Quinn goes still. "How do you know that name?"
"I read stock draw sheets." It's the truth, just not all of it. "Thornton supplied bulls at every event where a rider died this season."
"It's not just the bulls." Quinn drops his voice further. The horses shift behind him, tails flicking at flies. "Grant thought there was a connection between the stock draws, the prize money, and the people running the circuit. He said it went all the way up. Higher than Thornton. Someone with real power."
Higher than Thornton. Colt said the same thing at the bar, that a stock contractor can't manipulate draws and bury investigations alone, that it takes pull. Someone with influence. Someone neither of them will name out loud.
"Did Grant have proof?" I ask.
"I think he was putting something together. Some kind of proof. He never showed me what, but I'd catch him up late with paperwork spread out, or on his phone taking pictures of things he shouldn't have been that interested in." Quinn's hands are shaking. He shoves them in his pockets. "I think he was going to take it to the FBI. He had a contact. But he also had…" Quinn trails off.
"Had what?"
"A girlfriend." The word comes out reluctant, almost guilty. "A photographer on the circuit. Rainey something. Weathers, I think. She was always out there with her camera around the stock pens, the handlers, everything. After Grant died, she just vanished. Nobody's seen her. Nobody knows where she went."
Rainey Weathers. A photographer. Grant's girlfriend.
My brother had a girlfriend on the circuit and I didn't know. The realization hits me somewhere behind my ribs, in the place where grief stores the things you can't process standing up.
Grant had a whole life out here that he kept from me. A woman he loved. An investigation that consumed him. A death he walked into with open eyes because he believed the truth was worth more than his safety.
And he never told me any of it. Not Rainey's name. Not the scope of what he was doing. Not the danger. He called me the night before Las Cruces and said he was onto something big, and that was it. That was all he trusted me with.
The old anger flares, quick and hot. He was protecting me. I know that. Grant and Dax always protected me. They became my only family. But protection and secrecy aren't the same thing, and if Grant had told me the truth, if he'd told me about Tyler Brennan and the drugged bulls and the woman he loved, maybe I could have helped. Maybe I could have talked him out of riding that bull in Las Cruces. Maybe he'd still be alive.
Or maybe he'd have gone anyway, because that's who he was. And I'd have spent those last four days knowing what I was about to lose instead of being blindsided by the deputy on my porch.
I don't know which is worse.
I swallow hard and keep my voice even. "Do you know how to find Rainey?"
"If I did, I'd have found her already." Quinn picks up his coffee mug, and the rim trembles against his lip. "After Grant died, somebody drove her out of Las Cruces. I heard it was some old stock contractor, retired guy. That's all I know."
"And the proof Grant had?"
Quinn sets the mug down hard, and coffee sloshes over the rim. "That's all I've got. That's everything. And if you tell anyone I said any of this, I'll deny it."
"Quinn—"
"I'm serious." He turns on me, and the fear is front and center now, naked and awful.
"Grant asked the same questions you're asking. Tyler asked them before that. They're both dead. I don't want to be the next name on that list."
He folds the camp chair, shoves it behind the truck seat, and walks away without looking back. Long strides, head down, hands in his pockets. He rounds the end of the trailer row and disappears between the rigs.
I'm standing alone in the gravel next to his horses, watching the space where he was and listening to the sound of his boots fade out.
I walk to my rental car and sit behind the wheel with the engine off, processing.
Grant's investigation wasn't a side project. Quinn's description of late nights with paperwork and a girlfriend who kept her camera pointed at the stock pens tells me Grant was building something bigger than one man asking questions.
And all of it scattered when he died.
Rainey Weathers is out there somewhere with whatever her camera captured. The retired stock contractor who drove her out of Las Cruces might know where she went. The FBI contact Grant had is out there somewhere, waiting for information that never arrived.
I need to find Rainey.
I pull out my phone and search.
