Archer Mayor - St. Albans Fire

He circled the table and approached her. She held both her hands out to prevent him. “Don’t you come near me.”

He stopped. “Take your time.”

Catching her breath, she managed, “I want you out of my house.”

He considered arguing with her, or trying to console her-to somehow get across how her outlook and hostility helped make his suggestion appear reasonable.

But he saw it was a lost cause, just as her husband’s efforts to explain his giving the farm to Jeff had been futile, and Jeff’s persistent kindness and forbearance had been wasted. Marie Cutts was worse than a dog with a bone. She was hell-bent on martyrdom and righteous indignation and was now more committed to her suffering and loss than she could possibly be to the remnants of her family. The death of one of them had laid permanent claim to her spirit, and it would take more leverage than a mere love of the living to dislodge it.

“I’m sorry, Marie,” he said at last, and stepped toward the door. “I truly am.”

She said nothing and made no motion, so he turned, crossed the front hall, and showed himself out, pausing on the front porch to take in the view that had greeted this clan for generations, now missing its life-sustaining centerpiece.

He sighed and dropped his gaze to his feet, considering the conversation he’d just left, and his suspicions about the tortured train of events that this pain-racked, grieving woman had most likely set in motion.

For it was Joe’s growing conviction that Marie had conspired with Gregory to have the barn burned, in an effort to free her family of its tyranny, deprive her son-in-law of her son’s rightful inheritance, and yet still receive enough money to put them all comfortably on another track. Except that in a miscalculation of classically Greek proportions, she’d sacrificed that very son in the process-and had created a source of such enormous guilt that only more bloodletting could satisfy it.

Thus the murder of her happenstance accomplice-a hated, swaggering, city-born hustler on the fast road to riches. A man who’d probably accommodated her request for an arsonist to prove to himself that he had the makings of a real operator.

Joe shook his head, forever amazed at how the human species worked to tie itself in knots.

Joe looked back over his shoulder at the door he’d just shut, thinking he might try talking to Marie one last time, when he saw it hanging neatly from a wooden peg set into the wall, as conveniently located as a snow shovel.

It was a wooden-handled baling hook.

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.