St. Albans Fire (30 page)

Marie shook her head. “Farming’s a funny life. No money, terrible hours, no security. It’s dirty, smelly, and dangerous. Some of the dumbest beasts on earth get to rule your life and kick you out of bed and drive you to ruin. You get stepped on, pushed around, and slapped in the face with shitty tails every day. And that’s not even talkin’ about the regulations and agencies and inspectors and politics. You’ve got the organics and the traditionalists and the nonorganics and GMOs and hybrids and antibiotics and more paperwork than they got trees to make paper. And yet every farmer I know—everyone born to it, at least—understands that this life is why we’re on earth.”

She paused to take a breath before adding, “When you get away from all that crap, and you’re just out there, in a field or working the animals, you feel like the people who did this a thousand years ago.”

She placed her hand flat on the table’s scarred wooden surface. “This is how we all started out—when we left the caves and started working the land. We created the world like it is. Everything else followed from what we started. They try to tear it down and screw it up, and they treat us like dirt in the process—paying a hundred thousand dollars for a stupid car and demanding that bread and milk stay the same price they have been for decades. But we’re still here, ’cause in the end, even with their chemicals and fancy seeds, messing with Mother Nature and maybe poisoning the soil, they still need us to make it grow.”

Joe gave her a small smile. “A wild guess tells me you argued against letting Gregory list the place for sale.”

“You got that right.” Her cheeks were slightly reddened with the passion of her speech.

“Who argued for it?”

Her expression saddened. “Linda. Cal wobbled a bit when he saw she was keen on the idea—until he saw the rest of us weren’t interested.”

Joe nodded slowly. “So the ambivalence I picked up from her wasn’t totally off base.”

It wasn’t phrased as a question.

“No,” she admitted. “She’s had her troubles. The kids complicated her life. Got in the way of the dreams, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t like talking about that stuff.”

Joe thought about the vitriol he’d seen Marie pour over the heads of this family, visiting her own disappointment on them like a Bible-thumper invoking the devil. No wonder she didn’t peer at it too closely.

But he stuck with the topic at hand. “Just how heated did this conversation get?”

Some of her old fire flickered bright. “I told you that. She spoke her piece and it was done.”

Joe merely stared at her.

She shifted angrily in her chair. “For God’s sake. That’s all there was to it. This farm was everything to Bobby, it’s been everything to Cal and me, and Christ only knows, Jeff would be nowhere without it, so he sure as hell wasn’t for killing the golden goose. Linda said what she had to say and that was that—she gave it up. Why don’t you, too?”

She suddenly flared, a second wave building on the first. “Why are you so damned hot on this? We’re the victims here. You may be clueless about what happened—I sure don’t know why some rich flatlander bastard in a fancy car wanted my son dead—but that doesn’t give you the right to harass us just because you have nobody else to poke at.”

Joe sighed. Figuring he had little left to lose, he swung for the bleachers. “If I were you, Marie, and I resented this farm for how it reminded me of my father’s failure and I hated my husband for giving my son’s birthright away, I might do something drastic to force the rest of the family to accept an offer I’d never get again in a lifetime.”

Her face drained. Trembling with rage, she stood up, causing the chair to skitter away behind her, and shouted at him, “
My son died in that fire.”

Joe stood also, slowly, deliberately, and spoke in a calm but firm voice. “Your son was killed by accident, Marie. His dying was no one’s intention. Maybe that’s what hurts the most.”

She staggered back as if he’d pushed her, hitting her shoulder against the wall. She gasped a couple of times and finally burst into tears. “You bastard. You total bastard.”

He circled the table and approached her. She held both her hands out to prevent him. “Don’t you come near me.”

He stopped. “Take your time.”

Catching her breath, she managed, “I want you out of my house.”

He considered arguing with her, or trying to console her—to somehow get across how her outlook and hostility helped make his suggestion appear reasonable.

But he saw it was a lost cause, just as her husband’s efforts to explain his giving the farm to Jeff had been futile, and Jeff’s persistent kindness and forbearance had been wasted. Marie Cutts was worse than a dog with a bone. She was hell-bent on martyrdom and righteous indignation and was now more committed to her suffering and loss than she could possibly be to the remnants of her family. The death of one of them had laid permanent claim to her spirit, and it would take more leverage than a mere love of the living to dislodge it.

“I’m sorry, Marie,” he said at last, and stepped toward the door. “I truly am.”

She said nothing and made no motion, so he turned, crossed the front hall, and showed himself out, pausing on the front porch to take in the view that had greeted this clan for generations, now missing its life-sustaining centerpiece.

He sighed and dropped his gaze to his feet, considering the conversation he’d just left, and his suspicions about the tortured train of events that this pain-racked, grieving woman had most likely set in motion.

For it was Joe’s growing conviction that Marie had conspired with Gregory to have the barn burned, in an effort to free her family of its tyranny, deprive her son-in-law of her son’s rightful inheritance, and yet still receive enough money to put them all comfortably on another track. Except that in a miscalculation of classically Greek proportions, she’d sacrificed that very son in the process—and had created a source of such enormous guilt that only more bloodletting could satisfy it.

Thus the murder of her happenstance accomplice—a hated, swaggering, city-born hustler on the fast road to riches. A man who’d probably accommodated her request for an arsonist to prove to himself that he had the makings of a real operator.

Joe shook his head, forever amazed at how the human species worked to tie itself in knots.

Joe looked back over his shoulder at the door he’d just shut, thinking he might try talking to Marie one last time, when he saw it hanging neatly from a wooden peg set into the wall, as conveniently located as a snow shovel.

It was a wooden-handled baling hook.

GAIL BLINKED AND REFOCUSED ON THE
man addressing them. As with so many before him, he was wearing a dark suit, immaculately tailored, but this guy had on a shirt with French cuffs, an affectation bordering on the absurd in Vermont. His hair was blow-dried, perfectly coiffed, and had probably cost the price of the small puppy it resembled. He knew nothing about the state in whose capitol building he found himself, and was lecturing them on the fine points of his 100 percent safe, in-house-tested, biologically engineered agricultural product.

Gail hadn’t heard a word he’d said.

All morning, she’d been attending such committee briefings, ostensibly conjured up to educate her and her colleagues, and all morning, she’d been struggling to stay focused.

She was sleep-deprived, it was true, having spent the remains of the night in a motel room Joe had rented, staring out of the window. She’d refused his offer of company out of pride and spite, which had further eroded her ability to rest. And the large meeting room her committee was now using for the overflow crowd was hot and cramped and encouraging of napping.

None of which fully explained her distraction.

Gail was scared and paranoid, and angry to be feeling that way yet again.

She sat back slightly and eased her bag open in her lap, glancing surreptitiously for the twentieth time at the face of the man who Joe said might be stalking her. Closing the bag, she made a covert survey of the crowded room, trying to take in all the faces lining the back wall, filling the chairs, and jammed at the door. Nobody set off alarms.

But as soon as she was done, she felt the urge to do it again.

The large man sitting beside her leaned slightly in her direction and whispered, “You all right?”

“Fine,” she said shortly, not looking at him. In contrast to their speaker, his suit was cheap, poorly cut, and built to survive a washing machine with impunity. Not that the suit was the issue. Both it and the man wearing it were in fact almost endearing. But he was still her police bodyguard, and his attentive presence only aggravated her emotions. To her mind, he was a neon sign of her own frailty and the danger to which she’d needlessly been exposed—an unintended source of something verging on resentment.

· · ·

Sammie Martens found Joe back at the state police barracks in St. Albans, leaning on his knuckles and glumly surveying a fanned-out spread of files, photos, and aerial maps littering the conference table before him.

“Stuck?” she asked cheerily.

He looked up with a tired smile. “I feel like I’m on a tractor within sight of the barn, and I’ve just run out of gas. I need evidence. It’s driving me crazy.”

She pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket, unfolded it, and laid it between his hands, clearly delighted to be of service so late in a game she’d been wishing to join since the beginning.

“Try this.”

He picked it up.

“It’s from the crime lab,” she explained. “They got some DNA off the sharp end of that longshoreman’s hook you found. Perfect match for the late unlamented John Samuel Gregory.”

“Huh,” Joe acknowledged, reading on.

“That’s just what we were hoping for,” Sam added, by now irrepressible. “The kicker is, there were fingerprints on the handle—fresh ones. Belonging to Linda Padgett.”

· · ·

Gino couldn’t believe his luck. The cops up here had either no clue or no manpower—probably both—but it was pretty clear after a two-hour surveillance that they hadn’t left a guard on the target’s condo while she was at work.

He stretched out his legs. He was hidden among the trees on a hill overlooking Gail’s neighborhood, where, aided by his binoculars, he could see most aspects of her home. Cognizant that his good fortune could only be short-lived, Gino retreated from his post, cut back through the trees a quarter mile to a rarely used logging road, and retrieved his van from where he’d parked it behind a half-rotted pile of abandoned evergreen boughs.

Before he got in behind the wheel, he removed two magnetic signs from a pair of oversize cardboard tubes and pressed them onto the sides of the van, instantly transforming it into what he certainly considered the ultimate of ironies: a burglar alarm service vehicle—just the kind of thing Gail might have parked in her driveway.

He then slipped into a pair of similarly marked coveralls, started up the van, and trundled down the road to make the wide loop down and around to Gail’s street.

It was a gutsy stunt, appealing to his flair for the dramatic. He’d done similar things in the past, while either casing jobs or actually rigging them for a burning—using various vehicles, wearing an assortment of disguises, including that of a cop. He did it both because he believed in hiding in plain sight and because, in his mind, it infused his naturally secretive and anonymous work with a touch of individuality, even if he ended up being an audience of one. Gino had his pride, after all, and in this instance especially, his pride was deserving of a certain respect.

Parking in the center of Gail’s driveway, he swung out of the van, slid open the side door, extracted a couple of metal cases and a clipboard—the ultimate badge of legitimacy—and made a big show of checking the address against some presumed piece of paperwork. Visibly comforted, he marched up to the front door, worked the entry code, and walked inside, fully expecting every step of the way to be challenged and exposed.

With the front door closed behind him, he placed both cases on the floor, straightened, and let out a sigh of relief. A single half hour, he figured. Then the rest would be history, along with the cop’s girlfriend.

· · ·

Joe checked his watch. He was due to meet Gail at the statehouse after work—not something he wanted to miss, for a variety of reasons. By the same token, he was even more eager to conduct this briefing, since, as with most investigations, his instincts were telling him that they were finally nearing the end. It had not been an easy road—certainly one pitted with emotional potholes, only the latest of which had been his virtual accusation of Marie Cutts for the killing of her own son—something which now was looking doubly offensive, since it appeared far less likely.

Also, in case any shreds of self-congratulation were somehow still threatening, Joe had the missing Gino Famolare to consider, and the specter of the threat that Gino had made against Gail.

He looked up at the group already assembled, sighing at those last couple of thoughts, the pure mechanics of a murder investigation looking tame by comparison. Sam was there, of course, organized with a stack of folders before her, as were both Shafer and Michael. Willy Kunkle entered as he watched, giving him a single raised eyebrow in greeting. Finally, looking slightly embarrassed, since he was technically their host, one of the troopers from the earlier meeting slipped in and sat without comment. There were no sheriff’s deputies in attendance.

“We’ve had some breaks,” Joe started out, quieting them down. “Forensics tied the fatal injury in John Gregory’s head to a baling hook, found at the Cutts farm, complete with blood and fingerprint evidence. Sam?”

She opened her topmost folder. “Prints belong to Linda Cutts Padgett. Initially, this was only suggestive of her involvement, and not proof positive—it could have been she grabbed the hook after someone else used it to kill Gregory. But we’ve taken advantage of this break to get a couple of court orders, and things are now piling up against her.”

Jonathon Michael took up the narrative. “Turns out Linda has access to several bank accounts, all aboveboard. One belongs to the family business, another is a shared account she has with her husband, and the third she reserves for herself and her side job as a freelance tax adviser. This is the most interesting one to us, since, about three weeks prior to the fire that killed her brother, she cleaned it out of the almost thirty-three thousand dollars she had in it. There is no record of it being deposited anywhere else, nor is there any indication that she bought a car, vacation tickets around the world, or anything else legit. It just disappeared.”