The False Receipt Carried A Number That Did Not Exist

Nora sent me the receipt while we were still on the phone.

It listed all three module serial numbers. Under them was my signature and a date: March 19.

The first fire had happened in April. The second was in May. Lark Court had burned in June.

If the receipt were real, Cormac could claim I had kept a second set, or switched the parts later. At the least, he could muddy the story until people stopped listening.

"Don't contact him," Nora said. "Tell me what you see."

I enlarged the page.

The signature looked painfully familiar. My pen had caught on something when I made the L, leaving two little loops instead of one.

I remembered doing that. I did not remember signing that receipt.

Then I saw the phone number under my shop name.

"That's my new line," I said.

"How new?"

"May. A truck pulled down the old cable. I changed providers and got a different number."

"Find the bill."

I found the bill, the service email, and the first card I had ordered with the new number. My bank statement showed $42 for those cards on May 11.

None of that alone told us who had made the false page. It did tell us the page could not be the March original Cormac's lawyer had described.

I placed a jar of crooked screws on one corner of the printout. Then I opened my paid invoices.

The doubled loop was on a May receipt for shade work at Cormac's office. I had signed it, scanned it, and emailed it to Brynn.

"Send the original email with the attachment," Nora said. "Keep your copy as it is."

I did.

I also made a plain list of every version I had received, with the date and sender beside it. Nora checked the list before it went anywhere. The work took most of Saturday and earned me nothing.

On Sunday, Mrs. Bell called about her water-stained lamp. I told her I had found a shade that fit.

"What do I owe?" she asked.

"I'll send an estimate before I start."

It helped to give someone a normal answer to a normal question.

She sent the material to Rafael through the proper channel and asked Cormac's attorney to preserve the source of the claimed receipt.

His attorney withdrew it two days later.

That did not erase it.

"It was submitted in support of his claim," Nora told me. "We have it. The court has it."

I had spent two nights wondering whether a copied signature could take my shop. Now that same sheet was becoming another question Cormac would have to answer.

Rafael came by the following Thursday with another investigator. She handled the questions about the false receipt while he checked details from my original module report.

"Does this number identify a person?" she asked.

"No," I said. "A service device. A person could share it."

Rafael nodded once.

They needed me to know my work, not stretch it into something bigger.

After the interview, he noticed the lamp on my bench.

"That one looks different."

"It's supposed to. Someone put a table-lamp socket in a wall fitting. The switch rubs the shade."

"Can you fix it?"

"If I find the right collar."

I tipped a few screws onto a cloth. He reached for one, then stopped.

"May I?"

I handed him a short brass screw with its slot set off to one side.

"Why keep that?" he asked.

"Someone will need exactly that one."

He turned it carefully in his palm.

"My father kept bent nails," he said. "Coffee tins full. He said new ones didn't know the house."

I laughed. Rafael smiled, then looked down at the screw as though he had shown me more than he meant to.

For a minute, I forgot the empty spaces under my bench.

Then his colleague called him from the doorway, and he gave the screw back.

The next week brought the connection records.

I learned what they showed at a follow-up interview. A court order had required the service company to supply its stored business records. The company had also preserved them before its normal deletion date.

R-4418-N was registered to a service terminal in Cormac's office.

The records linked that terminal to the three buildings' central systems on the nights of the fires. They also showed a scheduled Juniper session after the utility crew had cut its power.

"So he did it," I said.

"We can place the device," Rafael said. "Now we establish who used it, what they arranged, and how that fits the fire scenes."

I looked at my hands.

"Thank you for telling me the part we still don't know."

That night, a blocked number called my shop.

Cormac's voice was as low as ever.

"Paper burns too, Alaina."