Page 55 of Into the Fire

“It’s all here,” Dante said.

“It didn’t need to leave.”

He looked at me.

“We stood in this room the day we found it and photographed every page,” I said. “It took us twenty minutes. He had all day.”

Dante was quiet.

Then he reached out and one finger hovered over the map beside the North Fork, not touching the paper.

“So somebody else has the line now,” he said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t move his hand.

“Who knew we came out here last time?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You’re the one making a list.”

“Shep watched us leave this morning. He would tell anybody standing still that we’d headed north.”

“He probably saw us last time too.”

“And Nash,” I said, “he’s been to the cabin before, with Dutch. He’s probably known the cabin was here for twenty years.”

Dante picked up his coffee. “But we’re not arresting Nash ourselves?”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Growth.”

I didn’t answer that. “He stays on the list. The list is most of the base plus anybody they talked to, which means most of the county. Knowing we came here is easy. That’s not the part that’s bothering me.”

“No,” Dante said. “The part that’s bothering you is that somebody knew what to look for.”

That was it exactly.

“He wasn’t checking on us,” Dante said. He crossed to the side table and stood over the map. “If you want to know what we found, you watch us. You don’t need this place. We walked out carrying everything we’d learned.” He tapped the table edge, once, beside the map. “He didn’t come here for what we know. He went through the drawer, and he went through the notebooks. He found this and read it long enough to forget how it was folded.” Dante looked at me. “That’s a man doing what we did.”

“Somebody is running their own search,” I said. “Same evidence. Same fork.”

“And we found out by a sagging door.”

I photographed the door, the flattened grass, the drawer at its one-inch gap, the envelope on top of the catalog, and the map folded clean on the stack. I wrote times on the legal pad: when we’d arrived and what we’d found in what order.

“When we get back, I want to know if that spare key’s still in Operations,” I said.

Dante nodded, and then he didn’t say anything. He was at the side table again.

He’d opened the map back up, and he stood over the North Fork. Not reading it. He was still, and I knew what that meant. Some piece of Carson Ridge had come near enough to touch. His eyes were on the pencil line.

“Dante,” I said.

He came back slowly and looked at the line for another second.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not yet.”