D Carpenter - Infertile Grounds

“Not a thing.”

“It’s for real.”

“Yeah,” Pell said quietly as he backed out of the driveway, and sped down the road.

Fifteen minutes later they turned off Route eleven and wound down some dirt roads until they came to their second fire scene of the day. A couple of state troopers’ vehicles, a game warden’s pickup and a hearse sat in the middle of the driveway.

As they stopped the car and got out, a tall state cop came over to meet them.

“Agent Pelletier?” He asked.

“Yes,” Pell said as they shook hands.

“I’m Detective Martin,” he said and turned to Chris. “And you are?”

“Chris Foster.”

“You with the FBI too?” Detective Martin asked.

“No he’s not but he’s good though. He’s with me and I can vouch for him. So what have you got here?” Pell asked.

“Like I told you this morning on the phone, it would appear that we’ve got a dead officer, Bert Nadeau. The only reason I even called you was because Peter Clemens, the commander up in Houlton, suggested that I do it.”

“Appreciate it,” Pell replied. “So what do we have? Can we look around?”

“This whole place is a crime scene now,” the detective cautioned. I can show you around but we are still waiting for the crime scene investigators and forensics team so I will need to ask you to respect that.”

They walked over to the closest burnt-out building – a charred foundation, heaps of ash and not much else.

“Is the other building in the same shape?” Pell asked studying the scene.

“Yes. There’s nothing left of it either. Must have been some sort of a chemical fire – something real hot. We’ve got a technician from the crime lab in Augusta flying up this afternoon to do some testing. Whoever set this knew how to make one hot fire.”

Pell nodded.

He walked out onto the slab foundation to where the middle of the room would have been and cleaned off a small section of concrete with his shoe. He pulled out his pistol. Aiming it at an angle away from himself and into the woods, he fired a bullet at the slab.

“What the hell are you doing?” The detective asked. “This is a crime scene. You can’t be doing this.”

Pell glanced at him briefly as he bent down and touched the concrete around where his bullet had hit. Chris walked over to him and stared at it. The bullet had created concentric rings in the cement, and Pell’s hand running over the surface caused it to crumble as if it were just packed-down sand.

“This was one hot fire all right,” Pell said as he stood up. “A couple of thousand degrees at least; definitely not an accident. How’d you guys find this?”

“A ranger in a fire tower down in Baxter State Park saw it. He said it went up around three-thirty this morning. Only burned for half an hour though. He sent someone down to investigate, and they found this mess and that state police vehicle.” He pointed to a cop car across the lawn. “And Bert Nadeau is no place to be found.”

“So you think he was in one of these buildings?” Chris asked.

The detective nodded.

“Why do you think that?” Pell asked him.

“I can’t prove it, but he was working on a double homicide that happened day before yesterday. Someone blew up the Wild Bear lodge. Killed the owner and his wife.”

Chris shot Pell a glance.

Detective Martin continued, “I think in the course of his investigation he somehow ended up down here, and then this place gets torched just like the Wild Bear and Bert is nowhere to be found.”

“You’re telling me that there was a double murder here this week, too?” Pell asked. “How do you know that the fire at the Wild Bear wasn’t an accident? What makes you think it was murder?”

The lanky Detective’s face flushed and his pitch rose up a notch. “I know it was a murder because there was residue from plastic explosives at the scene. Someone used some kick-ass explosives – C4 to be exact – to blow Annie and Stu into little itty-bitty pieces, and now we’ve most likely got another homicide, of a state trooper no less, on our hands right here.”

“It looks like you’ve been doing a thorough investigation,” Pell said. “Do you know who owned this property?”

“We’re trying to get that information now. It could take a while.”

“Why’s that?”

“This is Great Northern land. Look around, and for as far as you can see in any direction, the land is all owned by a consortium of timber companies. They let people lease plots from them, and figuring out who is leasing what can be a big pain in the ass – people sell their leases or die. Christ, I’ve even seen people lose them in card games. It’s a big mess”

“You’ve got people working on that now?” Pell asked.

The detective nodded.

As Chris listened to their conversation, he swept his foot through the fine ashes on the floor. Something ground under his shoe. He bent down and picked it up. After cleaning it off, to his disgust, he saw that it was a human tooth – charred but undeniably a tooth.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

“You guys are going to get me fired. Stop messing around. This is a crime scene. What have you picked up there? Jesus, you can’t be fiddling with the evidence,” the detective said.

Chris handed the tooth to Pell who studied it before passing it to the detective. “I think we just found Bert Nadeau.”

Detective Martin stared at the tooth. He was visibly shaken as he pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket and dropped the tooth in it. After a moment of silence, he cleared his throat and said, “Why did Commander Clemens want you to get involved? What do you know about this?”

Pell’s face was hard, his expression cold as he studied the Detective. “I don’t know anything about any of these murders specifically. Bert’s name came up in another investigation. I couldn’t prove it right now, but my gut says that you’re right, the murders here and at the Wild Bear are connected. We’ve got to comb this entire area for evidence. We’re going to need more manpower. Can you get some?”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Good. We also need to know who owned these buildings. Has anyone talked to neighbors?”

The detective laughed and said, “Neighbors? There isn’t another year-round residence within ten miles of here. There’re plenty of hunting camps, but you won’t find anyone in those this time of year.”

“We need to find out who these people were. Someone around here knows who they were. They had to eat, right? Check the stores.” Pell pulled out his mobile phone, no signal. “Can you get me in touch with Commander Clemens?”

“Sure,” Detective Martin said. “I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me back up the driveway and off the crime scene while I do that.”

Pell and Chris followed him up the driveway and as he walked over to his cruiser to track down his boss Pell said, “We’ll get these guys started, and then we’re out of here. We’ve got to get down to Boston to properly escalate this.”

“Sounds good to me,” Chris replied. Seeing Pell in action was more impressive than he had expected. He exuded much more force than Chris would have thought him capable of.

“I’ve got the commander on the radio,” the detective yelled from his cruiser.

“Excellent,” Pell said. “Let’s get the wheels turning.” He jogged over to the cruiser, leaving Chris alone to ponder the scene. This was just further confirmation that the people responsible for these deaths didn’t mess around. He looked down at his hand and saw thin ash lines from the tooth crisscrossed his palm. He reflexively wiped it on his pants. A crow cawed from the lowest branch of an enormous pine tree. He looked at the large black bird. It stared back at him defiantly before letting out another chilling screech that echoed in the woods.