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?”