St. Albans Fire (17 page)

Wolff froze for a moment. “Eight?”

“That’s how many have changed hands recently. When you look at the map, seems like a lot of activity with no logical explanation.”

Wolff pursed his lips. “What’s the nature of your investigation, Detective? Can I ask that?”

Jonathon smiled indulgently. “You can ask. Are you denying that you’ve been involved in eight land deals down there?”

In fact, Jonathon was bluffing here, since of the eight transactions that Joe had identified, only five had been traced back to Wolff’s office, meaning the remainder were either coincidental or just better disguised.

The Realtor stood up and crossed over to the papers that were spread across the far end of the conference table.

Jonathon expected him to retrieve a document to aid in his explanation. Instead, the older man merely placed both hands flat on the table, looking like an ancient and worn-out prizefighter.

“Detective,” he said, not looking up, “I have been in this business for almost fifty years. Chances are, I’ve set foot on almost every piece of real estate in the county, in one capacity or another. That has sometimes put me in awkward situations. I’ve been accused of fleecing widows and robbing destitute farmers and raping the environment and being a multimillionaire at everyone else’s expense.” He finally swiveled his large head to look at Jonathon directly. “But I have done none of those things, including making a million bucks. I
have
tried to conduct myself with honesty and integrity, and I have bent over backwards to get to know people and to prove that it has never been my intention to do anyone harm or to cause anyone distress.”

He straightened to his full height. “If you have something to tell me or to ask me, spit it out, because while I may conduct some of my business discreetly, I have nothing to hide from the authorities. That having been said, I am also not going to divulge private aspects of a business deal that may cost me everything if word gets out.”

He stopped speaking and waited, putting Jonathon squarely on the spot.

The latter cleared his throat quietly, wishing Gunther were there to keep him company. “Sorry, Mr. Wolff. I didn’t mean to imply you were up to anything. It was just that the pattern of sales I noticed might play into our investigation. You can understand why that got my interest.”

Wolff smiled tiredly. “What I understand is that you have things you can’t tell me, and I have things I don’t want to tell you. Since you’re the one who came to me, maybe you can convince me why I should be more forthcoming.”

Jonathon pondered that for a moment. He had no proof that Wolff was any less honorable than he claimed. During his research, the people he’d interviewed had all said Clark Wolff was a straight shooter. But there were rules of engagement all cops tended to follow, and revealing inner aspects of an ongoing case to an outsider, no matter how trustworthy, was a definite violation.

“Mr. Wolff,” he said, “the Vermont Bureau of Investigation is the state’s primary major crimes unit. We do not investigate misdemeanors. We handle murders, rapes, drugs, arson, and all the other headline grabbers. You can take it from me that the reason I’m here is not trivial. If I sense your holding back is with the intention of impeding my work, a few leaked details about a business deal will be the least of your worries. Is that convincing enough?”

It was a credit to Wolff’s maturity and experience that he didn’t simply blow up and throw Michael out. Instead, he chuckled after a pause and said, “All right. Let’s tiptoe into this and see how far we get. A little mutual back-scratching, okay?”

Jonathon didn’t answer, nonplussed by the man’s apparent imperturbability.

“For example,” Wolff continued, “you said I’d done eight deals in that area. I only know of three. Whose math is off?”

Jonathon extracted his notepad and consulted its contents. He recited the eight names of the farmers who’d sold out.

Wolff absorbed the list and answered, “I arranged the Loomis sale, as you know from before, as well as Cooper’s and Chauvin’s. I’d heard unrelated news—or so I thought—about a couple of the other farmers. That Beatty had been killed by his tractor and Martin put in the hospital for something with his lungs. Of course I knew about how Loomis’s barn burned down; and I won’t deny that I knew Noon was in trouble because of a couple of milk spoilage episodes. But he came to me. Before then, I’d never even met the man. As for the others, I honestly didn’t know their properties had been sold. Which is troubling, because I should have. It means a competitor worked fast and quietly and set in before anything was listed.”

Jonathon’s brow furrowed. “But you bought them out, through proxies. Are you denying that?”

“I absolutely am. I’ll even admit that I would have dearly loved to have gotten those three farms. They said they sold to me? Personally?”

“To your office.”

“What’s that mean?”

Jonathon was confused. “One of the people out there, I guess.” He gestured toward the other room.

“Except for Karla,” Wolff explained, “they don’t work for me. I give them a phone, a desk, and an association—meaning the credibility of my good name. In exchange, I get paid a small percentage of every deal they make. Who signed the paperwork?”

“I couldn’t read it,” Jonathon admitted. “I assumed it was you, since the signature was written over Wolff Properties.” He pulled a copy of one of the sales agreements out of his pocket and handed it to Wolff. “That’s not your signature?”

The old man stared at the document for a long time, plainly working out what was going on. He finally shook his head.

“No. It belongs to John Samuel Gregory. One of my associates.”

From the tone of the man’s voice, Jonathon could tell that all this suddenly made sense to him. But he wasn’t happy.

“MR. WOLFF,” JONATHON MICHAEL ASKED,
“What the hell is going on?”

Clark Wolff kept staring at John Gregory’s illegible scrawl at the bottom of the sales agreement. “In a word,” he finally answered, “ambition.”

Jonathon pointed to the document. “That’s not legitimate?”

Wolff returned it to him. “Oh, it’s good, all right. In more ways than one. Good in fact and good for the firm. I just didn’t know anything about it.”

Jonathon remained silent, expecting his exasperated expression to be eloquent enough.

Wolff understood, explaining with a sigh, “All right. What I will tell you is that we are trying to put together a very ambitious project—a development which will both benefit the community and make us very wealthy, but which will be tricky and time-consuming to pull off. A years-long commitment. In my case, I’m motivated for the sake of my children. This will take long enough that I expect they’ll benefit more than I. But for John, who is young and single, time is of the essence. As with most people his age, he thinks time is against him.”

“What’s the project?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

Jonathon didn’t argue the point—yet. “Then what is Gregory up to that caught you by surprise?”

“We are supposed to be working as a team,” the Realtor said shortly.

“You don’t agree with these purchases?”

Wolff slowly pulled out a chair and sat heavily. He rubbed the bridge of his nose before answering. “In all honesty, I can’t say that. They fit the overall scheme we’ve laid out. From what you showed me, the prices paid and the financial terms are in line. And,” he added with a sad smile, “aside from your being here, they haven’t attracted undue attention. So I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I just wish he hadn’t acted behind my back. It was a risk.”

“How so?”

“You create bad blood; you can make a mistake. A deal like this only works when you keep your whole team informed. John’s an outsider. He doesn’t know the folks around here like I do. Going solo just to make a point is a little like navigating a ship without a pilot, just to see if you can do it.”

It was time for Jonathon to put one of his cards down on the table, in the hope that the other man might do the same.

“Mr. Wolff, it looks like mistakes
were
made, by who we’re not sure yet. Farley Noon’s barn was an arson, it looks like Loomis’s might’ve been, too, and we’re suspicious about what might have led to a couple of the other sales on that list.”

“What are you saying?” Wolff asked darkly.

“Right now, that unless you open up a bit more, that timeline of yours is likely to get a whole lot longer. You know how things get when cops start talking about arson and murder.”

“Murder.”

“Talk to me, Mr. Wolff.”

Wolff stared at the opposite wall for a few moments, clearly weighing his options. “You don’t have anything concrete linking my firm to any of this yet. Is that correct?”

“I’m sitting here already,” Jonathon answered him ambiguously. “And we’ve barely started connecting the dots.”

Still, the older man wrestled. “Why does the exact nature of the project make any difference?” he asked plaintively.

“People have died,” Jonathon said patiently, knowing he’d already won. “Surely, that’s not a serious question.”

Wolff ran both hands through his hair and pushed himself up off his chair. “Come on,” he said, leading the way to a door at the back of the conference room.

He unpocketed a batch of keys and turned the lock on the door with one of them. They stepped into a darkened room with its curtains drawn. Wolff hit the light switch to reveal what looked like a military command post—a document-laden table, the walls covered with maps and charts and oversize photographs. At a glance, Jonathon recognized that the area of interest was the same swatch of land between the lake and the interstate, just south of town.

“Looks like an invasion plan,” he commented, glancing around.

Wolff was thoughtful before he answered. “In a way, it is.” He crossed to the most generalized map, which included Plattsburgh in New York, the whole of Lake Champlain, northwestern Vermont, and even a slice of Canada.

“You ever drive over to New York State from this part of Vermont, Detective?”

“Sure.”

“Takes a while, doesn’t it? Either taking the ferry from Burlington, leapfrogging across the islands, or almost entering Canada to get across the water.”

“Yeah.”

“For years, people have talked about solving that problem by building a bridge from Plattsburgh to Burlington,” Wolff explained. “Hooking I-89 to the New York Thruway.”

Jonathon laughed uneasily. Up to now, he’d thought of Wolff as a reasonable man. “I heard they once talked about putting a landing strip on Mount Mansfield, too,” he said. “Still didn’t make it likely. I mean, convenience aside, there aren’t enough people in the whole state of Vermont to justify that kind of expense.”

“The incentive doesn’t come from this state. It’s federal.”

Jonathon’s brow furrowed. “Are you serious? All this is about a bridge?”

Wolff switched to another, more detailed map. “Look at how the Champlain islands line up—like stepping-stones. With the proper funding and momentum, a little connect-the-dots would result in making this backwater an overnight hub, with preexisting interstates—now all linked—heading off in four different directions.”

Jonathon was baffled. “What for?”

“Homeland Security,” was the simple response. “I have it on good authority that the federal government wants to turn St. Albans into a major northern Homeland Security traffic circle—a jumping-off interdiction point extending along the border from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. There’s a string of about five such centers being discussed. The only hitch with this one is Lake Champlain.” He tapped the map with his finger. “Ergo, the bridge.”

Jonathon was tempted to challenge Wolff’s logic, but he’d already seen so much foolish money expended in the name of national security that a mere billion-dollar bridge paled by comparison. What might seem nonsensical to him—considering that the entire border was unguarded—didn’t mean there might not be government funding to make it happen.

He indicated the map. “This is why the properties you and John Gregory are buying could be worth a fortune? Because they’re directly in the path?”

Wolff merely waggled his eyebrows in agreement.

Jonathon ran this through his brain. Now that he’d discovered the rationale behind the purchases, the larger scheme had little meaning. Clark Wolff could have detailed plans of a landing base for alien spaceships. The crucial point remained not the credibility of the project, but that the people behind it believed it was feasible. And that it involved more than enough money to kill for.

He couldn’t resist one question, however, since he knew Joe would ask it of him in turn: “You said ‘on good authority.’ We’re pretty tied into Homeland Security, given who we are. I hadn’t heard anything about this.”

Wolff’s answer surprised him. “It doesn’t matter. I trust my sources—very highly placed and reliable. But in the end, even if this project doesn’t go through, these land deals are still sound, in and of themselves. I’ll still make money, even if not what I was hoping. The only real difference is that I’ve expended more capital than I would have normally. I’m very extended right now.”

“Is that where John Samuel Gregory comes in?” Jonathon asked. “Guys with three names are usually loaded. Doesn’t he drive a Porsche?”

Wolff’s voice flattened somewhat. “Yes, he does.”

“So you’re more business partners than you let on.”

“It’s my project,” Wolff said stubbornly.

Jonathon let his silence speak for him.

“Yes,” Wolff conceded. “We are partners because of his personal assets.”

“Tell me about Mr. Gregory.”

“He’s from down south. His father’s a highflyer. There’s always been money in the family. He came into the office half a year ago, papers in order, looking for a place to work out of. For a while, he functioned as they all do out there, but he’s smart and ambitious, and, of course, there was the money.”

“Of course.”

“Anyhow, when I found out about this”—Wolff waved an arm at the surrounding maps—“I needed someone to go in with me. I actually thought I’d have to create a consortium, which made me very nervous. Turned out, John was enough.”