I tapped my pen against my chin.
Cassidy and Xavier had been trapped in that cottage for two days. Long enough to find what was in those walls. Long enough to get it out, too. So where had it gone? And who were they hiding it from?
Then there was Bob. He hadn’t filed Bruce’s arson report. He’d gone out to that cottage himself, seen the stripped walls, and said nothing to me about any of it. Not a single word.
Something had been in those walls. Bob knew it. The Bransons knew it. And neither side wanted me anywhere near it.
I wrote cash or drugs? in the margin and circled it twice.
Kayden flew with one hand resting on the gear thingy and the other hooked into the door frame, jaw set, eyes fixed on the horizon. He hadn’t said a word since we’d lifted off. Whatever I’d said or seen at the cottage had rattled him. He was turning it over.
So was I.
The difference was, I was starting to think we were turning over the same questions. Just from opposite sides of a wall neither of us was ready to knock down yet.
The country below shifted from scorched black back to red. The fire had eaten about a kilometer of ground around the cottage before stopping dead where a creek bed had cut a natural break. Beyond the burn line, the country returned to its usual self—red dirt, spinifex, and the occasional bunch of gum trees standing in the middle of nothing.
Beautiful, in their own brutal way.
I’d grown up on a Merino sheep station outside Longreach, remote enough that the School of the Air had been my classroom and the UHF radio had been my social life. Now every time I went back to see Mom and Dad, which wasn’t often enough, I couldn’t decide whether I loved it there or wanted to claw my way back to a decent coffee shop.
I probably would have stayed on that land forever if Aunt Carol hadn’t been murdered.
I shut that thought down before it went any further.
“How much further?” I asked over the beat of the rotors.
“Fifteen minutes.”
Those were the first words he’d offered since we lifted off. I let him keep his silence and went back to my notebook.
The creek came up out of the landscape slowly. First, a ribbon of green threaded through the red, massive gums and grass spreading on either side, then the water itself appeared, glistening like polished silver in the sun. From up here, it was genuinely beautiful. Down there it was flies, heat, and red dust in every crease of your skin.
Kayden brought us down in a clearing on the western bank. The skids touched down, and we climbed out into heat that was more brutal here than at the cottage, closer to the water, and yet hotter, like the country was punishing us for showing up.
“This way.” He walked off without looking back to see if I was following.
I picked up my pace to catch him.
The creek was running, but only just. A gentle flow over flat stones, shallow enough that I could probably cross without getting my knees wet.
But the banks told a different story.
I stopped at the lip and looked up. Wedged in the fork of a red gum tree was a tangle of debris, branches woven together with fencing wire, and a fence post snapped clean in two. The debris was jammed so high I couldn’t reach it. The wall of water that had put it there had been moving with tremendous force.
I shook my head. Water was the lifeblood of outback stations like this. It could also be the enemy.
I lowered my gaze and kept walking along the bank.
Silt was smeared across rocks at waist height. A snapped fence line trailed into the creek on the far side, the wire kinked and twisted around the trunks of the gums like it was nothing more than a string of wool. Branches were strewn everywhere, some of them as thick as my torso.
This creek had been a wall of water—and recently. Weeks at the most, which fit neatly into the Doug Walker disappearance timeline. His boot and clothing had been found somewhere along here.
I climbed down the bank, and stones rolled under my boots as I picked my way along the creek bed.
Kayden came down after me slowly, like a man who didn’t want to be anywhere near this spot.
“Where did you find his items?”
