Archer Mayor - St. Albans Fire

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.

She sat on the ground, using his gravestone as a backrest, her eyes squinting against the setting sun as she took in the view all the way across St. Albans, the bay, the lake with its islands, and to the ragged gray horizon cut like a rough tear by the Adirondack Mountains.

It had been a beautiful day, clear and dry and warm with the scent of spring. She’d longed to sit on the grass like this, using Bobby to rest against as they used to, back-to-back, long ago. But until now it had been too cold or too wet, so typical of this godforsaken land. She’d been missing his company-his easygoing ways, his willingness to listen, the fact that he never once mocked her dreams, no matter how fanciful.

He was the only one she’d told about John, and he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, as she knew he wouldn’t, no matter how uncomfortable he felt. That part made her feel a little guilty at first, before her own enthusiasm overwhelmed her. But she hadn’t been able to keep it to herself, and who else was there?

Bobby was great, of course. Understanding and supportive, even if a little confused. He first assumed that she was breaking up with Jeff, naturally enough. It was hard to explain that becoming John’s lover had less to do with sex than with the launching of something new and bright and hopeful for all of them. That in this man’s arms, surrounded by his things, intoxicated by his presumption of privilege and money, she caught hold of a vision that she could make real for her family-including Jeff.