Shafer was doubtful. “You’re not saying it’s all connected, are you?”
Gunther moved away from the table and began pacing. “God, no.”
He waved vaguely at the spread-out map. “It would be totally paranoid to tie everything together. But by the same token, it could be that the torch is a local guy, or was in town on a separate contract, and that St. Cyr hired him coincidentally, just to do the one job.”
Joe took a breath and added, “There’s something else: I also had the circumstances of every one of these sales looked into, to see if the profile of the seller fit an older farmer who might be less inclined to rebuild after a disaster, like Loomis, or one who got an extra push, like Noon did with his tainted milk. Turns out one of them was killed in a tractor accident, leaving the widow to sell out. And another sold after almost dying from exposure to silage gas.”
“Come again?” Shafer asked.
“He was checking on the contents of his silo by sticking his head through one of the side portals. Silage produces gas-I guess it’s methane or something; I don’t know-but it put him in a coma for two weeks. Damned near killed him. I’ve heard of that before. Even a half-minute exposure can knock you out if you’re not careful. Anyhow, he was in his late sixties and his family insisted he get out of the business after that.”
“Did anyone check on the tractor accident?” Jonathon asked.
“No,” Joe told him. “It was written off as an accident and ascribed to ‘owner error,’ pretty much like Noon and his milk. Also, to add insult to injury, according to the widow, the tractor was declared totaled by the insurance company and disposed of.” He smiled, seeing his colleagues’ expressions, and admitted, “The same thought crossed my mind-I could buy the silage gas as accidental. The guy survived, after all, but the tractor? Sounded too much like a barn burning. Suspicious.”
“Speaking of the torch,” Jonathon said, perhaps seeking firmer ground, “Tim and I put together a profile of his signature-the potassium chlorate squibs, the use of glue trailers, the chips, and the rest-and ran it by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms databank, just to see if we got lucky.”
“And?” Joe asked.
“Still waiting. But I’d like to use my laptop to check if they’ve kicked anything back.”
“Go for it,” his boss urged.
Michael opened his computer, connected it to the high-speed line in the wall, and began typing. As he progressed toward the site he was after, Joe reflected at the ease of it all. The year he started out as a patrol officer in Brattleboro, long before even simple radios were common, much less computers, one of his colleagues had been reduced to summoning help by firing a shot into the air, Old West style. Times had changed fast.
“Got it,” Michael said.
“Who is it?” Shafer asked, peering over his shoulder.
“It’s not a who. It’s a where. According to ATF, a similar unascribed signature was filed with them by the Essex County arson task force, in New Jersey, to be kept on record for future reference.”
“Essex County?”
Joe stopped his pacing and faced them both from across the room. “That’s Newark.”
There was a long silence between the three men before Jonathon finally asked, “What do you want to do with that?”
Joe stared at the floor for a moment before answering, “We’re not making much progress here. A field trip might help.”
Shafer smiled, the very phrase an enticement. “I can take that, if you want.”
But he was disappointed by Gunther’s response. “No. You and Jonathon have enough on your plates already. Plus, I’m adding a couple of things: Order a check of all the surrounding gas stations and motels. We’re looking for a man in a fedora driving an out-of-state, dark four-door sedan-possibly from New Jersey-who was in the area around the three dates of the Loomis, Noon, and Cutts fires. And if there are any surveillance tapes on file, all the better. Also, that loose thread with Rick Frantz is still bugging me. Look into him more-his background, his whereabouts when the arsons took place, how and where he might’ve picked up that kind of knowledge. Find out if he or his father knows Loomis. I don’t want to get so distracted by a guy in a hat that I miss who might be right under our noses.”
He thought a little more, rerunning their conversation in his head. “And Billy St. Cyr. What’s going on there? First he’s a jerk, then he’s Mr. Sweetness and Light; he doesn’t want to keep farming, then he wants to buy more acreage. Interview him, see if we can get a look at his finances. Also, remember Barry Newhouse? The guy Marianne Kotch dumped for Bobby Cutts? She said he was all talk, but he did threaten to break Bobby in two. I’m not saying she’s wrong, but he’s worth sweating a little, just to make sure.”
He walked back to his pile of documents and began gathering them up. “I’ll go to Newark. And I know exactly who I want riding shotgun.”
Chapter 11
“Newark?” Willy Kunkle reacted. “I’d sooner eat shit.”
Gunther laughed, unperturbed. Willy Kunkle was one of his own squad members, out of Brattleboro, in the opposite corner of the state from where the arsons had occurred. Joe had driven all the way here to ask Kunkle to join him on his trip to New Jersey.
“Have you ever been there?” Willy asked incredulously.
“I’ve driven by.”
“What? The airport, at eighty miles an hour? Hardly the same thing. You do know what their town symbol is, like New York has the Empire State Building and St. Louis has the arch? They have a thirty-foot rusty metal bottle perched on top of an abandoned brewery. People in Newark tell each other to ‘Meet me west of the bottle,’ like other people say, ‘Meet me at the Central Park Zoo,’ except that there’s an outside chance you won’t get shot at the zoo. Newark is a pit.”
Kunkle had been brought up in northern Manhattan and had first cut his teeth as a New York City cop. Joe didn’t doubt that he knew what he was talking about, even while he was sure that his viewpoint was as badly skewed as it was about most everything.
“Do you know anyone who works there?” Joe asked mildly.
They were in the VBI office on the top floor of Brattleboro’s Municipal Building, a single room as spare, unadorned, and poorly equipped as all the other Bureau offices scattered across Vermont. The VBI hadn’t been around long enough to accumulate much junk or, for that matter, much respect from other agencies, despite its lofty major crimes unit status.
“I know a few,” Kunkle conceded, adding, “Or I used to.”
“How ’bout on the arson task force?”
“The county prosecutor’s office?” Kunkle asked, demonstrating the precise insider’s knowledge Joe was after. In New Jersey, county prosecutors had police working directly for them in special units, unlike in Vermont, where the state’s attorneys no longer even had in-house investigators.
“Yeah,” Joe said.
Willy shook his head. “No. The guys I hung out with were city cops, mostly crooked, and I haven’t talked to any of them since. Probably dead or busted by now. Urban renewal.”
“But you know the town?” Joe persisted.
“Like the inside of a toilet, and that’s how much I want to go back. What’s this all about anyhow?”
“An arson case up north,” Joe explained. “It’s in the dailies, if you’d read them. For that matter, it was front-page news. Teenage kid died along with sixty cows.”
Willy was sitting behind his desk, his feet up and his chair tilted back against the wall. He’d placed the desk at a diagonal across a windowless corner so he could survey the room as from a machine-gun nest. It said much about the man.
“I heard about it,” he said dismissively.
“Well, that arson looks like it was one of two, maybe three, around St. Albans, so Jonathon Michael ran the torch’s signature by ATF and was told that the arson task force in Essex County had filed the same signature less than a year ago.”
“But with no name attached,” Willy suggested.