"Talk to me."
"Development." His voice has that edge, the one from Kandahar, the one that means a situation just shifted from monitoring to active. "Blackridge MC left town last night. All of them. Checked out of the motor lodge at oh-four-hundred."
I go still. "Why."
"Don't know yet. But they were asking about the clinic yesterday and they're gone this morning. That's not random." A pause. "Stone's running it down. I want you at the clubhouse by nine. We need to talk about the new PT and why people are suddenly interested in her workplace."
He hangs up before I can answer.
Harper is watching me. She's good at reading faces and mine is apparently communicating more than I want it to.
"What happened?" she asks.
I set the phone down. Look at her standing in my kitchen in my shirt with her hair wet and her guard still up even after what we just did, and I make a decision.
"The men asking about the clinic," I say. "They left town. Early this morning."
She goes very still. Not freezing—bracing.
"That's... good, right?"
"Maybe." I pick up my coffee. "Or they got what they came for and they're reporting back."
"To who?"
I hold her gaze. "You tell me."
The silence that follows is careful. She's deciding something, I can see it happening behind her eyes, the same calculation I do before I give Intel to someone who might use it in ways I can't control.
"The man who called me," she says finally. "Outside the bar. He has money. Connections." She wraps both hands around the mug even though the coffee's still too hot. "If he wanted to know where I was working, where I lived... hiring people to find out would be easy for him."
"What's his name."
She looks at me for a long moment.
"Why do you need to know?"
"Because if he's the reason the Blackridge MC was in my town asking about you, I need to know who I'm dealing with."
"Ronan—"
"Harper." I keep my voice level. Flat. The way I say everything when I need someone to understand I'm not negotiating. "Someone was asking about the clinic. Asking questions about who’s been coming and going lately. That’s not casual interest. That’s reconnaissance." I set my mug down. "So, either you tell me who he is, or I find out myself. Your choice."
Her jaw tightens. That stubborn set to it I'm starting to recognize.
"His name is Derek," she says. "Derek Sutton."
I commit it to memory. First and last name, the way she says it with that particular weight, like the syllables themselves have done damage.
"Where's he from."
"California. Bay area." She's looking at the counter now, not at me. "He's a financial consultant. His family has money, the kind that comes with lawyers on retainer and people who make problems disappear."
She looks up at me. "I haven't had contact with him in fourteen months. I changed my number, my address, everything. I don't know how he found me."
"Money buys a lot of information," I say. "Especially if you know who to pay."
She's quiet for a moment. Then, "What are you going to do?"
