Chapter 13
The mayor didn’t come to work on Wednesday.
His doctor called the office at eight forty-five before Bonnie had even finished her coffee to say Lucas was having chest pains again and needed to stay home for at least two days.
Maybe the rest of the week. The doctor’s voice had the strained patience of a man who had been telling Lucas Shoemacher to rest for months and was running out of polite ways to say it.
Bonnie said all the right things. Of course. I’ll hold things down. Take care of him. She’d hung up and sat at her desk for a full minute, staring at Lucas’s closed office door. She had the office to herself. Maybe for days.
The list she’d made with Gray was in her bag, the notebook sheet folded into quarters.
She’d memorized it already. In reality she didn’t need lists to remember things.
She made them because the act of writing things down imposed order on chaos.
But she pulled out the list anyway and smoothed it flat on her desk.
She knew Lucas’s filing system better than he did.
She’d built half of it herself. But Lucas also kept a separate set of files in a tall wooden filing cabinet behind his desk that he’d brought from his home when he first took office.
It held ranch business, personal correspondence, and whatever else he didn’t want mingled with the town’s records.
In four years, she’d never opened it without being asked to retrieve something specific and being told where to find it. Because she was loyal. Because she respected his privacy. Because she was a good girl.
She walked into his office and closed the door.
Locked it for good measure. The room smelled like him: stale cigars and the wintergreen lozenges he’d been sucking on since his doctor told him to quit smoking.
She pulled open the top drawer of the wood filing cabinet.
There they were, about six inches back in the drawer.
File folders, neatly tabbed. Insurance—Barn.
Insurance—Ranch Vehicles. Insurance—Liability.
The first folder was thin. A declarations page, a premium notice, a renewal letter. Standard stuff. She flipped it closed and pulled out the second folder. Insurance—Barn, Claims.
Inside was a three-ring binder, which she opened to find about fifty pages of insurance documents inside.
She’d seen enough insurance paperwork in her life to spot an adjuster’s field report at ten paces.
The top page had the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped across the front in red ink that had faded to a rusty brown.
Her hands were steady as she turned the page. Her heart was not.
She read the cover letter on page 2. She skimmed the first paragraph saying that all loss of life claims would be handled as separate liability claims to be settled at a later date.
This document was identified as the final report in the matter of a claim for total loss of a structure due to fire and an additional claim for loss of all the contents therein.
Contents? Forty beautiful racehorses burned alive were contents?
She closed the cover. She wasn’t going to read the report.
Not here, not now. And definitely not alone.
Honestly, she hoped Gray would be willing to read the whole thing and just summarize the important parts for her.
She wasn’t sure she could handle dozens of pages of gruesome detail describing how Brent and the other men perished.
She carried it to the copier in the outer office and took the pages out of the binder. The copier hummed and clicked, fifty-two pages emerging warm in the output tray. She put the original back in its binder, banker clipped the copy together, and slid it into a manila envelope from her desk drawer.
She returned the insurance report to its place in the filing cabinet and closed the drawer.
She wiped the handle with her sleeve, which she realized immediately was ridiculous.
This wasn’t a TV crime show, and her fingerprints were all over this office legitimately.
But the impulse to clean up after her dirty deed ran deep.
But this dirty deed was for a good cause.
She went back to her desk and called Gray.
“I found it.”
A pause. She could practically hear him sitting up straighter. “The insurance report?”
“I already made a copy of it.”
“Where’s the original?”
“Back in the filing cabinet where I found it. But Gray . . .” She lowered her voice, even though the office was empty.
“The folder is in his personal filing cabinet. Not the municipal files. He owns that piece of furniture. If he comes in tomorrow and decides to move it, or shred it, or take it home . . .”
“Then we’d lose the original.”
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “I figure a copy of a document isn’t nearly as useful to Cooper as the original with the insurance company’s stamps and binding.”
Silence on his end. She could hear him thinking. Gray’s thinking had a quality to it, a focused stillness that she could somehow perceive even through a phone.
“We need to get the original to Cooper,” he said.
“If I take it, Lucas will notice it’s missing. He may not check that folder for weeks, but the one time I assume he won’t look is the day he’s going to.”
“What if we take the original and replace it with the copy?”
She considered that. A good copy on the same weight of paper with the same binding. The confidential stamp would be black, not that faded red, but if Lucas wasn’t looking closely, and given how bad his eyesight had gotten, he might not notice for a while.
“That could work,” she said slowly. “But there’s a problem. The notebook has the logo of the insurance company on the cover. Cooper will probably want that, too. As proof that it’s the original.”
Gray thought for a moment, then said, “There’s a print shop in Apple Pie Creek that does mugs and T-shirts and the like for corporate events. I’ll bet it can make an exact copy of the notebook.”
“Lucas is supposed to be out of the office today and tomorrow for sure. The doctor wants him to stay home the rest of the week, but to be safe, I’d need to make the swap before close of business tomorrow.”
Gray said, “I’ll pick up the binder this afternoon and take it to the print shop.”
She exhaled. “This is insane. I am a secretary committing larcenous evidence preservation.”
“Technically, swapping a copy for an original that’s on government-adjacent premises might be some sort of a misdemeanor.”
“That’s not as comforting as you think it is, Gray.”
He was quiet for a beat, and then he said, “You don’t have to do this. Cooper can subpoena the original through proper channels.”
“Which will take months and tip Lucas off that someone’s investigating him. He’ll destroy everything that’s left.” She looked at Lucas’s closed office door. “No. I’ll make the swap tomorrow.”
She made the swap at nine-fifteen Thursday morning, and it went without a hitch.
Gray had driven to Apple Pie Creek the previous afternoon and returned with a three ring notebook in the same shade of dark blue as the original with the insurance company’s logo perfectly reproduced on its cover.
The only difference between the two binders was the rings on the new one opened more stiffly than the old one.
She’d spent a half-hour at the kitchen table opening and closing it in an effort to get it to loosen up.
“What are you making?” Noah had asked, poking his head through the doorway.
“A report for work.”
“It looks boring.”
“It’s spectacularly boring. Go finish your math.”
Cassidy had glanced at the notebook and looked up sharply at Bonnie’s face. She said nothing and went back to reading. Sometimes Bonnie wondered what it would be like to have a nine-year-old who wasn’t preternaturally observant.
The swap itself took under a minute. She opened the top file drawer, removed the original, inserted the copy, and closed the drawer. She slid the original into the oversized envelope Gray had provided, sealed it, and placed it in her bag.
At noon, she met Gray at the fire station and gave him the envelope with hands that were only slightly trembling.
He took it and studied her carefully. “How are you feeling?”
“Terrified. Exhilarated. Slightly nauseous.”
“All reasonable responses to larcenous evidence preservation.”
A laugh burst out of her. An actual laugh. The kind she hadn’t heard from herself in days. “Stop calling it that.”
“You started it,” he replied, grinning.
He set the envelope on the table and looked at her. The station was quiet.
She was standing close enough to him to see the individual striations of silver and gray in his eyes, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes from laughing or maybe from squinting at textbooks in bad light.
His jaw was rough with a day’s growth of stubble, and his hair needed a trim. And he was giving her his full, undivided attention. Except his expression wasn’t analytical at all. It was much warmer than that.
Don’t, she told herself. Not here.
But she reached out anyway and rested her hand on his forearm. She felt the tension in the muscles beneath his sleeve. He was holding himself very still, the way he did when he was trying not to say or do the wrong thing.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not trying to talk me out of doing this.”
“Would it have worked? Trying to talk you out of it?”
“Not a chance.”
He smiled. It was the quiet, lopsided smile that had been doing increasingly unreasonable things to her pulse rate for the past few weeks. “That’s what I figured.”
She squeezed his arm and let go before she did something reckless, like stand on her toes and kiss him in the fire station where her husband had spent the last night of his life.
She wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. But she was closer than she’d been yesterday.
The part of her that had been afraid of closeness for four years noticed, with some surprise, that standing this near to Grayson Lawton didn’t feel dangerous anymore. In fact, it felt like the safest place she’d been in a very long time.
Cooper called Gray that evening. Gray put him on speaker so Bonnie could hear.
“I’ve been through the entire insurance report,” Cooper said.
His voice had the flat, controlled quality it took on when he was angry and trying not to show it.
“The insurance company’s investigator documented two origin points.
Flagged the fire as suspicious. Noted the absence of the fire suppression system depicted in the blueprints submitted with Shoemacher Racing, LLC’s insurance application.
He recommended the claim be denied pending further investigation of possible arson. ”
Bonnie closed her eyes.
Cooper continued, “The claim was paid out six weeks later. The investigator’s recommendation was overridden by a senior adjuster in the company’s regional office. No explanation for the override is in the document.”
“So someone at the insurance company pushed the payout through despite their own investigator saying the fire was suspicious?” Gray asked.
“Correct. And the state fire investigator’s report—Jansick’s report—directly contradicts the insurance company’s findings.”
Bonnie opened her eyes. “How much was the payout?”
Cooper told her.
The number sat in the room with a weight and mass all its own.
Lucas had received millions of dollars. She thought about forty horses screaming in terror and pain.
She thought about eight men fighting desperately for their lives and dying together.
She thought about the locked box in Lucas’s safe where he’d kept the evidence of how he’d profited from his own barn burning down with people and horses inside it.
“This report will go into the evidence package,” Cooper said. “With everything else you two have found, the case for arson and a coordinated cover-up is as airtight as I’ve ever seen.”
After Cooper hung up, Bonnie sat and stared at the wall of photographs and blueprints Gray had painstakingly assembled.
Gray watched her from the doorway, giving her space the way he always did.
“Are you okay?” he asked eventually.
“No,” she said frankly. “But I’m less not-okay than I was last week. Is that progress?”
“I’d say so.”
She picked up her bag. “I need to get home to the kids.”
He walked her to her car. The evening was chilly and clear, the mountains black against a sky turning from indigo to charcoal. Stars were appearing in the east, indifferent pinpricks of light in the sky.
She opened her car door and turned to look at him. “Gray?”
“Hmm?”
“We make a good team.”
He smiled slowly, the sexy smile that never failed to make her blush. “Yes. We do.”
She got in her car and headed out. In the rearview mirror, she could see him standing in the parking lot, watching her taillights until she turned the corner. How had she known he would stand there until she was out of sight?
The answer came to her as quickly as the question itself.
Because leaving before someone was safely gone wasn’t something Grayson Lawton did.