St. Albans Fire

Chapter 15

“Mr. Wolff,” Jonathon Michael asked, “What the hell is going on?”

Clark Wolff kept staring at John Gregory’s illegible scrawl at the bottom of the sales agreement. “In a word,” he finally answered, “ambition.”

Jonathon pointed to the document. “That’s not legitimate?”

Wolff returned it to him. “Oh, it’s good, all right. In more ways than one. Good in fact and good for the firm. I just didn’t know anything about it.”

Jonathon remained silent, expecting his exasperated expression to be eloquent enough.

Wolff understood, explaining with a sigh, “All right. What I will tell you is that we are trying to put together a very ambitious project-a development which will both benefit the community and make us very wealthy, but which will be tricky and time-consuming to pull off. A years-long commitment. In my case, I’m motivated for the sake of my children. This will take long enough that I expect they’ll benefit more than I. But for John, who is young and single, time is of the essence. As with most people his age, he thinks time is against him.”

“What’s the project?”

“I’d prefer not to say.”

Jonathon didn’t argue the point-yet. “Then what is Gregory up to that caught you by surprise?”

“We are supposed to be working as a team,” the Realtor said shortly.

“You don’t agree with these purchases?”

Wolff slowly pulled out a chair and sat heavily. He rubbed the bridge of his nose before answering. “In all honesty, I can’t say that. They fit the overall scheme we’ve laid out. From what you showed me, the prices paid and the financial terms are in line. And,” he added with a sad smile, “aside from your being here, they haven’t attracted undue attention. So I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I just wish he hadn’t acted behind my back. It was a risk.”

“How so?”

“You create bad blood; you can make a mistake. A deal like this only works when you keep your whole team informed. John’s an outsider. He doesn’t know the folks around here like I do. Going solo just to make a point is a little like navigating a ship without a pilot, just to see if you can do it.”

It was time for Jonathon to put one of his cards down on the table, in the hope that the other man might do the same.

“Mr. Wolff, it looks like mistakes were made, by who we’re not sure yet. Farley Noon’s barn was an arson, it looks like Loomis’s might’ve been, too, and we’re suspicious about what might have led to a couple of the other sales on that list.”

“What are you saying?” Wolff asked darkly.

“Right now, that unless you open up a bit more, that timeline of yours is likely to get a whole lot longer. You know how things get when cops start talking about arson and murder.”

“Murder.”

“Talk to me, Mr. Wolff.”

Wolff stared at the opposite wall for a few moments, clearly weighing his options. “You don’t have anything concrete linking my firm to any of this yet. Is that correct?”

“I’m sitting here already,” Jonathon answered him ambiguously. “And we’ve barely started connecting the dots.”

Still, the older man wrestled. “Why does the exact nature of the project make any difference?” he asked plaintively.

“People have died,” Jonathon said patiently, knowing he’d already won. “Surely, that’s not a serious question.”

Wolff ran both hands through his hair and pushed himself up off his chair. “Come on,” he said, leading the way to a door at the back of the conference room.

He unpocketed a batch of keys and turned the lock on the door with one of them. They stepped into a darkened room with its curtains drawn. Wolff hit the light switch to reveal what looked like a military command post-a document-laden table, the walls covered with maps and charts and oversize photographs. At a glance, Jonathon recognized that the area of interest was the same swatch of land between the lake and the interstate, just south of town.

“Looks like an invasion plan,” he commented, glancing around.

Wolff was thoughtful before he answered. “In a way, it is.” He crossed to the most generalized map, which included Plattsburgh in New York, the whole of Lake Champlain, northwestern Vermont, and even a slice of Canada.

“You ever drive over to New York State from this part of Vermont, Detective?”

“Sure.”

“Takes a while, doesn’t it? Either taking the ferry from Burlington, leapfrogging across the islands, or almost entering Canada to get across the water.”

“Yeah.”

“For years, people have talked about solving that problem by building a bridge from Plattsburgh to Burlington,” Wolff explained. “Hooking I-89 to the New York Thruway.”

Jonathon laughed uneasily. Up to now, he’d thought of Wolff as a reasonable man. “I heard they once talked about putting a landing strip on Mount Mansfield, too,” he said. “Still didn’t make it likely. I mean, convenience aside, there aren’t enough people in the whole state of Vermont to justify that kind of expense.”

“The incentive doesn’t come from this state. It’s federal.”

Jonathon’s brow furrowed. “Are you serious? All this is about a bridge?”

Wolff switched to another, more detailed map. “Look at how the Champlain islands line up-like stepping-stones. With the proper funding and momentum, a little connect-the-dots would result in making this backwater an overnight hub, with preexisting interstates-now all linked-heading off in four different directions.”

Jonathon was baffled. “What for?”

“Homeland Security,” was the simple response. “I have it on good authority that the federal government wants to turn St. Albans into a major northern Homeland Security traffic circle-a jumping-off interdiction point extending along the border from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes. There’s a string of about five such centers being discussed. The only hitch with this one is Lake Champlain.” He tapped the map with his finger. “Ergo, the bridge.”

Jonathon was tempted to challenge Wolff’s logic, but he’d already seen so much foolish money expended in the name of national security that a mere billion-dollar bridge paled by comparison. What might seem nonsensical to him-considering that the entire border was unguarded-didn’t mean there might not be government funding to make it happen.

He indicated the map. “This is why the properties you and John Gregory are buying could be worth a fortune? Because they’re directly in the path?”

Wolff merely waggled his eyebrows in agreement.

Jonathon ran this through his brain. Now that he’d discovered the rationale behind the purchases, the larger scheme had little meaning. Clark Wolff could have detailed plans of a landing base for alien spaceships. The crucial point remained not the credibility of the project, but that the people behind it believed it was feasible. And that it involved more than enough money to kill for.

He couldn’t resist one question, however, since he knew Joe would ask it of him in turn: “You said ‘on good authority.’ We’re pretty tied into Homeland Security, given who we are. I hadn’t heard anything about this.”

Wolff’s answer surprised him. “It doesn’t matter. I trust my sources-very highly placed and reliable. But in the end, even if this project doesn’t go through, these land deals are still sound, in and of themselves. I’ll still make money, even if not what I was hoping. The only real difference is that I’ve expended more capital than I would have normally. I’m very extended right now.”

“Is that where John Samuel Gregory comes in?” Jonathon asked. “Guys with three names are usually loaded. Doesn’t he drive a Porsche?”

Wolff’s voice flattened somewhat. “Yes, he does.”

“So you’re more business partners than you let on.”

“It’s my project,” Wolff said stubbornly.

Jonathon let his silence speak for him.

“Yes,” Wolff conceded. “We are partners because of his personal assets.”

“Tell me about Mr. Gregory.”

“He’s from down south. His father’s a highflyer. There’s always been money in the family. He came into the office half a year ago, papers in order, looking for a place to work out of. For a while, he functioned as they all do out there, but he’s smart and ambitious, and, of course, there was the money.”

“Of course.”

“Anyhow, when I found out about this”-Wolff waved an arm at the surrounding maps-“I needed someone to go in with me. I actually thought I’d have to create a consortium, which made me very nervous. Turned out, John was enough.”

“Had enough,” Jonathon corrected him.

Wolff scowled slightly. “Whatever. The point was that we stood a better chance of keeping this to ourselves as a result, at least until it didn’t matter anymore. At some point, you have to announce what you’ve got going-all the hearings and meetings and permits and whatnot. But by that time, we were hoping to have a major chunk of what we needed, so it wouldn’t matter as much.”

“How far along are you?”

“About fifty percent of that goal-where news breaking out wouldn’t have hurt.” He surveyed the room ruefully.

“Although a wild guess tells me none of that’s going to matter much now.”

He returned to the door and held it open for his guest. “Might as well go back to where it’s more comfortable,” he said.

Jonathon walked by him, allowing Wolff to reverse his security routine-switching off the lights and dead-bolting the door.

The Realtor sighed slightly as he sat back down at the conference table. “Probably for the better.”

“What is?”

Wolff was suddenly looking older. “All my life, I’ve seen this as a good business-matching people to their dreams, building businesses where people don’t have to drive an hour to get what they need, adding vitality to communities that are fraying around the edges. It was a good feeling. Even when the tree huggers or the anti-development types called me names, I could always see the value in what I did.” He shook his head. “But not if people are going to get hurt. You’ll have to prove to me that what you’re saying is true, but I’ll do what I can to help clear the slate one way or the other.”

“I’ll be damned,” Gunther said, folding his cell phone and slipping it back into his jacket pocket.

“Gee,” Willy snorted. “And I had you pegged for sainthood.”

“That was Michael. He’s been doing a little homework. Turns out most of those land deals I was telling you about, below St. Albans, tie into a single realty business-an ambitious old-timer and a rich flat-lander hoping to make a killing.”

Willy perked up. “For real?”

“A financial killing,” Joe said wearily, and then he corrected himself. “Well, maybe more, as it turns out. But here’s the kicker: When Michael asked the old guy where the younger one came from, he was told ‘down south.’ Turns out that was true Vermonter talk. He meant Newark.”