Chapter 12
Gray was at the station at seven in the morning, going through a stack of fire science coursework that had accumulated while he’d been focused on calving, organizing evidence, and the quiet, devastating collapse of a woman’s world.
He’d barely slept the past several nights. First, he’d laid awake fretting over how to tell Bonnie the truth. Then he’d laid awake afterward fretting about how Bonnie was reacting to the truth.
He had no frame of reference to even begin to understand how devastating it must have been to learn that her husband had been murdered and the prime suspect was her boss, a man to whom she owed her livelihood and security.
He was bad at emotions and feelings. He knew he was bad at them.
Give him a data set, a genetic sequence, a thermal dynamics equation and he could find the answer.
Give him a human being in pain and he was clueless.
He could read fire behavior with the precision of expert.
He didn’t even know where to start understanding the interior landscape of a woman whose entire framework for trusting anybody, ever again, had just disintegrated in front of him.
What he could do was be there. That much he’d figured out. Not crowd her. Not push. Just be steady and present and available. He’d sent the calf picture this morning because it was the only thing he could think of that might make her smile without requiring anything from her in return.
Now he sat in the fire station’s day room with his laptop open to his coursework and his brain refusing to cooperate. The words on the screen kept rearranging themselves into Bonnie’s voice saying, Both of them. The two men I trusted most in this world.
She’d nearly said something else. He’d seen it: the moment her mouth opened and then closed around a word she wasn’t ready to release. Something about Brent. Something beyond the simple grief of a widow.
He filed it away. He was good at filing things away and waiting for a pattern to emerge. Patience was one of his few social skills.
His phone rang. Cooper.
“You dropped off an envelope at my place last night,” Cooper said without preamble.
“I did.”
“Where did these emails come from?”
“Bonnie.” Gray set down his highlighter. “The mayor told her to shred a stack of documents. She read them first and kept the ones that mattered.”
A pause. “She kept them.”
Gray could practically hear Cooper processing the implications, not just of the emails but of Bonnie’s decision to preserve them. Cooper understood evidence, but he also understood people in a way Gray envied and would never replicate.
“Is she okay?” Cooper asked.
“No,” Gray said. “But she’s still standing.”
“These email addresses are anonymized. It’s going to take time to trace them.”
“How long?”
“A week, maybe two. I need to run them through some databases and see if the domains match anything on file. The amounts and dates give me a starting point.”
“What about the fire evidence? The blueprints, the sprinklers, the electrical analysis?”
“I’m adding my evidence to your package. When it goes to the Montana Department of Justice, it needs to be airtight. Every piece documented, sourced, and cross-referenced. You’ve done excellent work, Gray. The evidence you brought me is rock solid.”
The evidence also pointed at a man whose barn had killed eight firefighters, and that man was still sitting in an office next to a woman who now knew the truth and had to pretend she didn’t.
“You made it clear to Bonnie she can’t say anything to anyone yet?”
“I did. I told her she can talk to you or me about it any time, but nobody else. Not even the WoWS.”
“How did she react to that?”
“She balked a little. She thought the other widows would keep their mouths shut so the arsonist doesn’t catch wind of the investigation. But she was in such a state of shock after I showed her everything that she agreed pretty readily when I told her it was vital that no one else know.”
“Keep an eye on her,” Cooper said.
Gray got the impression Cooper wasn’t particularly worried about Bonnie spilling the beans. He was worried more about Bonnie’s emotional well-being. “I am.”
He hung up and went back to his textbook. The words still wouldn’t cooperate.
She showed up at the fire station at noon.
He didn’t hear her car pull in. One moment he was alone in the day room reading, and the next Bonnie was standing in the doorway from the engine bay, her face set in an expression he’d never seen from her before.
It wasn’t grief. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t the brittle composure she’d worn like armor since the day he met her.
It was . . . he took his best guess. Resolve?
“I want to help,” she said bluntly.
Gray closed his textbook. “Pull up a seat.”
She didn’t sit down. She paced. Back and forth, then around in circles, then back the other way. Her hands were shoved deep in her coat pockets, and her shoulders were rigid.
“I have access to everything in that office,” she said. “Every file. Every database. Every document he’s ever signed. The only thing I can’t get into is his personal safe, and I don’t need to because the most important thing in that safe is already in Cooper’s hands.”
She stopped pacing and turned to face him.
“If there’s more evidence in his office, I can find it.
I know how every file is organized. I know which drawers he uses and which ones he doesn’t.
I know his schedule, his patterns, when he’s in the office and when he’s not.
His health keeps him out at least two or three days a week now, and when he’s gone, I have the place to myself. ”
Gray studied her face. The circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept any more than he had.
But the set of her jaw and the clarity of her gaze told him the woman who had sat in this room two days ago holding his hand had spent the intervening hours doing exactly what he would have done in her position.
She’d analyzed the problem, identified her assets, and formed a plan.
The competence that had been her armor for four years was still present. But it wasn’t serving loyalty anymore. It was serving something harder and more honest.
“What could you look for?” he asked.
“You tell me. What information are you and Cooper still missing?”
Gray answered promptly, “The insurance report. Cooper’s been trying to get a copy of it for months. Every request he files gets lost or redirected or denied. The insurance company wants nothing to do with this case being re-opened.”
Bonnie nodded. “I’d bet good money it’s in Lucas’s files somewhere. He keeps copies of everything related to the ranch.”
Gray leaned back in his chair. “Cooper thinks the report was deliberately withheld from the final report on the fire.”
“Of course it was.” The flatness of her voice told him she’d already moved past surprise and into something colder and more functional.
“The insurance company paid out. Lucas collected. The investigation was closed. Everything about that fire was designed to be signed off on fast.” She added lightly, bitterly, “and it almost worked because everybody involved was either paid off or too devastated to question the official story.”
She finally sat down in the recliner beside his. “I was too devastated to question it. For four years.”
“You’re questioning it now.”
“I’m doing more than questioning it.” She met his eyes with a directness that made his chest go tight. “I’m going to find every piece of evidence in that office. And I’m going to bring it to you.”
He held her gaze. “Bonnie. This is a dangerous idea. If Lucas suspects—”
“Lucas doesn’t suspect anything. He thinks I’m his loyal lapdog. He’s convinced I shredded those documents.” She added, “I shredded a bunch of blank copier paper instead of the stuff in the envelope. He heard the shredder with his own ears. Trust me. He thinks he’s in the clear.”
She stared at him in determination. He stared back in doubt.
Eventually, he said, “Okay. Partners?”
She exhaled. It was the sound of a woman who had been holding her breath for a very long time.
“Partners,” she agreed.
They spent the next hour building a plan.
Gray laid out everything he and Cooper still needed.
The insurance report was the priority. It would document what the insurance company’s independent fire investigator had found and what he’d reported to his bosses.
It would make for an interesting comparison with what the state fire investigator Lex Jansick had seen and reported.
Cooper hoped it would show what Jansick had been paid to leave out, assuming Jansick was the recipient of the set of emails from Lucas after the fire.
Beyond that, they needed any correspondence between Lucas and the county building inspector that they suspected of having been paid off.
Gray ticked off a list of other documents: property records, financial statements, anything that would help build a timeline of the barn’s construction and the inspection process.
Bonnie took notes in a spiral notebook she’d brought with her. Gray privately wondered if her kids had picked up the habit of making notes from her or the other way around. Either way, it was a fun family tradition.
She numbered each item the way she numbered everything because even in the midst of her world collapsing, Bonnie was going to be organized about it.
He watched her write and felt a surge of admiration so fierce it surprised him.
This woman had just learned her boss had likely murdered her husband.
That the job she’d relied on for four years was part of the cover-up.
That the gratitude she’d felt every day since the fire had been cultivated and exploited.
That her loyalty—the thing she’d clung to hardest, the penance she’d performed for a guilt she carried in secret—had been used as the final layer of a murderer’s insurance.
And here she was, making a numbered list of evidence to find.