Chapter 5
The Cobbler Cove municipal records storage unit was located on the far edge of town past the grain elevator, a long, squat, cinder-block building designed by someone who believed utility was a virtue and beauty was a moral failing.
It was a nice morning, so he got out and opened the notebook on the hood of his truck that he had brought with him. He reviewed the list of questions he hoped to answer by seeing the Shoemacher barn blueprints.
Bonnie pulled up beside him in her Subaru at eight thirty-three, looking harried.
“Rough morning?” he asked sympathetically.
She rolled her eyes by way of response. He would take that as a yes.
“You were early,” she teased, getting out of her car.
“I was on time,” he retorted, grinning. “You're late.”
“Barely. I had to drive the kids to school. We all overslept this morning and the kids missed the bus.”
“Well then, I’m impressed you’re only slightly late.” He held out the thermos he’d brought along. “Coffee? I’m guessing you didn’t have time to get any.”
She accepted it, took a sip, and groaned gratefully. It was a dark roast, no sugar, the way she drank it. She handed it back without comment. But he was fairly sure she noticed that he remembered how she liked her coffee.
If she could be a mature adult about this and concentrate on doing her job like the professional she was, so could he.
She entered the numeric code in the gate’s keypad and drove inside. He jumped into his truck and followed her through. The gate slid shut ponderously behind him.
She stopped in front of a unit about halfway down the long building, and he parked behind her.
She unlocked the heavy padlock and bent down, reaching for the steel door handle.
Gray’s hand got there at the same time as hers, and their fingers brushed as they simultaneously reached for it.
A shock raced up his arm and through his whole body, tingling all the way to the vicinity of his toes.
Her fingertips were warm and soft. Feminine.
“Let me get that,” he murmured into her ear from a range of about twelve inches.
She looked at him, and their faces were no more than a foot apart. Her eyelashes were long and dark, framing her eyes. From this range he could see the ring of light brown around the outer edges of her irises, and green with flecks of gold in the center.
But as they stared at each other, her pupils dilated until only the brown ring was visible. He felt his own eyes widen in response.
She smelled good. Really good. Like vanilla and jasmine and something warm and spicy he couldn’t name. His gaze slid to her mouth. Her teeth were white and even. And her lips looked, well, entirely kissable.
Shocked at the direction of his thoughts, he jerked his gaze away from her face and looked down at the door handle. Clearing his throat, he grasped it firmly. As Bonnie stepped back a bit unsteadily and straightened, he hauled the steel door up.
An aroma of old paper and printer ink wafted out along with the faint chemical undertone of document preservation boxes.
“Welcome to Cobbler Cove's history,” she said lightly.
Gray looked around. The storage unit was long and narrow, the left wall lined with tall filing cabinets. The right wall was floor-to-ceiling shelves holding lidded cardboard boxes labeled by year.
He commented, “This is quite a collection.”
“These records go back to 1889.” She threw the light switch and a row of fluorescent fixtures flickered to life. “The oversized documents are stored in flat-file cabinets in the back, sorted by year.”
He followed her down the narrow aisle to three large, flat-file cabinets. Each one stood about five feet tall and had a dozen shallow metal drawers running across its entire width.
She opened the drawer marked 2012-2013. Inside, oversized drawings lay flat in a loose stack, each one labeled with a tab sticking out from the right edge. She tilted her head, reading the tabs.
She murmured, “They’re filed in chronological order by permit number.”
“We’re looking for permit 2013-0247,” he responded.
“You memorized the permit number?”
“I’m told I have an unusually good memory.”
“That's either awesome or alarming. I’m not sure which.”
“Most people land on alarming, eventually.”
She shot him a brief smile and went back to the tabs. “Here it is.”
He lifted the heavy stack of documents lying on top, while Bonnie carefully slid out the stapled sheaf of drawings. The large-format drafting paper had probably been rolled up originally, but years in the drawer had rendered them completely flat.
In the far corner stood a scarred wooden worktable. Bonnie laid the set of blueprints on it. The paper had yellowed slightly at the edges, but the drawings themselves were still white on brilliant blue. She gestured for Gray to take a look.
As he leaned over the blueprints, their shoulders brushed just enough to send his pulse off to the races.
Professional, Dude. You’re colleagues. Nothing more.
Maybe right now, the little devil on his shoulder retorted. She’s smart, funny, curious, a great mom. Exactly your kind of woman . . . plus she’s gorgeous and isn’t put off by how big a geek you are.
He smoothed his palms over the cover page and read the title, neatly handwritten in block print by whoever had drafted these. Shoemacher Horse Barn, 2013. Architect: Hennessey & Co., Billings, Montana.
The permit application number, date, and the Shoemacher property’s lot and parcel information were listed along with a note stating that there was no zoning restriction on this agricultural use land that prevented such a structure from being built. All standard stuff.
He reached for the corner of the cover page and lifted it carefully. Bonnie helped turned the brittle piece of paper, laying it face down gently.
The floor plan loomed in front of him. It was a large structure—fifty-feet wide by two-hundred-feet long, laid out in a standard horse barn configuration.
Two long rows of stalls along the exterior walls with a wide central aisle running the length of the building.
Tack room halfway down on the south side of the aisle, a bathroom and workroom on the north side opposite the tack room.
He turned the page. Huh. The second story was smaller than the ground floor, on account of the roof line, but it was still a large space, some 30 feet wide and running the full two-hundred-foot length of the building.
An office was drawn at the east end. Feed and hay storage took up the rest of the space.
Gray traced the main aisle with his index finger, picturing the concrete foundation he’d visited several weeks ago with his brother, Tucker.
The two blackened, pitted circles in the concrete would have been in the middle of this aisle, centered about thirty feet from the big sliding barn doors at each end of the alleyway.
Bonnie shifted her weight and he glanced over at her. She was studying him curiously. “What are you picturing?” she asked softly
“Give me a moment.”
She did. He appreciated that about her. She didn't fill every silence with noise.
He turned the page and made a sound of satisfaction.
At long last. He was looking at the actual, formal electrical plan for the building.
He traced the main circuits. One ran down each side of the alleyway ceiling with junction boxes at regular intervals.
No light or plug outlets were depicted within a dozen feet of either ignition point.
Which meant there was no electrical source that could explain either ignition point.
The conclusion was inescapable. Both fires had started in places where there was nothing to spontaneously light them.
The Shoemacher fire was arson.
While he’d been confident intellectually that his suspicions were right, it was another thing entirely to know it. The knowing sat heavily upon him, weighing down his mind and body with horror.
He forced himself to turn the page.
He didn’t focus immediately on the next drawing because he was still struggling to absorb the truth staring him in the face.
It was possible that someone dropped a cigarette or match. Maybe they thought it was put out, but it was still smoldering. That would cause a fire with one ignition point. This fire had two.
Furthermore, the fires had been started by something much, much hotter than a cigarette or a match.
Something had burned on top of the cement so fast and so hot that the moisture trapped inside the cement had no time to heat up slowly and evaporate.
Instead, that moisture had exploded, leaving distinctive crater-shaped pits called spalls.
No pile of hay set on fire burned anywhere near hot enough or fast enough to do that to concrete.
There was no way around arson as the cause of the fire.
The drawing he’d been staring at without seeing it came into focus before him. It was the mechanical sheet, depicting the plumbing, HVAC, and other systems to be installed in the building.
Wait. What?
Snaking all over the drawing of the barn were thin red lines, neatly drawn in a grid pattern. Red lines were the standard way of depicting a fire suppression system in a commercial structure.
Surely not.
He glanced up at the page’s title block and couldn’t believe his eyes as he read, HVAC, Plumbing and Fire Suppression Systems.
Fire suppression?
The barn had water sprinklers? Where had they been the day of the Shoemacher fire? And how come the final report made no mention whatsoever of them?
Sprinkler systems in commercial structures usually used pipes made of black iron or galvanized steel, and the sprinkler heads would’ve been made of brass, bronze, or stainless steel.
They might have melted in the fire at some point, but the remains of the pipes and sprinklers would have been obvious in the remains of the fire and impossible to miss.
Even the worst fire investigator in the world couldn’t miss hundreds of feet of metal piping melted in stripes among the ruins.