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Hector has worked my gate for years. They beat an old man, and he's mine.

Under the picture is a text. It went to Audrey's phone, so it's written to her.

Rusk paid you to bring her in. Finish the job. Hollister's gate man came running when he heard a girl crying in the ditch. The preacher's girl walks up Whitlock's front drive by sundown Monday. By herself. Anybody comes with her; the old man goes in the ground next to Royce. Tell her Dutch is still asking after her.

Delilah stands. She leaves the marker copy where it is and walks around the far end of the table, so she doesn't have to pass within reach of me.

At the back door she presses the release button, and the magnetic lock lets go without a sound.

Through the glass I watch her cross the yard to the horse barn. Audrey steps out of the aisle to meet her, and Delilah walks straight past her without a word.

She disappears into the barn. She'll be in the tack room. I screwed a bolt to the inside of that door myself, so she'd have one door on this place she could lock against anybody. Now she's locking it against me.

My right hand closes into a fist. The pantry door is an arm's length away, solid cedar, and I want to put that fist through it so bad my shoulder aches.

Saturday night I told Dutch that if he came through my gate again, he wouldn't drive back out of it. He never came through it. He got Hector to walk out of it instead. The way I see it, Dutch still owes me on that one.

I open my hand and set it on the table beside the page. I don't touch her on a day I've hit something in anger. If I hit that door, I can't put my hands on her tonight, even if she asks me to.

I photograph the picture of Hector and the text with my own phone, in case Audrey's phone goes somewhere I can't follow. Beckett comes in while I'm doing it, sees the page on the table, and keeps his mouth shut about it.

I tell him to watch that barn, and I drive Audrey's phone down to the gate.

Torres told Delilah to call her herself, not through me, and I've kept to that. I hand the phone to the agent standing in my ditch, who reads the text twice and calls Torres from the shoulder of the county road while I wait.

When the call ends, I forward the picture and the text from Audrey's phone to Torres. The agent calls the number it came from, and nobody answers. Torres wants to hear from Delilah first, and until she does, nobody goes near that hill.

Jesse calls while I'm driving back up. "A dually went through the low-water crossing last night," he says. "The tracks were still wet on both banks, and I photographed them from the truck. It could be the truck that turned around at your gate, or any dually in the Hill Country. Mud won't hold a tread well enough to swear to."

Before dawn I drew that crossing on the map and wrote Gil Strackbein's name beside it. It's the short way from Kerrville to Whitlock's back fence, and Gil hauls cattle out of Kerrville in a truck big enough to leave tracks like that. Delilah heard his voice through my barn wall, and he isn't on Hendricks's list of approved haulers. None of that proves he drove through that creek.

"That's Gil's road," I tell Jesse. "Or it belongs to somebody who knows it as well as he does."

I tell him about the picture and the text. He's quiet a while.

"Raven watched Dutch's diesel go up that front drive Saturday night," he says. "Neither of us has seen it come back down."

"Get back on the ridge road. Raven watches the front gate. Nothing moves on that hill without one of you seeing it."

When Jesse hangs up, I text Ozzie. Half the haulers in this county have stood in my barn on a Saturday night, and they sell at the same sale barns Gil does. I tell Ozzie to ask them quietly whether Gil has turned down any loads this week. Nobody asks Gil a damn thing.

When I get back to the house, Beckett holds the back door for Audrey, and she follows me into the kitchen. She looks at the marker copy on the table, then at me.

"You want to throw me off your place," she says. "Go ahead."

"Later," I tell her. "Right now, you're useful. Why did Rusk put that card in your file?"

"To point me at you, near as I can tell," she says. "He never said so. But he set it next to your name, so I'd look hard at the man who sold the marker and never once at the man who bought it."

"Tell him about the pickup on the road," Beckett says.

"A white pickup was parked on the shoulder down from your gate this morning, nose toward town," Audrey says. "I took it for a rancher checking cattle. Thinking back, it was too clean for that. No mud, no feed sacks, no dog box. I couldn't see anybody in the cab, and I didn't get the plate."

Coleman Whitlock drove a clean white pickup into the church lot to look at Delilah. Plenty of deacons in this county drive one just like it.

I text Ozzie a second question.

Who in town drives a white pickup that's never hauled a thing?