Chapter Fifty-Nine
Eliot
For the first time in a week, my phone isn’t ringing.
The last inspector from El Paso left this afternoon, Kurt’s out at a checkup on his broken arm, and since the entire office was working overtime cataloging photos and checking and rechecking every goddamn form, I sent most folks home an hour ago.
Four empty buildings are still open on Nate’s spreadsheet, but it’s still a hundred and two out there, and sunset is less than an hour away. I’ll knock ‘em out tomorrow when the temperature drops into the high eighties.
For this one moment, there’s nowhere I need to be.
I’m not ready to go home yet. Parker won’t be there. And while I know she and Nate are analyzing financial statements for the companies involved in this fucking fraud scheme, I miss her.
I have the records system open on my computer, and Nate’s spreadsheet on my tablet.
Seven buildings on his list burned down before anyone knew a damn thing about Apex Building Solutions or Senator Gabe Dines.
All seven cases were investigated by this office, then closed as accidental. None of them were mine.
Starting with the most recent one, I read through the report, then pull up the photographs. The fire was contained quickly. No injuries. The cause was ruled accidental. The photos from the original inspection Apex signed off on match the ones Kurt took after the fire. Minus the soot.
Twenty minutes later, I move on to the next building. This one takes half an hour. Double the square footage, double the photographs to review. Another accident. I mark it as resolved on Nate’s spreadsheet.
The third one is where shit goes sideways.
I catch it on the suppression system coverage map. There’s a sprinkler head marked on the Apex report that doesn’t show up on Kurt’s post-incident photographs. But it’s only one. He could have missed it. That section of the building took the brunt of the damage.
I leave the file open. I’ll talk to Kurt in the morning and get his take on it.
The fourth file loads, and I read the address twice before my mind catches up to what the rest of my body already knows. I don’t move. I can’t.
My shoulders lock as my fingers curl against the edge of the desk. My lungs stop somewhere halfway through a breath, and for a second, I can’t seem to make them start again.
I remember the halls. How my boots felt on the floor.
My hand on the radio. Heat against my face shield.
Smoke everywhere. The catwalk collapsing.
The sound my femur made when it shattered.
The building shifting and groaning around me until I listened to it come apart over a radio channel I still hear in the space between awake and asleep.
My body remembers all of it. Every muscle. Every minute.
Kurt’s the investigator of record. I read his name in black and white on the cause-and-origin report, dated and filed before I’d even regained consciousness in the hospital.
You don’t have to do this.
Kurt’s been here for a decade. He mentored me when I first started. If he marked this fire as accidental, it was accidental.
But I open the building plans and the photographs anyway.
The suppression system in my section of the third floor was insufficient. It should have covered all the way to the break room, but in the photographs, it stops eight feet short.
I remember where the fire found me. I remember how far away I was from the water. How I could almost reach it.
Kurt wouldn’t miss that. Would he?
I keep reading.
One of the support beams near the stairwell was missing its fire-resistive coating. Kurt’s photograph proves it. Bare steel catches the light flash in a very particular way.
Stop. Shut it down and go home.
I still can’t move.
Because the next set of photographs show the stairwell.
Something’s blocking part of the exit. Beams that have no business being anywhere near that part of the building. A support wall sits eighteen inches to the right of where the plans put it.
That’s why Zack couldn’t get out.
No grown man in full gear would have made it through that gap.
“Stairwell’s partially blocked. Metal’s groanin’ like a sombitch. Need another minu—”
Even after seven years, Zack’s voice is as clear now as it was then. I’ve heard it so many times, I stopped listening to the words a long time ago. I focused on the sound. The static. The collapse. Then nothing.
I hear the words now.
Zack wasn’t hacking away at debris that fell during the fire. He was fighting his way through a wall that was never supposed to be there.
Apex should have caught every problem during the initial inspection. The missing coating. The inadequate sprinkler coverage. The blocked stairwell. Someone signed off on that building anyway.
Kurt’s report came after the building burned down, but fire doesn’t destroy everything. It left evidence of every one of Apex’s crimes. And he didn’t catch any of it.
I call Kurt. Each ring is like a punch to the gut. After four, his voicemail picks up.
I disconnect without saying a word.
Maybe I misdialed. Maybe there’s a version of this where he answers the second time and explains this all away.
Four rings. Voicemail. Again.
My hands shake as I switch to text.
Need to talk to you tonight. It’s important.
I stare at it for a full minute, watching the screen like I can force the three little dots to appear.
The message stays unread.
I set the phone face down. What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
The office has gone quiet around me, and I’m alone with a building’s worth of bare steel and a stairwell that ate Zack alive because someone decided fire-resistant coating was too expensive to bother with.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyelids until color blooms behind them. Red. Orange. White.
For a second, I’m back there. The heat against my face shield. Flames eating through my gear. Through layers and layers of skin.
Not real. It’s not real.
I don’t remember standing up, but I’m halfway across the office with no memory of getting there.
I should have gotten to him.
For seven years, that was my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night.
I pace back and forth for several minutes, replaying every moment of that day. My knee aches, and eventually, I limp back to my desk.
I was too slow. Too far away. I should have protected him. Should have gotten to him.
I couldn’t. I made it as far as the building let me.
My knees go weak. I land in my chair, and it rolls until it slams against my file cabinet.
The words on the page blur. Breathing takes work now. I drag in a shallow breath. Then another. And another.
I don’t know how long I sit here. Or what I’m supposed to do with seven years of guilt that was never mine to carry.
Scrolling, I stop on the photo of the stairwell again.
Zack is still there. He’ll always be there.
Parker
Judge Nesbitt doesn’t give us any trouble with the warrants. A call from AJ didn’t hurt there. Nate’s already on the phone with the first developer before I’ve even had a chance to thank her clerk.
Seven sets of financial records.
By the time we’re back at the station, we have most of them. Four arrive electronically. Small miracle there. Then the bankers boxes start coming in. No one balked. But I reckon burying us in paper is the next best thing.
Nate speed walks into the conference room with two mugs of coffee and sets them both down next to his laptop.
“Gee, thanks for thinking of me, partner.” I reach for my water bottle, side-eyeing the first box open on the chair next to me. Eliot’s chair.
He glances down at the coffee, then over at me. With a sheepish smile, he slides one of the mugs across the table. “In my defense, I saw all the boxes and panicked.”
“Fair. But we have the inspection dates. We know who they’re payin’. We’re only looking at maybe six weeks of financial data per building.” I stare at his array of highlighters. “And you get to color code everything.”
That returns the spark to his eyes. Nate picks up a light blue pen and points it at me. “Welcome to the color-coding side, Parker. We have cookies.”
By the time six p.m. rolls around, my shoulders are screaming. My eyelids are made of sandpaper, and the conference room looks like a tornado rolled through a paper mill.
“Gotcha,” Nate mutters. On the wall monitor, he highlights three separate transactions. “The investment group that owns the Aldrich building cut three checks made out to cash eight days before their inspection. Seventy-five thousand total.”
We’ve only made it through two of the seven companies. With forty-one buildings, forty-one inspections, and forty-one inspection dates, this could take us a week. Longer, if the last twenty-something buildings on the spreadsheet also have issues.
Our warrants were very specific. All incoming and outgoing transactions for all company bank accounts for specific date ranges only.
We asked for eight weeks surrounding each inspection date.
Six weeks before, two weeks after. Only half of them listened.
Two of them sent over years of financial data, including tax returns, canceled checks, photocopies of ledgers, and receipts for everything from office furniture to vending machine services.
I called it malicious compliance. Nate called it thorough. Until he opened the first box and found ten years’ worth of petty cash receipts and a dead moth.
“Log it and move on. Unless you want to finish this in the morning?” I lug another box off the floor. “We could pull in the two new guys to help.” A cloud of dust escapes when I lift the lid. Great. More receipts we don’t need. “Show them how glamorous this work can be.”
“I’ve got another hour in me.” Nate scribbles something on the legal pad at his elbow.
“But after that, yeah.” He stretches his arms overhead, and bends backwards over the chair.
“You gotta wonder… Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just do the work?
Aldrich was what? Gaps in the firewalls and a water pressure issue?
How much would it have cost to do it right? ”
He’s got a point. “Eliot would know.” I start digging through the mess on the table, hunting for my phone. A stack of bank statements goes back in its box, then a handful of receipts, then an honest-to-God old-school checkbook.
Nate arches a brow. “You just want an excuse to call him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s just the best person to ask.” I find my phone behind a half-empty box and dial while Nate goes back to his spreadsheets.
He picks up on the third ring, but doesn’t say a word. I can hear him breathing. But there’s something off about the sound. It’s too fast. Uneven.
“Eliot?”
Another breath. This one is rougher. It catches in his throat.
“Eliot, talk to me.” I’m on my feet, eyes sweeping the conference room for my bag. Something is very wrong.
“The fire…Zack…” A raw, anguished sound tears from his throat. “Kensington.”
“Kensington? What’s Kensington? What does it have to do with Zack?”
“I can’t… They did this, Parker…”
Nate presses my keys into my hand. I didn’t even notice he’d gotten up. “Kensington is on the spreadsheet,” he says quietly. “Paper mill. It burned down seven years ago.”
Oh, God. I cover the mic with my hand and look up at Nate. “He was there. That’s the fire that almost killed him.”
“Go. You need me, you call.” Nate holds out my bag, his dark eyes bright with the start of tears. “For anything, Parker. I mean it.”
I nod, clutch the bag to my chest, and run for the door. “Eliot? Are you at the office?”
“Y-yeah.”
“I’m coming. I’m already in the car. Ten minutes, okay? Maybe less. Just…stay with me.”
The call switches to Bluetooth as I start the engine. But pulling onto Grand, I remember what time it is. Rush hour.
Fuck!
The Department of Public Safety has strict rules about running the lights and siren. I think about the consequences for exactly two seconds before I decide I don’t care.