“I did.She told me there were none installed in the barn.”
“Did you tell her one was in the plans?”Bonnie asked.
“I did not.The police investigation will become official soon, and Cooper asked me not to give the Shoemacher family any advance warning of the evidence collected.”
“Does Cooper think one of them started the fire?”she gasped.
“I don’t know.My part of the investigation was only to determine if there was or was not arson.Cooper and Sheriff Wheeler have been doing all the legwork on who might have started the fire.”
“The system was on the approved plans,” she said abruptly.“The county building inspector would have had to inspect the sprinklers.”
He smiled faintly.“You made that leap of logic fast.”
She frowned.“The final inspection was passed.The certificate of occupancy was issued.I’ve seen the paperwork.The inspector certified that the building met all specifications in the approved plans.”
Cooper nodded.“Including a fire suppression system that was never built.”
The room was very quiet.She could hear traffic on the street outside, faint and indifferent.She could hear, distantly, a meadowlark singing, the careless song birds sang when they didn’t know the world was ending.
She looked at the blueprints.At the photographs.At the summary whose conclusion she already felt in her bones like the ache before a storm.
“The owner of that barn,” she said slowly, “built it without the required sprinklers.And he collected a fat insurance payout after it burned.”
Gray said nothing.He didn’t need to.
She named the owner.“Lucas.”
It was the first time she’d said his name in this room.It raked across her skin like a knife and left a trail of blood in its wake.
She stood up.The chair scraped against the concrete floor.She walked a few steps toward the door.But she stopped because there was nowhere to go that was far enough from what she’d just heard.
The parking lot was out there, and her car, and her house, and her children’s school, and none of those places existed in a world where Lucas Shoemacher hadn’t done what the evidence saidsomeonehad done.
Gray didn’t approach her.He stood by the blueprints gave her the space she needed, the way he always did.The way he’d done the first day she walked into this building and nearly shattered in front of a stranger.He was the best man she’d ever met at knowing when not to move.
She stood there for a full minute.Maybe two.She breathed.She pressed her fingernails into her palms hard enough to leave marks.She did not cry because crying was a luxury and she couldn’t afford luxuries right now.She needed to think.
She turned around.
“I have something to show you, too.”
She walked back to her chair.Picked up her bag from the floor.Unzipped it.Reached past her wallet and her phone and an uneaten granola bar and pulled out the white envelope.She tore it open and laid out the two folded sets of paper that she’d been carrying around like a confession she couldn’t bring herself to make.
Gray sat down beside her at the table and just looked at her.Waiting for her to speak in her own time.
“Lucas keeps a locked box inside his safe.I don’t know the combination to the safe, and I’ve only seen the box once.But ten days ago, I heard him go into his office, open his safe, and pull out the box.A few minutes later, he came out and handed me a stack of documents.”Her voice was steady.She was surprised by how steady it was.“He told me to shred them.”
Gray looked at the papers on the table.Looked at her.
“But I kept them instead.I wanted to know what they were before I destroyed them.”
One of his eyebrows lifted, but he still said nothing.
“Normally, I would never do such a thing.But there was something about Lucas that day ...it made me suspicious.Something was off.At any rate, I did read them.And I found these.”
Gray leaned forward looking at the top page of the first set of documents.
She continued, “They’re two sets of email correspondence between Lucas’s email address and two different recipients I can’t identify.The addresses don’t include names.But the content is clear.Payoffs were made.Money changed hands.A lot of money.The amounts and dates are specified.And both sets reference arrangements made in exchange for those payments.”
