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Six hundred a month for two years is fourteen thousand four hundred dollars. Gerry Kessler had sold the room where Maren works nights for almost five months of what Maple Grove costs.

“He didn’t hire her for this,” I said. Out loud, apparently, because the table turned toward me. “He hired her four years before any of it. She was twenty-two and good and cheap and he got lucky.”

“Then what’s your point?” Brazil asked.

“My point is what he worked out afterward.” I put a finger on the lease. “Two years ago he signs this. By then he’s had her three, four years. He knows her grandmother’s in memory care, he knows what it costs, he knows she drives an hour out there every Sunday and that she has never once asked him for a raise. He didn’t find somebody who wouldn’t ask. He found out she couldn’t leave, and then he signed the lease.”

“He went and found somebody who couldn’t quit,” I said.

“And Kirill?” Hornet asked.

“Kirill’s a problem that solves its own damn self once we know where he stands.”

Fox nodded once and Church broke up around me. I stayed at the table. The map was still up on Surge’s screen. That pin on County 9, sitting there in the middle of a network like it had been drawn there on purpose.

Except it hadn’t, and that’s the part that kept getting hold of me. Nobody targeted her. Nobody in Kirill Popov’s operation had ever heard her name until Freak bled in her parking lot.

And that operation had nothing to do with the one his uncle ran. Grigori sold women. This one buys medicine through accounts nobody looks at twice and sells it on to people who can’t get it any other way.

The only thing the nephew kept was the last name and the habit of putting people in kitchens.

I put her in it. Not Gerry, not Kirill, not the sixteen months of orders.

Me. Because I needed a room and she was the closest one.

I went out across the gravel with the file under my arm and the cold coming up off the stone.

Leo was behind the bar through the clubhouse window, restocking, eighteen months in and still counting bottles twice.

I stopped at my bike and opened the file on the seat. Ruth Hale. Maple Grove Memory Care. Twenty-two residents. Night shift was two nurses and one aide. Front desk with a buzzer, one camera on the entry that the administrator told Gunner’s caller has been down since spring because the money went to a new lift instead.

A woman of seventy-eight who couldn’t be moved without coming apart, in a building with a broken camera. And a granddaughter who walks through that front door every Sunday at the same hour, because Sunday is the last thing that woman’s mind can still hold on to.

I stood there in the lot and did the thing I’ve done every day for twenty years, which is run the board. Every post accounted for. Every man where I put him. The gate covered, the rotation clean, forty acres tight as they have ever been.

And not one single body of mine standing anywhere near the only two people on that page who couldn’t run.

I closed the file.

Fox caught me in the lot before I got the file zipped back in the bag.

He didn’t come up on me fast. Fox has never come up on anybody fast in his life. He just walked over and stood on the other side of my bike with his hands in his pockets and looked out at the fence line for a while, the way a man does when he intends the next thing he says to be heard.

“Say it,” I said.

“Two questions.”

“Go.”

“First one’s easy. Do you want men on that facility?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve got them, and you didn’t have to ask, and I’d like you to notice you didn’t ask.” He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “Shooter’s the right man for it. He’ll sit in a parking lot for nine hours and not once check his phone.”

“Shooter’s the right man.”

“Shooter’s the right man and Shooter’s in Arkansas till Sunday. I’m not pulling him off that and I’m not sending somebody who gets made in an hour and teaches them we’re watching.” Fox turned his head. “He goes on it Monday morning. You good with that?”