Chapter 5 #2
Of course, it was possible the construction contractor installed the sprinkler system on the cheap and used CPVC pipes instead of steel.
But sprinkler heads were only made out of heat resistant metals.
There would have been several dozen heads scattered throughout the charred remnants of the barn.
No fire investigator would have missed those.
Ho. Lee. Cow.
This changed everything he’d thought he knew about the fire.
In the case of a hot, fast burning fire, sprinklers might not successfully extinguish it.
But they most certainly would have bought enough time for people to go into the barn and lead the horses out to safety.
Plus, sprinklers would have soaked the hay in the loft enough to slow its combustion way down.
Even on a hot, dry, August day, damp hay would burn a lot slower than dry hay.
The hay didn’t even have to be sopping wet to burn more slowly.
As long as the outsides of the bales were damp, the insides wouldn’t ignite anywhere near as quickly.
The hayloft certainly wouldn’t have exploded into flames all at once, trapping the Cobbler Cove firefighters the way the Shoemacher fire report said it had.
All the witnesses he’d spoken to who’d been at the fire that day described the whole roof of the barn going up in flames all at once.
The drawing depicted a large, pressurized storage tank of water, 30,000 gallons minimum, to be buried beside the well house.
Pipes delivered water under pressure from the tank to the barn and its sprinkler heads, which were depicted at forty foot intervals both downstairs and upstairs.
That was well below the minimum required interval for a building of this size.
This was a wet-pipe system, meaning the pipes were always full of water and pressurized, ready to spray at the first indication of smoke or heat in the system’s sensors. It should have done an excellent job of delivering the three C’s of fire suppression: coverage, cooling, and contraction.
Coverage referred to everything getting wet quickly.
Cooling happened as cold water absorbed thermal energy from the fire. Less heat meant less fire. Plus, water cooled the air and physical materials in the space, both those on fire and those about to be on fire.
Contraction happened when water hit the fire and turned to steam. That steam rapidly displaced the air in the room, sharply reducing the amount of available oxygen to fuel the fire, quickly contracting the fire’s size.
Even in the case of an extremely hot fire started by a nasty accelerant, a sprinkler system would have massively slowed down how fast the fire spread.
The firefighters should have had plenty of time to get in, fight the fire—and to get out if the blaze started to get away from them.
All firefighters were trained to spot the signs of a fire starting to behave badly.
He never had been able to understand why the Cobbler Cove firefighters, some of whom had advanced degrees in fire science and bloody well knew how to read a fire, had ended up getting trapped inside the Shoemacher fire.
Even the most rudimentary of fire training pounded home the first and most important rule of fighting a fire. If you lose control of it . . . GET. OUT.
The building permit, based on these plans, had been issued by the county building inspector.
During construction of the barn, there would have been at least one more on-site inspection to ensure the building met all the specs in its plans.
That inspector would’ve seen the sprinkler system in person.
Why then, had there been no evidence of a sprinkler system in the aftermath of the fire?
He thought back to the day he and Tucker had walked the barn’s foundation. He didn’t remember any pipe stubs sticking up from the north side of the foundation where this drawing said pipes from the underground pressure tank entered the barn.
He also didn’t remember seeing any indication of a tank being buried next to the well house. There would’ve been an above-ground pressure relief valve, a fill pipe, and maybe a hatch to get inside the tank for cleaning or repairs.
Had the sprinkler system been designed and approved then never been installed?
Surely, the on-site building inspector wouldn’t have signed off on the final code inspection if the blueprints had been approved with sprinklers and none had been put in.
Gray took a deep breath. Exhaled slowly.
He couldn’t look at Bonnie. Her husband died in this building. A sprinkler system very likely would’ve saved his life even if it might not have saved the barn.
Very carefully, he closed the blueprints.
He wasn’t going to tell her. Not now. Not here in a dingy storage unit with no warning and no preparation for a difficult conversation.
He needed time to compile all the evidence: the electrical analysis, Tucker's photographs, the permit documents, and blueprints. It had to be airtight before he showed it to anyone, most especially to one of the fire’s widows.
He needed to be ready for her reaction when he broke it all to her. Although honestly, he had no idea what her reaction might be. Would she cry? Rage? Shut down?
He wished he were better at reading people and gauging their reactions. Give him a book to read or a set of facts to memorize, and he grasped it at light speed. Put him in the room with a stranger and ask him to learn anything about that person without lengthy acquaintance, and he was lost.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Bonnie asked.
“I found the detailed electrical layout. And some other mechanical information I'll need to cross-reference.”
She looked at him steadily. “That's a careful answer.”
They looked at each other across the blueprints. The fluorescent light hummed. Dust moved slowly in the air.
“When you're ready to tell me the rest of it,” she said finally, “I'd rather you just tell me.”
“Okay.” He held her gaze candidly. “I will. But I need to check a few more things first.”
“Just give me some warning. I don't like being ambushed.”
“Noted.”
She held his gaze for one more beat. Acknowledgment passed between them that he was promising to keep his word and she was trusting him to keep it.
They headed outside.
As she locked the unit, Gray asked, “Does the mayor know you have access to these blueprints?”
“Of course. He knows I have access to all the city records.”
“He trusts you completely?”
“He does.” She answered calmly, but it couldn’t possibly be that straightforward. She worked for the man in whose barn her husband died.
Frustration rattled through him. He was completely out of his depth, here, and he needed to understand her feelings before he up and announced to her that the barn should have had sprinklers and they would’ve saved her husband’s life.
He reached into his truck and pulled out the thermos again. He turned around, and she was just emerging from her own car, holding out a thermos to him.
She looked at his thermos.
He looked at hers.
They broke into laughter.
“Don't make it weird,” she said.
“Too late,” he replied drolly.
They leaned against the side of her car and drank their coffee in the weak morning sunlight. A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, soaring in ever higher circles as thermals carried him up upward.
Neither of them spoke about the blueprints or what was in them.
Instead, she asked, “Were you in 4-H growing up?”
He blinked at the subject change. “No. My mom worked two jobs and we didn't have cash to spare for such things. I was more of a library kid.”
“What did you read?”
“Books on everything. I went through phases. Geology, marine biology, astronomy. Genetics is the phase that stuck.”
“Why genetics?”
Because I was terrified I would turn out like my old man and wanted to know if inability to love or to stick around for one’s family was inherited.
He set aside that answer and said instead, “It explains things. Why living creatures look the way they look. Why traits pass down the way they do. It’s the logic under the apparent randomness of Nature.”
“You like finding the logic, don’t you?”
“I do.” He paused. “I find logical things reassuring. Even when the answer is complicated.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Not everything has a clean answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “But most things have an explanation if you look hard enough. It might not be the one you want or it might be terrible. But it exists.”
She looked up at the hawk. He could see she was thinking. Whether it was about what he’d said or something else entirely, he couldn’t tell. The wind moved a strand of hair across her cheek and she tucked it away absently with one hand.
“Tell me something useless,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Like the sugar cube thing last week. Tell me another useless fact.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Not a disgusting one this time. I'm still getting over having a mouth full of bacteria.”
“Not all microbes are bad or make us sick. Many of the ones in our mouths help us digest and absorb our food.”
She threw him a dire look.
“Right. No more mouth bacteria talk.” He considered. “How about this? Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found edible honey in three-thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs In 2003 fifty-five-hundred-year-old honey was found in Georgia. The country, not the state.”
“Wow.” She thought about that. “That's actually kind of amazing.”
“I think it’s cool that bees have been making honey for all those thousands of years.”
“I'm keeping that one,” she said. “That's a good fact.”
“Glad you like it.”
She screwed the cap back on her thermos. “I need to get to work before the mayor gets back from his doctor’s appointment.” She pulled her car keys out and looked at him. “Thank you for helping Cooper with his investigation. I get the impression you’re doing most of the heavy lifting on it.”
“It’s minimal lifting, actually. And I’m fascinated by the things I’m learning.”
“Still. It’s a lot of reading and piecing together obscure details. I appreciate all the time you’re putting in on it.”
“Any time, Bonnie.”
Their gazes met, and the moment threatened to become way too intimate way too fast. They both looked away hastily and climbed into their cars without speaking.
He followed her out the gate and watched her drive away while he waited outside the gate to make sure it closed properly.
His thoughts drifted back to the blueprints. Maybe the sprinkler system had been installed but not properly maintained or inoperative at the time of the fire—
No. There still would have been melted pipes and brass sprinkler heads all over the ruins.
Someone either paid off the building inspector to sign off on the final code inspection even though the sprinkler system wasn’t installed, or someone paid off the Shoemacher fire inspector not to mention the remnants of a fire suppression system that had been inoperative or disabled the day of the fire.
In either case the evidence still pointed to corruption. And arson.
He pointed his truck toward Apple Pie Creek and the office supply store with the oversized copy machine.
On the drive home from Apple Pie Creek, he called Cooper.
“You found something,” Cooper declared. His brother had an unerring talent for reading people that Gray envied.
“I have a preliminary finding, but I need to look at the photographs Tucker took when we inspected the barn’s foundation.”
“And . . .”
“And there's another piece of evidence that points at arson. One that neither of us had any idea existed until today.” He paused at an intersection, waiting for a logging truck to pass.
“The blueprints showed a fire suppression system. Sprinklers, pressurized supply lines, underground tank. The whole shebang.”
There was dead silence in his ear.
Even he could tell it was the cold, still silence of someone who understood precisely what that meant.
“What are you looking for in Tucker's photographs?” Cooper finally asked.
“Anything to indicate a sprinkler system was installed. There should’ve been pipes entering the north side of the building, which means there should still be stumps of stand pipes, maybe the remains of a melted pressure gauge.
And I don’t recall seeing anything over by the well house indicating a tank is buried there. ”
“I didn’t see anything like that in Tucker’s pictures or in the pictures that aren’t missing from the final fire report,” Cooper said grimly.
“Me, neither. I've been through the images from that report dozens of times, and I’ve seen no evidence of any sprinkler infrastructure.”
“Brass heads don't melt,” Cooper said. “Not in a standard structure fire.”
“No,” Gray agreed. “They don't.”
Another silence. Outside, the foothills rolled by in shades of brown and ochre, waiting for the green that would come in April.
Cooper finally said, “But you don’t think this was a standard structure fire, do you?”
“Nope.”
“How long until you confirm whether or not there was a sprinkler system?” Cooper asked.
“I don’t know.” He turned onto the ranch road. “I want to find someone who was inside that barn regularly. Someone who would have known if there were sprinkler heads.”
“The trick will be finding someone willing to help with an arson investigation with Lucas Shoemacher at the middle of it. He’s a powerful man in this town, and his family isn’t likely to say anything incriminating,” Cooper replied heavily.
He pulled up to the bunkhouse and sat with the engine idling. “I'll figure it out. Keep this between us for now.”
“Of course.”
Gray ended the call.
He went inside and opened the folder of photographs. Pulling out a magnifying glass and a bright lamp, he went to work.