Chapter 10
Finally, disgust at herself overtook her terror of what Gray was going to show her. She parked in her usual spot, beside the bay door that was open despite the March chill. The front end of the fire engine gleamed red in the morning light.
Gray had waxed it again. Of course he had. That man polished things the way other people breathed—constantly, unconsciously, as if leaving a surface unshined was a form of neglect he couldn’t abide.
She knew what he was going to tell her. She’d known for weeks, maybe longer.
Since the first time he’d asked her about the building permit, politely, over the phone, with careful phrasing that tried very hard not to spook her.
Since the storage unit, when he’d gone quiet over the mechanical systems page and she’d watched the color drain from his face one shade at a time while he pretended to be fine.
She’d asked him to warn her before he told her. He had. Every time he’d asked her if she was ready to go over the evidence, he’d done exactly as she’d requested. He’d been clear and direct with no ambush.
She’d spent countless hours since the first time he asked, rehearsing calm, composed responses she already knew she would never use.
Her big purse sat on the passenger seat. Inside it were two folded sets of email printouts. She hadn’t planned to bring them today. She’d been carrying them in her bag ever since she found them. They’d been heavy at the bottom of her bag like a loaded weapon.
She’d been blindly loyal to Lucas for over four years. Until she wasn’t. Not anymore. And she didn’t understand why.
She told herself it was caution. The instincts of an organized woman who couldn’t bring herself to destroy something important without understanding what it was.
But that wasn’t the whole truth.
Some part of her—the part that had been smart enough to see through Brent’s lies four years ago, the part she’d been trying to silence ever since—had known what those emails meant. She recognized the careful language of a man concealing something he couldn’t afford to have discovered.
She’d refused four years ago to play along with Brent’s concealment of his affair, and she refused to participate in whatever cover-up Lucas was engaged in. At the end of the day, it wasn’t in her make-up as a person to tolerate obfuscation and dishonesty.
And that was why she was here today. It was time to learn the truth about how Brent died and why
She got out of the car.
Gray was waiting for her in the training room. She’d been in here before, but today it was arranged for a presentation to an audience of one.
He had set up two chairs side by side at the round table, facing a wall covered with pictures, blueprints she recognized, and a long timeline. A glass of water sat at each place. Nothing else sat on the table except a single folder.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She set her bag on the floor beside the chair. Did not take off her coat. Did not sit down.
He didn’t try to make her. He stood there with the quiet patience she’d come to associate with him, the steadiness that made her feel safe and terrified in equal measure because a man who could hold this much complexity with this much calm was a man who saw everything.
And being fully seen by someone was the most dangerous thing she could imagine.
Eventually, she took a deep breath, slipped off her coat, and sat down. “Let’s do this.”
He nodded and sat down beside her.
He started with the blueprints, walking her through the barn layout and electrical wiring plan. So far, so good.
Then he said, “Let’s compare the plans to the ignition points.”
“Ignition points? Plural?” she blurted. Her voice sounded far away, as if it belonged to someone standing at the end of a long corridor.
“That’s correct. There were two ignition points.
The fire started in two places simultaneously or very close to simultaneously.
I’ll show you how I know that in a minute.
Right now, I want to show you where the ignition points are on these blueprints.
Here—” he pointed at the barn layout, “—and here. Both in the exact center of the alleyway. Both approximately thirty feet from the nearest door.”
She wrapped her hands around the glass of water. It was cold against her palms.
“The nearest electrical source to either ignition point is over a dozen feet away. There’s no outlet, no junction box, no light fixture, no wiring of any kind in the locations where both fires started.
Given that there were the circuit breakers between the two ignition points mean no single electrical failure could have sparked in both locations.
Any surge at one ignition point would have been stopped before it traveled to the second ignition point. With me so far?”
She nodded. “Electricity didn’t start the fire.”
“Correct.”
He moved to Tucker’s photographs. “The stalls had heavy wooden doors with steel latches. The horses were contained. No animal knocked over a heat source or kicked something into the aisle. The stall design rules that out completely.”
She took a sip of water. It did nothing to alleviate the dryness in her mouth.
“The hay was stored in the west end of the loft. The eastern ignition point—” he tapped the floor plan, “was under the upstairs office. There was nothing flammable above it to fall, combust, or smolder.”
He continued, “I’ll show you evidence in a minute that rules out hay catching fire from something like a cigarette or match. In fact, no material commonly found in a horse barn burns anywhere near hot enough to explain the heat at both ignition points . . .”
“Gray.”
He turned to face her, surprised. “Do you have a question?”
“No. Just say it.”
His gaze was steady. Not cold—she’d never seen his eyes look cold—but right now, his expression was stripped of everything except the truth he was slow-walking her to.
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
He spoke clearly. Clinically. A professional presenting information he was absolutely certain of. “I have eliminated every accidental cause as a possible source of ignition. The fire in that barn was set deliberately.”
The words landed with the sound of stones dropping into still water.
She felt them sinking through her, passing through the layers of things she’d believed, things she’d told herself, and things she’d rebuilt her life around for the past four years.
The words hit bottom and settled somewhere deep and cold at the bottom of her heart.
“There’s more,” he said quietly.
Her gaze snapped to his in dismay.
“Do you need a minute or are you ready to continue?” he asked.
Part of her appreciated his quiet mercilessness. Without it, she would already be out of here, running away as fast and far from everything in this room as she could get. Including him.
But she knew he wasn’t going to let her out of here until she’d seen every single horrible, unthinkable fact he’d meticulously collected.
“Go on,” she managed to croak past her sawdust dry throat.
He pointed to the mechanical systems page.
The red lines she hadn’t understood the first time she’d seen them in the storage unit.
“The approved blueprints include a complete fire suppression system. These red lines depict pressurized, wet-pipe sprinklers placed at forty-foot intervals throughout the barn, upstairs and down. This is a thirty-thousand-gallon pressurized water tank beside the well house. And these are supply lines running underground from the tank to the barn.”
She stared at the thin red lines on the blueprint. Precise and everywhere, like veins in a body. Horror blossomed in her belly.
He continued inexorably, “If this system had been installed and operational, it would have soaked the loft, cooled the fire, displaced the oxygen fueling it. It wouldn’t necessarily have saved the barn given how hot the accelerants used to start the fire burned.”
She could see him choosing his next words with the care of a man walking across thin ice.
“But sprinklers would have slowed the fire long enough for the men inside to get the horses out. And to get themselves out.”
She was . . . staggered. Aghast.
A blanket of shock descended over her. She recognized it because the same thing had happened the day the Apple Creek Fire Chief told the wives gathered here at the firehouse that all their husbands had died.
Her thoughts jumped around like panicked wild animals trying to escape a trap.
“Ellie,” she said randomly. “You asked her if there were sprinklers, didn’t you?”
“I did. She told me there were none installed in the barn.”
“Did you tell her one was in the plans?” Bonnie asked.
“I did not. The police investigation will become official soon, and Cooper asked me not to give the Shoemacher family any advance warning of the evidence collected.”
“Does Cooper think one of them started the fire?” she gasped.
“I don’t know. My part of the investigation was only to determine if there was or was not arson. Cooper and Sheriff Wheeler have been doing all the legwork on who might have started the fire.”
“The system was on the approved plans,” she said abruptly. “The county building inspector would have had to inspect the sprinklers.”
He smiled faintly. “You made that leap of logic fast.”
She frowned. “The final inspection was passed. The certificate of occupancy was issued. I’ve seen the paperwork. The inspector certified that the building met all specifications in the approved plans.”
Cooper nodded. “Including a fire suppression system that was never built.”
The room was very quiet. She could hear traffic on the street outside, faint and indifferent. She could hear, distantly, a meadowlark singing, the careless song birds sang when they didn’t know the world was ending.
She looked at the blueprints. At the photographs. At the summary whose conclusion she already felt in her bones like the ache before a storm.