Rainey stands in the doorway of her studio and watches us leave, and the look on her face carries the same resigned certainty I heard in Grant's voice the night he called me from outside Las Cruces. The sound of someone who's already calculated the odds and decided to go ahead anyway.
I scan the street one more time before we step off the sidewalk. Habit. The kind that started the day I realized the circuit I've spent my career on is run by a man who orders murders through text messages. The street is empty. Creede on a Saturday afternoon is two tourists with fishing rods and a dog asleep on the porch of the general store.
Kenna walks beside me, close enough that I catch her warmth through the gap between us. She's holding the key in her fist, the edges pressing white dents into her skin. Her jaw is set in that way it gets when she's keeping herself together through sheer force, and I want to grab that fist and pry it open before she draws blood with the key teeth.
I don't. Touching her right now would be like grabbing a live wire, and I've already been electrocuted enough this week.
Grant's sister. The woman I've had pinned against a door with her legs around my waist. The woman who said my namelike a detonation while I was inside her, and every single time she was carrying his last name behind her teeth like a grenade with the pin half pulled.
I open the truck door and climb in. She gets in on her side without looking at me and stares at the key in her palm. The cab fills with her scent, that combination of dust and something clean that I've been breathing for days and can't scrub out of my system.
My body doesn't care about the lies. My body remembers the motel, the bunkhouse, the specific weight of her underneath me. My body is a traitor, and it's been running the highlight reel since the kitchen.
I start the engine and pull away from the curb. In the side mirror, Rainey is still standing in the doorway. She watches the truck until we round the corner, and then she's gone.
Grant loved that woman. He told me as much on the phone, but hearing about it and seeing it are two different animals. Seeing it is the flannel she still wears like armor, the photographs on her walls, the way she said his name with the raw, scraped sound of someone still talking to the dead in her sleep. The hurt of it sits in my chest like a broken rib I keep forgetting to protect.
He told me about all of it on one phone call, and I listened from the outside like a man watching a house burn through a window. A woman he loved. An investigation that consumed him. A death he walked into with his eyes open. I knew the facts, but I wasn't there for any of it, and the distance between knowing and being there is the part that keeps me up at night.
After we leave the post office with the safety box key, the drive south stretches ahead of us. The key sits in Kenna's pocket like a small brass weight pulling us both toward Albuquerque. The mountains give way in slow degrees as we descend, aspen groves thinning into scrub oak, then sage, then the flat goldstretch of the San Luis Valley. The sun is high and brutal, the kind of light that bleaches out shadows and leaves nowhere to hide.
Kenna has her notebook out, making lists in that precise handwriting, organizing the approach to Torres the way she organizes everything: like a woman who learned early that if she doesn't impose order, the world will impose chaos.
Her hair has come loose from its tie, and a strand falls across her face every time she looks down. She tucks it behind her ear without looking up, and the motion pulls the collar of her shirt sideways, exposing the slope of her neck and the spot just below her jaw where her pulse runs close to the surface. I've had my mouth on that spot. I know exactly what sound she makes when I find it.
I drag my eyes back to the road and grip the wheel until my knuckles ache. I have to remind myself: she lied. Every conversation. Every motel room. Every time she looked at me with those eyes and let me believe she was someone she wasn't.
The fury of it is clean and simple, and I've been wrapping myself in it because clean, simple anger is easier to carry than the mess underneath: the fact that I still want her so badly my teeth ache, and the wanting makes me angry, and the anger makes me want her more, and the whole thing is a loop with no exit ramp.
We stop for gas in Antonito. I fill the tank while Kenna goes inside for coffee and comes back with two cups and a bag of beef jerky that she drops in my lap without comment.
"You haven't eaten since yesterday," she says.
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat the jerky, Holloway. I'm not explaining to the FBI that my key witness passed out from low blood sugar in their parking lot."
"I'm not the key witness. Rainey is."
"Rainey is in a photography studio in a town with one stoplight, refusing to testify. You're the one who was on the phone with Grant the night before he died. You're the one who's been working this case since it went cold. Torres needs you functional and fed."
She climbs into the truck and closes the door and waits with the coffee balanced on her knee and the look of a woman who has made a tactical decision to keep me alive through sheer force of will.
I eat the jerky. It's terrible. Gas station beef jerky always is.
We cross the state line into New Mexico as the sun starts its drop toward the western mesas. The sky turns copper, then amber, then the deep, impossible red that only exists in this part of the country.
The tension I've been carrying between my shoulders lets go all at once. Not a decision. More like a bone shifting back into place after being set wrong for too long.
"Grant used to talk about you," I say.
Kenna goes still. Her coffee cup hovers an inch from her mouth.
"Not by name. He'd say'my sister'like it was a title. Like you were the only person in the world who held it." I keep my eyes on the road. "He said you were smarter than him, meaner than him, and twice as stubborn."
"He wasn't wrong." Her voice is careful, but with a hint of amusement. She's testing the ice.
"He said you could talk your way into or out of anything, and that he was terrified you'd end up in some war zone with nothing more than a press badge and a death wish."
