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Cranky, contrary, occasionally exhausting, good man. Which was probably the only kind of man Virgil would tolerate being.

She looked for his truck.

Nothing. No Virgil, either.

Jodie got out and walked closer to the opening. Tire tracks cut along the fence line, then continued west on the two-track. His guy must have come back for the cattle. Virgil had probably driven farther along the boundary to check the rest of the fence before turning around.

She climbed back into Willow’s truck.

“All right,” she said, more to herself than Goblin. “Let’s go find him.”

She turned west along the tracks. The two-track got rougher as she followed it, dropping into broken ground where the truck rocked hard enough to make Goblin shift his footing in the bed. The fence stayed somewhere off to her right, appearing and disappearing behind rises and clumps of sage. Tire tracks continued ahead of her, sometimes clear in the dust, sometimes lost where the ground turned hard and stony.

She almost missed the panels.

They sat down in a shallow drainage, far enough below the surrounding ground that she saw the top rail first. Jodie slowed, then stopped the truck.

“What the hell?”

Goblin stood up behind her.

The panels didn’t belong there, not with Virgil’s woven sheep fence running along the boundary behind her, and with the temporary BLM holding pens miles back in the other direction. These were tucked into the draw where nobody driving the main roads would ever see them.

Jodie pulled off the two-track and parked.

“Stay.”

Goblin jumped out of the bed before she got the door closed.

“Or don’t.”

He stayed close as she walked toward the drainage.

The smell reached her first. Horse manure, and not from this morning. It mingled unpleasantly with hay and stagnant water.

Her stomach went cold.

The pen came into view a little at a time. Just as she’d thought—portable steel panels, and a trough with green around the edges. Hay was ground into the dirt and the amount of manure told her that horses had been kept here for more than a few hours.

But the pen was open. She looked around with the crazy hope that maybe Luna, Sagebrush, and Lucky were still somewhere nearby, but of course there was no sign of them.

This was a bait trap, and it wasn’t on any plan she’d ever seen. Luna, Sagebrush, and Lucky had never been lost. They’d been lured here on Virgil’s land, then taken somewhere else.

Her own words from yesterday came back to her with humiliating clarity.

That does not mean Virgil had anything to do with Sagebrush or Lucky.

She’d said it in front of everyone.

At the community meeting, she’d pushed back when the woman behind Willow said you couldn’t reason with assholes like him. She’d refused to let people turn his anger about horses on his land into evidence that he was hurting them. Ten minutes ago, she’d sat in Willow’s truck watching Hank’s cattle walk through two cut fences and thought Good man.

Jodie swallowed.

There you go. Defending him already when the evidence is right here in front of you.

The thought hurt more than not finding the horses did. Because she knew this feeling.

It’s what she did all the time—found an excuse for somebody. Explained their problems away. Looked for the version of events that made them better than what was right in front of her.