Chapter 14
THE CHARGES COME IN three waves, and each one takes a piece of the architecture Rick built.
The first wave is arson and conspiracy. Eight counts between them, covering the Trentham yard fire and three of the eleven properties where the recovered records show accelerant purchase orders matched to Rick’s investigation dates.
Shanna is charged alongside him. She negotiated the Trentham contracts, approved the inflated cleanup invoices, and steered the insurance payouts on every fire in the spreadsheet.
Their attorney files for separate proceedings within the hour, which tells me what I already knew.
The partnership held only as long as neither was facing consequences. They’ll turn on each other soon enough.
The second wave is insurance fraud and evidence tampering.
Fourteen counts. The altered structural reports, including mine and Pruett’s, form the backbone of the tampering charges.
Pruett flies in from Lakeview to give his deposition, and I sit in the hallway at the courthouse in Medford, listening to his footsteps on the marble as he paces.
He’s wearing a dress shirt that looks like it came out of a suitcase, and he carries a laptop bag that holds the originals he kept on a hard drive in his RV for a year because he couldn’t bring himself to delete them and couldn’t bring himself to use them.
He goes into that deposition room a man who took an exit he shouldn’t have taken.
When he comes out, he looks at me and nods once.
I nod back. We are two engineers who wrote down what was true and had it turned into something false.
We both know the difference between the man who forged our work and the version of ourselves who let it happen.
The third wave is the one that matters most to Matthew.
Prosecutors charge felony murder, arguing Hallie Anderson died during the commission of the arson-and-fraud conspiracy.
The Bram Hollow evidence, the slab analysis, the dispatch-log discrepancy, the false wildland-threat call, and Hallie’s own notebook measurements prove the fire was deliberately set, and the call that put her inside was manufactured.
Prosecutors argue the arson supports the murder charge because Hallie died during the commission of the conspiracy, and the conspiracy killed a twenty-six-year-old firefighter who walked into a building because someone told her there was a person to save.
I think about that sentence every time I read it in the filing.
Someone told her there was a person to save.
Hallie went in because she believed the call.
She believed it because that’s what firefighters do.
They go where they’re told. They trust the information is real.
The information was a lie designed to put a body in a building designed to collapse and stop the questions she was asking.
She died doing her job on the strength of someone else’s lie. My husband’s lie.
Matthew calls me the morning the felony murder charge is filed. He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. I hear him breathing on the other end of the line, and I wait.
“They filed charges,” he says.
“I know.”
“She didn’t die because she made a mistake. That’s on the record now. That’s the official finding. She died because they killed her. It says that now, in a document with a case number and a judge’s name.”
“That’s what it says.”
He’s quiet again, and the quiet is different from the stillness at the coffee shop or the grief at the slab. This quiet has something finished in it. Not healed. Finished the way a measurement is finished once you’ve checked it three times, and the number holds.
“Thank you,” he says.
“You did this.”
“We did this. Don’t do that thing where you don’t take credit.
I’ve watched you build this case from a folder to a felony murder charge.
You did it without a license, a title, or anybody handing you permission.
You did it because you measure things, you can’t leave a wrong number alone, and my sister was the same.
I need you to hear me say that you’re the reason the truth is revealed. ”
I press the phone against my ear but don’t reply. I’m too choked up to speak.
THE LICENSING BOARD reinstates me eleven days after the DA files murder charges against Rick and Shanna.
The preliminary finding from Deschamps’s panel comes as a two-page letter that I read at my mother’s kitchen table, the same table where I read the complaint.
The language is formal and careful. It says, in essence, that the complaint was predicated on forged documents, my original findings are affirmed, and my license is restored in full with no adverse notation.
I’ve already filed for divorce. The paperwork was simple because there’s nothing to contest. Rick is in county lockup.
The house is in both our names. I don’t want it, which surprises me.
I spent seventeen years keeping that house clean, warm, and organized.
I thought letting go of it would feel like a loss.
It doesn’t. It feels like setting down a measurement that was wrong, a number I kept trying to make hold because I’d been living inside it too long to see it was off.
The house was the marriage, and the marriage was a structure built on a foundation I never inspected because I trusted the builder, but the builder was Rick. I’ll be glad when it sells, and I can be done with it.
I want the truck, the tools, my grandmother’s ring, and the external drive with twelve years of honest assessments on it. That’s what the marriage is worth, measured, and I already took all that.
The attorney I hired, a woman named Ling who handled the filing with efficiency, told me the divorce will be final in ninety days. That number means nothing to me. The marriage ended in a driveway when a woman fixed my husband’s collar, and everything since has been paperwork.
I drive to the Adams house on the way home from the attorney’s office.
I don’t have a reason to be there. I’m not conducting an assessment.
Dale and his wife are back in a motel while the floor gets rebuilt by a contractor who isn’t Trentham, and the rebuild is happening because my original report, the real one, said part could be salvaged.
I park across the street and look at the house for a while, staring at the blue tarp over the dining room where the joists are being replaced.
I think about the morning I crouched in that room, pressed a pen into a charred beam, and measured the damage at eight percent.
I didn’t know yet that the measurement was the first step in a chain that would end with my husband and his mistress each in a cell.
MATTHEW IS WAITING at my truck when I get back to my mother’s house.
He’s leaning against the tailgate the same way he leaned against the state truck at the board office, arms crossed, except this time, the gray under his eyes is lifting and the investigation isn’t between us. Neither are my marriage or the case.
“Ando called,” he says. “The Trentham containers had the operational records for nine of the eleven fires. Purchase orders, timing schedules, and contractor assignments. Two of them had accelerant receipts stapled to the work orders in Rick’s handwriting.”
“Good.”
“Good.” He pushes off the tailgate. “Tilly, I wanted to ask you something, and I wanted to do it here instead of at a scene or in a parking lot or at a coffee shop, because I’ve done everything important with you in places that smelled like smoke or bad coffee, and I’d like to try it somewhere that smells like your mother’s garden. ”
I look at him. The juniper is blooming along the fence. My mother’s sprinkler ticks across the lawn. He’s standing in it with the afternoon sun on his face, and he looks better. More at peace.
“Have dinner with me,” he says. “Saturday. A restaurant with tablecloths and a menu that doesn’t have the word ‘drip’ in it.
I’ll pick you up here. We’ll talk about something that isn’t fire.
If at any point during the evening you want to explain a load-bearing wall to me, I will listen with my full attention. ”
I laugh. “That’s a very rehearsed pitch.”
“I’ve been rehearsing it since the parking lot in Medford.” He doesn’t smile, but the corner of his mouth moves upward. “I kept waiting for the right time, and then I realized there isn’t one. The case is filed. Your license is back. The not-yet is done. So, Saturday?”
“Saturday is perfect.”