Chapter Twenty-Three

The phone yanks me awake just before dawn.

It goes silent before I can find it—still buried at the bottom of my bed, under a pile of yesterday’s balled-up socks and underwear, gum wrappers, and wrinkled receipts. It’s almost dead, of course—but starts ringing again right away.

Joe. For God’s sake. I almost hit ignore.

“You don’t get to be a pain in the ass until after nine A.M.,” I say.

“There’s been a fire,” Joe says. Nothing else. No details. No panic. Just: there’s been a fire.

I stand up and sway slightly, lightheaded. “Where?” I say, although I already know.

“Gallagher’s,” he says. “Get here.” He hangs up.

By the time I get to the farm the volunteer firefighters have cordoned off the blaze, spraying it down from different angles, like it’s some monstrous animal they’re trying to tether in place. The fields are all tinder, brittle from lack of rain, just waiting to go up.

The barn is gone. Little evidence is even left of what happened. It’s just a flat portion of foundation and a tunnel of ash whirling hot to the sky. Gallagher’s house got scorched, too, but not as bad. The damage is contained mostly to the paint job, although part of the east side has succumbed to the heat and crumbled away, leaving a view into his kitchen. The noise sounds like violent messy eating, like something giant snapping its jaws. The dogs are freaking, too, and for a terrible second I think of the cows and the donkey Gallagher keeps around.

Joe must know what I’m thinking, because the first thing he says is, “None of the animals were hurt.” He adds, almost as an afterthought, “Gallagher’s fine, too. It was the barn they were after.”

That’s all he has to say. Whoever did it, it was a stupid, desperate, clumsy move. Maybe the fire was meant to scare us off. Maybe it was somebody who is worried about having a job and a brand-new community center and plastic swing sets in the park.

Standing there in the smoke-choked morning, staring at the ghost silhouette of our makeshift office, now nothing more than ash and rubble, I feel almost giddy. This fire proves we’re right. It proves that we’re getting closer to the center of the maze. There will be answers in Optimal’s records. I’m sure of that now. And those records are sitting in the trunk of my car. Perfectly intact.

By noon the fire has been extinguished completely, and we waste an hour picking through the remains. It’s just something to do, a way to shove the day back into some kind of order while we wait for the men from the sheriff’s office to finish poking around, like they might find a can of gasoline with an address and a signature. Joe answers some questions, all the same way (Seen anything? No. Know anything? Nope. Anybody giving you trouble? No.), until the conversation finally lands on Optimal.

Now they want to know what we’re doing, what we’ve heard, what ridiculous stories Gallagher’s been feeding us, and do we know he got busted back in the day with enough illegal fireworks to blow the whole town apart, and do we know that Optimal employs sixty percent of Barrens half- or full-time, not counting the locals who run the bars and grocery and post office, all of them busy again after the town was nearly dead, if you thought about it that way you couldn’t count the people in Barrens who weren’t on payroll one way or the other…

And if there is something in the water it sure as hell ain’t running out of Optimal.

And do you know what you’re getting yourself into?

In the afternoon we lump the whole team into the tiny living room at my place until we can figure out a better solution. We divide twenty binders between us and get to work. Except for the rhythmic hiss of turning paper, we work mostly in silence, and unexpectedly I feel a sense of ease that I haven’t felt in I don’t know how long.

It’s Flora who first spots the discrepancy: not money going missing, but too much money accounted for. Optimal has been paying Clean Solutions Management, a firm they subcontracted to deal with chemical disposal, massive sums almost quarterly.

Clean Solutions Management’s website is all low-tech and full of meaningless jargon.

It always pays to follow the money.

I remember what Lilian McMann told me about the too-clean evaluations entered into the federal system on their behalf. There must have been a bribe in it somewhere. “Could Optimal be redirecting money through a company like Clean Solutions?”

Joe squints at me. “What do you mean, redirecting?”

“I don’t know. Think of what they did for Aaron Pulaski. Optimal’s parent company paid off Pulaski so he wouldn’t come after them for labor violations, didn’t they? Maybe one of their subcontractors is cutting checks, too.”

“That would be a lot of effort.”

“Well, maybe it’s a lot of pockets.”

Joe’s eyes are like razors—I can feel them trying to dive straight down into my thoughts. “Like whose?”

Like Colin Danner’s, I think. And maybe his buddy Michael Phillips, who cleaned up the reports he put into ICIS. Maybe the entire goddamn town.

“I don’t know,” I say instead. I haven’t told him about what I learned from Lilian McMann except in general terms. “I’m just throwing it out there.”

He doesn’t seem convinced. For a long time, he stares at me. “On the off chance you’ve forgotten, we’re working this case together,” he says.

“I haven’t forgotten,” I say. “I don’t have anything we can use.” My heartbeat picks up. The room has gone silent, and the comfortable feeling I had earlier has vanished. “Look, if we knew where Kaycee Mitchell went—if we could just get her side of the story—”

But Joe doesn’t let me finish. “If the Kaycee Mitchell case was legit, if she got sick, it only confirms what we think. We can’t prove it because we can’t ask her, and we can’t ask her because we don’t know where she is, and we can’t find her because that’s not why we’re here. Abby, we need to focus on what Optimal is doing now—not what they did ten years ago.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” I snap. Joe doesn’t understand that in Barrens, you can’t just peel away the present from the past. It’s like trying to get gum out of your hair: the more you try to separate it, the more strands get caught up.

“This isn’t about Kaycee Mitchell,” he tells me in a low voice. “This isn’t about what happened back then.” Then: “We might be able to save some people, Abby. But not her. You understand that, right?”

Despite the absurdity of storming out of my own rental, I’m out in the sunshine before I realize I have nowhere to go.

The same thing that makes Joe a good lawyer makes him a crappy friend: he’s right almost all of the time.