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I spent years building myself into a woman who could walk into any room under any name and leave with what she came for. The borrowed names are gone. The woman who made them convincing is still driving.

The Bureau left me the work that found the women: the carrier codes and the gray-bar charts nobody ever saw. Now those charts are the job.

The light turns green. I push the folder home and drive.

The Las Cruces fairgrounds smell like fried dough and diesel, and a spring wind off the mesa snaps the flags above the grandstand hard enough to crack.

Last season I walked through this gate wearing a crooked lanyard and a name that lived on an insurance company's payroll. Today nobody on these grounds has asked me for a name at all.

Brenda Foster leans on the intake rail at the east end in the same worn Carhartt vest, her spiral notebook braced against her forearm. A pen of steers trots past her, and her pencil moves with them. Her lips shape numbers she never says out loud.

"Same boots," she says without looking up.

"You noticed."

"I notice everything that comes through my gate. You're the insurance girl."

"Not anymore."

"I heard." The pencil keeps going. "First I heard you were FBI. Then I heard you weren't anything. Last week somebody told me you were a different kind of FBI. The circuit can't make up its mind about you."

"Carroll," I tell her. "Morgan Carroll."

She flips to the back of the notebook, to a page crowded with names in the same careful pencil, and writes mine at the bottom. "Two Rs?"

"And two Ls."

"Hmph." She underlines it. "Everybody who comes through here goes in the book sooner or later. You took your time."

A laminated placard hangs zip-tied to the rail at eye level. I passed an identical one on the contestant gate on the way in and another on the fence by the vendor row.

Transport concerns, route exceptions, or anyone who seems unsafe: call the Independent Compliance Office or talk to any Rider Watch member. You don't have to give your name.

"Does anybody actually call?" I ask.

"Enough that compliance hired a second girl to answer the phone." Brenda tips her head toward the trailer rows. A bronc rider I don't recognize walks the lane between goosenecks with a coffee in one hand and a blue patch on his sleeve. "Wade's boys walk the rows every performance now. The board made it official at the winter meeting and set up the compliance office too. They pay for it, but an outside livestock-integrity outfit staffs it and keeps the reports. Route exceptions need a second signature from somebody outside the director's office now, and the paperwork has to match the receiving facility before a trailer leaves the grounds. Nobody signs off on his own paper anymore." She sniffs. "It took two dead boys and a trailer full of women to get anybody to read a form twice."

She turns a page. "Carrick's saddle came in on my trailer. It's in the secretary's office. I hauled it from Prescott myself."

"You told me to tell him it was getting dusty."

"It was. I dusted it." Her pencil finally stops, and she looks up at me. "He paid me for the gas, then slipped me a second payment like I wouldn't notice. I'm keeping it."

The PA crackles overhead and calls contestants and families to the arena for the memorial ahead of grand entry. Brenda closes her notebook and tucks the pencil behind her ear.

"Go find him," she says. "He's been standing at that fence since they opened the gates."

He has. I find Slade alone on the arena side of the bucking chutes with his forearms on the top pipe and his hat pulled low. His competitor number is a pinned square between his shoulder blades.

He's picked one particular stretch of fence. I'd bet anything it's the stretch he went over for Grant Corbin, long before I met him, with the bull bearing down.

Slade doesn't turn his head. He'd know my stride in the dirt with his eyes shut.

"You're late," he says.

"I stopped to sign something."

His gaze drops to the bag on my shoulder and comes back to my face. It rests there, and nothing in it asks me whether I'm sure.