St. Albans Fire (6 page)

Calvin ran his hand through his hair. “Jesus, who hasn’t? For one thing, I’m a registered Democrat. That pisses my wife off right there.”

“Something you did,” Joe suggested. “Maybe involving a family member or a neighbor. A business deal.”

Cutts sat back in his seat, suddenly staring at Gunther in wonder. “My God, you think it could’ve been?”

“Anything’s possible,” Joe answered, not knowing where this was headed.

“Christ,” the other man murmured. “Last year, Billy St. Cyr and I had another run-in, but it couldn’t have anything to do with all this. That’s just too crazy.”

“Tell me about it anyway.”

Cutts still looked incredulous. “It was stupid. He drained a small wetland into my cornfield, and I called him on it. Instead of damming the ditch he’d just dug, like I suggested, he called the local ag agent on something he thought I’d done. He claimed I’d planted illegally close to a streambed, which I hadn’t—he got the regulation wrong. Anyhow, he was fined for his violation almost as soon as the agent showed up. It was totally crazy. He should have kept his mouth shut. Instead, he ended up losing a bundle and blaming me.”

“That was it?” Joe asked. “How big was the fine?”

“Not huge, and Billy’s got the money. He’s doing well. He takes advantage of every subsidy, every handout, and every financial incentive that comes down the pike, plus he sells off overpriced parcels of land to flatlanders looking for a piece of God’s country. He’s not a bad farmer, truth be told, but he’s a little shy on scruples.”

“He ever make an offer for your place?”

“No. If anything, he wants to get out.”

Gunther pulled on an earlobe, reviewing what he’d just heard. “You said this was
another
run-in. There were others?”

Cutts waved his hand tiredly. “All the time. Something like twenty years ago I sold Billy a truck that seized two months after he bought it, probably because he didn’t change the oil. He said I knew it was a lemon and that I should buy it back. I refused, and that was the start of it. He’s hated me ever since.”

“Has it escalated over time?” Joe asked.

Calvin shook his head. “Nope. It’s always piddly stuff, and it always comes up when he’s got nothing better to do.”

There was a knock on the door, and Jeff Padgett poked his head in. “Dad? The minister’s here. He was wondering if you’d like to see him.”

Calvin Cutts looked inquiringly at Joe, who immediately nodded. “Fine with me, Cal. I was pretty much done anyhow. You go ahead.”

Joe followed them both back into the front hall and, from there, saw a somber-suited man standing with Marie in the kitchen, speaking quietly. She looked thin and insubstantial next to him, her bony arms crossed tightly, her eyes glued to the floor. Joe couldn’t tell from this distance whether she was benefiting from the man’s words or simply waiting till he was done before tearing his head off. Her body language looked suitable for either option. For both their sakes, Joe wished for the former.

Without further ceremony, he let himself out, pausing on the front porch alongside the deputy sheriff standing guard—the same one he’d encouraged earlier to get a cup of coffee against the cold.

“Everything okay in there?” the man asked.

Surreptitiously, Joe noticed his name tag said “Davis.” “As okay as can be. Pretty hard knock to take. You find that coffee?”

The man smiled and nodded. “You bet. Felt good all the way down. ’Preciate it.”

“No problem.” Joe figured him to be in his mid-fifties, probably a lifelong cop like himself, but content to stay local and work the same patch he’d been born on. The way he was built conjured up a duffel bag wrapped in a coat.

“Guess you know the folks around here pretty well,” Joe suggested.

Davis chuckled. “If I don’t, I never will. The old-timers, that is. Lot of people coming in from away. Don’t know them so well.”

“Anything you can tell me about the Cuttses?”

The deputy made a face. “Not much to tell. They keep to themselves, like most farmers. None of them has any time to do much else.”

“No run-ins with you guys?”

Davis smiled. “Had a few with Jeff before he straightened out. That boy could drive like nobody I know. Old Calvin here saved his butt, sure as hell. But that’s ancient history—maybe fifteen years back, now.”

“What about Bobby?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Straight arrow. The girlfriend’s bad news, but I figured that was just a short walk on the wild side. Marie would’ve seen to that soon enough.”

Joe tilted his chin in the direction of the barn’s blackened skeleton. “Could she or her playmates have had anything to do with this?”

Davis mulled that over. “Anything’s possible, I guess, but nothing rings a bell. I’m talking sex, drugs, and booze with them. Nothing more violent than a domestic now and then—maybe disturbing the peace on a Friday night. The kind of stuff Jeff was getting into before Cal got hold of him. But Bobby wasn’t doin’ any of that. He just had the hots for Marianne. He didn’t hang with her crowd.” He gave a frown. “I can’t say I see this being connected to them. You could prove me a liar, though. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Joe patted his shoulder once before stepping off the porch onto the hard-packed snow. “Well, let’s hope we get lucky. I hate for this to drag on for too long.”

“Yeah,” Davis agreed. “Especially when they begin to pile up. People start getting antsy.”

Joe fixed him with a stare. “Pile up? What do you mean?”

The deputy looked surprised. “Barn fires. This is the third one in three weeks. You didn’t know?”

JOE FOUND JONATHON MICHAEL IN THE BACK OF THE CRIME
lab van, labeling one of the shiny paint cans he used to collect evidence.

“How’s progress?” he asked, propping one foot up on the tailstep.

Michael looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Joe. Slow, but we’re gainin’. How ’bout you? You talk to the family?”

“Most of them. The daughter’s asleep. I also got a little local background from the deputy guarding the front door.”

The other man laughed. “Yeah—I saw him. Big as a bear.”

“Right,” Joe agreed affably, adding, “He told me this is the third barn fire in as many weeks.”

Michael paused to reflect, but wasn’t as surprised as Joe was expecting. “I know of two, counting this one, but that’s it.”

Joe worked to hide his irritation. “You knew about another one? Why didn’t you mention it?”

Jonathon straightened to work out a kink in his back. “It was an accidental electrical fire. Took out the milk room and half the stable. The farmer admitted to repairing an extension cord with duct tape. It overheated, and
poof.
” He snapped his fingers.

“You were the investigator?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was pretty straightforward.”

“How come you don’t know about the third one?”

Jonathon smiled. “This is my first day back on the job. What with Diane’s surgery and all, I decided to take two weeks’ accrued time. One of the other guys must’ve handled it. I didn’t know about it because I haven’t even been to the office yet. I got paged for this at home at the crack of dawn.”

“Who should we talk to?” Joe asked, mollified. “Seems like we ought to compare notes at least.”

“Oh, yeah,” he readily agreed. “For sure. Tim Shafer’s the one you want. He was covering for me out of St. Johnsbury.”

St. Johnsbury was in the opposite corner of the state, in what was referred to as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Shafer being based there and yet having covered a fire near St. Albans was a perfect demonstration of both the state’s small size and how a handful of people had to cover vast portions of it.

“I can bring Muhammad to the mountain and ask him to meet us over here with whatever he has on file,” Michael continued. “He loves getting out of the office.”

· · ·

Tim Shafer was not a big fan of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. An ex-trooper like so many of his new colleagues, he’d made the switch for purely practical reasons. As he saw it, the Vermont State Police’s own investigative unit, the BCI, had been robbed of its eminence, the VSP brass had sold the agency out politically, and the troopers’ union had been either asleep at the wheel or in cahoots with someone.

His line of reasoning differed depending on who was listening, but the final leap remained the same: Shafer had joined the VBI because no one listed above had protected him from it.

He still had all his benefits, the same pay, and seniority, and was now lined up for a better pension. He also had the same statewide jurisdictional reach as before, if not slightly better, and from within a leaner, less bureaucratic, more autonomous organization. Nevertheless, his heart remained with the Green and the Gold of the state police, even as—it was hard to deny—he’d clearly thrown them over.

Such contradictions aside, Shafer remained a generally personable sort, if a little overbearing when it came to debating certain topics. This was a good thing right now, as his upbeat nature had been tested by the apprehension of being summoned from afar by the VBI’s second-highest-ranking officer—and told to bring just one particular case file.

Not surprisingly, Joe Gunther knew all this, and thus greeted a suspicious Tim Shafer with the friendliness of a doting uncle as the latter entered the St. Albans restaurant specifically chosen for this meeting.

“Tim,” Joe exclaimed, getting to his feet and waving the younger man over to join them at a quiet booth far removed from both the front door and the kitchen. “Hope you don’t mind the setting—we were getting sick of the office. Meal’s on me if you’re hungry.”

Shafer was hungry, which, along with his opinions, was also a well-known given. He wasn’t a fat man, although he was solidly built, but he ate enough for a wrestling team.

Gunther had selected an environment at once disarming and seductive.

Jonathon Michael smiled wryly as he greeted his fellow arson investigator, the reason for Joe’s earlier suggestion of a restaurant now becoming clear. At the moment, Tim Shafer was a reluctant ally, which made this neutral and flattering way station part of a careful pitch, indicative of a meeting of equals. As Shafer slid his bulk along the smooth surface of the fake-leather bench, Jonathon could see him visibly relaxing.

“You want to see a menu?” Joe asked, summoning the waitress.

Shafer accepted the glossy card, studied its contents before ordering a Coke and a burger, and sat back to see what would happen.

Joe pointed to the thick accordion file Shafer had walked in with. “That the file?”

Shafer pushed it farther into the middle of the table. “As requested,” he said neutrally.

“Definitely an arson?” Joe asked.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You have anyone for it?”

“Not yet.” Shafer was watching both of them carefully.

Joe smiled and nodded to Jonathon. “We just picked up a case of our own. Thought we should compare notes, since they’re both barn fires.”

Shafer looked surprised, as much by the coincidence as by the implied confirmation that he was not in trouble. “Sure,” he said. “What’ve you got?”

Jonathon filled him in, pulling notes, sketches, and photographs from the briefcase by his side. Taking Joe’s diplomatic cue, he detailed everything without asking Shafer to divulge his own investigation, until the other man’s growing enthusiasm made the point moot. Shafer began regularly interrupting with “Just like mine” and “Same as me.”

By the time Jonathon was wrapping things up, the burger plate had been pushed aside uneaten and half the contents of Shafer’s file lay spread across the table.

“It’s gotta be the same guy,” he was saying. “The chemical timers look the same, the trace evidence of potato chips and glue trailers, the weird detail about setting it in the hayloft first.”

“What do you make of that last part?” Joe asked.

Shafer looked baffled. “I couldn’t figure it out. It’s like the guy just went for the biggest source of fuel, regardless that it was up top. Not that it mattered, since the barn was a total loss. I mean, it worked, whatever we think about it.” He picked up one of Michael’s pictures of the devastated stable. “And he cooked the whole herd, huh? Least I didn’t have that to go through, not to mention the kid.”

Joe had been drinking coffee quietly through most of this, making comments only rarely. Now he sat back and eyed his investigators thoughtfully. “Okay, so we’re pretty sure the same torch did both barns. What do you make of your farmer, Tim?”

“Not much. Kind of pathetic, really, named Farley Noon, if you can believe it. I kept trying to get him to take a guess on who might’ve done him in, but he didn’t care. He just kept saying he was too old and too tired to give a damn anymore.”

“Another case of being underinsured?” Joe asked.

“A little. He could have built something pretty close to the original. But I guess he’d finally run out of gas. He’d been having a string of bad luck—contaminated milk.”

“How so?” Joe asked.

“Antibiotics. Any whiff of that stuff in the milk and the co-op puts you on notice.”

“But he must have had insurance for that, too,” Jonathon protested.

Shafer smiled wryly. “He did the first time. But he got stuck twice, one right after the other—that’s two truckloads of his milk and everybody else’s on the pickup route. Cost him six thousand dollars, not to mention that the state took him apart, going over all his books and procedures. He had to take out an additional loan to cover the loss, the co-op shut him off till he tested clean a few times in a row.… You get the idea. The barn going up in smoke turned out to be the last straw.”

“What was the story behind the antibiotics?” Joe asked.

Shafer shrugged. “Nobody knows. Noon swears he wasn’t treating any animals, which is usually how it gets into the milk—through the bloodstream. The presumption was that he was sabotaged. But that’s almost impossible to prove. One cow gets shot up with a single load of penicillin, her milk’ll screw up everything in the holding tank for three days running, while everybody runs around trying to find out which animal is dirty. It’s a near-perfect-crime type of scenario.”