Mick heard the catch in her breath just as one word halfway down the page leaped out at him. They’d missed it earlier when they’d been so focused on her father’s name and title at the bottom.
“Murder?”She gasped and poked her forefinger on the paper while she tried to catch her breath.
He repeated the name in his head but was certain he’d never heard it. “Did you ever know any ‘Ben Morrison’? It doesn’t say there who he was or even when…he died.”
Her eyes were wild as her hands braced on the edge of the table.
“Were there any members of your dad’s crew who died while he was chief?”
“The department hasn’t lost a firefighter in seventy-five years. That was always a point of pride for D—” She cleared her throat. “I mean Stan.”
Though Rachel didn’t look at him, her pain coursed through him. She’d lost her father twice now, both times in violence. She couldn’t allow herself to mourn him now. Refused to call him “dad.” As for the part about no firefighter casualties, Mick ruthlessly pushed that aside. If he allowed himself to think about the crew members he’d lost, he wouldn’t be in the here and now for her. And she needed him.
“Then who was he?” he asked.
She shook her head and continued to read. The confession was short and to the point. It listed bribes, falsifying documents and not one buttwomurders, all for which Stan Hoffman took full responsibility. Whether Rachel’s father had truly been involved in any of it, he couldn’t say. But if he had, Mick would have bet his pickup and all his furniture in storage back in Chicago that he’d had help.
“That seems a little convenient, don’t you think?” Mick pointed to that part of the letter. He hated that he’d said something similar when Rachel had first come to him, claiming secrets and cover-ups. Even if they didn’t have all the details, he knew now that she was right.
“What does?” She looked up from the document.
“That your dad confessed to a one-man crime spree. Seems like even if he did all these things, he would have needed help with the heavy lifting. Particularly covering up a murder.” He tapped his finger on the words. “It even makes a point of stating that he ‘acted alone.’ That’s at least a small red flag.”
That she shook her head, refusing to consider the possibility, made him more determined to convince her.
“And look at it.” He lifted the letter to examine it more closely. “This isn’t even an ink signature. It’s a copy. Why would your dad have kept acopyof a confession he never turned in? And who has the original?”
She held it up, studying the handwriting. “None of this is making sense, but that’s my father’s signature, all right. I tried a few times to forge it when I skipped school, but I could never quite get it right.”
“Do you think this could be a forgery?”
Rachel studied the signature a little longer. “It looks real.”
Her sigh made his chest ache. He’d given her hope for a second only to squash it, so he tried again, like grasping for something solid in a downpour.
“It still could be possible that someone else wrote the letter and forced him to sign it, maybe as a threat to expose him for lesser crimes.” He slid it closer to her again. “Look at the words. Does it read like something your father could have written?”
She frowned down at the page. “It doesn’t. He couldn’t spell to save his life, and grammar definitely wasn’t his thing.’”
“He wouldn’t have had AI available to him then, either.”
Rachel pushed the paper back at him. “Okay, so maybe he didn’t write it, but he still could be guilty.”
Her pained expression told him how much she wished that something in all those papers could have proven that Stan was innocent. He wished he could produce those documents for her as well.
Mick planted his elbows on the table and rested his head in his splayed hands, closing his eyes. But as the memory of the car from earlier burrowed beneath his closed lids, he opened them again, his chest tight, his pulse pounding as hard as it had when he’d noticed it in the drive. Waiting for her.
“But if your dad had acted alone in all of this, why would anyone care if you and your brother found out the awful truth about him? It wouldn’t have hurt anyone else.”
Rachel straightened in her seat and pulled the file closer to her. “Why didn’t I think of that? If they had nothing to hide, or believed that whatever we found would implicateonlyhim, then why the threats? Why set Riley up at work? Why any of it?”
“It’s de Cervantes’s quote, ‘I shall be as secret as the grave,’” he said.
She nodded several times, now on board. “They knew that even after his death, Stan had information that could still hurt them. So they wanted to ensure that my brother and I would be too scared to try to uncover it.”
“Or if you did find anything, they wanted to let you know what would happen to you if you told anyone.”
Rachel chewed her bottom lip. “Like that Fielding quote. Something like ‘not death, but dying which is terrible.’ They made that part pretty clear.”
