St. Albans Fire

Chapter 6

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.”

Jonathon absorbed all that and then asked, “The fire broke out midafternoon?”

“Right. Two-thirty.”

Joe got the point. “When all the cows were outside,” he mused. “Interesting difference between the two.”

Both men looked at him.

“What’re you thinking?” Shafer asked.

“What did Farley end up doing?” Joe asked instead.

“Sold out.”

“I’m thinking that somebody knew all too well how the business works, assuming the contamination was connected. Who was the buyer?”

“His neighbor.”

“Did he also get the cows?” Jonathon asked.

Shafer was looking a little uncomfortable, as if he hadn’t given this fairly obvious point the attention it deserved. Joe had been expecting such an awkward moment, sooner or later. It usually cropped up when several investigators compared notes-one of them began to feel he was unfairly being put under scrutiny.

“Yeah,” Shafer admitted.

“Probably neither here nor there,” Joe said placidly, and moved the conversation along. “Was there bad blood between the two?”

“No,” Shafer answered with just a bit more force than necessary. “That was the whole point. They got along fine. The neighbor wanted the acreage, sure, but it was always up-front-had been for years-and he seemed more upset by the burning than Noon. Plus, with the barn gone, he had to blow a bunch of extra bucks to build one of those oversize plastic Quonset hut-type things to house the extra cows. I gave both of them a real going-over-bank accounts, neighbor interviews, the local cops, you name it-they always came up real straight. And the neighbor’s supply of penicillin was all accounted for.”

Joe stared at the two piles of documents thoughtfully for a couple of moments, deciding how best to move on. “Where was the third fire geographically in relation to Farley Noon’s and Calvin Cutts’s?”

They both looked at him inquiringly.

“The so-called accidental electric fire that started in the milk room?” he prompted.

“Oh, yeah,” Michael said. “It was over near Lake Champlain.” He pawed through some of Shafer’s paperwork until he located a map. He slid it before his boss and tapped on a spot with his fingertip. “Somewhere around there. I may be off a hair, but that’s about right.”

Joe studied the map. “A mile from Farley’s. Do you remember what happened to that farmer afterward?”

Jonathon’s silence was telling. Shafer smiled to himself, feeling safely free of the spotlight.

“He sold out,” Michael finally admitted.

“A neighbor again?”

“That’s what I’m trying to remember. No. It was a developer, someone out of St. Albans. Clark Wolff-that was it. Wolff Properties. They handle a bit of everything: rentals, home sales, development projects.”

“You know what they have planned?” Joe asked.

Michael shook his head. “Nope. It just happened, so it may still be under wraps.” He glanced at the map again. “Given its proximity to both the town and the lake, though, it’s probably housing. That’s what’s hot right now.”

Joe pushed the map away and sat back to cross his legs. “Tough question, Jonathon, but without one iota of criticism intended, okay?”

Michael was already ahead of him. “How sure am I it was accidental?”

Gunther raised an eyebrow. “Three barn fires, two almost within sight of each other, all in short order. And with the end result that two out of the three unloaded their farms, and the third’s barely hanging on. You gotta wonder.”

“I was sure,” the other responded, emphasizing the past tense. “But there’s no way I’m not rechecking it now.”

“I know it’s a lot, given what’s on your plate already…”

Again, Michael headed him off. “No, I can do it, and I don’t need any help. I know the players, who to call. I can do it faster alone.”

Both men paid him the respect of accepting this small face-saving fiction. Mirroring Joe’s overall courtesy, Tim Shafer even shifted the emphasis somewhat. “If the torch did two barns the same way, without hiding that they were arsons, why would he disguise the third?”

“Too early to tell,” Joe answered. “We don’t even know it was set. But it wasn’t the third chronologically; it was the first. Could he have entered the barn through the milk room, like everyone does, immediately saw the cob-job wiring running to the tank, and figured what the hell? He took it as a gimme.”

“It ties to the other two being set from the top down, too,” Jonathon suggested.

“How’s that?” Shafer asked.

His colleague backed up slightly. “I didn’t mean directly. I meant that he may be a guy who works with whatever opportunity is staring him in the face.” He tapped the map again. “At my guy’s-Loomis is his name-he sees the bad wiring and uses that; at Noon’s, according to your sketches here, he sees access to a full hayloft right outside the door connecting the milk room to the stable; and at Cutts’s-given his success at Noon’s-he just repeats himself. I mean, think of it, we’ve all been in cow stables before, right?”

The other men nodded.

“What’s the reaction going to be from the cows when a stranger walks in, possibly carrying gas and/or glue as accelerants? Tim,” he added suddenly, warming to his hypothesis, “what style stable was Noon’s-tied or free stalls?”

“Free.”

Jonathon smiled. “There you have it.” He then answered his own earlier question: “They start moving. The skittish ones first, then the others. If this torch isn’t used to being in a barn, a free-stall stable with a bunch of huge cows moving around is not going to be the place to start setting up squibs and laying out trailers-not if you’re scared of being stepped on or crushed.”

Joe couldn’t resist smiling. “Nice-for a total piece of fiction.”

Shafer laughed, finally completely at ease. “Yeah, well, that’s how a lot of cases come together, right? You tell stories until you like one enough to chase it down.”

Joe conceded the point. “I do like it, I’ll admit that, but it only takes us so far. Assuming the Loomis fire is arson, which is a stretch, then what’s the connection between all three?”

“The farmers sold out, like you said,” Jonathon said quickly.

“Two of them did,” Shafer corrected.

Joe made a face. “Right-as far as we know. But if the point was to make each one sell out, then why? The properties aren’t contiguous, and one is miles away. Also, the two buyers we do have so far couldn’t be more disconnected.”

“Age?” Jonathon suggested, clearly thinking in overdrive, both stimulated by the challenge and embarrassed by his possible mistake with the Loomis investigation. “All three farmers were long in the tooth.”

Shafer and Gunther stayed silent for a while, until Joe suggested, “Okay. I don’t know what to do with that yet, but let’s keep it in mind. What else?”

No one answered. “How about a smoke screen?” he continued. “The old theory that you hide a needle best among other needles. Could be only one of the arsons really counts.”

“Then which one is the needle we want?” Shafer asked.

Gunther smiled. “That’s easier than it sounds. It may not matter. Again assuming that Loomis is an arson, we have three felonies to investigate anyhow. If you want to get technical, we don’t want to rule out two to find the one left over; we need to solve them all. If we’re successful, we’ll find out at the end.”

Now it was Michael’s turn to sit back. “But that was true from the start.”

Shafer couldn’t resist the dig. “Except that until now, we didn’t know to give Loomis a second look.”

Gunther gave Jonathon high marks-he merely pressed his lips together briefly before admitting, “Point taken.”

Joe tried to clear the air. “Okay, there are three of us and three roads to go down. Tim, you stick with Farley Noon; Jonathon, I know you have some of the Cutts case to organize, but while you recheck Loomis, let me carry the investigative load there. I suggest we get in touch every couple of days, face-to-face or by e-mail or phone, just to share updates. Also, I’m going to have someone at headquarters make a few calls, find out how many other farms in the area have gone on the block-when, where, why, and who bought them.”

He slid off the booth bench and stood up, looking down at them both. “You wanted something to chase, Tim. Guess we all got lucky-in spades.”