On Monday morning, Warren showed up early at the barracks. He poured himself a cup of terrible coffee and then he sat at his desk for nearly thirty minutes, thinking through the remaining threads he had to pull on the Hugh Weber case. He had a message from Chief Longwell, telling him that Victor Weber had been allowed to return to the Bethany Inn, with a caution that he should stay in the area, and also that they had done another search of the woods on Agony Hill, but hadn’t found any sign of the arsonist. He put in a call to Tommy, to ask about Samuel Armstrong. When he’d done that, he went out to the dispatch desk and found Pinky chatting with Tricia and one of the other troopers.
“Pinky, where’s all the stuff we recovered from the camp in the second fire?” Warren asked him.
“In the evidence room. I can show you. I meant to ask you about whether it should go up to the lab.”
“That would be up to the fire marshal. Probably,” Warren told him. “Let me take a look first, though.”
He got the boxes down and noted approvingly that Pinky had put the items in their own bags or boxes and labeled each with the date and the location where it had been found. The beer cans were in separate bags, each labeled. Warren put a clean sheet on the table next to the shelves and looked through the items one by one. There wasn’t much of interest and he suspected that most of the items had belonged to the Frederickses, who owned the cabin, though he’d need to confirm that. But there was one thing that he thought might have belonged to the arsonist.
Outside the camp, the firemen had found a charred cardboard box. Inside were an empty milk bottle, a couple of cans, and a piece of burnt cloth. Warren used a ruler to turn over the cloth.
“Cheesecloth,” Pinky said, when Warren called him in and asked him what it could be.
“Ah, thank you. This is a steel can but I can’t tell what was in it. The label’s gone, burnt away.”
Pinky leaned over to look. “Peas, maybe. Corn. But I don’t know.” Warren nodded and carefully removed the items from the box, then turned the box over. The wet ground must have protected the bottom of the box from the fire because it was remarkably intact. “It looks like it originally held something from a veterinary supply company,” he said. “ProVet. Does that ring a bell?”
“Yeah, I think there’s a dealer in Rutland,” Pinky said.
Warren looked more closely at the side of the box.
“There’s part of a label here,” he said to Pinky. “Is there a magnifying glass somewhere?”
Pinky disappeared and came back with an old-fashioned one, with a black bone handle and brass around the glass.
They peered at the label through the glass. Typewritten numbers swam into view, part of an order number or shipping code, Warren thought. He read out the numbers to Pinky and then asked Tricia to find the number of the veterinary supply company. Once he had the receptionist on the phone, he told her he was trying to track down an order that was mailed to an address in Bethany, date unknown.
“That’s going to take some time,” she said. “It was mailed to Bethany, you say?”
Warren hesitated. He wasn’t positive it had been mailed to Bethany, but chances were good and it would narrow things down and make the search go faster. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s start there anyway.” The woman said she’d call back once she found something.
“What should we do now, Pinky?” Warren asked him. “No use sitting around here waiting for the phone to ring.”
“Well,” Pinky said. “I was thinking about that heifer, the one tied to the fence. Maybe there’s some other evidence there at Jorah Hatchetts’, footprints or … We know he was there, so we could maybe find a path and follow it…” He blushed, unsure exactly what he was getting at.
“No, that’s a good thought. We’ll head there now.” Warren clapped Pinky on the shoulder. “Good thinking.” The praise elicited another round of furious capillary action and Warren went ahead to the cruiser to save Pinky any further awkwardness.
They found Jorah Hatchett in the barnyard, tinkering with a large piece of machinery attached to the back of a tractor. He didn’t acknowledge them in any way as they got out of the cruiser and made their way over to him, but he must have been aware of their presence because after Pinky cleared his throat in announcement, Hatchett muttered, “Hold this,” and handed a pair of pliers to Pinky. He bent to fiddle with the long chain that connected to the tractor and after a loud clanging, he came up with the end of the chain and nodded to Pinky, taking the pliers back from him. Then he let the chain drop and said, “Well?” It was as though they’d been wasting his time for an hour or more.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Hatchett, we were just wondering if we could ask you about the cow, about the person who might have tied her up,” Warren stammered.
“The heifer? On the fence? What about it?”
“You said that you thought someone might be in the woods, up on Agony Hill. We think you may be right. Do you have any idea who it could be?”
“If I knew, I would have said,” he muttered.
“And you didn’t find any … clues?” Hatchett made Warren feel verbose, like he was talking too much. The man shook his head. Warren waited. Nothing more was forthcoming. “Oh, well, is it okay with you if we go up and look around a bit more for evidence?”
“Sure,” Hatchett said. “Go ahead.”
He had already turned back to the tractor when they heard him say, “You won’t find anything, though, after that rain Saturday.”
“He’s right, you know,” Warren told Pinky. “Any footprints on this side of the hill washed down the slope with the rain. But we’ll look for anything else. If this man led the animal down the hill, he might have dropped something on his way.”
They traced a path up from the place where the heifer had been tied up, looking for broken branches or twigs. Pinky pointed out one spot where a branch might have been recently snapped, but it was hard to know if a human had caused it. After an hour of looking, they walked back to the car, passing Jorah Hatchett, who was still tinkering with the tractor. They thanked him but he didn’t look up from his work.
They were nearly back to town when Pinky sat up straight in the passenger seat and said, “Hey. Slow down. I think I saw something back there.”
Warren slowed and, checking his mirrors carefully, reversed along the empty road. “Where?” he asked Pinky. It was shadowy on the shoulders, the overhanging trees making long dark shapes on the road.
They’d backed up about three hundred yards when they saw a flash of red in the grass on the opposite shoulder. Something about the color was unnatural enough that it raised Warren’s alarm. “That’s it,” Pinky said. “I think there’s someone down there on the side of the road.” Warren pulled over and put his hazards on.
Warren thought about how many times he’d responded to traffic accidents as a young officer, how deaths and injuries often came after the initial event, when motorists got out of the wreck and stood on the shoulder waiting for help, how Good Samaritans could be hit when they pulled over to help.
They jumped out and dashed across the road. Pinky got there first and when Warren arrived, he felt his stomach rise toward his throat and he turned away for a moment so Pinky wouldn’t see his distress. It wasn’t the blood, exactly, though there was plenty of that, but the way the body was arranged that set off some deep trigger of recognition in his brain and his body. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
Then he opened his eyes again and felt his detective brain kick into action.
Victor Weber was lying absolutely still in the thick grass and tangle of weeds at the side of the road, his head back and his arms splayed out, one lying in a pool of stagnant water. His clothes were muddy, the white of his shirt soaked through with bright red blood that was flowing from a large wound on his head.
Warren felt his vision contract and blur. Everything seemed to narrow down to a thin channel in front of him that contained the dead man and then, oddly, Pinky’s face. The sky behind him rotated. He tasted metal.
“Are you okay, Detective Warren?” he thought he heard Pinky say from far away.
“Yes, I’m…” He was trying to stand still, to make the spinning stop, but it was impossible, and as he fell, all he could see was blood and he wasn’t sure if it was Victor Weber’s, or Maria’s, or his own.