Page 4 of Fated, Allegedly

"I know you don't."

She hands me the spare battery pack anyway. That's a bigger thing than it looks.

I get her to her truck and I go back for the collar myself, because I want to see the ground it came off of. It's sitting on a stump. Not caught in brush, not chewed off, set down, upright, in a clearing with a sightline to the drainage path. Twenty feet away the ferns are crushed in a rectangle where something waited, and there's a Nikon lens cap in the leaf litter, and boot prints with a tread I've never seen on any hunter in this county.

They didn't drop that collar. They baited it. And the thing they're fishing for has auburn hair and a state contract and no idea she's the hook.

3

ERIN

Four cameras are down when I check the network Thursday morning, and when I hike the west transect I've stopped being surprised and started being furious.

Station two is facedown in the ferns with the casing split. Station five has been unstrapped and set neatly at the base of the tree, lens shattered, like somebody wanted me to find it in one piece so I'd understand the message. Station nine is simply gone. Not a fragment, not a strap, not a screw. Someone unbolted a mount I sank into a red pine with a cordless drill and took the hardware with them.

I sit on a deadfall and eat a granola bar and do the arithmetic. Fourteen hundred dollars a unit. Three units confirmed dead, one abducted. My equipment line for the entire contract was eleven thousand. Amelia is going to have opinions delivered at high speed and moderate volume.

The laptop is worse. I get back to the cabin at four, plug in, and my field database opens to a folder structure that looks correct until it doesn't. Tuesday's transect: empty. Wednesday's water chemistry: empty. The metadata for the first eight camera stations, including my original GPS marks, is a directory with nothing inside it. Deleted, cleanly, and then the recycle bin emptied on top of it.

The backup drive is sitting on the table exactly where I left it. I know it's exactly where I left it because it was on top of my field notebook, and now it's beside my notebook, an inch to the left, squared to the table edge like some tidy intruder put it back. I feel the hair go up on my arms.

Nash comes when I call, which is its own kind of infuriating, because he arrives in nineteen minutes from a station that's twenty-six minutes away.

He doesn't say anything for a while. He crouches by station five where I've left it in situ, turns the casing over with two fingers, and looks at the mount holes in the bark like they're going to confess.

"Torx bit," he says. "T-twenty-five. Whoever pulled nine had the right driver and knew the mount before he got here."

"So he'd seen it. Or seen the spec sheet."

"Or both." He straightens. "You file with the sheriff yet?"

"I called Sheriff Louis Reeves this morning. He was kind about it. He also used the phrase 'kids with four-wheelers,' which, I want to be generous, is not a theory, it's an excuse." I shove my hands in my jacket pockets. "Nash. There are no four-wheeler tracks. There are no boot prints on the trail because somebody walked the creek bed both directions. That's not kids. That's tradecraft."

He picks up the broken casing and starts back toward the truck, and I match his stride because I'm not going to jog after him like a spaniel.

"Say something," I demand.

"I'm listening."

"You're stonewalling with excellent posture. Who is doing this?"

"I'm not sure."

"Guess. You've lived here your whole life. You know every boat, every dog, every grudge in this county. Give me a name and I'll do the rest."

He stops and sets the casing down with more care than a dead camera deserves. When he faces me his eyes have this flat blue steadiness I'm learning to distrust, because it never means calm. It means the door is shut.

"If I hand you a name and I'm wrong, you'll go and face the wrong person," he says. "If I'm right, you'll go to the right one. Either version ends with you alone in the woods with somebody who already came into your cabin."

"So your plan is that I know less."

"My plan is that you keep the doors locked and stop hiking alone."

"I've worked field sites in three countries…"

"I know." He says it without heat. "You're better in the bush than anyone I've walked out here with. That's not the problem. The problem is you're the only one on your side."

I want to argue. I discover, unhelpfully, that my throat's gone tight, because nobody has said anything close to that to me since the grant collapsed and my entire department discovered urgent business elsewhere.