Chapter 4
“Good,” Desmond said, nodding approvingly. “Now leave the servers alone for today. Come upstairs. Sheriff Miller just pulled into the gravel lot. He said he found some fresh tire tracks cutting through the brush down by the south culvert. Might be your thief making runs out toward the highway.”
Kit’s pulse spiked. “Miller’s here?”
“Up in the front office. Come on up out of the dark, son. We take care of our own business up in the light.”
***
Sheriff Miller was leaning against the laminate counter upstairs, his wide-brimmed felt hat resting beside a plate of half-eaten buttermilk biscuits.
Miller was forty-five, lean and wiry, with a hawk-like nose and sharp, hollow temples that made his eyes seem sunken deep into their sockets. Unlike Desmond’s rough flannel, Miller wore the crisp tan uniform of the county constabulary, though the collar was buttoned unusually high, fastened tight against his throat despite the warmth of the depot’s cast-iron woodstove.
“Kit,” Miller said, straightening up as Kit and Desmond came through the security door.
Miller smiled, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. As he smiled, Kit caught the faint, unmistakable smell coming off him—the same pungent, roasted chicory that Desmond smelled of, overlaid with a heavy, cloying application of talcum powder.
Under the fluorescent lights, Kit noticed something he had never paid attention to before: the skin of Miller’s neck, just above the starched collar, was covered in a thick layer of flesh-colored cosmetic foundation. It had been dusted on hastily; a tiny smear of it had rubbed off on the khaki fabric, exposing a pencil-thin patch of skin underneath that was mottled with dark, purplish-grey marbling.
“Desmond tells me somebody’s been playing fast and loose with your signature,” Miller said, resting his hand on his holstered sidearm. His hand was clad in a tight black leather shooting glove.
Even indoors, standing two feet from an iron stove radiating ninety degrees of wood heat, Miller kept the gloves on.
“Not just my signature,” Kit said, watching the deputy’s face. “They used a silicone cast of my thumb. Someone had access to my private quarters or my lab.”
Miller’s left eyebrow twitched. He pulled his leather-clad hand away from his holster and adjusted his belt buckle. “Silicone. That’s high-tech for these hills. We’re mostly axe-handles and siphon hoses around here.”
“Which means whoever is doing it has a buyer lined up outside,” Kit said. “Someone down in the lowlands is paying for pure Class-IV buffer. And our thief is getting bold enough to think he won’t get caught.”
Miller nodded slowly. “Well, I ran the perimeter fence down along the creek road like Desmond asked. Found fresh dual-track treads cutting off Route 9 into the brush behind the old irrigation pump-station. Heavy utility tires. Looked like a four-wheel-drive flatbed.”
“Did you follow the tracks?” Kit asked.
“Sun was coming up, washing out the frost,” Miller said, reaching for a biscuit with his gloved fingers, then hesitating and pulling his hand back. “Figured I’d come get you first. It’s federal property down by the weir. Don’t want to go trampling your jurisdiction without the liaison giving the nod.”
“I’ll drive down there now,” Kit said, turning toward the door.
“Hold your horses, Kit,” Desmond interrupted, stepping into his path with an easy, massive shoulder. “You haven’t finished Clara’s tea. And you look pale. Miller, doesn’t he look pale to you?”
Miller’s sunken eyes drifted over Kit’s face, cataloging his skin with a clinical, predatory intensity that made Kit’s hair stand on end.
“Drawn around the eyes,” Miller murmured softly. His breath carried that sharp, coppery tang through the air between them. “He’s working too hard. Missing his sleep.”
“I’m fine,” Kit snapped, his patience wearing thin under the claustrophobic weight of their attention. “It’s a five-minute drive to the irrigation weir. If someone’s using the old access roads to stash federal cargo, every hour we waste gives them time to move it.”
“I’ll ride with you,” Miller offered immediately.
“No,” Kit said, firm and sharp. “I need to run the environmental soil core around the culvert anyway to make sure there wasn't a container rupture. If a Class-IV ampoule cracked during transport, the chemical vapor will sterilize the groundwater in an hour. You don't have the hazmat respirator. I do.”
Miller looked at Desmond.
A silent, micro-second glance passed between the two older men. It wasn’t a look of confusion; it was a calibrated assessment, a quiet calculation between two partners who didn't need words to agree on a border.
Desmond sighed, patting Kit’s shoulder twice with that heavy, cool hand. “Take his truck, then. But you take a thermos of bone broth from the back fridge, and you don’t stay out past noon. If you’re not back by lunch, Kit, I’m sending the road crew out to drag you in. We can’t have our federal boy dropping from exhaustion in the brush.”
“Understood,” Kit said, pulling his pack over his shoulder and turning the brass latch on the depot’s exit door.
As he pushed the heavy door open, he glanced back over his shoulder.
Neither Desmond nor Miller had moved. They stood side-by-side under the buzzing fluorescent tubes, framed against the grey metal shelves of the federal depot. Miller was staring at Kit’s retreating back, his gloved thumb rhythmically tapping the leather of his holster, while Desmond stood motionless, his pale, blunt face entirely stripped of its warm smile, watching Kit with the still, unblinking focus of an owl in the rafters.
***
The gravel road leading down to the Blackwood Irrigation Facility was choked with blackberry brambles and dying pine scrub.
The facility itself was a relic from the 1960s—a brutalist concrete bunker built into the side of the limestone gorge where the mountain runoff was diverted into the valley’s agricultural canals. The valley’s entire water supply passed through these sluice gates before it was treated with federal biocides.
Kit killed the engine of his government-issued pickup twenty yards from the concrete intake apron.
The silence of the canyon settled over him instantly, broken only by the steady, muffled roar of the mountain water plunging through the subterranean turbines.
Kit climbed out, leaving his hazmat pack in the cab. He didn’t need a respirator. He knew there was no leak. The Class-IV stabilizer didn’t vaporize into the air; it was an injectable liquid buffer, thick as motor oil and twice as stable.
He walked toward the tire tracks Miller had mentioned.
The tracks were there, pressed deep into the muddy moss beside the chain-link gate. But as Kit knelt down to inspect them, his jaw hardened.
The tread pattern wasn’t a mystery flatbed.
The chevron-pattern lugs, the distinct diagonal slice missing from the left-rear tire wall, the thirty-two-inch wheel base—it was the exact signature of the county sheriff’s departmental cruisers.
Miller hadn’t found these tracks. Miller had made them.
Kit stood up, his heart thudding a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. He unclipped his field tablet from his belt, pulled his hand-held optical scanner from his pocket, and approached the padlocked gate of the irrigation weir.
The federal brass padlock hung open on its hasp.
Someone had slipped a thin strip of shim-steel into the locking cylinder, popping the latch without marring the exterior. Kit pushed the chain-link gate aside and stepped onto the damp concrete walkway spanning the sluice canal.
