Chapter 5
Dom was damned tired. He’d barely slept in almost ten days, since Wilson’s attack on the forensics team.
He’d been kept busy trying to figure out what in the hell Kimball had been doing that night.
He was still trying to answer that question completely.
Dom had printouts of everything that had been found in Sol Kimball’s home spread out in front of him.
Especially what had been hidden in that poster.
They were financial statements, mostly. But…there were cryptic notes in the margins and things that didn’t add up. Anywhere. He strongly suspected they were doctored now.
He wasn’t a forensic accountant. Dom could do math—he’d majored in math for his associate’s degree, before applying to the TSP academy—but forensic accounting was an entirely different ballgame.
Dom seriously doubted that nutball Kimball knew what to do with these kinds of bullshit reports.
So why did Kimball think a list of bank transactions were so damned important, he’d hidden them in his home before he’d gone to work that night?
Why that night? The reports in front of him were time-stamped.
Not even twelve hours before Hope’s shift had even begun. Yet Hope’s name was on most of them.
As was Heather’s.
Kimball had focused on the Coleson sisters. There had to be a reason for that.
It wasn’t unreasonable to think Kimball didn’t know his pals were turning on him that night.
From what they’d been able to piece together, Kimball had been assigned to that parking lot by happenstance.
Just like Haldyn had wandered into whatever was happening by chance.
There was nothing to prove differently, and from what Haldyn had told Madison that night, Kimball thought he was going to save them all.
Dom had transcripts of Haldyn and Madison’s statements next to him, too.
Kimball had told Haldyn that he wasn’t going to let anything else happen to Hope that night.
Kimball had gone out to save that kid. Madison had been very clear that when he spoke about Hope Coleson, they were convinced he was mixing up Hope with his daughter in his own mind. Some type of delusion, probably brought on by grief.
Dom had a photo of that teenager next to a twenty-year-old Hope. He studied it for a long moment.
The resemblance was there—but most of it, he suspected, had been all in Kimball’s head.
Kimball had seen Hope around the TSP, a woman who his own daughter had supposedly idolized, and he’d replaced his daughter with Hope. Maybe the grief had made him do it, Dom didn’t know. Kimball’s daughter had died around Christmas; Hope had transferred into the Finley Creek post back in January.
Grief over his daughter’s death had driven him mad. Or his guilty conscience had finally gotten the best of him.
Dom thought it was the demons haunting the man.
What a waste of a human life.
Kimball had started off good once. But time and greed had gotten the best of him.
Dom turned to the notepad in front of him.
Time to compare what he had here. The easiest records—Kimball’s own bank records. Why he’d included his own records, Dom hadn’t figured out yet. There had to be a connection there somewhere.
But the man had said one thing, one thing that had stood out to Dom’s own father the night of Wilson’s attack.
It had just been crappy luck Dom’s father and stepmother had been there that night.
Maybe. Dom wasn’t certain Kimball hadn’t chosen the hospital where Dom’s family and Heather’s family worked for a specific reason.
His father and Madison’s mother had been walking across the parking lot after their shifts had ended. Just to be caught with members of Heather’s own family and Murdoch Lake’s twin brother.
There was some sort of macabre justice in that. Families of those hurt by Kimball’s own actions. Dom wasn’t lost to the irony.
Some sort of absolution?
Dom didn’t believe that.
Dom believed in actions, evidence he could see.
Some of that was in front of him now. Kimball had felt this was important enough to keep. With Heather’s reports. What tied those together?
He had Kimball’s bank statements, he had copies of Heather’s attack reports, he had a random list of what looked like bank account transaction numbers—and he had Kimball’s journals.
Dom just had to figure out how they all fit together somehow. Because they did. Kimball had been certain of it. And when he got a chance, he was going to get in to talk to Hope Coleson. And her older sister. Maybe one of those two knew what Kimball had found.
It was at least a better place to start than he’d had.