Warren spent Friday morning at the barracks completing paperwork, organizing his desk, and looking through old case files.
He had been thinking about what Fred Fielder had said during Warren’s visit to the newspaper office. The editor had asked about an apparent homicide from back in the spring, a burglary and shooting at a house in Bethany. Warren had meant to ask Tommy about it and now he tried to remember the details. The homeowner had been from Washington, DC, Fielder had said. Was it possible there was a connection with the fires on Agony Hill? Warren searched through the case files Pinky had given him, but he couldn’t find one on the case. He’d ask Pinky when he got back.
The file with Hugh Weber’s letters was in his inbox and Warren took it out and read through them again. He was struck, as he had been the first time, at how much the totality of Hugh Weber’s correspondence read like a suicide note. Combined with the facts of the other farmer’s suicide, it seemed so clear what Weber had done.
And yet the autopsy had said it could have been homicide. Could have been.
And, there was the other fire, which seemed like too much of a coincidence for Warren’s taste.
Tomorrow was Old Home Day and Warren knew that most of the troopers as well as the local police and sheriff’s departments would be directing traffic and managing crowds for most of the day. Pinky and the other troopers had been told to go home early today.
But Warren wasn’t officially on duty tomorrow and he had the afternoon free. He decided to go back to Agony Hill to look at the site of the fire at the camp and to check again for signs of whoever it was who had tied up the cow that Hatchett had mentioned yesterday.
He passed the Webers’ farm, not seeing any signs of them out front, and went on slowly to the end of the road. The site where the camp had stood was now a pile of blackened timbers and ash. The fire investigator had taken some of the debris away and Warren had instructed Pinky to bring anything of interest back to the evidence room at the barracks. But still, he spent nearly an hour looking around the site where the cabin had stood. It would need to be almost completely rebuilt, but he liked the location, nestled onto a hillside and backed by trees and the woods rising behind it, with a lovely view of the hills and rolling pastures to the west. He had the thought that he would like to sit in a rocking chair on a porch here and watch the sunset. The thought was followed by pain: Maria would have liked it too. A place like this might have been a retirement dream for them, once he had finished his career and their children were off living their own lives, a place for them to all gather for holidays … But of course that would never happen now.
He gasped, the grief hitting him so suddenly he didn’t have time to prepare his body for it. It was almost like a seizure, the way it came and took him and there was nothing he could do but sink to the ground and go limp and let it have its way. He bent his head and let the sobs come.
As the paroxysm subsided, he sat up and heard a bird call from the woods, a high, thin silvery note, clear as a voice. For a long time, perhaps an hour or more, he sat on the ground as the bird sang and others answered. The trees bent with the breeze that had come along the valley from the east.
Warren felt almost cheerful as he wiped his eyes and got back in the car, gazing one more time at the view from the ruined cabin.
Back in town, he stopped at Collers’ Store for some milk and bread and he was waiting to pay when Roy Longwell came into the store with one of his officers. He nodded to Warren and then went up and handed the woman behind the counter a piece of paper. Warren heard him explain that the police department was suspending all street parking during the parade tomorrow and that the Collers should tell their customers that any cars violating the parking ban would be ticketed.
“Everyone in town will know,” he said. “But outsiders might not.” Warren wasn’t sure but he thought that the police chief glanced his way when he said it. The woman behind the counter—one of the Collers’ daughters, Warren thought—made a sarcastic remark about how a ticket might be just the thing for some of these out-of-towners and Chief Longwell laughed and thanked her, taking one of the donuts in the jar on the counter and telling her to put it on his tab. Warren, on impulse, put his purchases down on a nearby shelf and called out to the chief, following him and his deputy out onto the street.
“Chief Longwell,” he said. “I know you’re busy. I wonder if I could have a minute. I just wanted to ask you about a case.”
Longwell didn’t say anything, but he inclined his head as if to say, Go ahead.
“Mr. Fielder at the newspaper asked me about a shooting, back a few months ago, I guess. A man from Washington, DC, who’d recently bought a vacation cottage in Bethany? You must have responded when it was called in, but I didn’t see anything in the case files. Can you tell me about it?”
Longwell pressed his lips together and his eyes followed a group of teenage girls laughing and whispering as they came out of the drugstore. They were wearing brightly colored summer dresses and they made a nice picture against the tents and the Ferris wheel already set up on the green. When he looked back at Warren, his eyes were placid. “Well, I gave my report to Tommy Johnson, so if he didn’t give it to you, you’ll have to take it up with him,” Longwell said.
Hearing the edge in Longwell’s delivery, Warren hurried to explain it away. “I’m sure it was just an oversight or maybe my fault in missing it, but can you tell me something about it? Any chance there’s a connection with the Hugh Weber case or the other fire?”
Longwell turned to the officer with him. “You remember going out to that house, Phil?”
“I do.” The officer nodded.
“It was a strange one, wasn’t it, Phil?” Longwell spoke slowly, deliberately, as though he was setting a trap. “No sign of a break-in outside, but someone had turned a few pieces of furniture over inside. The guy, now, he was lying right in the middle of the living room, like he’d been standing there happy as a clam and then someone just up and shot him. I’d guess a .22 pistol was our weapon, but I don’t know because Tommy Johnson never sent me the autopsy. I gave him our report, but I don’t know what happened to it after that.”
“Was there any evidence at the scene? With a break-in, there should have been prints,” Warren started to say. “Maybe we can compare to—”
“That was all Tommy,” Longwell said shortly. He reached up to wipe a thin layer of perspiration from his forehead. It was hot in the direct sun on the sidewalk. “He’s the man for the science. Now, I’ve got things to do. Be seeing you, Detective Warren.”