks as though she hasn't sat down since the entry team went through the barn.

"The victim specialist runs the room," she says. "Your presence goes in my report as a support person Jenner requested, and you'll be walled off from everything else she gives us. You sit where Jenner can see you. If she asks you a question about the case, send it to me. If she asks you to leave, you leave."