His eyes moved across the images in sequence, cataloguing details with a focus that would have surprised anyone who’d only ever seen him telling bad jokes about fence posts.
“When?” he said.
“Thursday night or early Friday,” I replied. “Oxidation on the cut is fresh.”
“Where exactly on the eastern perimeter?”
“North-south junction. Thirty feet of cable, clean cut. Boot prints lead to the Blackwater access point.”
“How many sets of prints?”
“One. Consistent stride, consistent depth. Male, approximately six feet, 180 to 200. Contractor tread, diamond pattern. Moving with purpose, not exploration.”
“Approach vector from the eastern boundary?”
“Stayed inside the tree line from the county road. Used the cottonwoods for cover. Exited the same way.”
He nodded once. Sharp. The kind of nod that meant he’d processed the information and was already building the three-dimensional map in his head, the same way I did—terrain, sight lines, approach angles, the geometry of a threat rendered in the particular language of men who’d been trained to think in terms of vectors and vulnerabilities.
Caleb stared at the boot-print photo. His hand braced on the table edge, fingers spread, and I watched his face do the thing it did when he was thinking through something serious—his eyes going still, his mouth setting into a line that was quieter than Mitch’s but no less certain.
“Does Jackson know?” he asked.
“No.”
“He needs to know. And Rawley.” Caleb’s voice was soft. Calm. The same tone he used for explaining crop rotations or reminding someone to take their pain medication on schedule. “We should brief Burke in person, not by text. He’ll want to see the tread pattern himself.”
I looked at him. Really looked. The man who baked cinnamon rolls and talked to birds and moved through the world taking up less space than he was entitled to was standing in my kitchen recommending an operational briefing sequence that was, objectively, exactly right.
Mitch paused. His eyes moved from the phone to Caleb, and something shifted in his expression—not surprise, exactly. Recognition. The look of a man who had just watched someone he loved demonstrate a competency he’d always known was there, but hadn’t, until this moment, seen deployed in this context.
“I agree with Caleb,” Mitch said.
The words landed in the kitchen like something that had cost him more than he wanted to admit. He said them flat, direct, with the stiffness of a man who was not accustomed to conceding points and had decided, reluctantly, that this one was worth the concession.
Caleb looked at him. One eyebrow up. The corner of his mouth doing that thing—the small, careful warmth that lived in the crease beside his eye and never quite made it to a full smile.
“You agree with me?” Caleb said.
“I said what I said.”
“Write it down. I want it notarized.”
Mitch’s jaw clenched. “I’m not notarizing a verbal agreement about boot prints.”
“You agree with me on most things,” Caleb stated. “You might consider accepting it as a general principle.”
“I do not agree with you on most things.”
I pointed at the phone. “The observation that you agree with Caleb more often than you admit is statistically supportable.”
Caleb nodded. “Thank you.”
“I wasn’t taking sides. It’s an observation.”
“The observation is extremely sided,” Mitch muttered.
I glanced at the ceiling. Sighed. The heavy sigh of a man who had walked into a kitchen expecting to deliver a threat briefing and had instead walked into whatever this was—Mitch and Caleb negotiating the terms of their disagreement about agreeing, with me in the middle holding photographic evidence of a perimeter breach like a man trying to sell life insurance at a birthday party.
