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"Hector took his flashlight out to that ditch and went to whatever was lying there," I say. My voice cracks, and I make myself keep going. "He found me facedown in your hay. If somebody was lying hurt in that ditch, he'd go to them first and reach for his radio after."

"That's a guess."

"It's Hector."

Knox stands in the open gate with his pistol down along his leg and stares at the ditch. "I'd bet they got him to walk out of it," he says, low and quiet. He looks down the dark road where the tracks went. "Then they didn't come for you tonight. They came for somebody they can trade for you. When they call, you'll hear it the minute I do."

Knox orders Beckett to park his truck across the gate behind Hector's and sit there with his rifle. Then Knox calls Jesse and puts him on speaker.

"Nothing's come down off Whitlock's hill since Raven watched Dutch's diesel go up his front drive," Jesse says. "Not out his front gate, and not down the gravel to the back one."

"How did anybody get from Whitlock's hill to my gate, then?"

The night I got out, I climbed a pipe gate at the top of Whitlock's vineyard with cracked ribs and no shoes. The gate stands over a cattle guard, steel pipes laid across a pit. When I dropped down, my bare feet slid between the cold, wet pipes, and I nearly went into the pit.

"Over the top," I say. "There's a pipe gate in the deer fence on the ridge above his vines. I went over it when I ran. There's a road on the other side. That's where I saw the county sign."

Knox looks at me. "You hear that, Jesse?"

"I heard it. I'm not far from that road."

"Not in the dark. You put a light up on that ridge tonight, and Whitlock knows we've found the way off the back of his place. Go at first light, on the public road, and don't step off it."

Knox ends the call and hands me his phone. "Torres told you to call her yourself. Call her."

I find her number from earlier tonight and put her on speaker. She answers before the first ring ends and doesn't say hello. I tell her what's lying in Knox's ditch in a few short words.

"Leave it exactly where it is," Torres says. "I'm not calling the sheriff's office. I'm bringing in a Texas Ranger I've worked with to work the scene on your county road. She'll be at your gate at sunrise with one of my agents from San Antonio. My people stay on Whitlock and the hauling."

"What came back on the plates?" Knox asks.

"The diesel is titled to Royce Voelkel, at a rural route address outside Comfort, down in Kendall County. Another Voelkel at that address is in his forties and holds a commercial driver's license. Nobody has ever reported a Royce Voelkel missing."

Nobody reported Royce missing. His brother found him dead on my cell floor and never called the law. Dutch is driving a dead man's truck.

"Strackbein's truck is his own," Torres goes on. "Strackbein Livestock, Kerrville. He isn't on Hendricks's list of approved livestock haulers. I'm checking whether he's ever pulled a trailer for a carrier that is."

"His truck was the last one out of my gate after the fights tonight," Knox says. "I'm calling him."

"You call him, and you've warned him. Nobody goes near Gil Strackbein, and nobody goes up Whitlock's drive. If Whitlock has Mr. Saldaña, the first person through his gate without a warrant gives him every reason to make Mr. Saldaña disappear."

The line goes dead, and I hand Knox his phone. He pulls up Gil's number and stands there with his thumb over it. Then he puts the phone in his pocket.

We walk back up the cedar road to the fight barn for Knox's truck, and we spend the rest of the night in the cab.

Knox doesn't start with the fence lines. He drives straight to a black concrete slab in the weeds behind the old pens, where a barn burned down years ago. He holds the spotlight on it himself for a long time.

"Bo kept men in a cellar under that barn," he says. "Jesse burned it. I still check it."

He turns the truck toward the pastures. "If I'm wrong about the trade and they only wanted Hector out of the way, he's somewhere on my land."

I hold the spotlight out my window while Knox drives. We run the fence lines and check the creek crossings, the stock tanks where the cattle drink, and the thick stands of cedar. We don't find Hector, alive or dead.

Between pastures, Knox calls Audrey Treadmore and tells her to meet him at his gate at daybreak with Rusk's file. He has Ozzie put the word out on Dutch's diesel and Gil's stock truck. When there's nowhere left to look, we drive back to the house.

In the last dark before dawn, Knox walks into his office and comes back to the kitchen with a county map and the stub of a red pencil. He spreads the map across the table and pins one curling corner under his radio. The only voice on that radio since midnight has been Beckett's, checking in from the gate.

The map is old. It's soft at the creases, and red pencil covers it. Nearly every back road out of Fredericksburg has a red line drawn along it. Some are traced so many times the paper has worn shiny. The lot behind the Cattle Guard has a red circle around it, gone over and over until the paper has almost torn through.