Chapter 4
THE WOMAN AT THE LICENSING board’s regional office takes my report through the slot in the glass without looking at me twice, and I want to grab the edge of the counter and tell her what she’s handling.
This is the real one. Somewhere in your system, there’s a fake with my number on it, and I need you to know which is which before it matters.
I don’t say any of it. Twelve years I’ve been filing through that slot, stamped reports on the worst days of strangers’ lives, and the clerk has never once needed to know my name because the license number was the trust.
Now there are two versions with that number in her system.
One of them is a lie, and she’s processing both with the same indifference she’d give a parking permit.
I slide the folder through. She stamps a receipt and prints a confirmation number.
I fold it into my wallet behind my license, behind the card with my title on it, behind twelve years of work that used to mean something uncomplicated.
The license still means what it meant on Tuesday. It just doesn’t feel like it.
The clerk does ask one thing. “You want this flagged for the open complaint, or filed clean?”
So there’s already an open complaint. I keep my face calm. Fake calm has gotten me through collapsed floors, grieving homeowners, and adjusters trying to talk me out of what I can see with my own eyes. “What complaint?”
She checks her screen. Whatever she sees makes her decide she’s said too much.
“You’ll get a letter. I can’t get into it at the counter.
” She turns back to her keyboard, so the conversation is over, and I’m standing at a government window with a receipt in my hand and a complaint I didn’t file already moving through the system.
I walk out into the lot with a confirmation number and the knowledge that the machinery has already started turning without telling me.
That’s when I find the card under my windshield wiper.
It has nothing on it but a name and a number in pen.
M. Anderson. I recognize the truck before I find it, the state vehicle parked three spaces down with him leaning against the door, arms crossed, waiting like he had all day to.
“You followed me to the board office?”
“I’ve had a standing request with the board for two months.
Any filing that touches a fire origin report, they flag it to me.
That’s the paper trail nobody thinks to watch.
” He pushes off the door. Up close, he looks worse than he did at the barn, gray under the eyes, and running on something other than sleep.
“I recognized your truck. I came by for a different reason, not stalking.” His gives a brief smile.
” I was tracking altered structural reports tied to the same origin investigators, and another one surfaced this morning.
Eagle Point. Jim Pruett’s name, two different versions, same license number. ”
“Pruett?”
“You know him?”
“Everybody knows Pruett. He read burned structures for ninety years. If his reports don’t match, something’s wrong.” I unlock my truck. “What does that have to do with me?”
“You and Pruett work the same fires. You file with the same board. You’re both structural engineers assessing properties where my sister’s killer signed the origin report.
” He doesn’t soften it. “My sister died in that fire. Your husband signed the origin and cause. I’ve read it forty times, and it’s wrong.
I can’t make anybody listen because I’m the grieving brother and your husband is the man with the credentials.
I’m asking the one person who might read a burn pattern and tell me I’m not wrong. ”
“You think I’m going to help you investigate my husband?” I put my hand on the truck door. “You came to the wrong person.”
“He told you I’m unstable.” Matthew says it without heat. “He told you I’ve been driving around the county attaching my sister to every fire I can find. He probably said it kindly. Concerned. Poor Anderson, can’t accept an accident.”
That stops my hand on the door, because it’s almost word for word what he would say if he’d mentioned Matthew, though he didn’t.
“He’s not subtle when he thinks he’s winning,” Matthew says.
“He ran the same play on the fire captain who questioned the Bram Hollow timeline. He got him reassigned to a desk in Klamath Falls inside a month. Quietly. A word here, a concern there about the poor guy’s taking his daughter’s accident hard, you know how it is.
It’s not the first time he’s made the wrong call on a fatal fire. ”
A few days ago, I wouldn’t have believed my husband could be so careless. A lot has changed in a short time.
“By the time anybody looked into this fire, the only person asking questions is the dead woman’s brother, and the dead woman’s brother is easy to dismiss.
” He says it without self-pity. He’s reporting a tactic he’s already survived.
“He’ll do it to you too. He’s probably started.
How long before someone asks you, gently, whether you’ve been yourself since the separation? ”
Shanna, on the phone, warm and sorry. I know things are hard for you right now. She hasn’t called yet. She will to gloat if nothing else.
“Here’s a thing you can check yourself, so you don’t have to take it from me.
The Bram Hollow report says the fire started in the southeast corner of the structure, electrical, around eleven p.m. My sister’s crew got dispatched at ten-forty.
They were called to a structure already fully involved twenty minutes before your husband says it started.
” He lets that sit. “Pull the dispatch log. It’s public.
You’ll see the fire was burning before the report says it could have been.
He didn’t get the time wrong by accident.
He got it wrong because the real timeline puts somebody at that structure setting it. ”
I should get in the truck. I have a marriage on fire, a forged report with my name on it, and no room left for a stranger’s dead sister. My own problems are more than enough for one week. I get in the truck and put in the key.
“What was her name?” I ask through the open door, before I can decide not to.
The investigator drops off him all at once, the directness, the case, and the forty readings of the report. What’s under it is just a man who hasn’t slept.
“Hallie.” He looks at the asphalt. “She was twenty-six. She kept a Saint Florian medal clipped to her radio strap, patron saint of firefighters, which she thought was funny because she wasn’t religious.
She just liked that somebody was supposed to be watching out for her.
” He stops for a second, swallowing. “They gave me back the medal. It was the only part that didn’t burn. ”
He’s not performing it. I’ve spent seventeen years married to a man who I’ve realized performs everything, and the difference registers in my body before it reaches my head. Rick would have stared earnestly into my eyes saying that. He’d have watched my response and adjust as needed.
Matthew is looking at the ground because he isn’t running an angle. I’ve been so braced for one that the absence is what lowers my guard.
I take my hand off the key. “The dispatch log from Bram Hollow? You said ten-forty.”
“Ten-forty dispatch. Report says ignition at eleven.” Something cautious crosses his face. He’s been disbelieved so many times he doesn’t trust the turn. “You’ll check it?”
“I’ll check it.” I pull the door shut, then roll down the window.
“You’ve got Pruett’s Eagle Point mismatch.
I’ve got another one. There’s a structural report with my license number on it that I didn’t write.
It condemns a half-repairable house as a total loss and schedules it for full demolition.
A carrier read it to that family this morning as if I’d written it.
” I let him sit with that. “Two forgeries, same trick. Push the damage finding toward demolition so the contractor gets the job. Structural findings are mine. That’s a thing only an engineer can show you.
” I start the engine. “Where’s your office? ”
“I don’t have a local office.” He almost smiles. “There’s a coffee place on Hatcher that opens at six. Tomorrow? Bring the report.”
I’m pulling out of the lot before I consider what I just agreed to.
I drove to the board office this morning as a woman ending a marriage, and I’m driving away from it as a woman starting an investigation, and my new partner has every reason to hate the name I share with the man we’re both about to take apart.
I keep waiting to feel reckless. What I feel instead is steady. I’ve been handed a thing I can measure, and measuring is the one place I’ve never been wrong.