Six names.
Five of them are men I've already run.
One of them I flagged.
Todd Whitley—lifelong friend, best man at the wedding, and pallbearer.
There's a yellow tag next to his name on my screen.
Yellow because I'm not ready to make it red yet.
I put it there the day I read the obit, two months ago, because something about the way the funeral home had written him into the announcement didn't sit right with me.
Best man at the wedding and pallbearer is a man whose face you'd expect to see in the wedding photos.
He's not in any of the ones I pulled. Not the rehearsal dinner. Not the ceremony. Not the reception.
He's not in a single photograph with Hadley that I can find online.
But he's in three with Garrett.
And in two of the three, he's looking at Hadley.
Not at the camera.
AtHadley.
I look at the yellow tag for a long second, then I close the file.
* * *
The black sedan is what I'm thinking about when I leave the cabin for the dog walk in the late afternoon.
I haven't told Phantom about it yet.
Last week, on Thursday, I clocked it on the county road about a mile past the western fence on my morning walk.
Black, four-door, late model, rented—I ran the plate from my monitors the same afternoon and it came back to a Hertz in San Antonio paid for in cash by a man whose name doesn't matter because it isn't real.
The sedan was gone by sundown. I haven't seen it since.
It's not the kind of thing I'd usually bother Phantom with.
I've been in a cold-file holding pattern with the firm for almost a decade. They watch. They don't engage. Every couple years they roll a new asset past the ranch to make sure I'm still here.
The sedan could be that. Fuck, it probably is that.
But something about the timing is sitting wrong with me.
Two months after Hadley moves in, and after Phantom's deposit accounts started carrying a balance that's worth somebody's attention.
I don't believe in coincidences. I never have.
I head down to the kennel.
Nash is already there.
He's standing outside the chain-link with his stuffed Stitch tucked under one arm and a football tucked under the other.