Warren got to the Bethany state police barracks by eight the next morning, wanting to make a good start of things and then get back to the scene of the fire as soon as possible. Last night, lying in bed in his too-hot room, he’d found that something was bothering him about it. As an act of self-destruction, it seemed so … complete. The man could have shot himself, or slit his wrists. Why fire? Why risk destroying his family’s means of livelihood, all that hay, shelter for their animals? It didn’t make sense to him. He needed to know more about the man, to know if this was characteristic of Weber or not. And of course, he needed to speak to the family. Probably the answers would all be there. Weber may have told his wife what he was going to do. The son who drove to the neighbor’s house to alert the fire department may have seen or heard something definitive.
The Bethany state police barracks were located in the back of a now-abandoned gas station on Route 5, out of town about a mile. They had tried to hide the building’s origin, but a faded Citgo sign on a pole at the end of the parking lot gave it away and the long, low building had the unmistakable look of its former purpose.
Tommy had warned him about the repurposed barracks already, so Warren wasn’t surprised, but the collection of vehicles clustered next to the building did give him pause. One cruiser was relatively new, freshly painted and clean-looking. The other three cruisers were older models, at least 1958 or so, the paint faded and, in one case, scratched up at the rear fender. Two other unmarked cars sat next to them and Warren’s Galaxie looked positively shiny in juxtaposition. Tommy had told him that he’d have to use his own vehicle to start, that there wasn’t money in the budget for a cruiser for the newly created detective position, but that he’d see what he could do once Warren had a few successes under his belt.
Warren forced himself to put it out of his mind. He was lucky to have a job, after what had happened to him in Boston. He wasn’t going to waste time with regrets. He needed a new start, to make a go of it. The trappings didn’t matter.
Trooper Goodrich met him at the door.
“Good morning, Detective Warren,” he said cheerfully. “I can show you around if you want.”
Warren smiled up at him. There was something about Goodrich’s friendly face that lifted his mood. “That would be great, Trooper Goodrich. I thought I’d look through the files on some of the open cases, just to familiarize myself with the job, and then we can go back up to the scene.”
“You can call me Pinky. Everyone does.”
“All right, Pinky. And you can call me Warren. Everyone does. Everyone but Tommy anyways.”
Pinky flushed.
There was a reception/dispatch desk right up front and as they came through the door, the woman sitting behind it looked up, was apparently uninterested in what she saw, and went back to typing extremely rapidly.
“Tricia, this is Franklin Warren,” Pinky said. “Detective Warren, this is Tricia Green. She’s one of our dispatchers here.” Warren told her that he was pleased to meet her and she peered at him from behind a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles and murmured something in return he couldn’t make out. The radio setup looked modern, at least, and he liked what he could see of Tricia Green’s charts and note-taking systems.
Two middle-aged troopers, whose names Warren missed, checked in with Tricia and then went out on patrol. Before they left, Pinky gave them some information about an accident reported down in Springfield and then resumed the tour.
Beyond Tricia’s desk was a large room with more radio equipment and four battered wooden desks with squat black phones and typewriters on them. Against one wall was a bank of wooden file cabinets. Two doors opened off the other wall and Pinky led the way into the first one, which was a large storage area. “Lieutenant Johnson and I have been working on this,” he said. “They used to just shove evidence in boxes—what didn’t go to Burlington anyway—and keep it anywhere on those shelves, but I’ve been trying to make a dedicated shelf for each case and to have plastic bags for everything. It’s been working out pretty good so far.”
“This is well done,” Warren said, looking around at the shelves, neatly labeled with case numbers, cardboard dividers keeping everything separate. The key thing with an evidence room was that it kept items of evidence clearly labeled and safe and that there was a process for booking them in that could be presented during a criminal trial. The process they would have to work on, but Warren liked the neat rows, waiting for bags or boxes of evidence.
Pinky showed him a rudimentary darkroom they’d constructed in a supply closet at the rear and got a new Canon camera with a long lens out of a drawer stocked with film. Warren packed it into the black leather bag it had come in and handed it back to Pinky. “We’ll take that with us. Can you develop the film we took yesterday with the body in situ?” Pinky nodded and said he’d get started while Warren read case files.
He pointed to one of the desks. “You can use that one,” he said. “I’ll go get the files and then you can let me know when you want to go back to Agony Hill.”
The files turned out to be a manageable stack of about twenty cases, most of them resolved burglaries and other petty crimes. There was one case of embezzlement from a few months ago and two open unnatural death cases. One of them was the killing of a father by his son and the other was a woman poisoned by insecticide that could be homicide but was probably suicide. There had been six “forcible rapes” and eighteen robberies. Mostly there were burglaries and auto thefts.
And now a death and suspicious barn fire that were likely an act of suicide by arson.
He would need to spend much longer with the files, but for now, he felt like he had a good handle on the criminal activity of southeast Vermont.
“I’d like to drive myself so I start learning the roads,” Warren said when he was done. “I’ll meet you up on Agony Hill, Pinky. We’ll see what Mrs. Hugh Weber has to tell us about her husband’s frame of mind.”