St. Albans Fire (7 page)

Jonathon absorbed all that and then asked, “The fire broke out midafternoon?”

“Right. Two-thirty.”

Joe got the point. “When all the cows were outside,” he mused. “Interesting difference between the two.”

Both men looked at him.

“What’re you thinking?” Shafer asked.

“What did Farley end up doing?” Joe asked instead.

“Sold out.”

“I’m thinking that somebody knew all too well how the business works, assuming the contamination was connected. Who was the buyer?”

“His neighbor.”

“Did he also get the cows?” Jonathon asked.

Shafer was looking a little uncomfortable, as if he hadn’t given this fairly obvious point the attention it deserved. Joe had been expecting such an awkward moment, sooner or later. It usually cropped up when several investigators compared notes—one of them began to feel he was unfairly being put under scrutiny.

“Yeah,” Shafer admitted.

“Probably neither here nor there,” Joe said placidly, and moved the conversation along. “Was there bad blood between the two?”

“No,” Shafer answered with just a bit more force than necessary. “That was the whole point. They got along fine. The neighbor wanted the acreage, sure, but it was always up-front—had been for years—and he seemed more upset by the burning than Noon. Plus, with the barn gone, he had to blow a bunch of extra bucks to build one of those oversize plastic Quonset hut-type things to house the extra cows. I gave both of them a real going-over—bank accounts, neighbor interviews, the local cops, you name it—they always came up real straight. And the neighbor’s supply of penicillin was all accounted for.”

Joe stared at the two piles of documents thoughtfully for a couple of moments, deciding how best to move on. “Where was the third fire geographically in relation to Farley Noon’s and Calvin Cutts’s?”

They both looked at him inquiringly.

“The so-called accidental electric fire that started in the milk room?” he prompted.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael said. “It was over near Lake Champlain.” He pawed through some of Shafer’s paperwork until he located a map. He slid it before his boss and tapped on a spot with his fingertip. “Somewhere around there. I may be off a hair, but that’s about right.”

Joe studied the map. “A mile from Farley’s. Do you remember what happened to that farmer afterward?”

Jonathon’s silence was telling. Shafer smiled to himself, feeling safely free of the spotlight.

“He sold out,” Michael finally admitted.

“A neighbor again?”

“That’s what I’m trying to remember. No. It was a developer, someone out of St. Albans. Clark Wolff—that was it. Wolff Properties. They handle a bit of everything: rentals, home sales, development projects.”

“You know what they have planned?” Joe asked.

Michael shook his head. “Nope. It just happened, so it may still be under wraps.” He glanced at the map again. “Given its proximity to both the town and the lake, though, it’s probably housing. That’s what’s hot right now.”

Joe pushed the map away and sat back to cross his legs. “Tough question, Jonathon, but without one iota of criticism intended, okay?”

Michael was already ahead of him. “How sure am I it was accidental?”

Gunther raised an eyebrow. “Three barn fires, two almost within sight of each other, all in short order. And with the end result that two out of the three unloaded their farms, and the third’s barely hanging on. You gotta wonder.”

“I
was
sure,” the other responded, emphasizing the past tense. “But there’s no way I’m not rechecking it now.”

“I know it’s a lot, given what’s on your plate already…”

Again, Michael headed him off. “No, I can do it, and I don’t need any help. I know the players, who to call. I can do it faster alone.”

Both men paid him the respect of accepting this small face-saving fiction. Mirroring Joe’s overall courtesy, Tim Shafer even shifted the emphasis somewhat. “If the torch did two barns the same way, without hiding that they were arsons, why would he disguise the third?”

“Too early to tell,” Joe answered. “We don’t even know it was set. But it wasn’t the third chronologically; it was the first. Could he have entered the barn through the milk room, like everyone does, immediately saw the cob-job wiring running to the tank, and figured what the hell? He took it as a gimme.”

“It ties to the other two being set from the top down, too,” Jonathon suggested.

“How’s that?” Shafer asked.

His colleague backed up slightly. “I didn’t mean directly. I meant that he may be a guy who works with whatever opportunity is staring him in the face.” He tapped the map again. “At my guy’s—Loomis is his name—he sees the bad wiring and uses that; at Noon’s, according to your sketches here, he sees access to a full hayloft right outside the door connecting the milk room to the stable; and at Cutts’s—given his success at Noon’s—he just repeats himself. I mean, think of it, we’ve all been in cow stables before, right?”

The other men nodded.

“What’s the reaction going to be from the cows when a stranger walks in, possibly carrying gas and/or glue as accelerants? Tim,” he added suddenly, warming to his hypothesis, “what style stable was Noon’s—tied or free stalls?”

“Free.”

Jonathon smiled. “There you have it.” He then answered his own earlier question: “They start moving. The skittish ones first, then the others. If this torch isn’t used to being in a barn, a free-stall stable with a bunch of huge cows moving around is not going to be the place to start setting up squibs and laying out trailers—not if you’re scared of being stepped on or crushed.”

Joe couldn’t resist smiling. “Nice—for a total piece of fiction.”

Shafer laughed, finally completely at ease. “Yeah, well, that’s how a lot of cases come together, right? You tell stories until you like one enough to chase it down.”

Joe conceded the point. “I do like it, I’ll admit that, but it only takes us so far. Assuming the Loomis fire is arson, which is a stretch, then what’s the connection between all three?”

“The farmers sold out, like you said,” Jonathon said quickly.

“Two of them did,” Shafer corrected.

Joe made a face. “Right—as far as we know. But if the point was to make each one sell out, then why? The properties aren’t contiguous, and one is miles away. Also, the two buyers we do have so far couldn’t be more disconnected.”

“Age?” Jonathon suggested, clearly thinking in overdrive, both stimulated by the challenge and embarrassed by his possible mistake with the Loomis investigation. “All three farmers were long in the tooth.”

Shafer and Gunther stayed silent for a while, until Joe suggested, “Okay. I don’t know what to do with that yet, but let’s keep it in mind. What else?”

No one answered. “How about a smoke screen?” he continued. “The old theory that you hide a needle best among other needles. Could be only one of the arsons really counts.”

“Then which one is the needle we want?” Shafer asked.

Gunther smiled. “That’s easier than it sounds. It may not matter. Again assuming that Loomis is an arson, we have three felonies to investigate anyhow. If you want to get technical, we don’t want to rule out two to find the one left over; we need to solve them all. If we’re successful, we’ll find out at the end.”

Now it was Michael’s turn to sit back. “But that was true from the start.”

Shafer couldn’t resist the dig. “Except that until now, we didn’t know to give Loomis a second look.”

Gunther gave Jonathon high marks—he merely pressed his lips together briefly before admitting, “Point taken.”

Joe tried to clear the air. “Okay, there are three of us and three roads to go down. Tim, you stick with Farley Noon; Jonathon, I know you have some of the Cutts case to organize, but while you recheck Loomis, let me carry the investigative load there. I suggest we get in touch every couple of days, face-to-face or by e-mail or phone, just to share updates. Also, I’m going to have someone at headquarters make a few calls, find out how many other farms in the area have gone on the block—when, where, why, and who bought them.”

He slid off the booth bench and stood up, looking down at them both. “You wanted something to chase, Tim. Guess we all got lucky—in spades.”

DEPUTY SHERIFF LEON LEDOUX ROLLED HIS CRUISER
slowly to a stop at the edge of the shopping mall parking lot, far away from the nearest light source. In general, his assignment here was simply to patrol the lot, giving comfort to merchants and instilling caution in those planning mischief. But he’d done that earlier, as he’d been doing for more years than he could count, and it had been as effective—or not—as usual. The trouble with such gestures, he’d discovered—the reason they were so void of satisfaction—was that success was measured by the absence of activity.

His immediate boss, the chief deputy, always asked him the same question when he checked in every night: “See anything at the mall?” And to Leon’s perpetual “Not a thing,” he always responded, “Good. That’ll teach ’em.”

Leon had a good idea who the “them” were. He was less convinced about the value of his supposed teaching.

Not that it mattered in the long run, since that conversation only applied to when the stores were open and people milling about. Later, there was no doubt about either Leon’s lesson plan or the people he hungered to instruct. All ambivalence or frustration was replaced by the thrill of the hunt.

For right now, long after hours, the chief deputy was asleep in his bed and Leon Ledoux was out to catch bad guys.

He’d been doing this for ten years, ever since he left the Marines and joined the department. By day, he served papers, stood around court, drove prisoners from one spot to another, and chased taillights—and made those “demonstrations of force” so dear to his boss’s heart. But by night, with the setting of the sun, as the glow from his car’s dashboard slowly replaced daylight, Leon felt his nondescript, bulky, uniformed persona metamorphose into something predatory and lithe, like a watchful panther.

Leon Ledoux lived for the night.

His cruiser dark, its engine running, he reached for the binoculars he kept under his seat, and trained them on a tight circle of figures clustered around a car before the abandoned Ames department store across the parking lot. The store’s black and featureless windows supplied a suggestively apocalyptic backdrop to what was clearly a drug deal under way.

“I got you, you bastard,” he murmured, still staring through the binoculars.

Leon lowered the glasses and surveyed the snow-dusted ground between him and his target, as if he were planning an attack on an enemy pillbox. In fact, his approach would be simplicity itself: His only real choice was to emerge from the shadows and cross the lot as quickly as possible, blue strobes flashing, hoping against reason that his prey would stay put.

He sighed slightly, as if in recognition of reality not quite matching fantasy. In truth, the people he busted were mostly teenagers or assorted losers that he’d dealt with from virtually his first day on duty. Barring the few exceptions who appeared periodically from out of town—usually from nearby Canada—they were as familiar as the horses on a carousel and just as prone to coming around with monotonous regularity, circling out of sight into jail before returning for each repeat performance.

There were an elite few, however, who fit the truly rare category of the bad news local who had never been arrested—so far. They were a source of special irritation to Leon Ledoux, and he had one of them right now, literally in his sights: Rick Frantz.

He unhooked his radio mike and keyed the transmit button to update dispatch. Not in detail, of course—he didn’t want company messing up a drug bust. He merely mentioned he was investigating some suspicious activity.

After that, he studied the scene before him one last time—memorizing the players—before gunning his engine, hitting his lights, and peeling out of hiding like the avenging angel he felt himself to be. Partway across the parking lot, he switched on his public address loudspeaker and barked out, “This is the police. You are under arrest. Do not move.”

Of the five people he’d cataloged, three froze and two bolted. Frantz took off on foot, while the driver of the car hit the gas so hard, his back end began fishtailing on the slippery snow.

Ledoux had eyes only for Frantz, as the latter ran the length of the abandoned department store and headed for a dark alleyway between it and its neighbor.

This undivided attention, however, carried a cost. In exchange for only tracking Frantz, Leon took his eyes off the other car, whose rear wheels now suddenly found purchase on the asphalt under the snow and launched the vehicle straight at the cruiser.

Ledoux watched in horror as the young driver, caught like a ghost in the cop’s headlights, abandoned his steering wheel and covered his face with his hands. Ledoux swerved, lost control, and met the other car in a perfect T-bone configuration.

Shouting a string of curses, ignoring the pain in his neck, he leaped from his vehicle and ran to the other driver’s open side window.

“You son of a bitch,” Ledoux yelled, ignoring the blood that was pouring from the driver’s nose and lip. “You’re under arrest. Put your hands on the wheel. One above and one through the middle. Now.”

Dumbly, the boy complied. Ledoux slapped his cuffs on his wrists, locking him to the steering wheel. He then reached past him and pulled the key from the ignition.

“Where is Frantz headed?” he demanded, peering into the gloom.

But the boy was now crying.

The deputy stepped back, quickly surveying the damage to his own vehicle. “God
damn
it,” he swore, and kicked the door before him, making the driver jump in surprise.

Ledoux pulled his radio from his belt. “Dispatch, this is oh-eight. I’ve been in a ten-fifty at the mall. Am in pursuit of a subject heading behind the Ames store along the north wall. Need assistance.”

Paying no attention to the dispatcher calmly repeating his message, Leon replaced the radio and began running. Coming abreast of the three young men still standing rooted in place, he only slowed enough to yell at one of them, “I got all your names, Carl. You move one foot from where you are, and you are screwed for life. You got that?”