I nodded, and for a second we just looked at each other, the way you do when you both know something’s about to go wrong, but you can’t fix it yet so you just remember the moment for later.
He left, the barn door thudding shut behind him. The temperature dropped two degrees in the time it took the wind to sneak in.
I turned back to the truck, but my hands had stopped working. Instead I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the birth certificate, and unfolded it with the caution of a man handling a live grenade.
Name: Emilio John Hooper. Mother: [redacted]. Father: Tomás Hooper.
The signature at the bottom was the only part that mattered: Liam James.
I ran my thumb over the name, once, then folded the paper and slid it back into my pocket. I looked at Emilio, who was still staring up at the fluorescent light like maybe he could see something on the other side.
“Hang tight, kid,” I told him. “We’ll figure this out.”
I wiped my hands on a fresh rag, cranked the tensioner again, and let the noise of metal on metal cover everything else.
* * * *
The office at the heart of the old house was nothing like the rest of it. For starters, you could always smell a trace of pipe tobacco in there, even though nobody had smoked indoors since the Clinton administration.
The wallpaper was three generations out of date, the kind of beige that wanted to be white but gave up halfway, and every surface was cluttered—not the charming, homey kind of clutter, but the evidence-collection kind. Maps, legal pads, half a dozen open boxes of spent shell casings, and always, always, a stack of printed-out emails with most of the text blacked out.
Rawley sat behind the desk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms corded and crossed. The only light in the room came from a banker’s lamp that cast everything else into a cave of shadows. He had the Billings social register open in front of him, its gold-embossed spine so stiff it looked like it had never been read before today.
I shut the door behind me. It made a thud that felt heavier than it should’ve.
“Sit,” Rawley said, not a suggestion.
I took the side chair, which listed slightly to the left, and let the silence stretch. Rawley did not look up from the book.
“You know why I called you in,” he said, voice so dry it could have caught fire.
“I figured it was either this or you’d found my old probation record.”
He didn’t even blink. “Jasper ran the baby’s footprints.”
I whistled, low. “Didn’t know we had that kind of tech.”
“We don’t,” he said. “Jasper’s got a guy at the hospital.”
I waited. Rawley liked to play his cards one at a time, dramatic reveal style.
“Birth name matches the certificate,” he said. “Emilio John Hooper. Mother’s name is redacted from the hospital system, which means it’s either a protection order or a big-money privacy request. Father’s name is you.”
I tapped my fingers on the arm of the chair. “That’s the part that worries you?”
He shot me a look so cold it could have stunned cattle. “That’s not what worries me.”
I noticed then the topographic map pinned to the wall behind him, a crisscross of red and black marker that circled out from the ranch in concentric threat rings. Some of the lines were recent, fresh marker smell still clinging to the air.
“Who’s out there?” I asked, nodding at the map.
Rawley closed the social register with a heavy hand, picked up a single sheet from the desk, and slid it across to me. “Name ring a bell?”
I looked. It was a scan of a newspaper engagement announcement, block letters so sharp they might have been stamped with a chisel:LIAM JAMES, son of WILLIAM and CORA JAMES of Big Sky, to be wed to ELEANOR PETERSON, daughter of CLYDE PETERSON, owner of Peterson Cattle Company.
Underneath, a studio photograph—Eleanor, taller than her fiancé, jaw set like a bare blade, Liam in a too-large suit, smile like he was about to flinch.
“Yeah,” I said. “He mentioned an Eleanor that night.”
