Archer Mayor - St. Albans Fire

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.”