St. Albans Fire (12 page)

Joe stared at the floor for a moment before answering, “We’re not making much progress here. A field trip might help.”

Shafer smiled, the very phrase an enticement. “I can take that, if you want.”

But he was disappointed by Gunther’s response. “No. You and Jonathon have enough on your plates already. Plus, I’m adding a couple of things: Order a check of all the surrounding gas stations and motels. We’re looking for a man in a fedora driving an out-of-state, dark four-door sedan—possibly from New Jersey—who was in the area around the three dates of the Loomis, Noon, and Cutts fires. And if there are any surveillance tapes on file, all the better. Also, that loose thread with Rick Frantz is still bugging me. Look into him more—his background, his whereabouts when the arsons took place, how and where he might’ve picked up that kind of knowledge. Find out if he or his father knows Loomis. I don’t want to get so distracted by a guy in a hat that I miss who might be right under our noses.”

He thought a little more, rerunning their conversation in his head. “And Billy St. Cyr. What’s going on there? First he’s a jerk, then he’s Mr. Sweetness and Light; he doesn’t want to keep farming, then he wants to buy more acreage. Interview him, see if we can get a look at his finances. Also, remember Barry Newhouse? The guy Marianne Kotch dumped for Bobby Cutts? She said he was all talk, but he did threaten to break Bobby in two. I’m not saying she’s wrong, but he’s worth sweating a little, just to make sure.”

He walked back to his pile of documents and began gathering them up. “I’ll go to Newark. And I know exactly who I want riding shotgun.”

“NEWARK?” WILLY KUNKLE REACTED. “I’D SOONER EAT SHIT.”

Gunther laughed, unperturbed. Willy Kunkle was one of his own squad members, out of Brattleboro, in the opposite corner of the state from where the arsons had occurred. Joe had driven all the way here to ask Kunkle to join him on his trip to New Jersey.

“Have you ever been there?” Willy asked incredulously.

“I’ve driven by.”

“What? The airport, at eighty miles an hour? Hardly the same thing. You do know what their town symbol is, like New York has the Empire State Building and St. Louis has the arch? They have a thirty-foot rusty metal bottle perched on top of an abandoned brewery. People in Newark tell each other to ‘Meet me west of the bottle,’ like other people say, ‘Meet me at the Central Park Zoo,’ except that there’s an outside chance you won’t get shot at the zoo. Newark is a pit.”

Kunkle had been brought up in northern Manhattan and had first cut his teeth as a New York City cop. Joe didn’t doubt that he knew what he was talking about, even while he was sure that his viewpoint was as badly skewed as it was about most everything.

“Do you know anyone who works there?” Joe asked mildly.

They were in the VBI office on the top floor of Brattleboro’s Municipal Building, a single room as spare, unadorned, and poorly equipped as all the other Bureau offices scattered across Vermont. The VBI hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate much junk or, for that matter, much respect from other agencies, despite its lofty major crimes unit status.

“I know a few,” Kunkle conceded, adding, “Or I used to.”

“How ’bout on the arson task force?”

“The county prosecutor’s office?” Kunkle asked, demonstrating the precise insider’s knowledge Joe was after. In New Jersey, county prosecutors had police working directly for them in special units, unlike in Vermont, where the state’s attorneys no longer even had in-house investigators.

“Yeah,” Joe said.

Willy shook his head. “No. The guys I hung out with were city cops, mostly crooked, and I haven’t talked to any of them since. Probably dead or busted by now. Urban renewal.”

“But you know the town?” Joe persisted.

“Like the inside of a toilet, and that’s how much I want to go back. What’s this all about anyhow?”

“An arson case up north,” Joe explained. “It’s in the dailies, if you’d read them. For that matter, it was front-page news. Teenage kid died along with sixty cows.”

Willy was sitting behind his desk, his feet up and his chair tilted back against the wall. He’d placed the desk at a diagonal across a windowless corner so he could survey the room as from a machine-gun nest. It said much about the man.

“I heard about it,” he said dismissively.

“Well, that arson looks like it was one of two, maybe three, around St. Albans, so Jonathon Michael ran the torch’s signature by ATF and was told that the arson task force in Essex County had filed the same signature less than a year ago.”

“But with no name attached,” Willy suggested.

“Right—just to have it on record.”

Willy rolled his eyes and pulled on his ear with his powerful right hand. That, of course, was his own signature: He was a cop with only one functional arm. The left one, still attached but atrophied, useless, and generally pinned in place by its hand being shoved into Willy’s pants pocket, had been ruined by a sniper round some fifteen years earlier. He was still on the job thanks to the Disabilities Act, his own pugnacious ability to pass the agility tests, and Joe Gunther, who’d gone to bat for him despite unanimous suggestions that the crippling of Willy Kunkle was a clear sign from God that such men shouldn’t be allowed inside law enforcement.

What Joe continued to see in Willy had so thoroughly eluded everyone else that even Joe was no longer sure what it was, except that somewhere in the center of this irascible, infuriating, corrosively sarcastic person lay the heart of a man Joe could trust with his life.

“So,” Willy reflected, “based on that kind of airtight evidence, you figured you’d wander down to Newark and bring this torch to justice?”

Joe chose to play along. “Something like that.”

“Even though the guy might have burned a couple of buildings in Newark just like he did in Vermont, and maybe like he’s done in half a dozen other places, before returning home to Ames, Iowa, or Christ knows where?”

Gunther remained silent. In fact, with the myopia that often affects an investigator when he tumbles to an attractive notion, it hadn’t crossed his mind that his quarry might have no more attachment to Newark than he did to St. Albans, or even—to play devil’s advocate—that he could be a Vermonter who’d visited the city with evil intent, instead of the other way around.

Willy laughed at his boss’s expression. “Gotcha, didn’t I?” He then added with uncharacteristic generosity, “Been there, done that. It’s a bitch getting caught stupid.”

Not overly diplomatic, Joe mused painfully, but fair enough. “That mean I’m on my own?”

Still smiling, Willy considered him sadly. “Nah. You’d be a babe in the woods. I better go just so you don’t get killed.”

· · ·

At approximately the same time, in Montpelier, Gail Zigman stepped out of the capitol building to get some lunch, using the huge front doors instead of the more convenient side entrance only because she loved the view off the columned portico, overlooking downtown. Instead, she was confronted with a large crowd of winter-clad protesters, many carrying signs in opposition to the very GMOs she’d been hearing about in committee. At her appearance, even though there was no indication that she wasn’t merely a tourist or a clerk, a surge of chants and shouted slogans rose to greet her.

If not downright irony, there was a certain poetry to the moment that Gail, the newly minted legislator, could appreciate. Not only had she been a protester herself throughout her adult life, holding various signs for various causes, but she’d even been a lobbyist for Vermont Green, the state’s most outspoken environmental group, an organizer of such protests, and a staunch critic of GMOs.

Without hesitation, she descended the broad marble steps, approached the front row of protesters, and introduced herself to a young woman who appeared to be a leader. Within five minutes, lunch long forgotten, Gail had organized a sidewalk symposium on the topic of genetically modified products and ended up taking down names and contact information of people she wanted her committee chairman to consider as witnesses for the hearings.

An hour later, checking her watch, she bade farewell and retreated back up the capitol steps, feeling faintly as though she’d just played a part in some romantic black-and-white movie about the benefits of democracy. She crossed the threshold absentmindedly, sorting through the wad of notes and business cards she’d had thrust upon her, some from people she hadn’t even noticed. Which is when she found a small folded note on an otherwise blank piece of paper.

Opening it, she read, “Be careful you’re not playing with fire.”

· · ·

Newark, New Jersey, is one of the nation’s oldest cities. In what must now be classified as an irony of near cosmic proportions, it was founded in 1666 by Puritan zealots hoping to establish a theocracy of equally close-minded people dedicated to, among other things, repelling civil governance and banishing corruption. It goes without saying that these two particular ambitions failed to thrive. Indeed, in the heyday of its notoriety—now blessedly past—Newark could arguably have posed as the national poster child for municipal graft.

Joe and Willy approached the city as most everyone did, via crowded high-speed freeway, as unremarkable in their car as a single platelet coursing through an artery and, in Joe’s case, feeling about as irrelevant.

“We meeting with anybody specific down here?” Willy asked as Newark’s curiously old-fashioned skyline rose up like a postcard from World War II. “Or are we just showing up?”

“Special Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Silva,” Joe intoned. “Director of the arson task force.” He added the address he’d been given, on Glenwood.

Willy snorted. “Good location—in Orange. They don’t have to commute far to work that way. Orange is close to most of the old Mob hangouts. I love the guy’s title—sounds like something the Soviets would’ve come up with back when. He going to be of any use?”

Joe kept his eyes on the ever-changing traffic, cutting back and forth before him like a school of hyperactive fish. “He said he’d assign us a babysitter and make his resources available.”

“Babysitter?” Willy sounded incredulous.

“My word,” Joe corrected himself, “not his. I think he said liaison or something. Whatever he is, I’m hoping he’ll open a few doors for us.”

“Close ’em is more likely, from what I remember about the locals.”

“Not very welcoming?”

“Hardly,” Willy responded. He stared moodily out the window at the passing scenery, which by now had become a startling number of decrepit and/or abandoned buildings and vacant, weed-choked lots.

“Well, I’m not going to worry about it now,” Joe told him cheerfully. “Between you and the babysitter, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Willy turned to look at him sourly. “I wouldn’t count on it.” He pointed ahead. “You better take this exit if you don’t want to explore the rest of Jersey.”

Joe followed his subsequent directions, until Willy said twenty minutes later, “Glenwood’s right up ahead.”

Joe moved to the right lane. “How do you know this town so well?”

Kunkle’s answer was typically terse. “Like I said, I used to visit.”

The street Joe pulled into fit the overall neighborhood of nondescript one- and two-story buildings, until he came abreast of a glass and steel monstrosity—square, blockish, four floors tall—made of a mosaic of metal-framed rectangles, where every panel, if it wasn’t a window, was made of an equally shiny, bright green plastic. It was the worst of historical salutes to 1970s architecture.

“This is it,” he said, craning to see the number over the front door.

“Jesus,” Willy commented. “That’s some kind of ugly.”

They drove alongside the building and found a space in the parking lot to the rear. As Joe got out of the car, he noticed that each three-window cluster looming overhead was sealed with the exception of a tiny, centrally located drop-open enclosure, reminiscent of the tray doors mounted on prison cells in the movies, and presumably designed for access to fresh air. Here they also looked vaguely like naval gunports, row on row.

“Kind of makes you homesick for the Municipal Building,” he said softly, removing a briefcase from the back seat.

“Nah,” Willy countered. “I bet this has plumbing.”

They entered the front lobby, announced themselves to the guard at the desk, and were joined, minutes later, by a young man wearing a crew cut, jeans, a gun, and a T-shirt labeled “Arson Task Force” across the back. After the appropriate introductions, their escort led them into the elevator and up to the third floor.

“Pretty far from home, aren’t you?” he asked, holding open the doors.

“We’re not from Utah,” Willy growled.

“Yeah,” Joe said quickly, in response to their host’s startled expression. “Can’t get used to all the people. I like a little more elbow room.”

Giving Willy a covert second glance, the cop proceeded down a hallway to what looked like an apartment door, punched in a code on the combination lock, and ushered them into a suite of offices.

“The director’s office is right down here,” he told them, leading the way. “He’s expecting you.”

Benjamin Silva was short, compact, bald on top, and equipped with a thick black mustache that matched his bushy eyebrows. He came at them from behind his desk like a tiny linebacker and shook both their hands vigorously, waving them toward two chairs opposite the desk.

“Welcome to Newark. Have a seat. Want some coffee? How was the trip? I never been to Vermont. Hear it’s great.” Without pausing to await any response, he glanced at their guide and ordered, “Get Lil in here, would you, Phil? Thanks.”

Willy took him up on his offer. “Coffee would be good. Black.”

Silva crossed to a side table and poured a mug from a thermos. “You, Agent Gunther?”

“‘Joe’ is fine, and I’ll pass. Thanks.”

Silva handed the mug to Willy. “Great. I’m Ben. We’re far from the flagpole over here, so we run things a little looser, too.”

“I noticed the jeans,” Willy said.

Silva nodded. “For example. At the head office, they’re all bib-and-tuckered, but nobody likes it.”