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“I’ll take the guest suite,” she says. “Because the cattle and the originals are already there. I’m not accepting a favor.”

“Understood.”

“I doubt that.”

She rides in counsel’s hired car instead of my truck. It costs us eight minutes and gives her a driver whose paycheck doesn’t say McCall. I let her have it.

Then I pull Cole aside while the clerk exports the key log. “When you photograph her equipment, put a location tag on the base of her primary field case.”

His face doesn’t change. “She approved that?”

“No.”

“Mercer is involved now.”

“The data comes to me only. If she disappears, I want to know where that case is.”

“And if she finds it?”

“Then I answer for it.”

He holds my eyes long enough to make the warning clear. Then he walks to the car.

I tell myself I’m tracking the evidence, not the woman. The distinction is useful. It’s also a lie, and some part of me knows it even as I let it stand.

Cole’s first report reaches my phone before we clear the county line.

Public and authorized sources only, the way he promised. Undergraduate degree in animal science. Eight years with a regional compliance firm, then her own practice. No liens. No bankruptcies. A father who inspected brands in New Mexico for thirty-one years and died of a heart attack at fifty-eight.

And a civil file from two years ago.

A feedlot company’s board, a manager who resigned with a severance package, and a counterclaim against the independent auditor who’d found his fraud. The counterclaim said her methods had caused the losses she documented. It was dismissed eleven months later. The court’s order runs four pages and says, in careful judicial language, that the auditor was right about everything and that the company had spent a year trying to make her pay for it.

I read it twice on a dark highway with her headlights behind me.

Two phones. Sealed cases. Numbered strips. A lawyer on the line before she opens her own motel door. I thought I was looking at a woman who liked procedure. I was looking at scar tissue.

She didn’t tell me any of it. I found it because I sent a man to dig through her life on the first morning, before she’d done anything to me except say no.

I close the file. It doesn’t feel like information. It feels like I walked into somebody’s house while they were out and read their mail, and now I know where the furniture is and I can’t unknow it.

I should delete it. I don’t. I tell myself I’ll decide later.

We reach Barbed Crown after two. The guest suite is at the end of the old family wing, with its own exterior stair, a small kitchen, and a connecting door that locks from both sides. I hand her two new keys in a sealed envelope and keep none.

She checks the windows, both locks, the smoke alarm, and the exterior route before she sets down her bag. “Your family lives in this wing?”

“Not now.”

“Why not?”

“They prefer houses where my father can’t assign breakfast.”

She looks at me. “That sounded almost like humor.”

“Lack of sleep.”

“I’ll document the anomaly.”