So she watched.
At night she sat on a park bench across from Ber’s apartment, her Amish dress and bonnet making invisibility nearly impossible except under darkness and the world’s usual inattention to women sitting quietly alone. The next morning she saw him clearly for the first time. Large. Heavy-set. Aggressive even when merely walking to his vehicle. Unkempt hair. Stained shirt. The build Zilla described.
He drove to a greasy diner, then later toward the industrial district. The next night Quilla went to the brewery.
The place looked dead until she got close enough to smell it. Fermentation. Stale beer. Yeast. And beneath it, a fouler odor she could not yet name without fully understanding.
A guard dog found her before she found a way in.
The Rottweiler lunged on its chain hard enough to nearly reach her. Its barking ripped through the stillness. If Ber had been inside, he would hear. She retreated, scraped herself under the fence, and did not stop running until she reached the road.
That failure taught her something important. She could not sneak in while Ber felt in control.
So she went to the diner.
She arrived before dawn and sat with her back to the wall and a cup of bitter coffee cooling in her hands. At 8:00 sharp, Kenton Ber came in. When he sat, she stood and walked to his booth.
He did not recognize her at first.
Then she said his name.
Then she said hers.
Then she asked what happened to her daughters and mentioned the abandoned mineshaft.
When she added the smell of yeast and connected him to the attack on Zilla, he exploded exactly the way a guilty man explodes when his secret is spoken in public. He threw the table, threatened to kill her, shouted loud enough for witnesses to hear, and finally stormed out when the diner owner threatened to call police.
That was all Quilla needed.
He had confirmed himself.
But he also nearly confirmed something worse. The moment she left the diner, he came after her.
The chase through town was chaotic and terrifying. She had no car, no phone, no knowledge of the streets. Ber pursued her openly, shouting that she had ruined everything. She cut through an alley, over a fence, through an outdoor market, and finally onto a bus just ahead of him, watching through the window as he pounded on the glass in rage while the driver pulled away.
He knew she was there now. Knew she was looking. Knew she had reached him.
That changed the equation again.
By the time night came, Quilla understood that there would not be a safer moment later. If Ber panicked enough, he might destroy whatever he was hiding or move it before Russo could secure the warrant. If one of her daughters was still alive, delay might be its own kind of sentence.
So she went back to the brewery.
Part 3
The second approach to Bitter Creek Brewing felt less like trespass than crossing a border into a place where ordinary rules had already failed.
Quilla got out of the taxi a mile away and walked the rest of the distance alone through the industrial dark. The property lay at the end of a cracked access road behind rusted fencing and overgrown weeds, the warehouse a hulking shape of metal, broken windows, and old rot. Everything about it announced abandonment from a distance. Everything about it up close announced use.
She found the gap beneath the chain-link fence and squeezed through.
Inside, the smell was even worse than before. Yeast and fermentation rolled through the night air in thick waves, but something heavier sat under it now. Decay. Filth. Stale human habitation. Sickness.
This time she did not let herself retreat.
She kept low, moved through weeds and discarded equipment, circled toward the rear, and found a broken high window in the back wall. With a pallet dragged under it and a rusted tire iron from the weeds, she smashed enough glass to clear an opening and hauled herself inside.
The warehouse swallowed light.
Moonlight came in weakly through the opening behind her. Somewhere deeper inside, machinery hummed. Water dripped. Refrigeration units ran with the low mechanical persistence of systems no one else should have been keeping alive in a place like this. The floor was slick in places. The air coated her tongue with bitterness.
As her eyes adjusted, the interior resolved into a maze of vats, rusted pipes, pallets, stacked grain sacks, discarded equipment, and long shadows. In the far section she found the makeshift living area Ber had carved out for himself. A filthy mattress. Empty bottles. Food containers. A portable television flickering in the dark. Most disturbing of all were the walls. They were covered in black-marker scrawlings—twisted religious phrases, misogynistic condemnations, warped ritual language, and bitter declarations against the Amish.
It was not just evidence of crime.
It was evidence of a mind that had made hatred into liturgy.
