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“And if his answers hurt Barbed Crown?”

“You write them down accurately.”

“Good. I like interviews with attainable standards.”

The corner of his mouth moves. A week of working beside me has taught him to recognize a joke without making the mistake of encouraging it.

I’m in a better mood than the situation warrants, and I know exactly why.

I woke this morning with Garrett’s arm under my neck and the laptop still glowing on the desk where I left it. He was already awake. He hadn’t moved, because moving would have woken me. He was just lying there looking at the ceiling with an expression I’d never seen on him before, loose and unguarded, like a man who’d set something heavy down and wasn’t sure yet whether he was allowed to leave it there.

When he felt me stir, he turned his head and said, “Morning,” in a voice rough with sleep, and that was all. No claim. No question about last night. Just morning, like it was a word we’d been saying to each other for years.

I had to get up fast and go stand in the shower, because I didn’t trust what my face was doing.

The rancher asked us not to bring a Barbed Crown truck onto his place. Garrett’s first response this morning was to offer three men and an armored vehicle. His second, after I pointed out the man owns his own house and has the right to stay in it, was to ask what help the rancher actually wanted.

That’s progress. It isn’t absolution. Still, I’ve been trying not to smile about it for forty miles.

The rancher meets us on the porch in clean work jeans and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned wrong at one cuff. He’s alive, plainly and inconveniently so for whoever has been selling cattle under his name. A stock dog studies us from under a metal chair. Six black cows stand in the shade of a loafing shed while two calves worry a mineral tub.

“You’re the woman from Barbed Crown,” he says.

“I’m the independent auditor working there. Barbed Crown doesn’t control my notes.”

“Their lawyer drove you.”

“Their lawyer provided a driver because someone shot at a search team two days ago. You can talk to us together, separately, or not at all.”

He thinks about that. “You bring a picture?”

We sit at his kitchen table. The room smells of coffee, dog, and fly spray. Nothing in it is decorative enough to be useless.

I lay out the photographs. The old tag where we found it in the trough. The black heifer in a Barbed Crown sale pen eleven months ago, head turned away from the camera.

He reaches for reading glasses from the windowsill. “That prefix was mine before I switched systems. Doesn’t mean the tag stayed on one of mine. Those things come out.”

“Correct.”

He looks up. “Most people don’t like that answer.”

“Most people aren’t paying me to tell evidence from optimism.”

He goes and gets a cracked black binder and a butter-cookie tin full of vaccination cards bound with rubber bands. His records aren’t elegant. They’re more complete than the packet that moved his heifer through Barbed Crown.

The old tag number is there, next to a spring birth group. Left-ear notch. Black. Small white mark above the right rear hoof. A tattoo inside the right ear.

“She was open when we worked them that fall,” he says. “Held her back another season.”

“If we find her,” I say, “the tattoo could settle it.”

“If nobody cut the ear off.”

He lost six young females the week a fence crew finished on his south trap. He counted short on a Friday morning. He found one stretch of new wire loose over a dry wash. He drove the ditches for three mornings and called every sale barn he used. Then he called the county.

“Which office?” Mercer asks.

He names the deputy.