Page 71 of Into the Fire

“Walk me through yesterday,” I said. “The statements are short. I need to fill in the gaps for the file.”

“Sure.” He set the wrench down. There was no tension in his body. “Morning, I was on the tower rebuild with Hollis. Lunch at the wall, Ramirez’s chili bread thing. Then I had the clipboard when—” he paused—“the afternoon. I wrote all that down.”

“Between the rebuild and lunch. Where were you?”

“The wall. I went over early; I was hungry.”

“Straight there?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you go through the loft?”

“No.”

I gave him a second.

“Think about that,” I said.

Shep looked at me.

“I wasn’t in the loft.”

“Anywhere near the gear shed? The tower side of the yard during the front end of lunch?”

“No.”

The kid who slept at my gate rather than risk being late looked me in the eye and told me he hadn’t been where I’d seen him.

I wanted to ask why and say I saw you, Shep, and watch his face, but if he didn’t know what I had, then I had something.

“Okay,” I said.

He picked his wrench back up.

“That everything? For the file?”

“That’s everything. Order the part.”

Shep lied to me. I kept that close all day. That evening I went looking for Dante.

He was on the bunkhouse steps with his paperback, reading by the porch light with his travel mug going cold beside him. He looked up when my boots hit the gravel and marked his page with a finger.

“Shep lied to me.”

He straightened, and I sat down on the step below him. I told him the entire story of where and when I’d crossed paths with Shep.

“How sure are you it was yesterday?” Dante asked. “Not Tuesday. Or last week.”

“The memo was in my hand. Marty typed it yesterday morning. It can’t be any other day.”

He nodded slowly and looked out at the yard. He didn’t say Shep did it. “Then we’ll figure out why he lied,” he said.

That wasn’t what I expected.

“He could be covering something stupid,” Dante said. “He’s twenty-five. The list of stupid things a twenty-five-year-old covers up is long, and most of it’s embarrassing, not criminal.”

“I didn’t—”