Page 5
Months later, a highway crew found an overturned pickup below the shoulder outside Socorro with unidentified remains inside. The truck was registered to a Thornton shell company, and the body carried no identification. The county report listed a broken neck and called it a single-vehicle accident. Nobody connected the John Doe to a missing bull handler, and the case stayed cold until Torres pulled it into her review.
The match changes the map. Vic didn't go underground. He was murdered, and whatever happened to him passed for an accident until this morning.
"The corridor is still operational," I say. It's an observation, but it's also the thing that keeps me out here wearing someone else's last name on a lanyard.
"The corridor is still killing people," Torres corrects. "Merrick is convicted. Thornton is dead. The infrastructure they built is being run by someone else, and whoever that someone is, they're still eliminating witnesses." She pauses, which is unusual for her. "And Carroll,” she continues, using my real last name. “Whoever inherited these routes has institutional access. Vic's death was staged to look like an accident, and it held up for months. That's not amateur work."
"Understood."
The line disconnects. Torres doesn't do goodbyes. Every conversation with that woman has gone the same way since my Assistant Special Agent in Charge or ASAC in El Paso coordinated the intel-sharing agreement between our unit and her public corruption team.
I pocket the phone and walk back into the vendor row. The afternoon sun clears the grandstand roof, throwing narrow bands of shade across the east side of the grounds.
The crowd is thinner than it will be by the evening performance. A few families with kids, couples in good hats and clean jeans, the weekend people who buy tickets, eat funnel cake, watch the rodeo like fireworks, all spectacle, no stakes. Come for the show, leave before the lots go quiet and the real business starts.
A woman at a folding table covered in turquoise jewelry waves at me from behind her booth. The light catches the stones and throws pale blue across the display surface.
"You need earrings," she calls, cheerful and persistent, the pitch clearly aimed at every woman who walks past. "I've got a pair that would look gorgeous with your coloring."
Her name badge reads Penny Jenner. She's young, mid-twenties, with sun-streaked hair pulled back under a bandana and a face that hasn't learned to guard itself yet.
The display board behind her is hand-lettered in careful script. The earring cards are organized by stone and price with a tidiness that says this small business matters to her. She's been working the vendor row for at least the past few events. I've seen her setting up before the grounds open, breaking down after the last performance, hauling her own cases because the solo vendors don't have staff.
"I'm more of a plain-stud girl," I tell her.
"That's because you haven't seen the right pair yet." She holds up a set of dangly turquoise drops with silver wire. "These are hand-set. The artist works out of Gallup."
"Next time," I say, and I mean it enough to smile.
A man approaches from the competitor side of the row, and Penny lights up before he's close enough to speak. He's tall, rangy, with an easy grin and a stride that takes up space without hurrying. He's wearing a team-roping number pinned to the back of his shirt.
"Penny, you selling or socializing?" he says.
"Both. It's called multitasking, Clint."
Clint Wilson. Team roper. Quinn Gallagher's partner. I've seen him at every event I've attended, which tracks with a full-season competitor.
On the grounds he's furniture: always present, always friendly, never the center of attention. Everybody knows him. Nobody watches him.
I watch him now because of an image in my case file.
The image was taken at a Lubbock fairground bar the night a woman named Sandy Canutson disappeared. Sandy is standing beside Clint, leaning into his space with a smile that reads as warm and willing. The introducer is visible at the edge of the frame, seated at the bar with a bottle in front of him and his face turned partially toward the camera.
Sandy's body was recovered from a culvert outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico, weeks after that picture was taken. The cause of death was exposure compounded by blunt-force trauma. The county medical examiner's report noted ligature marks on both wrists that predated the fatal injuries by several days. Sandy didn't end up there by accident. Sandy was held somewhere, and then she was disposed of on a stretch of highway that runs parallel to the old Thornton transport corridor.
The county listed her as an unidentified female. We matched her through dental records months later, the same way Torres just matched Vic. The identification remains sealed while the task force works the connection to the circuit.
Clint picks up a bracelet from Penny's display, turns it over, sets it back down without buying it. "You coming to the afterparty tonight?"
"Depends on who's buying drinks," Penny says.
He grins and walks off toward the competitor lot where the team-roping horses are tied to trailer rings. Penny watches him go with the casual interest of a young woman still deciding whether she wants to be noticed.
The man who just invited her to a party is the last person seen leaving a bar with a woman whose body turned up in a culvert.
Penny fits the profile: alone on the road, limited support, orbiting the same social circle as competitors with money and attention to offer. I photograph her booth number as though I'm documenting the vendor row for my insurance files and send Penny's name to the monitoring channel. I can't warn her without collapsing the investigation, but Clint will not leave these grounds with her unwatched.
Sandy's case sits at the center of the larger pattern. Over the past year and a half, women have gone missing from towns within a day's drive of Southwest Circuit events. The timing correlates to the competition calendar. The geographic spread follows the I-40 corridor and its feeder routes through southern New Mexico, west Texas, and the Arizona border country.
