Eight

Peyton and Karen Smythe were ten feet behind Fred, who stood facing Marie.

“Drop it!” Peyton yelled.

The blast from the .357 knocked Marie backward, toppling her rocking chair.

Peyton watched Marie go over backward and screamed again for Fred to drop the gun. Out of the corner of her eye, Peyton saw Karen crouch behind a wicker love seat, her 9mm sited on Fred’s back.

“Drop it, Fred!” Peyton shouted again.

“I’m sorry,” Fred said again; then, in a whisper, “but I have to go.”

“Put the gun down, Fred,” Karen said. “This is over.”

Still with his back to the officers, Fred nodded, bent, and reached toward the ground. But instead of laying the gun down, he dropped to his knees, quickly placed the barrel before him, and squeezed the trigger.

Karen shouted something inaudible.

And Peyton’s scream—“Don’t do it!”—was lost amid the large pistol’s blast and its echoed report, which seemed to go on and on, ringing in Peyton’s ears—ceasing only when she realized what the red and white mucus was that covered the toe of her left boot.

“Requesting two ambulances.” It was Karen Smythe who called it in; after all, it was a murder-suicide, and homicides belonged to the state police. “No need for sirens and lights,” she said, looking down.

The scene had been cleared—the .357 kicked to the side (and later bagged as evidence), the search for pulses completed (which, given the state of each body, was futile)—and now Karen began to formally process the scene. She was stringing yellow crime-scene tape and awaiting the ME. The crime-scene technicians, depending on where they were coming from, could take longer than an hour to arrive.

“Fred climbed out the den window,” Peyton said, “and came around the porch. The .357 must have been in the den the whole time.”

“Is Hewitt in the office?” Karen asked.

Peyton nodded. “I’m sure he’ll be here.”

Mike Hewitt had fallen into something of a dual role: PAIC at Garrett Station and, given his experience and this young group of state troopers, a crime-scene consultant for the state police.

Wearing latex gloves, Peyton stood over the corpse of Marie St. Pierre and looked down. The flesh of the woman’s torn face resembled a bludgeoned watermelon.

The trajectory of the second bullet had ripped part of Fred St. Pierre’s skull away, leaving bone fragments, blood, and tissue, like Play-Doh, pasted to the porch ceiling.

“There’s a bullet hole in the roof,” Karen said.

“Judging from the back of his head”—Peyton motioned to the body—“Fred got the barrel into his mouth.”

The corpse of Fred St. Pierre had fallen near his wife’s feet. His eyes were open, locked in a never-ending stare; his head turned toward Marie, as if he’d focused on his final earthly act as he departed this world for whatever lay ahead.

“You said you thought your interview this morning led to the fight,” Karen said. “I assume I’ll be the lead officer on this one. Can you fill me in?”

“It was my idea to leave him in there alone,” Peyton said. “This is on me, not you. And I’ll make sure it goes down like that.”

“Peyton, he’d have shot her whether we left him alone or not. Even if we’d have cuffed and stuffed him, he’d have posted bail, gone home, and done it then. You heard what he said to her. He thought they both needed to go.”

Peyton was squinting at a huge maple tree to the west, where a single robin perched.

“That conversation was bizarre,” Karen continued. “You were right. There is more to this than meets the eye. She was talking about someone forgiving them. And he said he had no choice about them both having to die.”

They re-entered the kitchen, and Peyton realized the scent of cordite was still present and wafting in from outside.

“Think the cabin has something to do with this?” Karen Smythe said.

“No idea,” Peyton said, finally turning off the stove. Marie’s stew, like a lot of things now, would never be finished. “But I do think Simon Pink had something to do with it. I think there was something there.”

“Love triangle?”

“Possibly,” Peyton said. “I’ll be looking into it as well.”

“Because of the cabin?”

“Yeah. That scene is still being processed by the fire marshal. But my guess is it was a lab of some sort, very close to the border.”

“I heard about that,” Karen said. “If it’s crystal meth, I’ll be surprised. I haven’t heard of that being a problem around here.”

They had returned to the den. Karen lifted several magazines off the coffee table, saw nothing of interest, and examined several desk drawers.

“Red phosphorus is hard to get in most places,” Peyton explained, “but it’s used to make fertilizer. Fred was a potato farmer. No one would think twice about him having it.”

“I can’t see Fred St. Pierre as a meth cook,” Karen said.

“Someone else might have been doing the cooking.”

“And he was the landlord?”

Peyton shrugged. “This farm covers five hundred acres. Pretty good place to hide a lab. And Fred St. Pierre would be about the last person anyone would suspect.”

“What would his motive be?”

“Money,” Peyton said. “He’s a farmer. A lot of them take out huge operating loans. There’s a lot of pressure each year to pay those back. I’ve seen it firsthand.”

“Your family?”

“Yeah,” Peyton said. “My father lost our farm when I was in middle school.”

“Sorry,” Karen said.

“It’s the past,” Peyton said, but of course, it never would be.

“You hear Fred say something like, ‘I hope she can forgive me’?”

“Yeah.”

“Think he was talking about you?” Karen asked.

“Why would he need forgiveness from me?” Peyton said.

“I don’t know. Maybe he felt guilty, thought this put you in a bad spot.”

“Because I knew them? My mother does play bridge with Marie—or did. But that scenario doesn’t feel right. She wasn’t close to my mother.”

“I don’t know,” Karen said.

“I’m going to the second floor.” Peyton started for the stairs.

“Okay. I’ll go through the living room. Don’t move anything, or the crime-scene techs will flip.”

“They’ll never even know I was there,” Peyton said.

Peyton knew the state police would own the domestic-dispute-turned-homicide crime scene, which meant Karen Smythe was affording her a professional courtesy: an informal crime-scene walk-through.

A brown leather purse lay on a table in the upstairs hallway. According to Marie’s driver’s license, which Peyton found in the purse, she’d been only fifty-eight. Judging from the school photos in Marie’s wallet and framed pictures scattered around the house, Sherry had a son, maybe Tommy’s age, and a daughter a little younger. The young girl looked just like Sherry. The boy, though, had his own look, distinctive from either parent. Marie would never see her grandchildren grow up.

In a side pocket of Marie’s purse, Peyton found a passport and nine crisp hundred-dollar bills. Had Marie been planning a trip?

Peyton returned the items to the purse. She hadn’t been in the house regularly in close to twenty years, but Sherry’s room hadn’t changed much: basketball trophies, a University of Maine banner, yearbooks, even a stuffed bear Peyton could remember them playing with in elementary school. Except now there were photos of Marie and Fred with two grandchildren—the little girl, a dead ringer for her mother, and her raven-haired brother—in the hayloft with Marie, on the tractor with Fred, and one picture Peyton found particularly sad: the two kids side by side at the dining room table for a holiday dinner.

The third bedroom, to Peyton’s surprise, looked lived in. A man’s shaving kit lay atop the dresser. Did Freddy Jr., Sherry’s younger brother who worked the farm with Fred, still live at home?

Would he return to find crime-scene investigators and the ME?

She wouldn’t wish that sight on anyone—Marie, nearly decapitated, lying near an overturned chair; Fred, the top of his skull missing, eyes open, lying facing his victim—let alone the couple’s younger child.

She moved to the dresser and found a small-caliber handgun and $500 in Freddy’s sock drawer.

She crossed the hall. Familiarity with the region gave her many professional advantages—she knew the roads, the land, and many residents—but having spent her childhood among these people also posed challenges. As she rifled through Marie’s underwear drawer, she felt as though she was violating the woman who’d welcomed her into this house so often when she’d been a young child and whose eyes always met hers with sympathy after Fred made sure she no longer received invitations to visit.

The lingerie in Marie’s drawer was more exotic than she’d anticipated. Had she ordered Victoria’s Secret panties and a red teddy for Fred?

Peyton was closing the drawer when she spotted a manila envelope.

The downstairs was empty when Peyton returned to the den.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The Journal of Northeast Agriculture lay open on the coffee table next to a now-cold cup of coffee. Apparently, Fred had been reading an article about fertilization. Next to the journal was a book titled Politics of Eastern Bloc Countries written by Dr. Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall. Peyton had lost touch with Sherry during high school—Fred had seen to that—and she knew Sherry had overcome a lot to earn her Ph.D.

Peyton looked around the room and tried to imagine what happened. Marie called 911 for help. That much she knew. And Peyton had witnessed the argument’s conclusion. But how had it begun? Had Fred seen Marie’s reaction upon hearing of Simon Pink’s death—hand suddenly covering her mouth, the odd whispered statement: “That’s why”—as something more than the sympathy one would normally feel at the loss of an acquaintance?

The envelope she’d found upstairs made that theory credible.

Peyton had been struck by Marie’s reaction. But she was paid to note deviations in expected behavioral patterns. Fred wasn’t. Had he been suspicious to start with and found Marie’s reaction equivalent to a confession? If so, a confrontation was the logical progression.

And what of the couple’s final conversation? Pleading for her life, Marie said, “We can talk to her.” Talk to whom? And from whom did Fred need forgiveness?

On the porch, she found Karen, wearing footies and latex gloves, standing on a chair and holding a flashlight to a hole in the roof. She was looking for the .357 slug.

“I was going to send out for coffee,” Karen said. “Want a cup?”

Peyton thought it was a good idea. Karen would be here a while: a murder-suicide was unusual in Maine, unheard of in tranquil Aroostook County.

Peyton nodded. “They have a son, Fred Jr., who works the farm with his father. The room upstairs looks like he still lives at home.”

“How old is he?”

“Maybe thirty,” Peyton said. “I found five hundred dollars cash and a handgun in the sock drawer in the room I assume is his.”

“Where is he now?” Karen said.

Peyton shrugged. “And Marie had nine hundred dollars in cash in her purse and two passports.”

“Two?”

“Yeah. Only one was hers.”

Karen looked off into the distance. “This is turning into a shit storm.”

“Yeah,” Peyton said. “We’re going to need that coffee.”

“Any idea where the son of the St. Pierre couple is?” Mike Hewitt asked.

“No,” Peyton said. Her iPad in hand, she was reviewing her notes.

They were near Karen Smythe’s dark Interceptor. Karen was there, but Hewitt was looking at Peyton.

“I’d like to have someone meet him,” Hewitt said, “before the poor bastard shows up at this scene.” He looked at the porch, where yellow crime-scene tape had been spread and two sheets covered the corpses, and shook his head.

“You both realize the report isn’t going to make either of you look very good,” he said. “You left him alone. He got a .357 and … ” He pointed at the porch.

“That’s on me,” Peyton said. “I asked Karen to step out so I could ask her what Fred said to her. Then I wanted a few minutes alone with the couple before Karen arrested him.”

All of five-two, Karen had to look up at Mike Hewitt, but she stared him in the eye nonetheless. “The guy was passive as hell, Mike. Neither of us had any idea he’d hidden a gun in there. I think it didn’t matter. He’d have posted bail, which certainly would’ve been low, given that he has no record and a good reputation, and then done it when they were home. He said as much.”

“What did he say?”

They started at the beginning—with Peyton’s first interview—and alternated speaking, as each woman recalled details, finishing with how they’d searched the house.

“I don’t know what your boss will require, Karen,” Hewitt said and turned to Peyton, “but you need to write this up, Peyton. A copy will go in your file.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think that’s right, Mike,” Karen said. “You weren’t here. You don’t know what took place. You didn’t see him. You’d have done the same thing.”

He looked at her, started to speak, then closed his mouth and looked out over to the trees at the far end of the property. The sun was shining.

“Peyton, tell me about the son,” he said.

“I’ve seen him in the Tip of the Hat a couple times in recent years, so I’d recognize him. But I don’t know if he has another job or where he hangs out.”

“Between the mother and son,” Hewitt said, “they had a lot of cash in this house.”

Peyton felt beads of perspiration on her brow. She wore a T-shirt beneath her Kevlar vest, which only trapped the sweat against her body.

“Maybe I’m getting old,” Hewitt said, looking at her iPad.

Peyton didn’t respond. Wasn’t in the mood for small talk. She was thinking about her personnel file, about what was in it already. Three years earlier, she’d been suspended for crawling into an overturned van, a decision that forced her to shoot and kill a man for the first time in her career. He was a man she’d known growing up. She was a single mother, and her ex-husband’s alimony would never put food on the table or clothe their son. She couldn’t afford a personnel file weighed down by a trail of mistakes.

“Tell me more about Fred St. Pierre Jr.,” Hewitt said.

“I don’t know him very well. Growing up, I spent a lot of time here with his sister. Then, during our first year of high school, his sister, Sherry, simply cut me and everyone else out of her life. No more boyfriends. No friends. Quit varsity basketball. But she did get straight As and graduate valedictorian.”

“Wish I’d had those priorities in high school,” Hewitt said. “I wouldn’t be scraping brains off a ceiling into evidence containers. I’d be a financial wizard with a thirty-foot boat.”

If he was still angry and thinking of writing a formal reprimand for her personnel file, he wasn’t showing it.

“We’ll have someone else make the call to the daughter,” he said. “When she gets here, though, you can interview her.”

There were three Border Patrol vehicles at the house now. A second state police cruiser pulled in belonging to Leo Miller, who’d been at the original investigation of the burned-out cabin.

“I was busting a kid for shoplifting,” Miller said, getting out of his car, “when the DD call came across the radio. Look what I missed. This will be big for six months.”

“You missed a family tragedy,” Peyton said. “That’s what you missed. I knew the couple.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Right,” she said.

Miller swatted at the black flies. “Jesus Christ, the flies are bad today.” He slapped the back of his neck then spotted Karen Smythe crossing the front porch with two Border Patrol agents and hustled toward her.

Peyton and Hewitt watched as Karen stopped Miller and pointed at his hands. He quickly retrieved gloves from his duty belt, snapped them on, and proceeded into the house.

“Don’t touch a thing, Leo,” Karen called after him.

“Got so excited he forgot latex,” Peyton said. “He needs to get out of the area for a while.”

“Location has nothing to do with it,” Hewitt said. “Guy needs to grow up.” He looked out at the idle tractor in the field. “This is going to be a big operation for a young guy to run by himself.”

“True.”

“Fred said he was sorry,” Hewitt said, “then blew her brains out?”

“Mike, I knew them.”

“I know. And I’m sorry to put it like that, Peyton, but that’s what happened. I can’t get my head around it. The guy is reading a magazine one minute, smacking his wife the next, and shooting her and himself after that?”

“Sad to say, but abuse happens in this country a lot, Mike.”

“She had close to a grand in her purse and a passport,” he said. “Where was she going?”

“Maybe as far away from Fred as she could get,” Peyton said.

“Think she was cheating?”

“Likely.”

“So,” he said, “the husband shoots her because he’s jealous?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Guys who murder their spouses aren’t usually the most rational people in the world. Maybe he didn’t think he’d hit her hard enough.”

She shook her head. “Just doesn’t feel right. Not this case. Not here. I’m telling you, Mike, she was surprised when he walked onto the porch with a gun. We were all surprised. Fred went from zero to a hundred in five seconds. I was talking to Karen, but I heard the surprise in Marie’s voice. And she said something strange to him.”

Hewitt’s gaze could be laserlike, and his blue eyes were intense now. She’d felt his stare several times in his office, the last time being when he suspended her. She thought she’d done the right thing by entering the overturned van, but he’d said she’d gone “Lone Ranger.” She could still feel the pain in her chest where her Kevlar vest had saved her life that night.

“He was apologizing for what he was about to do,” she said, “and she was saying they could ask for forgiveness.”

“From who?”

“Not sure,” Peyton said. “He said, ‘I hope she can forgive me.’”

“No one knows who he’s talking about?” he said.

“I know the family, and Marie plays cards with my mother every week …”

“So it could be you?”

“I guess,” Peyton said. “But I doubt it.”

Hewitt took his phone from his pocket and checked for messages.

“None of it makes sense,” Peyton said. “Marie knew Fred had guns in the house, yet when he stepped onto the porch with one and pointed it at her, she asked what he was doing. I think she expected this fight to blow over.”

“Sounds like this wasn’t their first fight.”

“True, which makes me think Marie accepted her husband’s physical abuse, but never thought he was capable of murder.”

“But if that’s right,” Hewitt said, “why call the cops? She must have known it was different this time.”

Peyton couldn’t think of how it would be different. But if his theory was correct—and it very well could be—it meant Marie was scared.

Of what?

And why?

“I think the asshole knew this common occurrence was going public,” Hewitt said, “so he killed them both.”

“Too drastic,” she said. “It’s got to be something else. When I asked why he hit her, Fred said, ‘Because I wanted her to leave. Now it’s too late.’”

“Too late for what?” Hewitt asked.

She shrugged. “Killing her doesn’t make sense. I keep replaying it in my mind. It just doesn’t fit. Why say he’s sorry right before shooting her? That’s like saying he didn’t want to kill her but had to. That doesn’t jive with a domestic dispute that turns into a murder. It’s as if the two were unrelated.”

“Seems to me like the violence escalated and he killed her,” Hewitt said. “Simple as that.”

She looked away. She and Sherry had played in the woods surrounding the farm one winter day and returned for Marie’s homemade hot chocolate. That afternoon Fred St. Pierre had come to seven-year-old Sherry’s room and scolded his daughter in front of Peyton. Sherry had forgotten to water the living room plants, and Fred pointed a thick finger at her, his face red, and told her, “How dare you, eh? You appreciate nothing.” Then he called Peyton’s mother and said it was time for her to go home. Sherry had stood at the front door with tears in her eyes that day as she waved goodbye. Peyton, for her part, had never forgotten the humiliation on Sherry’s face.

“Look into the passports and nine hundred dollars,” he said. “We’ve got more than a grand in cash, two passports, a lab on the border with a murder victim inside, and now a murder-suicide.”

“There isn’t a lot coming together on Simon Pink. But one former employer mentioned a chemistry background.”

“That might play well with your crank-cook theory.”

“It might. I’m going to chase that down. He seemed to have been conservative and outspoken.”

“A conservative crank cook?” he said.

“Takes all kinds. Any word from the fire marshal?”

“Gasoline and matches.”

“That’ll do it,” she said. “So arson led to the explosion?”

“That’s now the working theory. Could have torched the cabin for the insurance money.”

“They built that cabin themselves. And these were simple farm people, Mike. Marie was on local boards, something of a community leader.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Can we have someone look at their financials?”

“I already put Mitchell Cosgrove on it.”

Cosgrove had been a CPA before becoming an agent.

“To be clear,” Hewitt said, “I don’t want you going off on your own if ICE or HSI shows up and trumps you.”

When she’d begun her career, there had been a total of ten thousand Border Patrol agents and the US Border Patrol had its own investigative arm, the Anti-Smuggling Unit (ASU). Now, within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there were subsidiaries—among them Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit. ICE had been created in 2003 and absorbed all of the investigative duties of what had been US Immigration Investigations, US Customs Investigations, and US Border Patrol’s Anti-Smuggling units, making ICE the investigations arm of the Department of Homeland Security. And within ICE, which now totaled twenty thousand agents, there was an international offshoot, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), featuring 6,700 special agents working 200 US cities and 47 countries, using undercover and plainclothes agents to focus on human and goods trafficking into and out of the US. Peyton mostly approved of the increased awareness, but she hated getting caught up in the alphabet soup.

“Think ICE and HSI will be here?”

“That cabin is near the border,” he said. “If someone’s smuggling meth into Canada, HSI might very well want to be involved. You may be asked to desist.”

“No problem,” she said.

He looked at her, his brows rising.

“Are you saying I’m stubborn, Mike?”

“Meeting adjourned,” he said.