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"Did she leave a forwarding number? I bought a piece from her last time and wanted to follow up on the artist."

"She didn't leave anything." The woman adjusts a card on its stand. "They called me from the vendor coordinator's list. The booth space was open, so they asked me if I wanted it."

The vendor coordinator is a circuit employee whose office is a folding table behind the grandstand entrance. He tells me Penny missed her check-in window, and when they couldn't reach her, they filled the booth from the standby list.

He says it happens. Vendors burn out, decide the highway miles aren't worth the margins, go home. He says it like it's a sentence he's said before, and maybe it is. People leave the circuit all the time.

I ask for Penny's information, and he pulls her vendor application from the file folder. She drives a white Chevy Tahoe, older model, New Mexico plates. He gives me the plate number and an emergency contact, a sister in Las Cruces. The application lists no other staff.

The vendor in the next booth is unloading her own cases when I stop at her table.

"Penny? I saw her loading out after the evening performance." The woman stacks ring trays while she talks. "It was late. Teardown always runs past dark. She was hauling her cases by herself."

"Did she leave with anyone?"

"Not that I saw. But there was a cowboy standing near the vendor exit while she loaded. Tall, rangy, black hat. I've seen him team rope at nearly every event." She pauses. "He wasn't helping. Just standing there."

The description fits Clint Wilson. The neighboring vendor doesn't name him because Clint is furniture on this circuit, present at every stop, noticed by nobody.

I walk the vendor row to its end and cut through the stock pens toward the competitor parking. The morning is already hot, the air pulling dust, diesel, and the green smell of livestock feed into a haze that sits low over the loading area. Handlers move cattle through temporary alleys, hooves drumming packed earth. Nothing out of normal.

Clint is at the team-roping trailer, saddling his sorrel with Quinn beside him. His voice carries over the pen rails at the volume of a man who wants to be heard by everyone. He catches my eye across the lot and tips his hat, and the grin hasn't changed since the first event I attended.

The last photograph of Sandy alive places her beside him at a Lubbock bar. He called Penny by her first name from twenty feet away at multiple events, and now her booth space holds another vendor.

The connection is circumstantial. It sits in my chest like a fishhook.

Torres assigned departure coverage at the last stop after I flagged the Clint proximity. If that coverage saw Penny leave the grounds safely, whatever happened to her happened on the road between events, in the gap where the task force has no eyes.

Sandy left the circuit, too. Her body was found in a culvert outside Santa Rosa with ligature marks on her wrists.

The comparison doesn't belong in the same sentence. Sandy was last seen leaving a Lubbock bar with Clint Wilson. Penny was a solo vendor selling turquoise to strangers. The circumstances are different.

The fact that my lungs tighten anyway tells me something has contaminated the analytical process.

I drive to the motel and lock the door. Torres picks up on the first ring, and I skip the greeting.

"Penny Jenner is gone."

"Define gone."

"Failed to appear for this event. No forwarding contact, no call to the coordinator. She was at the last stop. Your team had departure coverage on the east gate. I need the log from that night and whether Wilson was anywhere near the exit while she loaded out."

Torres processes this without comment. Penny's name has been in the file since my second report as a recurring circuit presence with proximity to Wilson.

"I'll run her through missing persons and pull the departure log," Torres says. "If she left clean and never arrived at the next stop on the circuit, we're looking at a transit-window disappearance. Vehicle?"

I give her the plate number and description from the vendor application. "The neighboring vendor saw her loading alone after the evening performance. A team roper matching Wilson's description was standing near the gate while she worked. He wasn't helping."

"Noted. I'll pull it against the log. And I'll have Las Cruces contact the sister and run a welfare check at the residence. Highway patrol gets the vehicle description in the meantime."

"There's more. The convergence is building. My transport analysis, Kenna Corbin's financial trail on the Hendricks name, Carrick's carrier anomalies. They're overlapping."

"I know. Your ASAC and I are formalizing the joint-investigation protocol. Your transport analysis stays attributed to your task force. Kenna gives us her source documents, and we obtain the underlying records from the banks and corporate custodians through subpoena. If Carrick cooperates, his information comes to me directly, not through you. We corroborate each source independently so the defense can't argue we circulated the same unverified information through different hands."

The call ends with Penny's vehicle description on its way to highway patrol and a cooperation framework that might hold the evidence together long enough to matter.

Penny's face is still behind my eyes. The sun-streaked hair under the bandana. The way she held up earrings to strangers like every pair might be the one that finally closed the sale. She drove between events alone, and she said it like a punchline.