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People did look for Marcus, of course they did. A senator's son doesn't just evaporate without somebody noticin'. But the timing was a gift, because the oil crash out in the Bakken formation had every federal agency in the region chasing their own tails—reassigning personnel, shutting down field offices, pulling resources from county investigations to deal with the economic fallout rippling across three states.

A missing man with soft hands and political ambitions just didn't rank the way it should have. Not when wells were bein' confiscated and money was disappearing faster than people.

They looked, but they didn't put their hearts into it. Not really. Not the way they would have six months earlier.

They came with a search warrant one day in early November. Gray sky, a hard frost still clinging to the fence posts, breath visible in the morning air like little confessions nobody asked for.

But they never even found the elevator door. Never even got that far inside the house, honestly.

The sheriff—a man I've known since I was a child, a man who attended my mother's funeral and shook Cash's hand and told him he was sorry for his loss with actual tears in his actual eyes—looked genuinely embarrassed when he presented the warrant. He held it out like it was somethin' shameful, like a parking ticket he was issuing to a priest, and he wouldn't meet Cash's gaze when he did it.

Cash, always a gentleman, always composed, invited him inside for coffee while his men fanned out across the property. He brewed it himself. Used the good mugs. Sat at the kitchen island and talked about cattle futures, and the weather, and the sorry state of the county road budget like there wasn't a dead man's absence hanging in the air between them.

That's Cash. That's what he does. He makes you comfortable in the house where the thing happened, and you never even think to look down.

They searched the barns. They searched the house—superficially, politely, the way you search a place when you already feel bad for being there. They poked through the equipment sheds, and walked the fence line closest to the main road, and wrote things down on clipboards, and talked into radios, and none of it mattered. None of it came close.

Because Marcus didn't drive a family truck out here that night. It was someone else's vehicle—borrowed, stolen, I never asked and I never will. Not even Marcus was dumb enough or confident enough to leave a fuckin' road map of his own madness. Whatever arrogance carried him onto this property, it wasn't the kind that left a paper trail. I'll give him that much. That singular, useless credit.

And that truck—whoever it belonged to, whatever story it might've told—was parted out in one of our many outbuildings before the sun came up. Stripped to the frame, catalogued by function, distributed across four counties, and the chassis itself was on its way to Mexico less than twenty-four hours later.

Cash is thorough like that, too. He doesn't leave loose ends so much as he unravels them into threads so fine they cease to exist entirely, and by the time anyone thinks to pull, there's nothin' left to grab.

There was a small stink about the burning of Badlands too. Out in Terry, people were talkin'—the way people in dying towns always talk, which is to say constantly and without precision, standin' in the parking lot of the only gas station that still pumps diesel, passin' rumors back and forth like communion wine at a church where nobody actually believes in God.

But Terry is Prairie County, and Drybone is Dawson County, and those two jurisdictions share a border the way estranged siblings share a last name—technically connected, functionally indifferent. And the Ashbys had no connection to anything that happened out on that unmarked road at the edge of those red cliffs.

Not one they could justify. Not one that would survive a single phone call from our family attorney, who bills at nine hundred dollars an hour and has never once lost a game he agreed to play.

There was talk of bodies. There's always talk of bodies when a structure burns that hot—when the fire eats through corrugated steel and timber and pours black smoke into a sky that nobody in Terry bothers to photograph.

But nothin' came of it. The investigators picked through the ash, and the rubble, and the melted neon, and the collapsed roof beams, and what they found was evidence that people had once been there—boot prints baked into softened concrete, the ghosted outline of furniture, shell casings warped beyond ballistic use, the kind of residue that tells you a story happened but refuses to give you the ending.

But apparently, ya need a body to have an honest investigation. You need bone fragments, or dental records, or something that used to breathe, and without that, all you've got is an insurance claim and a shrug.

And I doubt—I sincerely, deeply, from the bottom of my Ashby-educated heart doubt—that a single person up in Prairie County wanted to look too close.

Not the sheriff, not his deputies, not the volunteer fire crew who arrived forty minutes after the flames were already dyin' on their own.

They had, after all, looked the other way for decades.

Looked the other way when the bikes rolled through town.

Looked the other way when the money appeared in local accounts that couldn't explain it.

Looked the other way because lookin' straight ahead at what Badlands actually was would've required a courage that nobody in Terry had ever been compensated enough to summon.

And then… the whole thing just went quiet.

Not a single deputy has pulled Legion over on the highway. Not once.

Not a single legal letter has arrived at the ranch, or at the trailer, or at any address attached to the name Kane. No subpoenas. No warrants. No politely worded requests from the district attorney's office askin' if anyone might be willin' to come in for a conversation.

Nothing.

The silence isn't accidental. I know that. Silence that complete, that coordinated, that absolute—it takes effort. It takes the kind of institutional agreement that doesn't happen in meetings or over email but in the spaces between sentences, in the things people decide not to say over coffee at the diner, in the way a file gets moved from one desk to another and then to the bottom of a drawer and then to a box in storage where nobody will ever think to look for it.

Badlands died with Marcus.