by John Farrow
“No way,” Dupree let him know, “this one, I will do myself.”
“I understand. Thanks again. For everything.”
“No promises, Émile. But you’re welcome.”
“Take good care, Dupree. Stay cool.”
“Y’all stay warm.”
Sandra came away from his flip chart with so much success that Émile retired to the basement to give it further study himself. The aggravating issue for him was to posit how her abductors in New Orleans could also have been involved in installing the Lumens on their property in Quebec years earlier. By any stretch of the imagination, how could those two circumstances be linked, and what flowed between them, over time, across borders, and amid disparate lives?
He tried to get at it from any and every possible direction through a series of rash suppositions, including the blatantly ridiculous, anything that might trigger a possibility. He considered that the men were indiscriminate killers, but showing up in two locales in two countries and both incidents being connected to Cinq-Mars remained a more extraordinary coincidence than he could swallow. If they were not, then, indiscriminate killers, did that make them discriminating? And presuming that that was the case, what targets attracted them and for what purpose? Or, the men could be police, but what game were they playing and to what possible end? The Lumens were in witness protection, so the men who established them on their farm could easily be, and were likely to be, FBI. And in New Orleans, Sandra’s abductors wanted to make a point of being considered the good guys in all of this. Your garden variety benevolent kidnappers. Of all the scenarios that came to mind, this was the most promising. But if they were indeed the good guys, who were the bad? Or, maybe they were not the good guys at all and were really international criminals whose activity involved the Lumens somehow. Émile’s own investigation of the Lumens’ murders meant that he had shown up on their welcome mat, hence their actions down south. Such men wanted him to return to mucking out stalls in the Canadian countryside, not to muck about dives in New Orleans. Or, they were international terrorists hell-bent on world domination and somehow, some way, he had interfered with a master plan. That thought provoked a smile. Given what he knew about the case, one crazy idea just might be as valid as the next, although he conceded that he was barking up trees that might not exist.
Nothing worked for him wholly or succinctly. Nothing at all. He could not see through the maze. But he sensed FBI involvement where perhaps it did not belong.
Already dressed for the outdoors, Sandra skipped downstairs to kiss him goodbye and offer up a summary of leftovers lurking in their refrigerator should he want lunch. She was off to the village for an outing and a little food shopping. She didn’t expect to be gone for more than three or four hours and did he need anything? He requested that she stop at the pharmacy for his monthly medications and she happily added them to her list. He detected that she was glad to be off on her own—now that she’d hired a man to look after the horses during the day, such an excursion was a pleasant indulgence. She didn’t have to rush. Émile could tell that she was not canvassing for company, so he didn’t ask. Individual forays were a break from being stuck together constantly, so had merit apart from the practical purposes served.
“The roads are dry. I’ll take the Nissan. Leave you the Jeep.”
“Don’t need it.”
“Whatever.”
When she bent to kiss him, Émile ran a hand up her back, then down.
“Don’t spend the day in the basement,” she commanded, and was soon gone.
In her absence as the house went still, he acknowledged that the space was dark, despite the bare lightbulbs, and dreary, so before long he abandoned the easel and returned to the company of Merlin and the sunlit rooms on the first floor. The dog greeted him and wholeheartedly concurred when Émile suggested a walk.
Despite a nip in the air, he became ambitious, hoping the walk might clear his synapses and provoke a good thought or two. He slipped one leg then the other over a wood fence, one that the aged Merlin leapt through, and headed off across the fields of snow. The wind still had bite, picking up the snow’s coolness, but if the day was this breezy going out the wind would be behind him on the home trek and easy to bear. The walk took about twenty minutes down a riding path to a lone pine at an intersection of split-rail fences, and it seemed obvious to Merlin before it occurred to Émile that they were achieving their destination for the day. The retriever waited for his master, who leaned against the tree out of the wind when he arrived, and they both took in the vista, then trudged on home again.
The hired man’s pickup was in the yard by the time he got back, but Émile decided against going into the barn for a chat. For the nonce, he was taking the measure of his solitude and enjoying it. Inside the house, he started up a fire in the wood stove, more for the ambiance than the extra heat, and looked through his CD collection for something, really anything, neglected over the last while. He decided on the Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3, performed by Horowitz, when the telephone rang again. His home phone this time.
Émile was torn, but finally put the CD down and crossed the room to the side table to take the call. No screen to identify the caller here, and he began as usual with his own identification.
“Cinq-Mars.”
“Émile, it’s Bill. Have you heard?”
“About Vira Sivak. Yeah, it’s very sad.”
Mathers was quiet a moment. “Ah, who’s that again? What happened?”
Realizing his error, that Mathers didn’t know her, that he’d only mentioned her name in passing, Cinq-Mars relayed a short version of the morning’s news, adding, “I hope you have something better.”
“Only marginally, Émile. Morris Lumen’s farm is on fire.”
Once again, he could scarcely believe what was being relayed. “What? Who told you that? On fire? How can a farm be on fire in the winter?”
“Not the farm. You know what I mean. The house, the barn, maybe both. I’m heading out there to have a look.”
“Why?” Émile asked.
“Why what? Why is it burning? I’m not there yet. How am I supposed to know? I don’t have the particulars.”
He wanted to yell at him, but instead took a couple of seconds to calm himself. “Bill, I mean, why are you going out there? You’re a city cop, remember? The Lumens’ property is not in your jurisdiction and anyway, you’re not a fireman. You don’t have the muscle mass.”
“Ha ha ha. Captain Borde called me. Just now. He’s on his way himself, but since it’s connected to our case, he gave me a call. What’s wrong with that, Émile?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry, Bill, I’m just—”
“That’s okay. Listen, Borde called me as a courtesy. Now I’m calling you, same courtesy. Borde knows I’m calling. So if you want to come out and see it for yourself, he said to say that you’re welcome. We don’t know what’s going on. Could be kids. Could be an electrical short. Could be nothing. Could be interesting. We don’t know.”
He was on his own anyway. He might as well do something with his day. “Yeah, I’ll go up. I hope it’s not the barn. It’s a well-built barn.”
“Then you’ve got a good reason to go. To look after your interests.”
Merlin wanted to come to, and Cinq-Mars considered it. He could run around the other property, help the fire department do their work. But sometimes one thing led to another and who knows when he might get back home. The dog might starve. So he filled up his water bowl and left him on-site, with a stern warning to protect the premises.
The drive took him across rolling countryside, then through a lengthy corridor of spruce for about two kilometers, then onto a plateau of farmland. The moment he emerged from the woods the smoke and flames were evident. Departments from several towns must have been called, as so much equipment was on the scene. Volunteers all, so among the hook ’n’ ladder trucks and the pumpers were personal vehicles, mostly large pickups and four-wheel-drive SUVs. Cinq-Mars already knew what he’d find before
arriving all the way up the long drive. The pumpers had no water to pump, as hydrants didn’t exist out there. A nearby pond probably took time to locate as it was frozen over and under several feet of snow. The trucks couldn’t reach it easily, but men were cracking ice, though that was mostly for show. Whatever was burning was going to burn to the ground. As he neared the farmhouse he saw that everything was ablaze—house, barn, tractor, and truck.
The fire on the tractor had been doused by shoveling snow onto it, but so far everything else was being allowed to incinerate.
Cinq-Mars drove up the long road and climbed out of his Jeep. Borde and Mathers were nearby, behind a line of firemen who gazed at the flames.
“We think it was set,” Borde told him.
“Really? You think that?”
“You know, Émile, it’s not a sin to state the obvious. It’s just a way that people communicate sometimes. You should try it. It’s called being friendly.”
“Great to see you, too, Gabriel. How’s the family?” Then he acknowledged Mathers. “What kind of a greeting do you require to make your day, Bill? Will an everyday cordial comment do for you?”
“Be more effusive than that, thanks.”
“He requires a hug,” Cinq-Mars said to Borde and all three men smiled. “What do we have, really?”
Borde blew his nose into his handkerchief first. “According to our lovely volunteer firefighters, it’s too early to tell if this was set. They’ll have to bring in an investigative team.”
“But—” Cinq-Mars started to object.
“Exactly. No way did the cars catch fire from the buildings. They’re all separate fires.”
“Plus,” Bill Mathers said. He seemed coy.
“Plus?” Cinq-Mars asked him.
“We found the packaging for the accelerant. Can’t say why they didn’t let the packaging burn. And—”
Cinq-Mars waited, then finally had to ask. They were obviously yanking his chain.
Borde answered. “We found the gas can. Thrown away in the field. Nobody was trying to hide that this was an arson. But the fire department, they’ll have to send in an investigative team.”
Cinq-Mars listened to the fire crackle and snap and gazed skyward as the plumes of gray and white smoke ascended to the clouds.
“I’m brokenhearted,” he attested a minute later. “I wanted that barn.”
“Why?” Borde asked him. “You don’t need another barn, do you?”
“That’s what I thought,” Mathers said, although only after he spoke did he realize that he had been too intimidated to ask the question himself.
The retired detective shrugged. “If for no other reason,” he admitted, “than to see who would show up to try and sell it to me. Now, I’ll never find that out. But, yeah, I was serious. I can use another barn.”
They had to move aside for a vehicle to back up to the burning pickup. The firefighters wanted that flame out to prevent an explosion, although the charred metal suggested that the gas tank had already been compromised. Probably not a lot of gas had been left in it.
The three men reformed their circle with a slightly different viewing angle of the twin fires to barn and home.
“So what do you think, Émile? We’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure how this could have anything to do with our murders. We’ve fired off nothing but blanks so far.”
“Did they make any noise, your blanks? I wouldn’t think so. A hospital owns the property now. To suggest that they might burn their holdings to the ground to collect on the insurance strikes me as ludicrous. I know it’s not a great market in agriculture right now, but the death knell hasn’t been sounded. The property has to be worth more with two sound buildings on it than with none. So you know who that implicates.”
Borde appeared to be nodding in agreement so Mathers asked the question.
“Who?”
Borde answered. “Buyers.”
“The property is worth less now,” Cinq-Mars concurred, “and the seller might be even more motivated than before. So I hate to implicate our local farmers, but that’s the first place I’d go looking. I let them know that I’d be willing to buy the barn, but that wasn’t enough to save it, I guess.”
“I’ll pass that on to whomever gets the case. It won’t be me.”
“The arsonist got away with it. Your only hope is an eyewitness. The odds on that? Finding a winning lottery ticket in a snowbank is easier.”
With no dispute of the argument, they permitted themselves to observe the blaze. The robustness of the flames would shift from one section of each building to the next, sprout here and appear to diminish there, then be fanned to a new brightness and rage all over again. Fortunately, the smoke dissipated in a constant direction, they didn’t have to duck it, although sometimes it did gather itself and strike for the ground well beyond where they were standing, only to billow up again. With no other buildings within two kilometers, and with the owners already long in the grave, the fire was almost a peaceful thing, a sound and a fury quite fascinating in its evolution and slow demise.
Sergeant Detective Bill Mathers was the first to turn impatient. “So,” he inquired, “nothing for us here, I guess.”
“Guess not,” Borde acknowledged.
Cinq-Mars hesitated. “Bill, you said that the dogs and the cat were found. Or the cats and the dog, whatever it was. Do you know where, precisely?”
“That would be my people who located them, Émile,” Captain Borde interjected. Unlike the other two, he was in uniform, and his overcoat was the same grim green as the SQ tunic. “I could find that out soon enough.”
“Why?” Mathers wanted to know.
“All part of the killer’s mindset. Granted, we don’t have much to go on. If he dropped them a short distance away that indicates one set of parameters. Perhaps that he was hurrying. Or just didn’t care. But if he dropped them into the snow a long way off, then he really was trying to keep them concealed forever. If he thought that way it gives us a different set of mental parameters.” He looked over at Mathers. “If he dropped the animals and the accelerant in the same spot, is that coincidence or is that the same person doing it? Good question, no? In a case like this, when we have nothing, I want to keep looking for something, anything. I found out today that the people killed in Geraldine, Alabama, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, were both visited prior to their deaths by an insurance adjustor, who presumably was there to assay the value of the destruction to their property. Cops dismissed the information and never took it a step further. So that’s what I’m looking for, Bill. The evidence we’re missing not because it’s not there, but because it’s been overlooked.” Émile shot a glance at him, then chose to apologize. “Sorry. I’m in a mood today. I didn’t mean to lecture.” To Borde, he explained, “An agent for the FBI, someone I worked with down south, was found murdered this morning.”
“Sorry to hear that. The adjustor thing is an interesting angle though.”
“Why’s that?”
“This place. It didn’t need one before the Lumens were murdered. But it’s going to need one now. I’m not serious, but I’m pointing that out. Maybe he’s in the neighborhood. Might be interesting to see who shows.”
“I see. You want our killer to just appear on our doorstep.”
“Admit it, Émile. That would be nice.” The three enjoyed a brief chuckle, but they were moving to go their separate ways. “Bill,” Borde said to Mathers, “if you don’t mind, I’ll get my people to send the answer on Émile’s request to you. That way, I don’t have to explain sending information off to a civilian.”
“No problem. I’ll pass it along.”
“Gentlemen, next time, let’s bring marshmallows. Have a great day.”
Each man returned to his vehicle, and Émile Cinq-Mars, last in, was positioned to be the first out, and led them back to the highway where they split up, Émile going one way, the Montreal and SQ policeman the other.
TWENTY SIX
Where farm
land yielded to a spruce forest, at the crest of a rise, Émile Cinq-Mars pulled over. He didn’t know why. Not a hunch or the need for a quiet moment, yet he felt that he was responding to an inner notion that, although amorphous, was somehow compelling. Stepping out, looking back over the plateau under its snow blanket, he observed the buildings still spewing smoke onto the breeze and the gathering gloom of dusk. The sun was setting behind him and behind the spruce, the darkness gaining upon a land that remained shot through with a ruddy glow of light. He felt, if anything, nostalgic, but had trouble putting a finger on his mood.
Nostalgic? he pondered. For what?
That was the question.
Not for the day, as it was just another one on the cusp of spring, soon to be over. Better weather, if nothing else, was promised for the coming weeks, and he felt no nostalgia for winter. Although the hour and the red sun suggested a finality, the expiration of an allotted moment—he acknowledged that the day brought the news of Vira Sivak’s death and that was likely part of this—but something else, vaguely mysterious and quaint, was taking a tentative hold on his sensibilities.
Cinq-Mars tried to scratch away at his mood. The day was ending, and the grand epic that is winter in the north was terminating as well, so there was that, and in following that line he soon realized where his nostalgic thread was guiding him. Way in the distance, mere pinpricks now, the taillights from Borde’s and Mathers’s cars shone. Then even those infinitesimal dots vanished as Venus and the first stars of the evening emerged. So was that it then? He was going home, and those two might be heading home to their wives also, and in Mathers’s case to his kids as well, but the men remained on the job, and in the morning they’d wake up to their responsibilities to investigate and to protect. Whereas he would not. Cinq-Mars recognized that he was pleased to be working this case despite it’s sluggish and even nonexistent progress, but for the first time since retiring he was truly missing both his badge and his duties, even his Glockmeister. In the months that passed since retirement, he’d been too distracted by cracked ribs and pneumonia, and the announcement by his wife that she might be done with him, to take any time to simply say goodbye to his long and eventful career, to reassess, and to get on with something new. This case yanked him right out of his new life and dropped him into a time warp among aliens. Thanks to the case he could almost believe that he was a legitimate policeman again. On a hillock at dusk, observing the fire diminish to smoke, Émile Cinq-Mars understood, really for the first time, that he was a detective no more, and for the first time, with an appropriate level of honesty, he was saying goodbye to his long career, and more importantly, to the life he’d led and even to the person he understood himself to be.