by Dudley Lynch
Angie was fingering the edges of my pad. “What are you thinking?”
“Several things.” I started drawing and writing on the pad again. “Please don’t be offended, but I don’t think our local college students have ever contributed significantly to the crime in Flagler. These are Bible colleges — quote, unquote. Most of the kids that go there are rule-followers, real straight-laced. We don’t get many bad apples in the first place, certainly not serial offenders willing to stay and muck around with the campus and the community year after year.”
I used my pen to point to the line between two of my entries. 1972 and 2002.
“During this span, I think Flagler and its sheriff’s department was whipsawed by one or more groups intent on strategic misinformation. Or disinformation — whatever you want to call it. It’s used in warfare a lot. The idea is to confuse the enemy. Make them think they need to be focused on one thing. Surveil this particular location. Shadow this group or person. Watch for particular consequences. Which is exactly the wrong thing to do if what matters is something else entirely.”
I laid my pen to one side of my pad. Rested my case, you might say. Felt a little hubris. Thought that I’d argued my theory well.
This moment of self-congratulation lasted about as long as a firefly’s blink.
Chapter 35
I never saw it coming.
Angie reached a hand toward my pad. Used her thumb to tease up the page where I’d been sketching. Slipped her other hand beneath it and pressed the pad to the table. Grasped my page with her free hand and tore the page off the pad. Didn’t crumple or damage the page in any way. But laid it aside.
Removed it from contention, you might say.
And drew her own line on the blank page now staring at both of us. “What if we start a lot earlier?”
I knew her question was a claim to ownership and not one she expected to be answered. So I took instructions from the Psalmist: “This is the day the Lord has made; We will rejoice and be glad in it.” I mean, what else can we do, Lord?
I repeated her question. “So, what if we started a lot earlier?”
The room grew quiet. Angie had reached around and dragged her long ponytail over her shoulder. That way, she could stuff a wad of hair into her mouth and nibble. She’d done this before, and I’d asked if her hair was that nutritious. But I accepted that she did this sometimes when her mind went on an adventure of its own. She’d be back when it decided the trip was over.
It consumed so much time that I did some fiddling of my own. Stuck an index finger inside the collar of my golf shirt. Traced the seam down to the backing that held the buttons and button holes. Explored a button hole. Wondered where the shirt was made. If I reached behind my neck, tugged the brand tag into view, I could find the answer. China, in all likelihood. Or Indonesia. Didn’t matter. I liked the shirt.
When Angie’s mind returned, she started writing dates on her line. The first one went at the beginning.
“Nineteen forty-five. A bomb goes off in the Huntgardner kid’s head, not to mention on the Alamogordo bombing range. I mean, both were world-changing events, don’t you think? His world was never the same after that. And —” She wrote another date a little farther down her line. 1947. “Roswell, of course. And Huntgardner enrolling at the University of the Hills that fall. Flagler’s world was never the same after that.”
Angie wasn’t as skilled at upside down sketching as I was. I laid a hand flat in the center of her page. “Got a suggestion. You come around to this side of the table.”
The brilliance of the idea became apparent the moment she lowered herself into her new chair. Now, we were no longer in opposition. We were partners again.
She added another date. Her handwriting was much steadier this time. 1951. “You’re going to have to help me a lot from now on.”
“Always a pleasure.”
“Well, you know things I don’t know.”
“‘Sometimes I am a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of relationships lies in knowing when to be one or the other.’”
“Who said that?’
“Napoleon Bonaparte. Almost. I changed a couple of words.”
She gave me her boys-will-be-boys look. “I meant you know more about Professor Huntgardner than I do. I assume he graduated from the university in 1951. Do you know when he joined the physics faculty?”
I lowered the last two fingers of my right hand and tapped my thumb with the other two. Since it had drained tension once before, this time I was resorting to American Sign Language. My signal meant no. “But I’m guessing it was in the mid-’60s. I think he became chairman of the department about the time they opened the new science building.”
“Which was when?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
She wrote 1968 at the end of her line. And reached for the page she had removed without ceremony from the pad. My page. She aligned the two sheets end to end so that my line started where her line stopped. Hers quit at 1968. Mine started at 1972.
“Three things. First, the contents of the No Cock Crowed boxes aren’t the end-all and be-all of everything. I think we should assume that Flagler’s craziness commenced years before the McWhorters invaded the sheriff’s office.
“Second, timelines work best with a good beginning.” She looked pleased. “Did I just say that? Write that down. Sounds Napoleon-ish.” She laughed at her own joke, then she got serious again. “It all begins with young Huntgardner. Strange, isn’t it?” She went quiet again for so long that I turned to her with a puzzled look. “The atomic bomb blast. We haven’t begun to connect the dots on what it meant for Flagler.”
That’s when she began tapping my page from the pad with a steady one-two rhythm using the middle finger of each hand. The movements were coordinated, but I don’t think she noticed. One finger was doing a two-step tattoo over the first date I’d entered — 1972. The other was connecting in similar fashion with the final mark. Where I’d written “Now.”
“Third, you’re right. Our murders aren’t going to be solved until somebody can tell who’s wearing Pinocchio’s nose. This quaint little city’s problem isn’t so much that it’s a house of cards. It’s a house of lies. But then, that’s what you’ve been telling me. Right, Mr. Bonaparte?”
This was when I noticed my own middle fingers had been keeping time with hers. “So, where would you start?”
I don’t know if she’d been thinking about it or if the answer came to her in a flash, but she didn’t hesitate. “I’d start by seeing if we can find Dr. Huntgardner.”
I could have reminded her that it was not for lack of trying that we hadn’t located Huntgardner. I’d given that assignment to others, but I knew the drill. My detectives had reached out to the professor’s acquaintances, his colleagues, and his immediate family and friends. Registered him with the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). Checked hospitals in case he was injured. Checked churches in case he was troubled and wandered in. Checked jails in case he’d somehow run afoul of the law. Checked out social media and created a fast website.
I’d have asked for updates on all those activities as soon as I got to the office the next morning if the cock hadn’t chosen to crow again much sooner.
Chapter 36
I didn’t learn anything about the predawn fire until the phone call. It arrived during my Sunday morning breakfast. I was eating alone. Angie had needed to leave before the sun rose to drive to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. She was catching an early morning flight to D.C., and our local feeder airline didn’t have a flight scheduled until later in the day. So she hadn’t stayed the night.
The caller was the Flagler Fire Department’s assistant arson investigator. I kept chewing my food and listened to him hem and haw. He said he knew it was Sunday. Thought I might have been in church. Said he hoped he wasn’t interrupting anything important.
Could always call back later if I preferred. Should he be talking to one of my deputies instead of me? Wasn’t sure how urgent all this was, anyway.
At first, I found his diffidence amusing. Then something to tolerate. In the end, it was annoying. He was going to need help getting to the point.
“Marshal Burrows, the fact you consider it important works for me.”
“Call me Delbert, Sheriff.”
“Delbert, I’m going to take a wild guess. You’re at the scene of a fire, and you’ve seen something you think I should know about.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got a whole crowd of people hoping you can come tell us what it is.”
That’s how I learned of the fire at the former Cromwell Company warehouse close to the Flagler Shorthaul Railway’s switching yard at the south edge of downtown I’d had a special interest in for more than a day now. That news alone motivated me to carry my plate of scrambled eggs and link sausage to the refrigerator. Eating had lost its place on my priority list.
I hadn’t dressed for going out since I had nothing scheduled.
A quick call to my dispatcher let him know that the sheriff was about to be on the move. As I dressed, my brain stayed busy. A search warrant was no longer going to be needed from cranky old Judge Kincannon. The pickup of interest and its trailer-mounted backhoe should now be available for viewing.
I also had a growing suspicion. One that began vague and unsettling, then began to spread in my awareness like incoming fog. One or more malefactors in Abbot County had started abandoning their tactics again. For almost two decades, their MO had been to go to any lengths not to be noticed.
So much for that.
Leaving ten bodies moldering for the buzzards didn’t fit that approach. Neither did strapping a bomb to the sheriff’s car or torching a massive downtown building. An arson investigator was already probing, and no doubt other examiners would follow. The local sheriff would soon be on the scene. Media headlines were certain to follow.
It felt like a mistake. A bad mistake. A compoundable mistake. A mistake that was going to help the current sheriff dig deeper into the underbelly of his community’s most malevolent secrets.
Maybe I was leaping to conclusions.
But Delbert Burrow’s excitement had been fueled to the point where he’d become almost incoherent. I doubted that a blackened truck and trailer with a backhoe smoldering on it could be the full explanation.
As I walked toward the old Cromwell building, what surprised me was that fire apparatuses hadn’t been moved. Engines and ladder trucks were still parked where they’d arrived. No hoses had been rewound that I could see. Firefighters were standing around, a cluster here, a cluster there.
Gawking.
This happens at most fire scenes after the fire is extinguished. Personnel are letting the adrenaline settle. Savoring the excitement. Reliving the battle. Getting their energies back. When you’ve conquered dreaded fire, you are entitled to do that. But Assistant Marshal Burrows had said this fire had happened before dawn. Hours ago.
Then I noticed the yellow crime scene tape that had put the entire building off-limits. Including the fire hoses that snaked through some of its doors.
Stringing crime scene tape was something arson investigators often did. But I’d never seen them do it before their firefighting colleagues could gather up their gear and return to their firehouses. And that seemed to be the skinny here.
The voice boomed at me like a wrecking ball. “Sheriff, sir! Molotov cocktail. Nothing fancy. Half gasoline, half motor oil. Went through a side window.”
Delbert Burrows’s face looked like it had been drawn by a kindergartner for an art project. Nothing fit. Seeing it for the first time, I struggled to sound like the adult in the conversation. “You have a nose for sniffing around, do you, Marshal Burrows?”
I winced at my clumsiness.
He had a nose that looked like two mismatched woodpecker holes in a warped barn board. He could have taken instant offense but appeared not to have noticed. “My sniffer does most of my sniffing. You know how they work, don’t you?”
I grabbed at the chance to change the subject like it was the last free pass to heaven. “You need to tell me.”
He explained how the nozzle drew in vapors. The targeted gas molecules and applied reagents in the vapors reacted with each other. This produced electric currents, which the sniffer measured. And, voilà (the actual word he used), you could tell if you have combustible and hazardous vapors, which ones and how much of each.
“Um-hmmm.”
That was me, signaling admiration. Buzz-cut-wearing Assistant Fire Marshal Delbert Burrows might be able to scare a stuck eighteen-wheeler out of the mud with that face, but his head housed an excellent brain.
I quizzed him while I got my protective gear out of my car trunk and started slipping it over my street clothes. “You’re in charge of the fire scene here?”
He grinned a broad grin. I somehow knew it was coming. He had a diastema — a gap between his two front teeth. A large one. Thank God he was bright. Mother Nature hadn’t cut him any slack in the looks department.
“Oh, hell, no. I’m just in charge of you.” Another grin, but one followed by a moment of searching my face. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I turned to gaze into the earnest countenance anchored by two gigantic jug ears and ransacked my memory. Nothing.
“You taught me how to cheat at marbles.” He was enjoying this. “When you lived on Willows Street, I lived next door. I’ve never forgotten. You showed me how to fudge over the line — get a little closer to the target with your agate. I’d never thought of that before. ’Course, I was only a snot-nosed kid. Seven or eight, I think.”
I expressed chagrin that I’d not been a healthier influence. He chose that moment to bushwhack me again. “Providential, I think.”
If there was one thing I hadn’t expected to burst out of the mouth of the unsophisticated-looking assistant fire marshal of Flagler, this would have been it. I wondered if he’d meant to use it, so I asked him what he was thinking.
“Providential — your living next door to me. This way, I could tell my boss that I know you and convince him that you should investigate this case. Except I had a case of nerves when I called you. Weren’t sure you’d want to come.”
“But this is a fire scene, Mr. Burrows. Fire marshal’s domain, not mine.”
“Truth is, Sheriff, I’m not sure whose domain it’s going to turn out to be.”
We were walking up to the yellow crime scene tape at the front of the warehouse. The triple-wide rolling steel door that had been installed during the warehouse’s remodeling had a gaping hole close to its center. A firefighter’s carbide-tipped circular sawblade had made three connecting slices in the door.
Then the fire crew had kicked the severed metal aside and voilà — to use Delbert’s word — a new opening. One big enough to walk through.
I reached out to stop Delbert before we stepped inside. “But why keep your firefighters from gathering up their gear and returning to quarters? The fire’s obviously out.”
What happened next I’d be able to replay in my mind in faithful fidelity for the rest of my days.
My long-lost marble-playing acolyte went still. Bent to lay his sniffer device and his krypton-gas-bulbed flashlight on the concrete driveway. Turned toward me and took a short step. Reached out and grasped my arms not far above the elbows. Turned my body until it faced his square-on. Looked in both directions over my shoulders. Put his massive nose within half a foot of mine. And spoke in a sotto voce voice that was so soft I had to strain to hear him.
“Sheriff, what you are about to see inside . . . if it is what I think it is, I don’t know how Flagler will ever explain it. Or live it down.”
“So you decided to call me.”
“Not at first. Didn’t think of
you right away.”
“Where’d the idea come from?”
“I remembered . . .” He was still hedging. “Remembered what else you told me that day.”
“The day we were playing marbles?”
“Um-hmmm.”
“Okay, what else did I tell you?”
He cleared his throat. It sounded awkward because there was nothing in it that needed clearing. “You told me it was easy to cheat at marbles. But that you’d still have to live with yourself after. You told me to stay away from easy.”
Well, good for me. “What does that have to do with this?” I asked.
“I decided to call you because if I was about to stay away from easy, you were the guy I wanted to do it with.”
Chapter 37
The fire from the Molotov cocktail had darkened the interior of the warehouse, especially toward the back window, but hadn’t interfered with what we could see when we entered the warehouse.
The big dual rear wheeled pickup truck, Ford F-350, and the trailer carrying the backhoe were parked to our left. That was the Count’s thingamajig. To our right, a creepy bus glared down at us like a replica of one of Arthur C. Clark’s monoliths. Not the vertical ones — the elongated one in 2061: Odyssey Three.
The assistant fire marshal pushed the door open and stepped up into the bus first. I followed. We both realized about the same time we were going no farther.
We were stuck on the half-a-card-table-sized landing that was supposed to deliver you to the aisle running through the center of the bus. And it would have if not for an elaborate door of metal bars that blocked our path. I flicked one of the bars with an index fingernail. Didn’t get a ding back. Clang was more accurate. Stainless steel made such sounds. These bars were serious. To keep people from getting on? Not in the main, although they did that too.
The door had a deadbolt lock. But you’d need more than a key. Above the lock was a touchscreen. You’d likely need the code and the key before you could enter.
