St. Albans Fire

Chapter 25

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.”

“Gino costs forty grand for an out-of-town torch job,” Willy added.

“Right,” Sam confirmed, grabbing another folder for consultation. “Which means Linda was still some seven thousand short if Gino was her intention. We have proof of her withdrawing five from the family farm account, no doubt something she hoped the eventual insurance payoff would cover before it was noticed. But that still left the final two thousand.”

She waved a sheet of paper in the air. “She also had a safe-deposit box in her name and Jeff’s. We don’t know for sure what was in it, but we did get a look at the signature card at the bank. With neither one of them having touched that box in over four years, she checked it out at exactly the same time she was scrounging for cash. We have a copy of the bank log, complete with her signature.”

Getting into the round-robin, Tim Shafer chimed in, “There was a thought that if she’d gone into that box to get something to sell, maybe she sold it either to a pawnshop or on something like eBay. Sure enough, after checking around here and in Burlington, and looking through her computer files, we found where she auctioned off a diamond ring for twenty-five hundred bucks.”

“I ran a check of the Cutts phone records,” Willy said in a bored voice. “Little jerk didn’t even have the sense to use a pay phone. Close to the same date she was pulling all this other shit, she also placed a couple of calls to a number in Jersey. I had the cops down there run it down-it’s one of the Italian social clubs Lagasso’s known to frequent.”

Joe glanced down the table at the lone state trooper and invited him to join in with a silent nod.

The man smiled and sat forward. “We got hold of St. Albans PD after we came up with nothing on our own computers and found out that Linda Padgett was stopped for speeding and given a warning just outside of St. Albans on the same night we think Gregory was killed. She was heading back into town from the bay.”

Joe nodded. “Thanks. On my end, I had the crime lab compare a bunch of John Doe prints they collected at Gregory’s house to Linda’s. They found several matches. It was their opinion that, given the number of prints and where they were found, she must have spent a fair amount of time there.”

“How’d you get her prints to compare to?” Willy asked.

“I collected a bunch of her personal items from home-birth control dispenser, sanitary napkin box, stuff like that-and sent them to the lab.”

“She wasn’t there?”

“I made sure neither she nor Marie would be,” Joe replied, and then addressed them all. “I also had a brief chat with her husband, Jeff, and asked him about the time the whole family discussed Gregory’s offer to list the farm. Marie had told me it was no big deal-that Linda had made a pitch to sell and run with the money, but that she’d folded once everyone else went against her. Jeff’s story was a little different. He says she really pushed for it, crying, yelling. Told me it was the first time he realized she might not really like the farming life.”

“Well, duh,” Willy snorted. “You have to talk to this clown with a two-by-four in your hand?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Sam muttered to herself.

“Pretty understandable self-denial,” Joe explained. “The farm means everything to him. That’s partly what made me think for a while that Marie did it.”

“And crispy-crittered her own kid?” Willy asked with an incredulous laugh. “I love it. You are hard, boss man.”

“Bad enough that the sister did it,” Sam said quietly. “So what’s the connection between Bobby dying and Linda killing Gregory?”

“I think we better ask her that face-to-face,” Joe concluded.