“I know too,” Sue chimed in.
The deputy ignored them and motioned for Tyler to continue.
“I was supposed to take my son hiking,” he said quietly. “Garrett. He was two and a half. Loved being outside, loved the mountains. I’d planned a short trail, nothing too difficult. We’d done it before. He’d walk some, and I’d carry him in a pack some.”
The memories hit him hard. Garrett’s excited face when Tyler had mentioned the hike the night before. Jen had made them lunches. They’d take their time and just enjoy the day. He’d asked her to go along, but she wanted to catch up on laundry and maybe get some reading done. “I might even soak in a hot bath until the water runs cold,” she’d told him with a laugh.
“That morning, Garrett woke up with a fever. Nothing serious, just a cold, but enough that taking him out wasn’t a good idea.” Tyler forced himself to continue. “Jen toldme I should go anyway, get some air and clear my head. I’d been working a lot of overtime and was stressed about bills.”
“So you went alone,” Adam said.
“Yes.”
“How long were you gone?”
“Four hours. Maybe a little more.” Tyler’s hands clenched into fists. “When I got back, the house was on fire. Fire trucks were already there, and neighbors were standing in the street. I tried to get inside, but the firefighters held me back.”
His voice had gone flat, robotic. The only way to get through this was to detach, to recite facts without feeling them.
“They found Jen in the kitchen. Garrett was still in his bed. Smoke inhalation. The fire marshal determined it started in the kitchen, probably overwhelmed Jen immediately. Some kind of issue with the gas range. Completely accidental.”
“But you collected insurance money,” Adam pressed.
“Of course I did. That’s what insurance is for. I used it to pay off our bills and cover the funeral expenses. The rest I gave to Jen’s parents.”
“Convenient story.”
Tyler’s control snapped. “My wife and son died while I was hiking because I chose myself over them. That’s what I live with every single day. I chose to go to the mountains instead of staying home, and they died because of it. So don’t stand there and suggest I had anything to do with that fire, because surviving when they didn’t is punishment enough.”
The room went silent. Sue had tears in her eyes, and Robert’s expression was grim. Even Edi looked uncomfortable.
Adam’s face remained impassive. “Just doing my job.”
“Yourjob,” Tyler said bitterly, “seems to involve harassing innocent people.”
He knew that wasn’t entirely fair. Adam had been new to the sheriff’s department when the fire happened and was eager to prove himself. For reasons Tyler never understood, he had fixated on him as a suspect despite the evidence. He dragged the investigation out, showed up at Tyler’s temporary housing with more questions, and made it clear he thought Tyler was guilty.
Edi wasn’t a deputy then. She had just returned to Irma from school and was taking a semester off to help her parents after her dad’s cancer diagnosis. Edi easily found a part-time job working with the county, just to keep from going crazy, she’d said.
Tyler had understood what she was going through. His mom had died in a car accident when Tyler was in middle school. His dad died while Jen was pregnant with Garrett, after battling colon cancer for more than a year. With his folks both gone, then losing Jen and Garrett, it had been easy to leave Irma.
When Tyler came back to Irma just before Christmas last year, Adam had shown up at his rental house within a week. No official business, just a “friendly” reminder that people hadn’t forgotten what happened. That they were watching.
Tyler had considered leaving again, going somewhere else and starting over yet again. But he’d tried that for a dozen years, and it hadn’t worked. He’d been miserable in Montana, lonely in Idaho, and restless in Utah. Indianaseemed promising, but it was just too flat. There was no place that felt like home because home was here, in Basin County, whether he liked it or not.
So, he stayed. And aside from Adam’s periodic harassment, it had been okay. Better than okay, actually. His old friends seemed happy to see him.
Edi had stopped by his place a few days after Adam, not in uniform. At the time, he didn’t even know she was employed by the sheriff’s department. They’d chatted and caught up. When she told him she’d been on the job for four years, he’d been surprised.
She hadn’t dropped by his place again, but he still saw Edi around town. He ran into her at the bank a few days ago, talking with Sheila, another woman they’d both gone to high school with. The three of them stood there catching up for twenty minutes, and for a little while things felt almost normal.
Even now, during this interrogation, Edi didn’t seem to think Tyler had anything to do with the body they’d found. Her questions were procedural, professional. Adam was the only one who kept circling back to suspicion.
“Are we done here?” Tyler asked.
“For now,” Adam said. “But I’ll have more questions as the investigation progresses.”
Sue took a step forward. “Did you find one body or two? I’ve been wondering since yesterday.”
