St. Albans Fire (2 page)

Now he was done, he thought, stepping back at last and slipping the syringe into his breast pocket for later disposal. Almost.

Still smiling, he made for the nearest shortcut to the vast hayloft overhead: a broad wooden ladder punching through an open trapdoor in the ceiling. The least he could do was supply the happy twosome with some fresh hay.

Climbing with the ease of a seasoned sailor up a ratline, Bobby broke through to the hayloft floor in seconds, its suddenly enormous, domed, black vastness emphasized by its emptiness. So late in the season, there was but one towering pile of bales left, against the far south wall. The rest of the expansive floor space was bare, aside from a six-inch layer of chaff rustling underfoot.

He started walking toward the bales, feeling confident and restored, when he froze abruptly, suddenly concentrating. Like most people brought up in a world dependent on tools and machines, he had an ear for mechanisms in action and often monitored this ancient and gigantic barn as much by ear as by sight.

There didn’t seem to be anything amiss. Bobby could feel more than hear the fans and pumps and motors throughout the building, as soft and delicate to him as the inner workings of a living entity. But he could swear that he’d heard a hissing of sorts—clear and distinct. And, more important, all his instincts were telling him that there was something very wrong.

He stood absolutely still in the near total blackness, searching for some form of confirmation. Slowly, as lethal as the message it carried, the smell of smoke reached his nostrils.

A farmer’s nightmares are full of fire, from a carelessly tossed match to a spark from a worn electrical wire to a fluke bolt of lightning. Even the hay itself, if put up too damp and packed too tightly, can spontaneously ignite and bring about disaster. More than one farmer in Bobby’s experience, Calvin Cutts included, wrapped up every day by giving the barn a final fire check before bed. To say that such vigilance smacked of paranoia was to miss the larger point: Fire to a farmer was like a diagnosis of cancer—survivable perhaps, but only following a long and crippling struggle, and only if you were lucky.

Bobby had two choices: to investigate and perhaps stifle the fire before it got worse, or to run back to the house, raise the alarm, and get as many people and as much equipment coming as possible.

Typically, but unsurprisingly, he yielded to a young man’s faith in his own abilities and set out to discover what was wrong.

Bobby’s sense of smell led him away from the bales and toward the sealed-off so-called fuel room that Calvin had built as far from any flammable materials as possible. Here was kept the gas and oil and diesel for their machines, locked behind a heavy wooden door.

He could hear more clearly now, as he approached that door, the hissing sound that had drawn his attention. But as he unhooked the key from a nearby post and freed the fire extinguisher hanging beneath it, he remained convinced of his course of action. It was a closed room; whatever lay within it was contained and could thus be controlled.

Which is when he heard a second sudden hissing behind him, accompanied by a sharp snap—harsh, like the bite of a rat trap—far across the loft.

He swung around, startled—frightened. He’d been wrong. The noise beyond the door wasn’t his only problem. And this second one, he realized with a sickening feeling, was accompanied by a flickering glow. A second fire had started near where he’d just been.

Bobby Cutts began to sweat.

Distracted now, not thinking clearly, he clung to his initial plan of action. First things first. Ignoring the heat radiating from the lock as he slipped in the key, he twisted back the dead bolt, readied the fire extinguisher, and threw open the door.

The resulting explosion lifted him off his feet and tossed him away like a discarded doll, landing him on the back of his head with a sickening thud. His mouth was bleeding copiously from where the extinguisher had broken several teeth as it flew from his hands.

Dazed and spitting blood, a huge, curling fireball lapping at his feet, Bobby tried scrambling backward, screaming in pain as he put weight on a shattered right hand. He rolled and crawled away as best he could, the smell of his own burned hair and skin strong in his nostrils. In the distance, at the loft’s far end, he could see a second sheet of flame working its way up the face of the stacked hay bales.

He got to his knees, staggered to his feet, and began stumbling back toward the ladder, his remaining instincts telling him to return below and free as many cows as possible before escaping himself.

It wasn’t easy. His eyes hurt and weren’t focusing properly, he kept losing his balance, disoriented from a brain hemorrhage he knew nothing about, and as he reached the top of the ladder, the injury to his hand returned like a hot poker. The only saving grace was that he could see anything at all, the hayloft being high-ceilinged enough that the red, glowing smoke stayed above him.

He grabbed the ladder’s upright with his good hand, fumbled for the first rung, and began his descent, hearing the tethered animals starting to get restless.

Halfway down, just clear of the inferno overhead, he stopped for a moment to adjust to the stable’s contrasting gloom. There, hanging by one hand, praying for salvation, he watched in stunned disbelief as all around him one bright rope of fire, then two, then three, magically appeared on the walls from the ceiling and dropped like fiery snakes to the floor, shooting off in different directions and leaving lines of fire in their wakes, stimulating a loud, startled chorus of bellows from the frightened creatures below him.

The fire spread as if shot from a wand, in defiance of logic or comprehension, racing from one hay pile to another. Bobby watched, transfixed. The cows had panicked in mere seconds and were now, all sixty of them, struggling and stamping and heaving against their restraints, lowing and roaring as the encircling fire, progressing with supernatural speed, changed from a series of separate flames into the sheer embodiment of heat.

One by one, the animals broke loose. Stampeding without direction, corralled by fire, they began generating a stench of burning flesh in the smoky, scream-filled vortex of swirling, lung-searing air. A broiling wind built up as it passed by the dying boy, the trapdoor directly above him now transformed into a chimney flue. Bobby Cutts clung to his ladder as to the mast of a sinking ship, weeping openly, the fire overhead filling the square opening with the blinding, blood red heat of a falling sun.

His hair smoking, all feeling gone from his burning body, he gazed between his feet into the twisting shroud of noise and flames and fog of char, no longer aware of the contorting bodies of the dying beasts slamming into his ladder, splintering it apart, and uncaring as he finally toppled into their midst, vanishing beneath a flurry of hooves.

JONATHON MICHAEL STOOD UNDER THE OPEN SKY
in the remains of the stable, dressed in heavy boots and coveralls, swathed in an acrid atmosphere of burned wood, insulation, and the sweet smell of cooked meat. The word “Police” was embroidered in block letters between his shoulder blades. He was empty-handed, his arms crossed, his expression pensive. After eighteen years as a state arson investigator, he’d learned that the first best rule in this work was to do nothing, or at least nothing physical. Time and again in the past, he’d seen others steamroll in, get distracted by the flashiest evidence, and reach the wrong conclusion—or at best waste a huge amount of time getting around to the right one. Truth be told, he had done just that more than once in the early days.

But not lately. He’d closed every case he’d handled over the last ten years, and while Vermont couldn’t brag of the arson stats of New York or Boston, it still had its share of wackos, insurance defrauders, and just plain pissed-off people. And the state’s rural nature didn’t necessarily mean a low average IQ among its crooks, either; some of the ones he’d arrested had done excellent, subtle work, making the end result look for all the world like a simple mishap.

So Michael took his time. He usually arrived without fanfare and out of uniform, walking around unnoticed and alone. Eventually, before he was done, he’d talk to the firefighters who battled the blaze, to the cops who controlled traffic and managed the crowd, to neighbors and friends, even sometimes to the press photographers and reporters, and finally to the family, all in the pursuit of telling details. Also—at some point in the midst of it all—he’d process the actual scene, occasionally taking days to do so. The pecking order for this complicated, often diplomatic procedure varied from case to case and usually, as now, was helped along by others, especially the Vermont Forensic Lab, which today was still on its way. Inevitably, however, sooner or later Michael found himself where he was right now: standing alone in the middle of a water-soaked, blackened, artificial swamp, trying to think through what might have led to its creation.

Traditionally, barn fires were among the worst. For the most part old, dry, wooden structures, barns were match heads to begin with, before they were stuffed with hay and chemicals and tractors and gas and oil and anything else highly flammable. By an overwhelming margin, when it came to investigating barn fires, Jonathon Michael found himself the tallest thing standing in a clotted field of tangled char.

This one was the rare exception. For reasons he hoped to discover—through his own reconstruction and from witness accounts—this barn had not been reduced to a cellar hole. It wasn’t salvageable by any means—the entire hayloft overhead was missing, for one thing—but there were remnants of the building still standing, if only to an eye as practiced as his, which meant that he had a great deal more to work with than usual.

This was especially good news, since the primary reason he was standing here instead of running preliminary interviews was the strong possibility that a young man lay dead at his feet somewhere.

· · ·

Joe Gunther carefully replaced the phone.

Gail Zigman glanced up at him. “Trouble?”

“Yeah,” he answered tiredly. “A possible arson way up northwest, St. Albans area.”

She raised her eyebrows. “They called you?”

“Someone died,” he answered.

Her face softened. “Ah,” she murmured, once more struck by how often death played an intimate third to their relationship. She and Joe had been together for a long time now—decades, in fact—long enough to give her pause occasionally.

“You going?” she asked him, a coffee mug halfway to her lips.

He stretched and arched his back, causing the newspaper spread across his lap to slip onto the floor. “Yup. Not much choice. Sorry.”

She took a sip and then shook her head. “No, no. I understand. I have work to do anyhow.”

They were tucked into her small Montpelier condo, where she now spent most of her time. She’d recently been elected to the Vermont State Senate—a low-paying, part-time job in a citizen legislature that functioned only half of each year, although such a description didn’t do justice to either the job’s real demands or Gail’s ability to transform potentially light labor into something all-consuming. Gail Zigman was nothing if not passionate, and did few things halfway. As a result, her large home in Brattleboro—which she’d briefly shared with Joe a few years back—had become little more than a place to touch base. Certainly, Joe, if he wanted time with her, had learned to drive here for it, usually rationalizing the trip by also checking in with his Vermont Bureau of Investigation headquarters in nearby Waterbury.

Joe got to his feet and went in search of his shoes by the front door. “This’ll probably take a while—maybe a few days. I’ll give you a call.”

“Sure,” she answered. “No problem.” She added, suddenly concerned, “This is safe, right?”

He looked up at her, one shoe in his hand, and smiled. “Yeah. Probably an insurance thing gone wrong. Maybe a feud. We’ll just be cleaning up the mess. Nobody shooting at us, at least not till the lawyers show up.”

She nodded at the feigned humor and let him get back to his task, but the small smile she offered was entirely false. He’d almost died a couple of times on the job, once in a car accident and once when a knife thrust put him in a coma for weeks—not to mention too many lesser injuries and close calls to count.

Reacting to these thoughts, she, too, rose from her chair and crossed over to him, putting her arms around his waist and giving him a tight hug.

He chuckled tentatively and rubbed her back, burying his nose in her hair and breathing her in as he loved to do. “You okay?” he asked. “What’s this about?”

She pulled back and looked into his eyes, her expression serious. “Nothing. I’ll miss you. Do call.”

· · ·

Jonathon Michael watched as the medical examiner and the funeral home crew wrestled the gurney bearing Bobby Cutts along the narrow trench that Michael had, for safety’s sake, allowed to be cut through the debris, despite it all being a probable crime scene. The volunteer EMT/firefighters had been a huge help there—shoveling a pathway in barely twenty minutes. No surprise, of course; they were routinely reliable if you treated them right, hanging around long after their job was done, eager to assist, sometimes to a fault. Michael had pulled the leash on them more than once in the past to preserve potential evidence from being trampled or destroyed. Among cops, the inside joke was that EMT actually stood for “evidence mangling technician.” Still, he remained grateful—they were cooperative, interested, and instinctively hard workers, especially when it came to the heavy lifting he so commonly required. In his experience, few of his own law enforcement colleagues were as useful—or, to be fair, as plentiful.

The gurney crew reached the edge of the barn’s foundation and the trampled, soiled snow field beyond, to be immediately enveloped by Bobby’s family—assuming that what they’d found was Bobby. Luckily for the medical examiner, given what was left, dental records and DNA would confirm the identity of what had taken hours to locate. Michael’s thermal imager had finally done the trick, just barely distinguishing Bobby’s curled-up form from the smoking timbers and carcasses around it. In fact, when he’d turned the machine off to confirm his discovery, he couldn’t tell the difference.