St. Albans Fire (11 page)

But not right now, Gail thought, watching the bland face of the man addressing them. This one was a bench-warmer she doubted would be around for the final showdown. And that, she had to admit, was a battle she was looking forward to.

The mere thought of it brought her back to the here and now, and Joe was allowed to slip from her mind as she asked a pointed question of her own.

· · ·

The setting this time wasn’t a restaurant. For one thing, no restaurant had a big enough table for what these three men required. For another, Tim Shafer was now safely on board and no longer in need of a nurturing environment. As a result, he found himself lugging his two boxes of files down a narrow hallway and into the conference room in the Vermont State Police barracks building in St. Albans. There Joe Gunther and Jonathon Michael were already setting up their own paperwork piles along the length of a large wooden table. A thermos of fresh coffee was parked in the middle like a surveyor’s cairn.

“Hey, Tim,” Michael greeted him as Shafer bumped the door open with his hip. “You need help?”

“Nah,” Shafer grunted, dumping the stacked boxes on the table’s one clear area. He began opening them up and distributing their contents, mimicking his two colleagues. “You wouldn’t think traffic in Vermont would be anything to bitch about, but Burlington is going straight to the dogs, if you ask me. Be faster to use the back roads.”

Burlington, also along the shore of Lake Champlain, and the state’s largest town, was about twenty-five miles to the south. Gunther checked the clock on the wall. “It’s after five. You must’ve hit rush hour.”

That did little to calm Shafer down. “Story of my life.”

Michael was oblivious, still shuffling his paperwork. “I heard Chittenden County’s population is growing every week.”

“Well,” Shafer countered, “you can have it. I’m happy living in St. J. with two woodchucks and a cow next door.”

Joe, the first to have arrived, chose a seat and propped one foot on the edge of the table, waiting for the others to catch up. “Not to get the cart ahead of the horse, Jonathon, but did you ever find out why that developer bought out Loomis?” Loomis was the farmer who’d lost his farm to a presumed electrical fire.

Michael didn’t bother looking up. “Nope. I talked to the buyer again—Clark Wolff—and he told me it was a pure investment. That the same urban sprawl that just gave Tim fits in Burlington is heading this way. According to him, it was money well spent. In the meantime, he’s leasing out the fields to neighboring farmers.”

Joe tapped the side of his head. “Wolff—that’s why it rang a bell. When I was interviewing Linda Padgett, I saw a business card on the bulletin board in her kitchen. Belonged to someone called John Samuel Gregory—sounded a little over-the-top, so I commented on it. But now I remember the card said he was with the Wolff firm.”

“He put a price on the farm?” Jonathon asked.

“Wasn’t that kind of conversation. He may have wanted it to be, but I think all he got to do was leave behind that card.”

“I met him,” Jonathon admitted. “He was in the office when I was talking to Wolff. Slick—snappy dresser, smooth talker. Just the type that gives me the willies. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I assumed the Porsche parked out front was his.”

“You happen to ask Wolff what other properties he’s bought recently?” Joe asked.

Jonathon tapped his last little pile straight and immediately swooped down on a file he’d placed earlier, opening it up. “Yeah. I kept it to farms only, since he’s a jack-of-all-trades, selling, leasing, and renting damn near anything he can list. He couldn’t tell me what deals might still be in the works with the other people who work out of his office, like Gregory, but”—he extracted a single sheet of paper and slid it across the table to Joe—“here’s his list.”

He continued speaking as Joe glanced at the document. “Not much to it, like you can see. There’s the Loomis place and two others. I included the names, dates, prices, phone numbers, and everything else he gave me. I also double-checked the land records at the various town offices, to make sure he wasn’t bullshitting me, but I guess he was telling me the truth. He seems like a pretty straight guy.”

Joe put the report aside as Jonathon also found a seat and settled down.

“And what about a cause for the Loomis fire?” he asked. “Your last e-mail said you were still digging.”

Michael looked disappointed. “That hasn’t changed. When we were at the restaurant and arson first came up, I was scared I’d dropped the ball somehow.” He held up his hand quickly, adding, “I’m not saying I didn’t, but I went back over everything, down to the last detail, and the only thing I’d change now is to leave the cause as undetermined, instead of electrical mishap. I jumped the gun a little there.”

Tim looked up from his housekeeping. “Too much damage?”

Jonathon nodded. “The place was trashed. I could trace it to the milk room and the bulk tank wiring, no problem, but that’s about it. Loomis admitted right off he’d fooled with the wires and that it might not have been the best job in the world. I went from there. But to be honest, I never could find anything you’d call a positive source of ignition. If it was arson, it was well done, and designed to look like faulty wiring.”

“Things just get too hot for any evidence to survive,” Tim chimed in supportively. “It happens a lot.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Joe agreed appeasingly. “So there’s nothing to go on at all?”

Jonathon smiled and extracted another document. “Maybe. I reinterviewed everyone as well, and this time I asked if anything unusual or suspicious was noticed before the fire. I did that the first time, of course,” he added, “but now I was a little more persistent.” Again, he handed over what he was holding to his boss. “That’s a statement from Butch Yeaw, Loomis’s hired hand. He claims to have noticed a dark sedan with out-of-state plates drive by a couple of times the same week as the fire. He didn’t get where it was from, just that the plates were light-colored. It stuck in his mind because it seemed like a city car to him—four-door sedan, American-made. But that was pretty much it.”

“He couldn’t describe the driver?” Joe asked.

“Only that he was alone and wearing a brimmed hat. Yeaw also said the car was going slowly, as if the guy was a tourist, except that the feeling was all wrong.”

“We talking reality here, or too many cop shows?” Joe wondered out loud, staring at the cover of the statement.

Jonathon didn’t take offense. “Butch Yeaw doesn’t seem overequipped in the imagination department. I think he tells things pretty much like they are.”

Joe paused to think a moment—a mason considering what stone to use next. “Rick Frantz is still in a coma. It might be interesting to find out if he had access to an out-of-state car.”

“And the hat could’ve been a disguise,” Jonathon suggested. “Local boy throwing suspicion on some mysterious flatlander.”

By now Tim Shafer had sat down, his unpacking finished. “I have a sighting of a man in a brimmed hat,” he said, holding up a statement. “Right here: ‘Looked like somebody from the city—short leather coat and a hat like one of those gangster shows from the seventies—a fedora.’ That’s according to Farley Noon himself, who saw the guy a couple of days before his barn went up.”

“No car?” Joe asked.

“Nope.”

“Still,” Joe mused, “that’s a connection, if only a small one, between Loomis and one of the other two. It gives a little more credibility to Loomis’s being an arson.” He then asked no one in particular, “I wonder if Loomis knows Rick Frantz.” He turned to Tim. “You get any further into your case?”

Shafer looked equivocal. “I went back over it all and conducted a few more interviews, but to be honest, I don’t have much more than before. It doesn’t seem like there was a reason to burn down Noon’s barn. Nobody benefited except the neighbor, who bought the place, like I said, and he looks squeaky-clean.”

“I might have something,” Joe finally admitted, unfolding a map and spreading it open on the table. The other two left their chairs to gather beside him.

“I had somebody at headquarters call around for all the local farm sales over the last half year. This is what they came up with. I’ve circled the acreages in red.”

The map showed Lake Champlain on the left, speckled with various-size islands looking like stepping-stones, and the Vermont shore to the right, with St. Albans at the top and the outer reaches of Burlington lining the bottom.

“Huh,” Shafer grunted softly. “That’s interesting.”

From a distance, the small cluster of eight red circles looked like a shotgun blast, the brunt of which covered a patch of land between the water and Interstate 89, which in turn pointed like a blue ruler line straight at the Canadian border.

“God,” Jonathon commented. “If I ever saw a blueprint for a development project, this is it.”

“Big, too,” Shafer agreed. “Huge, in fact.”

“Maybe,” Joe cautioned. “Some of these properties are three hundred acres or more. If these clustered sales are related—which is a major if, since no one buyer stands out—then it’s possible the actual point of interest is something like this.” He placed his fingertip on a remote crossroads bordered by three of the circled properties. “Right there you have a prime, commercial, two-acre spot owned by three different people. For all we know, the plan is to build a gas station and make a killing on the side by selling off the excess acreage.”

Both arson experts looked at him dubiously.

Gunther laughed and shook his head. “I’m talking theoretically, guys. The point is that something unusual is going on, we have no clue what it is, and it isn’t on the up-and-up. ’Cause here”—he stabbed the map among the red circles—“is the Loomis place, and here”—he stabbed again nearby—“is Noon’s.”

“But Cutts is nowhere near there,” Jonathon said.

Joe looked up from the map, his eyes bright. “Exactly.” He pointed to the outermost property, far inland and distant from the rest of the cluster. It was outlined in blue, distinguishing it from the land sales. “It’s way out in left field. Interesting, huh? For some reason, the same guy who burned Noon’s and may have burned Loomis’s—assuming he’s the man in the brimmed hat—traveled way over here to torch the Cutts place, too. The question is why?”

The others remained silent.

“And to add to the mystery,” Joe added, “I heard this morning that Billy St. Cyr, the same neighbor who’s been ragging at Cutts for two decades but all of a sudden showed up at the funeral and is doing Cal’s sugaring for him, has just offered to buy his place, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“They going to accept?” Jonathon asked.

Joe shrugged. “Don’t know. I just got it through the grapevine. The catch there is that when I interviewed Cal, he said that St. Cyr is looking to get out of the farming business, not wade in deeper. Makes you wonder about the sudden change of heart.”

Shafer was doubtful. “You’re not saying it’s all connected, are you?”

Gunther moved away from the table and began pacing. “God, no.”

He waved vaguely at the spread-out map. “It would be totally paranoid to tie everything together. But by the same token, it could be that the torch is a local guy, or was in town on a separate contract, and that St. Cyr hired him coincidentally, just to do the one job.”

Joe took a breath and added, “There’s something else: I also had the circumstances of every one of these sales looked into, to see if the profile of the seller fit an older farmer who might be less inclined to rebuild after a disaster, like Loomis, or one who got an extra push, like Noon did with his tainted milk. Turns out one of them was killed in a tractor accident, leaving the widow to sell out. And another sold after almost dying from exposure to silage gas.”

“Come again?” Shafer asked.

“He was checking on the contents of his silo by sticking his head through one of the side portals. Silage produces gas—I guess it’s methane or something; I don’t know—but it put him in a coma for two weeks. Damned near killed him. I’ve heard of that before. Even a half-minute exposure can knock you out if you’re not careful. Anyhow, he was in his late sixties and his family insisted he get out of the business after that.”

“Did anyone check on the tractor accident?” Jonathon asked.

“No,” Joe told him. “It was written off as an accident and ascribed to ‘owner error,’ pretty much like Noon and his milk. Also, to add insult to injury, according to the widow, the tractor was declared totaled by the insurance company and disposed of.” He smiled, seeing his colleagues’ expressions, and admitted, “The same thought crossed my mind—I could buy the silage gas as accidental. The guy survived, after all, but the tractor? Sounded too much like a barn burning. Suspicious.”

“Speaking of the torch,” Jonathon said, perhaps seeking firmer ground, “Tim and I put together a profile of his signature—the potassium chlorate squibs, the use of glue trailers, the chips, and the rest—and ran it by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms databank, just to see if we got lucky.”

“And?” Joe asked.

“Still waiting. But I’d like to use my laptop to check if they’ve kicked anything back.”

“Go for it,” his boss urged.

Michael opened his computer, connected it to the high-speed line in the wall, and began typing. As he progressed toward the site he was after, Joe reflected at the ease of it all. The year he started out as a patrol officer in Brattleboro, long before even simple radios were common, much less computers, one of his colleagues had been reduced to summoning help by firing a shot into the air, Old West style. Times had changed fast.

“Got it,” Michael said.

“Who is it?” Shafer asked, peering over his shoulder.

“It’s not a who. It’s a where. According to ATF, a similar unascribed signature was filed with them by the Essex County arson task force, in New Jersey, to be kept on record for future reference.”

“Essex County?”

Joe stopped his pacing and faced them both from across the room. “That’s Newark.”

There was a long silence between the three men before Jonathon finally asked, “What do you want to do with that?”