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"When the circuit packs up." I cross to the laptop, and Ostrander slides it toward me without being asked. I pull the victim timelines forward so the gray bars sit on top of the calendar. "Most of the disappearances on this chart cluster around the close of an event. Penny made it off the grounds safely and disappeared on the road after teardown. Sandy left a Lubbock after-party and was found weeks later on the corridor."
"And today everybody's moving livestock," Ostrander says.
"Delilah was moved before your team hit the barn," I say to Torres. "If she went where these rigs have been losing their hours, she may be at Pecos Crossing now. She may also have been there until the carriers that hauled her vanished from the list. By tomorrow the yard can be a row of empty pens with spotless paperwork, and the women can be anywhere in trailers nobody is looking for."
"I know what tomorrow looks like, Carroll. And out of the yard?"
"Every lagged leg rejoins I-40 and follows the circuit's own haul toward the next event. They travel inside our traffic." I drag the cursor along the interstate. "If they move the women today, that's the road the pattern says they take."
Ostrander copies the route onto her legal pad and boxes it.
"A New Mexico livestock inspector can demand the movement certificates and inspect the stock," I say.
"He can enforce the Livestock Code," Torres says. "I can't use him as a stalking horse for a trafficking search. If armed men may be holding women behind that gate, I get a warrant and send a team equipped to handle it."
She's right, and I hate that she's right. I learned to love procedure at Quantico because it keeps a case alive after the people who built it have gone home.
"What does the AUSA have?" I ask.
"Not your question, Carroll."
I don't need her answer. I can build it from what I've witnessed myself. Penny named Clint while I sat an arm's length away. Kenna's trail on the Hendricks name was feeding into this case before I recused. My lag still glows on the wall behind her. Slade has been sending Torres his own material straight from his phone, and I kept my eyes on his face instead of his screen.
Every piece points toward the compliance office, and none of it puts a hand from that office on a single load. The sealed packets would. Slade carried them with S.H. in the corner for most of a year, and nobody else the task force can reach can swear to where they went.
The phone lights up against the table, and Torres glances at the screen. "The AUSA. He's building the affidavit on your lag, and he has questions about how you built it." She puts the call on speaker and sets the phone face up between us. "Questions about the analysis, Carroll. Nothing else."
The AUSA's voice comes through thin and tinny. He wants to know how I sized the lag, what I counted as late, and which legs I threw out and why. I tell him.
He asks whether a defense expert could call the delay ordinary road trouble, and I give him the fuel and the tires in fewer words than I gave Ostrander. He moves to his next question without thanking me.
"The judge will read a stack of maybes and a map," he says.
"I know," Torres says. "I've read them, too. Carroll, you're done. Ostrander, walk her out."
She turns her back to us and bends over the phone. I'm in the doorway beside Ostrander when the AUSA speaks again. "And Carrick? Is he coming in or not?"
Torres answers him without turning around. "Surveillance will be on the yard within hours. I'm drafting the affidavit with what I've got in case I have to walk it in tonight." Her voice drops, and every word of it reaches me anyway. "If Carrick doesn't come in, we move with what we have and hope it's enough."
She turns and finds me still in the doorway. Her thumb hits mute a beat too late. The look beneath all that exhaustion says she knows what she just handed me. She says nothing.
I follow Ostrander down the hall. At the reception counter she signs me out of the visitor log and holds out her hand. I lift the lanyard over my head and give the badge back.
The elevator carries me down alone. My phone is in my hand before the car starts to drop, and the thread with Slade sits on the screen: one word from me, one word from him.
He's on the interstate with a borrowed sorrel in a borrowed trailer, still working to a schedule Torres gave him before the paper started burning. He thinks he has until he can put everything on her table at once. He has until tonight. Four words would tell him. Torres needs you now.
If those words come from me, whatever he says in her office stops being his. Every defense attorney who reads the file will say the agent in his bed walked him through Torres's door, and they'll be right. My thumb stays off the keys. When the doors open on the lobby, I put the phone away and walk out into the glare with nothing added to the thread.
17
SLADE
More than a decade ago, on the concrete floor of a Cheyenne bar, I ended a fight with one punch and a man never got up. Tonight I'm walking into another fight on purpose. This time, the FBI knows where I'll be standing when it starts.
Neil's message came in while Morgan stood in my motel room with one boot on, pretending she hadn't already decided to go. I read it twice because Neil never wastes words and I didn't want to miss any.
I've got the motel picture and the Lubbock receipt with your signature on it. You can have both. Wash rack behind the east pens at the next stop, after dark. Come alone. Bring anybody, and both go to your parole officer in Wyoming.
