St. Albans Fire (8 page)

All three merely nodded as he passed.

Despite the extent of this turmoil, Rick Frantz had been gone for only a little over a minute.

Ledoux arrived at the entrance to the alleyway, sweating and out of breath. Already, in the distance, he could hear sirens approaching. He didn’t have much time.

He poked his head around the corner. The alleyway ran straight and narrow to a streetlight at the far end, allowing him to see that there was no one in sight. Still, crouched low, he entered the narrow space warily, watching and listening.

About halfway down, he found something. A side door into the empty building was slightly ajar. Using his flashlight, Ledoux saw a set of melting footprints leading inside.

“You dumb bastard,” he said in a low voice, killing his light and silently stepping through the doorway.

It was cold in the building, almost as cold as it was outside, and very dark. The only light came from the parking lot fixtures, far away and filtered through the long row of dusty front windows. The room was huge, as befitted a space that once housed a department store and was now only home to a scattered jumble of counters, broken shelving units, forgotten furniture, and dozens of boxes.

It was otherworldly in its stillness and oddly disconcerting, since above a certain height, all obstacles ceased to exist, the abandoned rubble not reaching above five or six feet. It was like being in an enormous movie soundstage, designed for cameras and lights to fly overhead for hundreds of feet, totally unimpeded.

Except that Leon had no access to airborne lights or cameras. He was stuck on the ground, and that ground was increasingly resembling a maze of potential ambushes.

He hesitated, considering his options. He knew he was in trouble. The car crash had reduced his derring-do to the swagger of a reckless cowboy. His choices, as he saw them, were to retreat and face some serious disciplining, despite having taken in all but one of the suspects, or to finish the job, make a clean sweep, and hope that his success might offset his transgressions.

It wasn’t even a contest. Walking on the balls of his feet, Ledoux advanced into the cavernous room, keenly aware of his shoes crunching on the debris underfoot.

Even with the tumult before him, he could pick out the ordered pattern of erstwhile aisles, and began calculating what route Rick Frantz might have taken. He then moved toward the long back wall, instinctively bent over, and got the dim light coming through the far windows to reflect off whatever wet footprints were still visible.

Feeling surer now, and further stimulated by the appearance of blue strobe lights in the parking lot, he killed his radio and pager so they wouldn’t give him away, removed his heavy shoes, and silently began traveling parallel to Frantz’s glistening tracks.

He moved fast. Even buried inside the building, he could hear car doors slamming outside, along with a few muffled shouted commands. It wouldn’t be long before his colleagues followed his example, informed by the kids he’d left behind, and found the same door he had in the alleyway. He needed to get his hands on Frantz before that happened.

He was nearing a collection of tall shelf units, lined up like dominos, row on row, when at last the footprints inevitably faded to nothing. Undeterred, Ledoux remained against the far wall so that as he worked the row of shelves, he only had to look in one direction. He hadn’t seen a weapon during his earlier surveillance, but by now, he was beginning to fantasize that one reason Frantz alone had taken off was that he was probably armed. Instinctively, Ledoux slipped his gun from its holster.

He glanced down the first alley-like aisle and stopped dead in his tracks. The shelves were too tightly packed to allow the light from the front windows much access. Disappointed, he pulled his flashlight free, aimed it down the shadowy corridor, and hit the switch for just an instant. In a burst of light barely longer than a camera’s flash, Ledoux saw only empty floor space. He slipped along the wall to the next aisle.

He’d worked his way up five rows in this fashion, his tension increasing with each flash of his light, when he suddenly heard the loud crash of a door opening far behind him, making him jump.

“This is the police,” came a shouted, nervous voice. “If anyone’s in here, come out with your hands up.”

Ledoux swore under his breath. Things were not improving. Hedging his bets between remaining silent and letting out a shout, he turned his radio back on and murmured into the mike, “It’s Leon. I’m in the Ames store. I got him cornered. Block the door so he can’t get out.”

Instead of the answer he was hoping for, he heard, “Unit calling. I can’t copy.”

He was about to respond, bluntly and loudly, when a small sound drew his attention. He looked up the aisle beside him, just in time to see a shadow flit past its far opening.

He gave up the radio and bolted down the aisle. At its far end, he turned toward where the shadow had been heading, assumed a shooter’s stance—one hand holding the gun, the other the flashlight—and shouted, “Police. Don’t move.” He then switched on the light and captured Rick Frantz out in the middle of the room, one hand holding a small canvas bag.

Damn, he thought, I got you.

But it wasn’t to be. A split second later, bank by bank, in rapid succession, the ceiling’s rows of fluorescent lighting stuttered awake, causing both Ledoux and Frantz to instinctively freeze, their eyes cast heavenward.

With the light came a burst of shouted voices, causing them both to whirl and face the side entrance.

“Don’t move.”

“Police. Freeze.”

“He’s got a gun.”

To his horror, Ledoux saw not one but four of his colleagues on either side of the door, all of them with drawn weapons, half of which were pointed directly at him.

“It’s me,” he shouted, and waved his hands.

It was the wrong thing to do. One shot rang out, the bullet thudding into the shelf unit by his head, followed by another, which only elicited a small grunt from Rick Frantz.

Ledoux spun back in time to see the boy crumple to the floor, dropping his small bag.

“You stupid bastards,” Leon screamed, fighting the impulse to return fire. “It’s me.”

He ran over to Frantz’s side, seeing a pool of blood already seeping out from under the body.

He came to a stop in his stocking feet, holstered his gun in an embarrassed quick gesture, and stared at the end result of his evening’s work.

“Shit.”

GENERALLY SPEAKING, BODIES AREN’T BURIED DURING
the winter in Vermont. The ground’s hard, covered in snow, and the expense of dealing with both is too great. Most people attend a service away from the cemetery, comfort the grieving family, and bid farewell to the casket, not considering that the body will spend the rest of the season in cold storage before being quietly interred a few months later.

Most people were not Marie Cutts, however. Despite the family’s financial misfortune, she was sparing no expense. Her son was to be buried properly and promptly, with no practical discussions being broached.

The morning following Leon Ledoux’s series of poor decisions, Joe Gunther parked behind a long line of vehicles—mostly pickups—that was tucked against the embankment of a narrow dirt road at the top of a hill. He got out, turned up the collar of his coat against the chill morning air, and made for a small metal gate in the wrought-iron fence ringing the cemetery.

It wasn’t large, as burial grounds go, but it was perfectly perched on the hill’s very cap, so that as he climbed the path toward the backs of the assembled crowd, Joe felt the sky opening up all around him. And as he reached the crest, this faintly biblical impression was only enhanced by the view suddenly yawning at his feet. Instead of seeing more hills, which was the norm in a state as geologically lumpy as Vermont, he was faced with a vast and dizzying emptiness, sweeping away into the Lake Champlain valley, across the flats cradling a miniaturized St. Albans, over the frozen slab of the lake itself, and only then coming to a halt against the distant and forbidding wall of New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. It was a view to impress even the dullest onlooker, made all the more stark by being clad entirely in snow and ice. To the horizon’s hard edge, under a blinding sun and a sky as blue as the base of a torch’s flame, the whole world looked as cold as when glaciers had scoured the trough in which the lake’s waters were now frozen.

It was at once beautiful and repellent—a fanciful glimpse of the Paleolithic past and a future conjured up by science fiction writers too depressed to imagine anything less bleak.

A perfect setting, Joe thought, for this particular funeral.

He found Jonathon Michael standing apart from the crowd, dark-suited like Joe and wearing a thick topcoat. He’d found a small knoll to stand on, presumably chosen to give him a vague sense of distance and objectivity, and which, Joe found as he joined him there, also served well as an observation post.

“You hear the latest?” Joe murmured to Jonathon after exchanging nodded greetings.

Michael merely raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“Rick Frantz is in a coma, shot by some nervous deputy last night during a drug deal.”

“We can’t talk to him?”

“Not if we want him to talk back.”

They were silent for a few moments, watching the somber group slowly reorganizing around both casket and minister, a few settling into the folding chairs reserved for the immediate family.

“It would be a drag if Frantz is our guy,” Jonathan said in a low voice, “and we never got to find out.”

The same thought had occurred to Joe. “It’s early yet. I wouldn’t worry too much. You know who that is? Looks like a basketball player with a weight problem.”

Jonathan nodded. “Billy St. Cyr. Neighboring farmer to the south.”

“No kidding?” Joe remembered the name. “He’s the one Cal said he’s been arguing with for twenty years.”

They inventoried the assembled faces, exchanging information on the few they knew so far. Joe figured that before this was resolved, they’d probably have a conversation with almost everyone here.

“How ’bout the blonde?” he asked eventually.

Michael cast him a look. “You didn’t meet her? That’s Linda, Jeff’s wife.”

Joe grunted softly. “She was asleep when I met the others. She’s very pretty.”

Jonathon didn’t respond, leaving Joe to his own reflections. In fact, Linda Cutts Padgett was a beauty. Even tired to near haggardness, she was endowed with the same soft and vulnerable radiance that had made the young Julie Christie such a hit in
Doctor Zhivago.
On her looks alone, Jeff had to count himself a lucky man.

Joe shifted his focus to the rest of the family, noticing that the grief he’d witnessed the day of the fire had changed into a different, more volatile, complicated kind of tension.

The minister became its first victim, attempting to arrange the seating. His hopes had clearly been to line them up patriarchally with Cal first, then Marie, followed by Jeff, Linda, and the two kids. But Marie would have none of it. She brusquely pulled Cal down the line, placed him between her and Jeff—casting a loathing glare at the latter—and fired a quick snarling comment at the minister that brought him up short.

Jeff showed no notice. He was tending to his children, getting them to settle down, while his wife merely stood there, staring blankly at the ground, a thousand miles away. When it came time for them all to sit, Jeff gently lowered her to her chair, as if tending to an ancient Alzheimer’s victim.

By then, Joe’s eyes were on Calvin. When they’d first met, he’d taken the farmer to be an appeaser by instinct, naturally resolving all conflicts within range. But he wasn’t that way here. Despite the minister looking at him imploringly, there was no deflecting of Marie’s both barrels from Cal. In a rough approximation of his daughter’s apparent catatonia, he seemed to be functioning on automatic pilot.

The service had barely begun when, from their elevated knoll, the two police officers saw another car pull up by the side of the road. From it, a young woman began making her way up the path toward the group.

Joe took in the short skirt, streaked hair, and a glint of silver from an eyebrow post, before turning back to the family, his attention drawn by a sudden sharp sound.

Marie Cutts was standing, her arms rigid, her chair toppled backward. Seen this way, thin and tensioned, her profile highlighted by the sun, she was pure gargoyle of old, perched in muted mimicry of some demonic spirit.

Until she let out a scream.

“No. Not her. Not here. Get her away.”

The minister stalled in midsentence, Calvin looked up at her quizzically, as if she’d shattered a profound daydream. Jeff was the first to act, reaching across his father-in-law to offer comfort. But, of course, that was precisely wrong. Marie recoiled from his touch as if he’d been on fire, violently jarring the minister, who had to lurch not to drop his Bible.

Jonathon Michael was dispassion personified, whispering, “Let me guess: Marianne Kotch? Should we do something?”

Joe said, barely moving his lips, “Not yet.”

His book safe, the minister rallied, grabbing Marie by the shoulders, his body language supportive but disciplining, as if warning her to behave or else. He steered her back to her chair, which Jeff had righted, and almost pushed her back into it. He then nodded to the young newcomer, directed her to a spot as far from Marie as possible, reopened his Bible, and asked of his audience, “Shall we resume?”

They did, including Marie, who sat beside her husband in furious, silent, impotent defeat, as glowering as Cal appeared lost.

“Wow,” muttered Jonathon, “I wonder why she showed up.”

Joe was still watching Marianne Kotch, her head held high but her stance suggestive of a deer’s about to bolt.

“I think I’ll ask her,” he said.

He had the opportunity after the service. Because of where the minister had placed her, and her own reluctance to mingle, Marianne stayed far back of the crowd, among the other headstones, biding her time until she got a clear run to her car.