The Vixen’s idle died with a purr as the bay door rumbled shut. John was waiting at the threshold, arms crossed, grease on his sleeve, expression set to “disappointed uncle.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure if you’re a sadist or a masochist,” he said.

Coraline popped the seal on her helmet and kept walking. “I know it was supposed to be stealth. I did what was right, it netted results, and I’m not in a body bag—so save the lecture… mom.”

He snorted. “Cute. Med bay. Now.”

She brushed past, but he was already pressing a cold pack into her hand. “Face is fine,” she said.

“Not for your face. For the shoulder you’re pretending doesn’t exist.” He motioned to her shoulder to remind her she was still banged up after her encounter with Bloodletter a few days ago.

She gave him the quick-and-dirty: “Ghost guns sunk. Trackers alive. Four loaders napping, one foreman sang—white male, solid build, older white pickup, cash buyer, plates obscured. Armor and smoke were purchased to spec, not browse.”

John’s jaw worked, then eased. “Okay. That’s… good work.” A beat. “And loud work.”

“Yeah,” she admitted, deadpan. “Loud on purpose.”

He rolled his eyes, but the edge was gone. “I’ve got two pings steady on the van and box truck. RCMP will trip over your UV fox-head at dawn, and I masked your fireworks with a phantom transformer surge on the grid logs. Next time, give me five minutes’ warning before you drop a crate into Lake Ontario?”

“Tell them next time, don’t leave ghost guns on my waterfront.”

“Touche.” He held out a gloved hand. “Gauntlets.”

She surrendered them. He checked hinges and mounting rails, then nodded, satisfied. “Kitsune no tsume survive their debut. Minimal scuffing. You owe me a field note on grip indexing.”

“You’ll get prose,” she said. “Maybe a haiku.”

“Spare me.” He jerked his head toward the war room. “Dump whatever you pulled—faces, plates, chatter. I’ll start a sweep on older white pickups with consistent night parking near Bloor, plus clinics for shoulder punctures.”

Coraline cracked the cold pack and set it against her shoulder with a hiss. “Run it. Then coffee.”

“Coffee after peroxide,” he said, already moving. “And Cora?”

She paused in the doorway.

“Good job. Try not to get yourself killed doing the next one.”

“No promises,” she said, and meant: I’ll be careful.

They did a quick patch-and-go in the med bay—peroxide, steri-strips, a cold pack jammed under Coraline’s collar—then sank back into the glow of the war room. The Den hummed; the coffee maker burred; the wall clock shouldered its way past midnight.

John scrubbed a hand over his face and leaned away from his screen. “Everything I’m pulling is mush. Plates lead to rentals, the van’s on a shell company, and the pier cameras were ‘mysteriously’ pointed at the gulls. You?”

“About the same.” Coraline didn’t look up. “I pushed our prelims to Detective Benoit. Meanwhile I’m chasing a line she flagged in her notes—something that smelled wrong and local.”

She flicked through digitized clippings. Headlines from Guelph stacked on her monitor: missing student, missing apprentice, body found in rural outbuilding.

John leaned in. “What’s the line?”

“Copycat versus prelude,” Coraline said, rolling the tension out of her neck. “Three years back: cluster of missing young men in Wellington County and one confirmed homicide. The homicide’s the tell.” She tapped a photo of an old barn, police tape snapping in wind. “Victim strung up in an abandoned barn, throat cut over a blood bucket.”

John’s mouth tightened. “Dad and I used to dress deer in sheds. That’s… specific.”

“Victim was an enforcer on a local hockey team. Big kid. Whoever did him had the strength to haul him and the discipline to keep it quiet—no defensive wounds, no panic cut. Posture and drainage, not a frenzy.”

John nodded slowly. “So, strong, quiet, precise. Ambush kill. And the drain. Reads like our guy.”

Coraline clicked to another file. “The missing-persons overlap is thin, but it’s there—the school. All of them passed through the same high school within a four-year band. Benoit thought the cases smelled related; they got shelved on lack of evidence.”

“Revenge?” John ventured. “Bullied kid turns butcher?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t think ‘hunter.’ I think ‘farmer.’”

He raised an eyebrow. “Explain.”

“A hunter follows sign and takes the shot he gets. A farmer creates conditions,” Coraline said, eyes on the barn photo. “Tools staged. Space controlled. Drainage managed. He doesn’t chase; he corrals. The barn choice isn’t whim—it’s a room he understands. Hoists, buckets, slings. You can run a carcass line alone if you know your angles.”

John’s gaze slid to the map. “Guelph’s ringed with barns, abattoirs, and co-ops. The university runs ag programs. You’re thinking he grew up around this?”

“I’m thinking familiarity,” Coraline said. “Someone for whom a hoist isn’t exotic, for whom blood is workflow not taboo. The hockey enforcer angle suggests a grievance vector—dominance dynamics at school—but the method says trade knowledge. Apprenticeships. Farm work. Butcher shops. It fits our ‘farmer’ more than a woods hunter or the medical professional theory floating around.”

He grunted. “So what’s the play?”

“Timeline and geography.” She dragged a circle over a map tile—Guelph to Bloor. “Three years back: list every farm-adjacent workplace within a thirty-kilometer radius of that barn—abattoirs, locker plants, meat counters, co-ops. Cross with the high school roster from that span and anyone who later shows up in Toronto with a butcher’s résumé or access to a walk-in. Then overlay missing-persons dates against seasonal labor cycles. Farmers and meat plants run on calendars.”

John was already typing. “And older white pickups registered to anyone in those buckets.”

“Plus late-night clinic visits for shoulder punctures in the last week,” she added. “And any cash buyers of smoke canisters from the likely distributors you pulled.”

He shot her a sideways look. “Farmer, huh?”

She nodded once. “Farmers feed, cull, and keep records. Our guy feeds himself myth, culls his ‘herd,’ and curates the aftermath. He’s not chasing chaos—he’s maintaining a ritual.”

“And rituals can be mapped,” John said, more to the keys than to her.

“Exactly.” Coraline saved the search parameters and pushed the job to crunch. “Let’s grow a field and see what pops.”

Coraline rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Yeah. If the first rupture happened when he was sixteen or seventeen, anything official is sealed. Juvenile court, school discipline—the works.”

John swiveled, grimacing at his spreadsheet. “And out here every second driveway has a pickup. ‘Farm-adjacent’ plus ‘owns a truck’ narrows us from ‘everyone’ to… ‘most everyone.’ Great.”

“Then we stop looking for court paper and look for shadows,” Vulpes said. “Stuff that isn’t sealed because it was never ‘official.’ Yearbooks. Team rosters. Local news blurbs. School board minutes. Coop placement lists. Trophy engravings. ‘Barn party got out of hand’ posts in alumni groups. Anyone who had a public run-in and then transferred, anyone who disappeared mid-season.”

John perked up. “Soft records. I can scrape digitized yearbooks, community papers, and school newsletters from that four-year band. Keywords: suspension, transfer, ‘incident,’ ‘safety review.’ Cross with ag co-op partners and butcher apprenticeships.”

“Add: part-time jobs,” she said. “Locker plants, meat counters, abattoirs, co-ops. Ontario apprenticeship registries, Red Seal meat-cutter lists—anything that puts a blade in a kid’s hand early.”

He typed, then hesitated. “Sealed youth files… Liv can petition a judge if we give her probable cause.”

“Exactly. We build the probable cause from the soft trail; she knocks on the door with a warrant,” Vulpes said. “Meanwhile, we hunt the present tense.”

John nodded toward the Bloor map. “ALPR hits near our scenes? White pickups with distinctive damage or aftermarket lights?”

“I’ll ping some cameras and canvass in person,” she said. “Closing time, behind-the-counter talk: ask about a quiet, precise guy who sharpens like a religion. Butcheries, small grocers, late-night clinics near Bloor.”

He kept going, momentum returning. “I’ll mine plates around each dump window for repeaters, then filter for trucks with mismatched panels or custom racks. Also scraping Facebook alumni groups for ‘remember when’ posts. People love to confess to each other twenty years later.”

“Send anything promising to Benoit,” Vulpes said. “If juvenile records exist, she’s our key.”

John flicked his eyes to the job queue. “Scrapes running. Traffic cam request in. Jerry’s profile check should land by morning.”

Vulpes pushed back from the desk. “Good. I’ll do a sweep of butchers on Bloor, then sleep in two-hour chunks and pretend it helped.”

John snorted. “Text me if ‘sleep’ turns into ‘stakeout.’ And if you see a white pickup with a driver who moves like he’s guarding a shoulder? Don’t be a hero.”

She was already pulling on her cowl. “I don’t play hero John” she said, dry and he rolled his eyes catching her subtle emphasis on the word “play”,

Liv woke to her phone’s priority klaxon sawing through the last threads of sleep. She killed the alarm, pawed for her work laptop, and prayed Jerry had something. The inbox said otherwise: sender “Sly_F0X99,” subject line “Intel on the case.”

Great. Relief and irritation arrived in the same breath. So the arrangement might actually pay off—also, how in hell did the Vulpes get her secure work email?

She hovered a second, cop-brain kicking in. No links. No auto-preview. She pulled the Wi-Fi, spun up the air-gapped VM, and opened headers first: anonymized relay, SPF neutral, no obvious spoof flags. Of course. Vigilante OPSEC with a sense of theater.

Attachments sat there like little landmines—“dock_cam.jpg,” “notes.txt,” “plates.pdf.” She sandboxed each one, eyes scanning. If this was real, it wouldn’t be evidence; it would be a tip she’d have to backfill with her own chain-of-custody. Lead, not gospel.

“Okay, fox,” she muttered, rubbing the grit from her eyes. “You’re clever. Stay clever.”

Another ping. Same alias. Subject: Followed your notes about the Guelph incident, notes attached.Another ping. Same alias. Subject: Followed your notes about the Guelph incident, notes attached.

Liv exhaled through her nose. Clever fox—or reckless. Attachments: a cropped satellite map with three circles south of Guelph, a one-pager of bulleted “observations,” and a time-stacked list of missing-persons dates bracketing the barn homicide.

She previewed in the sandbox only. The bullets were tight and—annoyingly—useful: farm adjacency; pickup density along two concession roads; a note that the victim’s high school overlapped the missing men’s yearbooks by two years; and a line that read, “Drain frame suggests practiced animal dressing → look at home butchery, 4H/FFA, abattoir temps.”

“Not bad,” she murmured, despite herself.

No reply over RCMP mail. She printed to a burner folder, logged receipt in her private case notes (not the main log), and started her to-do stack:

• Request Guelph PD’s full file through the formal channel.
  
  
• CPIC pulls on the MP dates; cross with rural property rolls within the mapped radius.
  
  
• Quiet call to the provincial vet/abattoir inspector about temps in that window.
  
  
• Yearbooks and team rosters: confirm the overlap, not trust it.
  
  

On the agreed quiet channel she typed only: Received. Will verify independently. Do not use RCMP email again.

Then she closed the lid, finished her grocery list in her head—bread, milk, deli—and reached for a fresh legal pad. Leads were leads. 

She didn’t reply further to any of the emails. For now, she logged the time and started a list titled “Independent Corroboration.” If the intel held water, she’d make it RCMP-clean. If it didn’t, she’d know before anyone in Ottawa knew she’d looked.