St. Albans Fire (24 page)

“You think he was hiding in the house?” Joe asked.

“Don’t be dumb, boss,” Willy suggested, trying not to fall over in the back. “It was a hypothetical.”

“Like what he said,” Lil confirmed, gunning through a gap between two cars ahead of her and then stamping on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian.

They were near Newark’s center, where the courthouse on its slight rise lorded over a commingling of major streets. As the light ahead turned red and traffic bunched up before them, they lost all sight of the Mini.

“She at the light?” Lil asked.

“I don’t know,” Joe answered, craning to see.

“Hang on,” Willy ordered, and before either one of them could speak, he was out of the car and trotting up ahead on foot.

He didn’t bother cutting over to the sidewalk, but stayed among the cars, hoping to use them for cover. The effort was in vain. Her vehicle was so small that by the time he discovered it at the very front of the pack, he was close enough that he had to stop dead in his tracks. But his movement drew her attention. Through her back window, he could see her eyes lock onto his via her rearview mirror, and he knew he’d been burned.

Without hesitation, as if responding to an electrical jolt, Peggy’s car sprang from its place in line and shot straight into the busy intersection, the epitome of its driver’s pure adrenaline.

But that’s where her luck ran out. Her skill perhaps hampered by seeing the one cop who’d really scared her earlier, she collided first with one car, then with another, like a pinball running free, and finally, spinning and spraying bits of glass and debris, she was catapulted into the space between the front and rear tires of a tanker truck carrying gasoline, which was immediately hit by a bus.

Willy watched, stunned and stationary, surrounded by an audience of cars filled with transfixed onlookers as caught by this sudden chaos as if a volcano had suddenly erupted right before them.

The sounds of metal and glass and rubber subsided briefly, enough that for an instant, Willy distinctly heard the cheerful chirping of a distant bird, before the first shouts began rising from all around.

But Willy stayed rooted in place, still watching what was left of Peggy’s tiny red car. He could see her moving slightly through a twisted side window, her long hair shifting in a shaft of sunlight. But by the same light, he could see a sparkle of liquid freely flowing from above her—from the body of the punctured gas tanker.

“Stand back,” he yelled at the people approaching the crash site. “It’s going to blow.”

But, of course, nobody listened. He probably looked like a deranged cripple, standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by cars, waving his one arm.

The explosion, ignited by Peggy’s overheated engine, began as an air-sucking whoosh, but then blew out with full force, picking up people and tossing them through the air, and sending Willy staggering back, covering his face against the heat blast, until he collided with Joe, who’d come running up behind him.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said, catching his colleague by the shoulders. “What the hell happened?”

The initial fireball quickly faded back to a roaring column of white-hot intensity, looking as if the earth’s molten core had burst through the crust in a single shaft, heading right for the sky.

“She saw me,” Willy said simply, sounding as small and abashed as he’d been irascible back at her town house.

Joe was startled by his subdued tone of voice. “What? Are you okay?”

“She saw me,” he repeated in a stunned monotone. “Tried to run.”

Joe stared at him as Willy continued looking at the fiery tangle of cars and trucks and people. Around them, sirens began closing in from afar, offset by a few horn blasts from motorists who didn’t know what had happened. In that sudden, vulnerable moment, Joe realized that Willy had been as struck by Peggy DeAngelis as Joe had been—by her beauty, her youth, her clear, almost breathtaking innocence. But where Joe had engaged her by talking, Willy had done just the opposite, as if she represented a threat to him personally.

Joe squeezed Willy’s shoulders, at one with his friend’s sense of loss, the memory of this vibrant young woman so clear in his mind.

He wanted to say something useful, far beyond soothing, but he was hard put to speak at all. Transfixed by the white-hot flames, knowing who lay in their embrace, having spoken with her and yearned for her safety mere minutes ago, he was trapped by a paralyzing stupor of futility, waste, and guilt.

For he and the man beside him, as they’d done before to uncountable others over the years, had brought confusion and fear to Peggy DeAngelis. Who knew why she’d run just now and placed herself finally in the middle of this inferno? Where there was no doubt whatsoever was that Joe’s appearance in her life had marked the beginning of the end.

He glanced at Willy’s pale, suddenly vulnerable profile. If but a few of those same thoughts were presently going through his head—especially commingling with his earlier harsh words to her—it was no surprise why this should hit him so hard.

“Come on,” he urged. “We better get back to the car. Find a way out of here.”

· · ·

Tito’s voice came through the closed door. “Gino. You up?”

Gino was using one of the Outfit’s houses they were sure the cops knew nothing about, in an upstairs apartment he borrowed whenever he needed to lie low.

He was stretched out on his bed, reading a magazine, wishing to hell he could be someplace else, preferably with Peggy.

“What d’you want?”

“Got a phone call.”

Gino sat up slowly. Only a couple of people knew where he was—trusted people he’d assigned to watch both his home and Peggy’s place.

“Who from?”

“Fredo.”

That meant Peggy’s. He slid his feet off the bed, got up, and crossed over to the door. When he opened it, Tito towered over him, a cordless phone clutched in one meaty hand.

Gino took the phone. “Thanks.”

Tito faded from view like a ghost, always amazingly quiet.

“What?” Gino asked the phone.

“I got bad news,” said a disembodied voice.

Gino scowled. “And I’m supposed to guess what it is?”

“It’s Peggy,” Fredo conceded, abandoning his plan to be subtle. “She’s dead.”

Gino felt his heart lurch. His body tingling and numb, he reached out for the nearest wall.

“What do you mean?”

“She was killed in a car crash. I’m real sorry.”

“A car crash? What the fuck are you saying?” Gino slapped the wall with his hand. “What the fuck was she doing in a car? I told her to stay put, where I could find her. You stupid son of a bitch, talk to me.”

“That cop came to visit her—the one you told me about—and right after, she drove off, real fast. I don’t know why. Maybe to lead them off, maybe ’cause she was scared. But that’s how it happened. She peeled outta there, they took off after her, and
bam.
She got hit by a gas truck.”

“A gas truck? What kind of gas truck?”

There was a confused pause at the other end. “Like what brand?”

What should have infuriated Gino merely sent him slowly sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. There was a loud humming inside his head.

“What type of gas, Fredo?” He spoke quietly.

“Gasoline,” Fredo said with relief, happy to have the answer. “She burned to death.”

There was dead silence as both men were brought up short—Fredo by the realization of what he’d just said almost cheerily, and Gino by the excruciating irony of the nature of Peggy’s death.

“That cop,” Gino finally said, hearing his own voice as if it were coming from far off. “Was it the older one?”

“Yeah, Gino,” Fredo said nervously. “The one you said was from Vermont—who talked to her before.”

Gino didn’t respond.

“You there?” Fredo asked.

“Joe Gunther.”

Fredo hesitated before asking, “What? Oh… yeah. Are you okay?”

No answer.

Fredo tried again. “Sorry. Dumb. I mean, is there anything I can do to help?”

“Did you kill him after he killed Peggy?”

Fredo was clearly stumped this time. Having been there, he knew Gunther hadn’t even seen the accident and that Peggy had caused it herself. Finally, for want of a more self-protective answer, he risked admitting, “No.”

“Then forget about it,” Gino said flatly, his voice dull. “I’ll do it myself.”

Gino wasn’t the only one receiving bad news by phone. At last back in flowing traffic, two hours following the crash, and heading toward the arson task force office, Joe answered his cell phone.

“Gunther.”

“Joe, it’s Jonathon Michael.”

“What’ve you got?” Already, Joe’s apprehension rose. There was something about the younger man’s voice that told him to prepare for the worst.

“Kind of a weird development, to be honest. John Samuel Gregory was found dead in his condo a couple of hours ago.”

“Dead how?” Joe asked, his wording catching Willy’s attention.

“Dead murdered,” Jonathon answered. “So far, we can’t figure out who did it or what was used, but he has a good-size hole in the top of his head, like somebody hammered him with a railroad spike.”

“Wild guess,” Joe suggested, “you have no clue.”

“Nothing,” Jonathon admitted.

“Who do you have on it?”

“Right now it’s Tim and me. The forensic team is still here, collecting stuff.”

Joe was already shaking his head. “Jonathon, you need more help. You’ve got three arsons, two homicides, maybe a third if the tractor accident was intentional. Not to mention possible flimflamming by the Realtors, with all the legal mumbo jumbo that implies.”

“I hear you, Joe. I’ve been calling around. More people’ll be coming in, but they got to clear their decks first. We’re talking maybe a couple of days before I can rally a team.”

“Get hold of Sammie Martens, then,” Joe urged. “She may be in the far corner of the state, but I happen to know she’s got a light load, and she’d be perfect for this. Until the others show up, at least, it should help. You don’t have time to wait.”

“You got it. Will do.”

Joe hesitated a moment, thinking back to what had happened so far in Newark—the deaths of Santo and Peggy, Gino’s vanishing act, the fact that neither Tito nor Dante Lagasso would ever open up, at least not before bevies of lawyers had earned their keep. Aside from a few useful facts, this little field trip had garnered nothing but disaster.

And considering the present mess, it was unlikely that Joe and Willy would be allowed much more room to move. Farber and Ben Silva were deep into it now, and their tolerance for these previously laughed-at Vermonters would be wearing thin.

Finally, there was the most nagging consideration of all: If John Gregory—the presumed instigator of this whole string of events—had been murdered, then who killed him? And why? The evidence linking a Newark arsonist to Gregory was circumstantial at best. Had chasing it also made Joe miss a far more complicated scenario than a lucrative, if bloody-minded, land deal? It was certainly looking that way.

Had Joe dropped the ball big-time?

“I’m coming home, too,” he suddenly added. “With reinforcements.”

“You done down there?” Jonathon asked, surprised.

“That’s one way to put it.”

A BEAUTIFUL VIEW, JOE THOUGHT.
Soothing, tranquil, encouraging of meditation. The setting sun cast the distant Adirondacks into bold relief and made the calm waters of St. Albans Bay look like a mirror framed by the flat, forested land of its cradling U-shaped shore.

A far cry from Newark’s tangled, crowded, sharp-angled bristle.

“You all right, boss?” a soft female voice asked from near his shoulder.

He turned away from the picture window to gaze upon the scene behind him. A large, modern, urban-style condo, something out of a men’s magazine for the upwardly mobile, swinging single male living in an anonymous metropolitan center.

Except, of course, for the blood.

“Yeah, Sam,” Joe said to her. “Just wondering what the hell’s going on, is all.”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said supportively, and quickly moved over to one of the lab technicians, who was putting away his equipment after a full day of trace evidence collection. Joe watched her at work—earnest, high-strung, responsible to a fault, constantly worried she might let something slip, Sammie Martens was as dedicated to her job as a bloodhound in pursuit.

And for all of that, she was also as vulnerable, insecure, and in need of praise as a child being judged by her elders. He’d often thought that her romantic connection to Willy Kunkle was either the most counterintuitive of lifesaving medicines or a recipe for disaster. Two more volatile personalities he was hard put to imagine, and yet, by now, they’d already been together for several years.

Joe continued surveying the scene—the designer chair facing the window, the blood down its back and covering the floor behind it. The body had long since been removed for autopsy in nearby Burlington, but it was clear what had happened. Joe could almost see, as if they were visible, the killer’s footsteps as he’d entered the large room from the hallway, approached the chair across a rug-covered, silent floor, and killed John Gregory where he sat.

Whoever he was, he’d been in here before, Joe ventured. And he’d had a key.

Sam reapproached, her conversation with the technician concluded. “What do you think?”

“Not a stranger killing,” Joe said. “You up to speed on what’s been going on?”

She nodded once, sharply, a tiny reflection of her military past. “Jonathon filled me in on the local background, and I managed to squeeze just enough out of Willy to hear that things didn’t turn out too well in Newark.”

“You could say that,” Joe admitted ruefully.

She digested that before asking, “Did anyone besides Clark Wolff and Gregory know they were working a land deal together?”

“Not that Wolff will admit to or knows about. That was the whole point of the secrecy.”

“And as far as we can tell,” she continued, “Gregory hasn’t pissed anyone off a whole lot since he’s been here.”