I pull out my phone. Scroll through the same dead-end contacts I've been scrolling through for two months.
Rainey's number, the one I pulled off her photography website before it went dark, goes straight to a disconnected recording. Flint's phone rings and rings and rings. Vic's number is dead. Torres, the FBI agent in Albuquerque, hasn't returned my messages.
Every trail Grant left behind leads to a wall.
"That seat taken?"
The journalist slides onto the stool next to mine before I can answer.
She's changed out of the press-box outfit. Instead of tailored slacks, a silk t-shirt and light weight blazer, she’s wearing jeans, boots, and a fitted flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to herelbows. The notebook is gone but the sharpness is still there, sitting behind those eyes like a blade she's deciding whether to draw.
She smells like soap and coffee and something underneath that's clean and warm, and it cuts through the bar stink of spilled beer and leather like a knife through smoke. I notice because noticing things is the only skill that's kept me alive on this circuit, and also because I'm a man and she's beautiful and pretending otherwise would be a different kind of lie than the ones I'm used to.
"You following me?" I ask.
"I asked the copy editor from Lubbock where riders drink after events." She signals the bartender. "He said any bar with a neon boot on the sign. This was the closest neon boot."
"Smart man." I study her over the rim of my glass. "What do you want?"
"Same thing I wanted an hour ago. To talk."
"I'm better at drinking."
"You can do both." She orders a Shiner Bock, and when it comes she wraps both hands around the bottle like she's cold, even though it's eighty degrees outside and the bar has no air conditioning worth mentioning.
"You said Grant Corbin was murdered. You said Thornton Livestock's bulls were drugged. That's a hell of a thing to say to a stranger."
"I say it to anyone who'll listen. Nobody listens."
"I'm listening."
I look at her. Really look. The freckles across her nose. The way she holds her body, coiled and ready. Her eyes, which in the low light of the bar look almost familiar, like I've seen them before in a face I can't place.
I lose the thought before it forms.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because two riders are dead and you're telling me someone killed them on purpose." She takes a pull from her beer. "If you're right, that's the biggest story in professional rodeo. If you're wrong, you're a grief-stricken cowboy with a grudge and a death wish, and that's a story too."
"Two riders." I set my glass down. "You caught that."
"You said Grant and you said Thornton Livestock's bulls have been juiced." She ticks off the points on her fingers. "Bulls, plural. And every stock contractor from here to El Paso knows about it. That's not a one-time thing with one animal. That's an operation. Which means Corbin wasn't the first."
She's smart. Smarter than her credentials suggest.
The way she connected the timeline tells me she's not just asking questions to fill column inches. She's building something. Mapping the shape of it the way I do when I'm studying a bull's footage, looking for the pattern in the chaos.
"Tyler Brennan," I say, and I watch her face when I say it.
Blank. No recognition. A journalist covering the circuit who's never heard of Tyler Brennan. That's either very careless or very suspicious.
"Few weeks before Grant. Fort Worth event. Different bull, same stock contractor. Thornton Livestock."
"Same cause of death?"
"Tyler got thrown and trampled. Same as Grant. Both ruled accidents. Both riding bulls supplied by Thornton. Both top-ranked riders who'd been asking questions they shouldn't have been asking."
"Questions about what?"
