The top drawer holds invoices and vendor contacts: feed suppliers, veterinary services, and transport companies. There's nothing unusual.
The second drawer holds event contracts, standard circuit paperwork, and stock assignments for the last two seasons. Thornton files his livestock transport receipts in the same cabinet where he keeps evidence of murder. I wonder if he alphabetizes those too.
The third drawer is locked.
"I've got a locked drawer," I say.
I grab a paperclip from the desk tray and straighten it out. The lock is cheap, the kind that keeps honest people honest, and it takes me less than a minute to work the tumbler until it catches and turns.
Inside, I find a leather-bound ledger. It's handwritten, the kind of recordkeeping that stays deliberately analog because the person writing in it doesn't want the contents anywhere near a computer.
There's something almost quaint about it, a man who runs a criminal enterprise and keeps his kill list in a leather journal like a Victorian gentleman tracking his fox hunts.
I open it, and my throat closes.
The pages are organized in columns of names, dates, event locations, and notations. The left column lists rider names. The middle column lists events. The right column has single-word entries that read like instructions.
MONITORED. CLEARED. WARNED. HANDLED.
My thumbnail finds my index finger before I register doing it, the tic that's been with me since the funeral, the one I use to anchor myself when the grief hits hard enough to knock me sideways. My fingers trace down the list. I recognize names from the circuit standings. These are riders who sustained injuries atThornton events, riders who withdrew from competition after receiving unnamed "warnings."
Two-thirds of the way down the page, a name stops me cold.
TYLER BRENNAN. Fort Worth. HANDLED.
Below it, in the same careful handwriting:
GRANT CORBIN. Las Cruces. HANDLED.
My brother's name written in the hand of the man who helped kill him, written in the same column with the same clinical notation, as if ending a human life were an operational task to be checked off and filed away.
My hands are shaking. I photograph the page, then both pages, then every page in the ledger, front and back. I work fast, keeping the camera steady despite the tremor running through my body.
Then I move to the filing cabinets where Colt is pulling folders.
"I've got altered prize records," he says, his voice tight and controlled. "Payments to bull handlers, with cash amounts, dates, and handler initials. And this."
He holds up a manila envelope. Inside is a list of shell company names, account numbers, and transfer dates. It's the financial architecture of the fraud, laid out in Thornton's handwriting.
"Photograph everything," I say. "We take nothing physical. If they know someone was here, they'll destroy the originals. If they don't notice, the originals stay in place for the FBI to seize with a warrant."
Colt nods. We work, taking photograph after photograph, page after page, the phone's flash lighting the small office in rapid strobe bursts. My internal clock is screaming that we've been here too long.
"Colt. We need to go."
"I know." He slides the bottom drawer shut and straightens. "I've got everything from the cabinet."
"You should have let me photograph the second cabinet," I say, and even as the words come out I can hear the fight starting. Not now. We don't have time for this now.
"You were at the desk for too long. We needed to move."
"I was at the desk for exactly as long as the desk took. You pulled me off the cabinets because you decided we were done."
"I decided we were about to get caught."
"You decided for both of us. That's what you do, Colt. You make the call and I follow, and we pretend that's a partnership."
His face goes blank. The dangerous blank. "This isn't the time."
