Six
During the day shift, three field agents conducted routine border sweeps—driving to various locations, observing wooded areas, or walking trails and sign-cutting—leaving Peyton and two other agents on duty to follow up on open cases. The corpse of murder victim Simon Pink made the fire on the St. Pierre property high-priority.
Aroostook Oil and Heating was located at the north end of Academy Street in Reeds, a ten-minute drive from the stationhouse. It was the site of a renovated farm. Peyton didn’t need to ask why the venue had leapt from farm to private business. One of two things had occurred: the farmer had worked the land until old age then sold the place off, or the farmer hadn’t been able to keep up with the Canadians’ government-subsidized potato prices and was driven to selling or, like her father, had lost the farm.
She pulled her white-and-green Ford Expedition to the side of the barn and climbed out, recalling the day when she’d been thirteen and watched the bank’s men and her father around the kitchen table, hearing the words “small, maybe a trailer, on one acre.” Charlie Cote hadn’t taken the trailer the bank men offered. Instead, he’d built his own house—the 1,200-square-foot home in which her mother still resided. Usually Peyton smiled when she thought of her late father. Now, though, she remembered his slouched shoulders at the kitchen table as he signed the bankers’ papers, recalled his first day as janitor at Garrett High School and the look on his face when they’d seen each other in the hallway, and finally the day his heart gave out. It taught her that when you take a man’s way of life, you take his dignity, and when you take his dignity, you take his life.
She entered Aroostook Oil and Heating glad to push those thoughts aside and think of the bullet hole in Simon Pink’s torched skull.
She crossed what had once been a parlor complete with a stone fireplace and leather furniture. A young receptionist sat, head buried in a textbook. In her early twenties, the raven-haired woman wore jeans, a blouse with three buttons undone, and stylish short boots with two-inch heels. She closed The Principles of Accounting and centered her keyboard, ready to type, but looked up instead.
“May I help you?” Her words were spoken in a default tone, but there was an oh-shit quality in her voice Peyton had come to anticipate when entering someplace in uniform unannounced.
“I need to speak to whoever might be in charge.”
“That would be Gary. Everything okay?”
Peyton smiled, moved to the stone fireplace, and stood near the hearth.
“Gary owns the company.”
“If he’s in charge of personnel,” Peyton said, “then he’s the guy I need to see.”
“Is everything okay?” the receptionist asked again.
“Of course,” Peyton said, reading the girl’s name plate: Samantha Buckley. She took her iPhone out and made a note of the jumpy receptionist.
“Sammy told me you have some questions about our employees,” Gary Buckley said.
It was a leap, albeit a subtle one, from If he’s in charge of personnel, then he’s the guy I need to see to questions about our em-
ployees.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Is Simon Pink still employed here?”
He shook his head. “No way.”
The crow’s feet around Buckley’s eyes said he was older than he looked. Or maybe life had thrown a lot at him, and stress had caused the wrinkles. Peyton had interviewed enough people to have seen both scenarios many times.
Buckley wore a Maine Winter Sports Center golf shirt and looked like a guy who used the winter months to Nordic ski. Peyton hadn’t done much Nordic skiing, preferring snowshoeing, but she knew of the Nordic Heritage Center, located between Reeds and Garret, a place where Olympic Nordic skiers and biathlon athletes came to train year-round. She’d been inside the 6,500-square-foot lodge once and took Tommy hiking along the mountain-biking trails in the summer.
“Not a fan of Mr. Pink?” she said.
“Care to see his application and résumé? Sonofabitch lied to me. Said he was an out-of-work chemist.”
She said, “I’d like to see his file.”
“I’ll go get it. Guy should’ve listed ‘creative writing’ on the damned résumé.”
Buckley got up and left the room. He returned with two paper coffee cups and a manila folder under his arm. He set a coffee in front of Peyton and handed her the folder. She read Simon Pink’s résumé. It was suitable for the work Buckley hired him to do.
“You said he told you he was a chemist,” she said. “The top qualification he lists here is a commercial driver’s license.”
“Maybe he was full of shit about being a chemist.” He shrugged. “He said he took his driving classes at Northern Maine Community College. We needed a driver, so I hired him.”
“And?”
“And it didn’t work out,” Buckley said.
“Tell me about it.”
“He worked for me a year ago. The guy was weird. I could tell that about a week into his employment. He was in this office for something, and he starts talking about the World Junior Biathlon.”
“At the Nordic Heritage Center?”
“Yeah. I’m on the board of directors out there. At the time, the Junior Biathlon was six months away. But I told him we were planning, looking for volunteers. Then the guy offended me.”
“How?”
“He called the place a liberal outpost where yuppies hang out and talk about liberal politics.”
“The only people I’ve ever seen out there,” she said, “are the athletes training for the Olympics.”
“A handful of them live there and practice, yeah. The whole conversation was bizarre. Then he got an OUI, so I cut him loose. I hear Fred St. Pierre hired him. Fred sure as hell didn’t check
references. Pink in trouble again?”
“He’s dead,” she said.
“Drunk driving?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I never wished the guy any harm. But I admit I didn’t want him around here. I never felt like he was really stable.”
The coffee was no better than that which they brewed at Garrett Station. On the wall behind Buckley hung a photo of him and a boy kneeling next to a slain deer. Buckley held what looked like a .30-06; the boy held a shotgun. Both barrels pointed skyward, away from the deer and each other—they were hunters who knew what they were doing, not victims of “buck fever.” With his free hand, Buckley was lifting the deer’s head by the antlers, smiling broadly at his conquest; the boy’s expression was different, sullen. She imagined the boy had either vomited or turned away when Buckley had undertaken the gruesome work of field dressing the deer.
Buckely turned to the photo. “Know any hunters?” he asked.
She nodded. “I hunt,” she said. “My father introduced me to it. Now I take my son. Field dressing a deer isn’t for the faint of heart.”
“No. My boy didn’t do well on that day,” he said, eyes still on the photo.
“My father used to send me out to the road after we shot one, so I wouldn’t have to watch.”
“Ever shoot one yourself?”
She held up two fingers.
“Two?” He shook his head and whistled quietly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like a hunter.”
“I’m tougher than I look,” she said.
“I bet you are. You single?”
“What made you think Simon Pink was unstable?”
He chuckled and drank some coffee. “All business, huh?”
She waited.
“I just always felt like the guy was full of shit,” he said. “I don’t know if that makes sense. Just something about him. Never seemed like he was leveling with me. I can’t really describe it.”
He didn’t need to. She’d questioned thousands of people at the international border crossing between El Paso and Juarez, had been lied to hundreds of times, and had relied on gut instinct and a well-earned grasp of human nature and the signs people unwittingly offered—a blink, a sudden urge to wipe a damp palm, an unwillingness to look her in the eye—to know when she was being bullshitted.
“Funny thing was,” he continued, “that I could never see a reason to lie.”
She said, “What did he lie about?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like that, not like I caught him in a lie. I just never thought he was telling me the whole truth. Just little stuff that didn’t add up. Like he said he was from Youngsville, but he didn’t have a French accent.”
“Did he have any accent?”
“He sounded like Drago from Rocky IV.”
That went with Fred St. Pierre’s “Russian” accent claim.
“Anyway,” he said, “the guy smoked like a Canadian—two, three packs a day. That’s really all I can tell you. I have another meeting in five minutes.”
She stood and said she’d show herself out.
“Come by anytime,” he said.
She thanked him—and wondered why he hadn’t asked exactly how Simon Pink died.