Thirty

“I’m sitting here shaking my goddamned head, eh,” Freddy said at 9:25 a.m. in an interview room in Garrett Station.

“I hear this is your last day in Garrett,” Peyton said.

She’d just sat down across from him. The window was wire mesh, but the glass was bright, as if sunlight outside reflected off it.

Len Landmark—who said he no longer represented Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall (only husband Chip)—had apparently deserted both sister and brother because now it was young Steve St. Louis, a local attorney, who sat next to Freddy. St. Louis was all of twenty-eight and wore a Polo shirt and khaki pants. Peyton knew this was his first murder trial. His golf shoes were wet and full of grass.

“Come from the course?” Peyton asked St. Louis.

“Especially for this.” He smiled eagerly—the same smile the salesman had offered her when listing all the accessories on her new Jeep Wrangler.

She said, “I hear they’re taking you to Houlton tonight or tomorrow, Freddy.”

She knew Freddy wouldn’t like that, remembered well his comments about the farm outside Garrett being the last place he’d seen his mother happy. But she didn’t care. Now that he wanted to see her, she could play hardball.

“They really moving me?” Freddy looked at St. Louis, who only shrugged.

“I just got here,” St. Louis said, “but I’ll be sure to look into it.”

Freddy turned back to Peyton. “You bullshitting me?”

Peyton ignored him. “I also heard that Nancy Lawrence is kicking your ass to the curb. No alibi.”

Freddy looked down at the tabletop between his forearms. “She’s a bitch,” he said.

“I’ll ask that you treat my client with the respect and dignity that he deserves,” St. Louis said.

“If I was treating him with the respect he deserves,” she said, “I’d taser his ass. How come, when I asked you to talk to me last week, Freddy, you wanted no part of it?”

“I couldn’t then.”

“But you can now?”

Freddy looked up at her. “I have to now, eh.”

“You’re a real sweet-talker, Freddy. I can see why Nancy turned on you.”

“She told them because a cop lied and said she could go to jail.”

“It’s no lie. It’s called Obstruction of a Criminal Investigation.”

St. Louis was taking notes on a yellow legal pad, and his first murder case had him looking like a freshman trying to keep up in a linear-algebra class.

“It’s only true if I was guilty of something,” Freddy said.

“Okay, Freddy,” Peyton said. “Then can you please explain to me why you appear to be the first man in the history of the criminal-justice system to need an alibi when you are not guilty of anything?”

“We need to speak seriously,” Freddy said.

She took her iPhone out, hit Record.

St. Louis reached over, tugged Freddy’s shirt sleeve. “I think we should discuss whatever you have to say privately, Fred, before you speak to Agent Cote.”

“I can’t get myself in trouble, eh, because I didn’t do it all.”

Peyton sat up straight, made sure the iPhone was recording, and said, “I need you to explain that, Freddy.” No longer exhausted and frustrated, she knew if she could get Freddy to start talking the spool might come unwound.

“Please be quiet now,” St. Louis said.

“No,” Freddy said. “I want you to separate the fire from the shooting. They ain’t connected. I didn’t shoot nobody.”

“Fred, that’s enough,” St. Louis said.

Peyton leaned forward. “What are you telling me, Freddy?”

“I didn’t know anyone was in there, Peyton. That’s the truth.”

“None of this is on the record,” St. Louis said. “You hear me, Peyton? None of it.”

“He’s been given his Miranda warning, Steve,” Peyton said. “You know that. Everything is admissible.”

But she wasn’t looking at St. Louis as she spoke. She was staring at Freddy St. Pierre. And processing what he’d just said.

“Did you set that fire, Freddy?”

He looked at her. She waited. Stranger things had happened on farms in Aroostook County. The year before, a farmer couldn’t make payments on his loans. Mysteriously, his barn burned to the foundation. Three months later an insurance check arrived. It took the fire marshal six months to prove arson.

Beads of perspiration popped on Freddy’s forehead.

“You don’t have to say anything, Fred,” St. Louis said.

“Can you separate the fire from the shooting?” Freddy asked.

“You need to tell me the whole truth, Freddy,” Peyton said, “before we can discuss that. I need to know what really happened.”

“I don’t know nothing.”

“You know something,” she said.

“I didn’t know that was part of the plan.”

“Tell me what the plan was,” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I did what I was paid to do.”

“Burn down your cabin?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What did your father think of that?” she said.

“He didn’t know.”

“Who paid you?”

Freddy looked at St. Louis.

“Again, Freddy,” St. Louis said, “I urge you to stop talking.”

And he did.

She turned off the iPhone recorder, pocketed it, and drove directly to Garrett High School.

A half-hour later, Peyton was back in her service vehicle, driving toward a fishing spot called Black Water Creek, where she was to meet game warden Pete McPherson.

Traveling north on Route 1 toward Caribou, she glanced at the Crystal View River. At this time of day, she knew you had to fish the edges, casting toward the riverbanks, hoping to pick off trout or bass moving slowly in the mid-day sun.

She’d learned a lot in the past twenty-four hours from Matt Kingston and Freddy St. Pierre.

According to Freddy, he had built the cabin with his father, and then been paid—as part of someone’s master plan—to burn it.

Freddy wanted to separate the arson from the shooting. Seeing as he was facing a murder charges and they had the weapon, and it was his, that was smart. He would say, she assumed, that, sure, he’d gone to the cabin—probably early in the morning—discovered no one around, and lit the fire.

What he didn’t know was that Peyton’s stop at Garrett High School had been highly productive: Matt Kingston recognized Freddy’s voice instantly as one of the three people he’d heard when Peyton played her iPhone recording. In court, the recognition might be merely circumstantial. But if Kingston took the stand, his reaction—the quick nod, the knee-jerk “No question that’s one person I heard”—could be damning for Freddy because it placed him at the scene of the murder when the murder took place. He may have met Nancy Lawrence at the Tip and slept on her couch, but he was definitely at the cabin earlier that night.

So Freddy had been there and the late Simon Pink had been there. Who was the third person?

She pulled to the side of the road, took out her cell phone, and dialed. When Stone Gibson answered, she said, “Remember when we said since you’re heading the murder investigation and I’m looking into what was taking place in the cabin, there would be overlap? Well, I have some news for you,” she said. “I can place Freddy St. Pierre at the crime scene when Pink was shot. Freddy doesn’t know it yet.”

And she told him what Matt Kingston had said.