Chapter 5

The call that ended the afternoon came from an area code in Billings, and it went to the range shack's landline, which Pruitt answered with two words and then stood listening with his shoulders going rigid by degrees, like a man being measured for a coat he didn't want to wear.

When he hung up, he walked across the gate apron without looking at anyone, his boots hitting the asphalt with the flat, heavy rhythm of a man walking toward something he couldn't avoid. He stopped at the edge of the concrete barrier where Whitfield sat with the property book closed on her knees, and he held out his hand, palm up.

"The card," he said. Not an order. Not a bark. Just the flat statement of a man who had run out of other moves.

Whitfield's hand tightened around the paper in her pocket. "Why?"

"Because the unit commander just called." Pruitt's voice was level, but there was a crack in it, a hairline like the one in the asphalt at the county line. "He heard about the serial mismatch from the armory office. He wants the full chain of custody on that rifle by 1700 today, and he wants to know where the other one is."

"The other one," Whitfield repeated. "There's another one?"

Pruitt's jaw worked. "The registry flagged a second serial this afternoon. Another rifle from this unit's inventory was reported lost in shipment to a depot in March — the same week Gaines went on leave. It never arrived. The depot filed a discrepancy report, and it sat in a queue for ten weeks because nobody flagged it as critical." He looked at Hector, and the look was different from the one he'd worn all day. It was smaller, and older. "The first sergeant just found the report in a stack of files that were supposed to have been signed off in April."

Reyes picked up the thread. "Ten weeks, Pruitt. Ten weeks a report's been sitting in your office, and you're just now finding it?"

"It wasn't my office." The words came out flat, but there was an edge underneath, something that might have been shame or might have been the first crack in a wall he'd held up all day. "The deputy moved it up the chain the day it came in. It sat in a queue for the commander's signature, and when it didn't get one, it went to the bottom of a stack instead of back to the depot." He stopped. "I didn't see it until this afternoon."

"You didn't see it because you signed the leave extension," Reyes said. "Because you put a soldier on extended leave without verifying his status, without a note from his mother, without a return date, and then you let the paperwork for a missing rifle sit in the same office for ten weeks."