Once Burned

by Gerry Boyle

  “He was right,” Reynolds said.

  “He’d killed Lasha. He was going down fast. Had to get it done before it was too late, before it all unraveled.”

  “I know you cared about her.”

  “I did,” I said. “She was a special person.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am, too.”

  Reynolds was quiet for a moment and then said, “Tory says you stood and watched and let him burn. Both of them.”

  “I’m not a firefighter,” I said. “I guess I froze.”

  “He says you prevented Louis from coming to their aid.”

  I shrugged.

  “So, a revenge arsonist. Multiple times. Fire for a fire, eye for an eye,” she said.

  “One for the books, huh?”

  “I’m taking this as a learning moment,” Reynolds said. “What could I have done differently?”

  “Penney,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Yeah. I should have considered that maybe he’d come up with something before he really started to lose it.”

  “On his good days, in his lucid moments, he probably was still a decent cop.”

  “But nobody took him seriously,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. I mean, he couldn’t find his way back to the hotel in California. Lost the rental car. I mean, you couldn’t put him on the witness stand.”

  Pokey chewed, swished his tail. Behind us the cop radios murmured.

  “My other mistake,” Reynolds said. “When the fires were all directed at Tory and Rita and Don, places they were connected to, and they were clearly being hurt by that, I figured somebody was targeting them. My hunch was that Louis was singling them out for some reason, some slight. I didn’t think they could be targeting themselves.”

  “Or that they weren’t a single unit. That one was targeting the others. And the fire at Don’s was a smokescreen. Probably was going to raze the barn anyway.”

  She mulled it over, shook her head.

  “Not sure where I went wrong there. The most basic question with an arson fire is always who stands to benefit.”

  “Hard to find the answer to that one unless you know who the players really are,” I said.

  Pokey lifted his head and eyed us, started to amble over. Reynolds bent down and picked a clump of clover and held it out. Pokey gummed it from her hand.

  She said, “What did you learn from all of this, Mr. McMorrow?”

  I thought for a minute.

  “That people are weak. And troubled. Even the ones who seem to have it together. We just see the veneer, the public face. That innocent people die all around us. In fact, it’s the innocent ones who die most.”

  Reynolds looked at me. Smiled. “I am what I seem, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Reynolds went back to the other cops. I walked around the paddock. Clair and Louis were leaning, silent now. I took a place beside Louis and put my arms up over the fence. Pokey headed over, ready for a handout.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Louis shrugged, stared straight ahead. We were quiet, and then Louis said, “The anger, the things you see—it just takes over you like a demon. Thing about evil is that it doesn’t just destroy you or kill you. It can do that, but most of the time it just absorbs you. Sucks you in. And then you’ve gone over. If you do that, there’s no going back. There are some black marks you can’t erase.”

  I hesitated, then said, “But you’ve tried?”

  He turned to me, smiled sadly.

  “I’ll die trying,” Louis said, and he shoved himself back from the fence and turned away. He touched Clair on the shoulder on the way past, said, “Stay in touch, Recon.”

  Same fence, two hours later. Mary was leading Sophie around the paddock on Pokey. Sophie was holding the reins loosely, letting them drape in front of her.

  “That’s right, honey,” Mary said. “Now that’s a horsewoman.”

  I stood with Roxanne on my left, Clair on my right. Roxanne leaned against me. We watched Sophie, and Roxanne said, “I’m sorry. About your friend.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “It’s so sad. Senseless.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Both those things.”

  “You liked her,” Roxanne said.

  “Yes, I did. She was an interesting person. Talented. Funny. She didn’t deserve any of this.”

  “I’m sorry I was jealous.”

  I started to say there was no reason. I stopped.

  Clair said, “Guy must have loved that girl, in a weird way, to track them all down over all these years.”

  “That’s not love,” Roxanne said. “That’s obsession.”

  “A fine line,” I said.

  “No,” Roxanne said. “This was all about Don, not about Julie. All this vengeance. Horrible.”

  I caught Clair’s shrug. I waited.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think vengeance, reprisal—it’s the only thing that maintains order. You hurt my family, I hurt yours. Otherwise there are no consequences.”

  “But then you’re just repeating the same offense over and over,” Roxanne said.

  We were quiet for a minute, no way to resolve it. Roxanne shook her head.

  “I’ve got to believe in the power of forgiveness,” she said. “I’m thinking, once they find Alphonse, I’m going to meet with Beth. Help her get on track, if I can. See if we can get back to where she was before Ratchet died. She was doing okay then.”

  Alphonse. I felt a tremor. Anger. Fear. An urge to finish this once and for all. Me and Clair. Maybe Louis.

  After all of this death and destruction, still a very loose end.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just make it a very public place.”

  That night Sophie fell asleep on our laps. I carried her upstairs and laid her in her bed and we tucked the blanket in around her. Then we walked down the hall to our room. We undressed and slid under the sheets and Roxanne rested her head on my shoulder. Outside the window a mourning dove played its ocarina song. We listened, and then it flew off into the dusk, its wings whistling.

  “Do you ever think it’s all going to hell, Jack?” Roxanne said. “I mean, all of the violence, the sadness?”

  “Sure,” I said. “And sometimes I feel like some sort of angel of death, people dying all around me. Maybe it’s my fault, and there’s nothing good anywhere. I mean, this was one little town, in one week. It’s madness, and you can multiply it by the thousands.”

  I paused.

  “But then I look around me, at you and Sophie, at Clair and Mary. And I know better.”

  “But Beth and Ratchet, and the fires. That poor boy and Lasha and the doctor, that mother with her young kids. And what about Alphonse? Where is he?”

  “They’ll find him,” I said. “Don’t despair.”

  “I know,” Roxanne said.

  “We’re in this together, you know.”

  “I know that, too,” she said.

  “Fighting the good fight,” I said.

  “Always,” she said.

  I felt her smile, and I leaned down and kissed her forehead. She looked up at me and I kissed her lips. Gently, just a touch. She moved up and we embraced, and when our cheeks touched they were wet.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Times sent a freelance photographer named Tilar Huntington up from Portland to shoot the Sanctuary story. Huntington was a go-to for the Times. She was persuasive, charming, beguiling, known for portraits that seemed to get inside the subject’s head.

  The people of Sanctuary shut her down.

  No one in town wanted to be photographed for the story. Not Harold at the store, not the remaining members of the citizen’s patrol, not Chief Frederick or Paulie or Ray-Ray, or Davida Reynolds or any of the cops.

  My story ran with a single photo: a wide-angle shot of the square with the general store in the background. The photo was taken from across the green. The flag was at half-staff. A handwritten sign had been place
d at the base of the flag pole. The sign said, PRAY FOR THEM.

  HAUNTED BY WOMAN’S MURDER, VICTIM’S

  BOYFRIEND REPEATS THE CRIME

  By Jack McMorrow

  SANCTUARY, MAINE—A crime spree that left four people dead and a small town terrified ended here when a local man tried to kill a man he said was the last of the perpetrators of a double murder—a crime he had sworn to avenge.

  Police say Derek Mays, 38, aka Don Barbier, tracked four men he contends burned his girlfriend to death in a drug-related execution twenty years ago. The young woman, Julie Barber, was said to have been a bystander when she died near Bangor, bound and gagged and left to die in a burning house. Mays, also from the Bangor area, tracked the men he believed responsible for the crime and killed three of them in separate arson fires in Arizona, California, and Georgia in recent years, he admitted to investigators.

  Mays came to the small central Maine town of Sanctuary last spring in search of the fourth man, Tommy Stevens. Police say Tommy Stevens was known as Tory Stevens, a local real estate broker. The vendetta came to an end Thursday when Mays abducted Stevens and attempted to burn him alive in a barn in the nearby town of Prosperity. Stevens survived the incident, but both men suffered serious burns.

  The murder of Julie Barber remains an open case, said Davida Reynolds, lead investigator for the Maine Fire Marshal’s Office. Mays, who remains in a Boston burn center this week, along with Stevens, will be charged with multiple counts of arson and murder, Reynolds said.

  “We hope this will bring closure and let this town start to heal,” Reynolds said.

  Four people died in Sanctuary: Lasha Cabral, 46, an artist who was strangled outside her home; Bertrand Talbot, 69, a retired physician who died in his summer home when it was set ablaze; Woodrow Harvey, 16, a high school student who was beaten when he came upon Mays starting a fire; and Eve Johnson, 28, a mother and housewife who died when her truck was deliberately run off the road. Police say Mays will be charged with at least one of the deaths, and possibly all four. He was said to be cooperating with investigators, although his injuries had delayed a full accounting for his actions.

  Investigation of the Julie Barber killing is ongoing, Reynolds said.

  She said she believed the Mays arrest “broke the chain,” but acknowledged that this provides little consolation for the families of the deceased. “Evil begets evil,” she said. “These were all good people who didn’t deserve to be dragged into this.”

  Asked if Mays’s motive was love or obsession, Reynolds said, “In this case it appears that one turned into the other.”

  She paused and added, “It happens, doesn’t it?”