"Start here." I hand her the official report. "Brake line failure. That's what they ruled. But I handled all our vehicle maintenance. Changed the brake fluid myself six months before she died. Those lines were solid."
Harlow reads, her expression shifting from neutral to focused. The FBI agent emerging. "Who investigated?"
"State police initially. Then it got kicked to a federal task force that never filed a final report."
"A federal task force for a single-vehicle accident in rural Alaska?" Her eyes narrow. "That's unusual."
"That's what I said. Got told to stop asking questions. Got warned off by people who shouldn't care about a dead nurse in Whitewater Junction."
She flips through more pages, making notes on a pad I didn't realize I'd set out. Her handwriting is neat, organized. The kind of person who thinks in systems and patterns.
"Your wife was a nurse at Palmer Hospital," she muses. "Night shifts. Long commute on mountain roads."
"Five days a week. Same route every time."
"Which means anyone watching would know her schedule. Know exactly when and where she'd be vulnerable." Harlow pulls out the map, studies it. "The accident happened here. Mountain Pass Road."
"Same route she always took home."
"And you didn't know anything was wrong until dispatch called you about the accident."
"Right. Two forty-seven a.m. I thought she was safe at work." The memory burns. "But when I got to her, before she died, she told me it wasn't an accident. That a black truck forced her off the road."
Harlow goes still. "Her last words."
"Her last words. She died before she could tell me anything else." The words taste bitter. Three years and they still taste bitter. "But about a month before she died, the hospital had admitted several patients from an industrial accident. Foreign workers, according to the records. Injuries consistent with labor accidents."
"You think they were trafficking victims."
"I think Emma treated them. I think she noticed injuries that didn't match the official story. And I think she started asking questions." I pull out another file. "Three weeks after Emma died, one of the doctors who worked with her transferred to a hospital in Seattle. Sudden. No explanation. I tried to contact him. Got nowhere."
"Name?"
"Dr. Peter Kovak."
She writes it down. "What about the black truck Emma mentioned? Did anyone ever find it?"
"No. And here's the thing." I spread out photos of the crash site. "The marks on the road suggest another vehicle forced her off. But those marks were gone by the time the state police photographed the scene. Someone cleaned up before the investigation."
"Someone with access and resources."
"Someone who could take out a sheriff's wife and make it look like an accident so that even three years later, I still can't prove it wasn't."
Harlow looks at me. Really looks. And I see recognition there. Understanding. She knows what it's like to carry this weight.
"The trafficking network you've been investigating," she says slowly. "It uses mining operations as fronts. But hospitals would be perfect too. Treat injured victims, create fake medical records, move people through the system disguised as legitimate patients."
"That's what I've been thinking. But I can't prove it."
"Maybe we can now." She taps the files. "Irina said the camp has been operating for years. Your wife died three years ago. That's a timeline that connects. And if Emma photographed evidence or documented what she saw, that evidence might still exist."
"I searched our house. Her car. Her locker at work. Found nothing."
"Where did she keep her phone?"
"They never recovered it from the wreck. Assumed it was destroyed."
Harlow's quiet for a long moment. Then: "What if it wasn't in the car? What if she hid it somewhere before they forced her off the road?"
