It had been a huge barn, but a secondary circle of caution tape narrowed ground zero—the spot where Don’s body had been uncovered beside a small industrial tractor, black now, but surely the telltale green and yellow not twelve hours earlier. The floor was covered in junk. Charred wood, fat old nails, slate tile scraps everywhere. Casey turned his attention to the tractor first, to its engine, exposed where one panel had been propped up. He couldn’t make much sense of anything with just one beam. Couldn’t say where the fire had started, which way it had spread, how hot it had gotten. Only daylight could tell him those things. But tonight, he wasn’t after the how. He was after the who.
He swept the light around the mess underfoot, shifting debris, looking for anything unusual and wishing he owned one of those doohickeys his father had had when he’d been little—a strong magnet on a long rod, for fishing dropped bolts and screws from underneath cars or behind workbenches. There might be a single tiny staple somewhere in this mess—the only clue left behind from a pack of matches. Even if there was, though, talk about a needle in a hay—
His hand froze, locking the beam on something square, just where his rustling, plastic-booted foot had pushed aside some litter. Square and black and familiar. He moved the Maglite to his left hand and picked it up.
A cigarette lighter.
It wasn’t unlike his own—a chrome deal, though a gas station knock-off, not a real Zippo. He didn’t dare wipe at the soot, on the off chance any fingerprints had survived, but instead peered at it by the beam of the flashlight. Like his, it, too, had an emblem on one side. Faux enamel, it looked like, and the plastic once coloring it had melted away, leaving only the metal relief of a cheesy skull-and-daggers motif.
Don didn’t smoke, far as Casey knew, and even if he’d had a secret habit, he sure as shit wasn’t dumb enough to have lit up while working on a greasy old tractor engine.
It could have already been here. Just another forgotten bit of junk cluttering up this disused barn. But Casey doubted it. Doubted it as surely as he could picture the amateur arsonist who’d started this fire—picture him flicking it open, striking the wheel, perhaps dropping it in surprise or pain when those flames lashed back at his hand, more aggressive than expected, startling him.
He set the lighter on the hood of the tractor and resumed the search.
Casey couldn’t say how long he was there, scrabbling around on his hands and knees, peering at blackened scraps and bits of junk by the beam of the Maglite. He only knew that when his back began to ache and his head to throb that it must’ve been hours.
He checked his phone. Hours indeed. It was pushing six, and though he wasn’t sure when dawn was due, precisely, he knew he’d be stupid to still be here once the sky grew light.
One cheap lighter wasn’t much, but it was something. He slipped it into a sandwich bag from his pocket and picked his way through the rubble, the scorched earth, and eventually found grass and gravel beneath his feet once more. He ditched the taped-up plastic and the gloves, wadding them up and stashing them in his trunk for the time being. Sloppy, but time was of the essence.
He found his front door key and let himself into the farmhouse, relieved to find it dark and silent. Normally Christine would be up by this hour, but he had no doubt she needed to sleep in . . . if she’d dropped off at all. He fucked around until he found the right light switch, then crept up the front stairway to the Churches’ wing of the house, hoping Miah’s room was where he remembered, the last door on the left.
Casey knocked firmly. No answer. He turned the knob and eased the door in on a dark room. “Miah?”
“Yeah.”
He pushed inside, letting the light from the hall reveal Miah, who was sitting on his bed, fully clothed, with his back against the wall and his hands linked atop his belly, staring at the far window.
“I got no doubt you don’t feel like talking just now,” Casey said quietly, “but I found something that I could really use your opinion on.”
“What?”
“Turn on that light.” He nodded to the lamp on Miah’s deep windowsill, and he turned it on. He looked about fifty by its mellow glow.
“I found a lighter in the barn, beside the John Deere. Any chance you recognize it?”
He handed Miah the baggie, and the man’s eyes were wide in an instant.
“You know it?”
“Yes, I fucking know it.”
“Whose?”
Miah spoke so quietly—a simmering growl of a sound—Casey could only just make out the name.
“Bean?” he echoed.
“Chris Bean.” Miah sat up, still staring at the bag. “He used to work for us.”
“When?”
“Must’ve hired him five, six years ago. Fired him two winters back.”
“Why?”
“Drugs. He was one of our best hands, until he got mixed up with amphetamines. I was the one who caught him at it. I’d know that lighter anyplace—I found him camped out in one of the outbuildings, and I saw it on the floor beside a couple of folded-up sheets of aluminum foil, with tweaker streaks burned all over them.”
“You think this is revenge, for your dad firing him? That’s pretty fucking extreme.”
Miah shook his head. “Dad didn’t fire him. I did. Dad gave him more second chances than he deserved, even paid for him to go to rehab. I’m the one who got sick of it and kicked him out.” His head jerked to the side, facing the open door like he might jump to his feet and stride out into the predawn darkness at any moment.
“There any chance he could’ve dropped that in the barn back when he was still working for you?”
“None. I hustled him out that night. Stood there watching while he packed.”
“He drive a dark truck back then?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean shit.”
Well said. “You know where he is these days?” Casey asked.
“I know where he used to stay, after he left.”
“Has he been in touch since? Started anything, with any of you?”
“Nothing. But I’m only happy to start something with him right fucking now.”
“It’s six a.m.,” Casey said, but Miah was already swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress and reaching for his boots.
“I’m coming with you.” Casey didn’t trust the hate blazing in Miah’s eyes and wouldn’t put it past the man to do something rash.
He followed his friend out of the room, down the stairs, and they grabbed their coats in the front hall. Miah didn’t hold the door for Casey, just flung it wide and went striding into the dark. “We need answers, Miah, okay? Answers first, justice later.”
“If you come, you stay the fuck out of my way.”
“I can’t promise that.”
Miah stopped short. “That cocksucker murdered my father. You have any fucking clue what he has coming to him?”
“Miah—”
He began walking again. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”
“Just don’t get yourself shot or thrown in prison for the rest of your life, man. Your mom needs you.” Hell, fucking Fortuity needed him. Needed the ranch. Vince needed him. “You got too much riding on your shoulders to fuck this up, Miah.”
“You come, you better keep out of my way,” he said again.
And what choice did Casey have, really?
Chapter 27
It wasn’t a long drive—just to the other end of Fortuity, barely twenty minutes at the clip Miah was going. He turned them off the main road just before the railroad tracks and down a cracked and faded residential road, all the way to its end. It was one of the town’s more depressing corners, dotted with small houses and trailers, a good quarter of them looking abandoned or at the very least terminally neglected.
The sun was just rising and Miah squinted at the various shitboxes they passed.
“What number?” Casey asked.
“Can’t remember, but it was a single-wide, with an old-school laundry line beside it. Dad insisted on cutting him a final paycheck. I insisted on delivering it, so Bean wouldn’t get a chance to play the pity card and try to win himself any more chances. I remember there were about six cars parked out front. Just what you’d expect from a load of—”