Page 10 of Faultline

"Marc told me Tosh MacIntosh called the department yesterday. Some of her former clients accepted relocation packages from a corporate recruiter. Some left town. They stopped responding afterward and their phones were disconnected."

I picture the woman behind the café window. Direct gaze. Measuring.

"She’s that advocate who set up shop for the Aurora Covenant, right?"

"That's her. Tosh doesn't rattle easy. If she's flagging something, I'm paying attention."

"What does relocation have to do with Cascade?"

"I don't know yet."

Better answer than pretending otherwise.

"Do we know the recruiter was Cascade?" I ask.

"Not directly. The corporate name is different. That's what Tosh is working. Right now I've got her clients on one side and what you're finding on the mountain on the other."

"And Cascade somewhere in the middle."

"Maybe. They keep surfacing around the edges, but I can't draw the whole line yet."

Neither can I.

Rhys continues. "What I can work right now is trespass, fraudulent survey markers, destruction or theft involving that camera, depending on what we can prove. The cemetery gives us property damage. Your observation site gives us another problem entirely."

"Reconnaissance."

"Exactly."

The word sits differently when somebody else says it.

"Whoever used that hide knows your routine," Rhys says. "When you're home. When you're not. That's not surveying."

"No."

"Watch your six until I get up there."

"I will."

"Liam."

"I said I will."

I end the call and sit with the evidence spread across the table.

My camera is gone. Somebody watched my cabin long enough to learn how I live. A survey crew worked Frank's property while he was out of town. Someone planted a boundary marker that moves Stoddard land on paper. Someone else, or maybe the same people, stapled survey tape to four graves.

And two women who took relocation money from a corporate recruiter have vanished from Tosh MacIntosh's reach.

I can't draw a straight line through all of it. Not yet. But Cascade keeps appearing wherever the line should be.

I don't know what's underneath this mountain that Cascade wants badly enough to tag the dead, but I know what happens to the people responsible once I find out.

4

TOSH

The third woman on my follow-up list picks up on the second ring and tells me she's fine in a voice that means she isn't. Her name is Jeanine. Late twenties, two kids under five, a restraining order that lapsed because her ex's attorney filed a challenge and she didn't have representation to fight it.