Page 16 of Faultline

Marc reaches for a form on the desk. "I'll take the report. Rhys is going to want to see the site."

"He saw the hide site earlier this week. Now he's got fresh evidence to add to it."

The door to the back office opens and Rhys fills the frame the way he always does, like the building was designed for smaller men and nobody told him. He takes one look at my face and at Marc's posture and pulls a chair from the wall without asking what happened. "Tell me."

I lay it out. Everything from the hydraulic cut to the second observation post. Rhys listens without interrupting. When I finish, he sits with it for a long moment, his hands laced behind his head and his eyes on the ceiling.

"Two surveillance positions," he says. "One covering the cabin. One covering the equipment. That's not a lone contractor on a freelance job. That's a coordinated operation with multiple personnel and a target package."

"I know what it is."

"I know you do." He drops his hands and leans forward. "Liam, I've been sheriff of this jurisdiction long enough to know the difference between a property dispute and an operation. This stopped being a property dispute when they tagged your family's graves. The equipment sabotage is the next step. If the pattern holds, the step after that involves a person, and that person is you."

I don't answer, because he's right and the answer doesn't change anything.

"I'm coming back up tomorrow morning. I want to photograph the sabotage, the tire tracks, and the gate while the evidence is fresh, and I want to document this second observation post alongside the first one." He pauses. "I also need to talk to you about something else."

I wait.

"I told you that the advocate for Aurora Covenant, Tosh, has been tracking a pattern. Women connected to her program are being approached by corporate recruiters tied to Cascade. Relocation offers. Job placement. Some of her clients are unreachable. Phones disconnected or go to voicemail."

He watches my face when he says her name, and I keep my expression level because the alternative is letting him see what that name does to the back of my skull. The image is immediate and specific: dark hair pulled back from a face that doesn't soften itself for company, the line of her throat when she tilted her chin up to hold my gaze through the café glass, and a mouth that looked like it had never let a bad argument walk away breathing.

"You mentioned that on the phone."

"I did. What I didn't mention is that the pattern she's building mirrors yours. You've got the land side. She's got the human side. Cascade is buying property and clearing the people off it, and the two investigations are the same investigation running on parallel tracks." He straightens in the chair. "I set up a meeting. Tomorrow afternoon, at the Ridgeline. The three of us."

The image is back before I can stop it. Her hip against the counter edge. The sharp geometry of her hands cutting the air mid-sentence. The way she turned back to her conversation without giving me a single thing, and how that refusal landed somewhere below my belt and stayed there through the switchbacks. I've been looked at by women. I've looked back. This is the first time in years that the looking felt like the beginning of a problem I was going to enjoy making worse.

"Fine."

Rhys almost smiles. "Eloquent as always."

"You want me to rehearse a speech?"

"I want you to bring your evidence and not scare her off by standing in a corner looking like you're about to dismantle someone with your bare hands."

"I'll do my best."

Marc snorts from behind the desk. Rhys ignores him.

"One more thing," Rhys says. "Tosh has been surveilled. Silver SUV, rental plates, photographing storefronts on main street. Same vehicle has been spotted near her office more than once. If that vehicle shows up on your property, I want to know about it before you do something I'd have to arrest you for."

Every muscle in my forearms locks. The image of a rental SUV idling outside her office, a man with a camera pointed at her window, cataloging her the way they cataloged my cemetery. My hands go still on the arms of the chair, and I make myself unclench them one finger at a time.

"Understood."

I leave the sheriff's office and walk back to the truck. The afternoon light sits low on the mountains, and the air carries the particular weight of a September day that knows winter is coming and has stopped pretending otherwise.

Across the street, the Aurora Covenant logo is visible on a storefront window between the post office and the empty lot. Packing tape holds it in place. The lights inside are on.

I keep my eyes forward, and it costs me more than it should. Half a block of sidewalk and a pane of glass between me and a woman I have barely seen. The pull is low and steady, lodged in the part of my body that doesn't respond to tactical thinking. I can feel the weight of her presence the way I feel a change in barometric pressure before a storm. My hands tighten on the steering wheel before I'm off the block.

The drive back to the cabin takes forty minutes. I spend every one of them thinking about access points, choke points, and the distance between the service road gate and the staging area where someone put their hands on my equipment in the dark.

At the cabin, I pull the toolkit from the truck bed and spend the rest of the afternoon replacing the hydraulic line and the brake hose. Both repairs require parts I keep in the tool shed, because my father kept a full inventory of replacement components for every machine on the property and I have maintained that inventory without interruption since his death.

The hydraulic fitting seats with a clean click. The brake line bleeds clear after three pumps. The machines are functional again by sundown.