Four of a Kind Read online

  This got a small round of grim laughter from several other firefighters.

  John slammed his hand down on the table hard enough to make half a dozen firefighters jump in their seats, and it’s not easy to startle firefighters. “That’s enough of that,” he said loudly. “Like it or not Bobby Dawkins is the Sheriff in this town and it’s up to him to figure out what happened to that poor girl.”

  “If he can,” Tom Schmitt blurted out.

  That earned him a black look from John. Tom shrank a little in his seat.

  “And it’s up to us,” John continued as if without interruption, “to give him whatever help we can. Is that understood?”

  There were some sullen noises and a few weak “Yeahs.”

  “I said, is that understood?” John repeated firmly.

  This earned him a few more “Yeahs,” perhaps with just a smidge more enthusiasm.

  Not the response he had been hoping for, John looked like he was going to say something else, but at that moment the Sheriff entered.

  Bobby Dawkins held a thick stack of papers in one hand as he strode into the room, every eye upon him. It took several seconds for him to reach John’s side and during that time no one uttered a single sound.

  I felt a harsh tension in that silence, a volatile mix of barely contained anger and frustration radiating from the other firefighters. It made no sense to me. What made them think the Sheriff was so incompetent? I was a relative newcomer to the town, so they must have known something about him that I didn’t. But what?

  I had never before seen the Sheriff in person, and was shocked by how large he was. John was about my height, a little over six feet, but he was a half a head shorter than Bobby Dawkins who must have been six-six or a taller. Max looked like a small, chubby boy compared to him. And it wasn’t just that he was tall, but he was huge, with a bull neck and heavy shoulders and a broad chest, and thighs that strained the fabric of his uniform pants. He looked to be about twice as wide as John who was no string bean himself.

  The Sheriff stepped into the space at the front and center of the room that John vacated for him. “I have the written witness statements from those of you who were at the fire last night,” he raised the hand which held a thick sheaf of papers then let it fall to his side again. “I’d like to talk individually to some of the firefighters, especially those who were first on the scene, and go over your statements with you. If you have any details you didn’t write down because you didn’t remember them or thought they weren’t important, I’d like to hear about them. Any questions?”

  No one had any, or at least none they chose to ask.

  “I’d like to start with the officer of the first truck.”

  “That would be me,” Russell Burtran raised his hand from where he sat slouched in a chair near the back of the room.

  “Come with me, please. For the rest of you, I realize you have other places to be so I’ll try and get through this as quickly as possible.” He and Russell left the meeting room.

  That unsteady silence continued for some time after they had left, but quietly whispered comments grew and spread until the buzz of conversation again filled the room.

  “Oh man, oh man, oh man,” Paul breathed as he rocked in his seat.

  “Relax, Paul, it’s going to be alright,” I said, finding that it sounded only slightly less asinine the second time I said it.

  “But what do I say to him?”

  “We’re witnesses, not suspects. Just tell him what you saw.”

  A pretty easy task really, because what I had seen was going to stay with me for a very long time.

  Three

  Three hours later I was still sitting there, literally the last person waiting to be interviewed. I had been on the first truck and had found the woman in the house, so why hadn’t I been among the earliest? I didn’t know.

  The only other person in the meeting room with me was John. He had been interviewed hours ago, but probably felt that it was his duty to be the last one to go home. We sat at a table together, me slouched back in a chair with my arms folded across my chest and John leaning forward with his elbows on the table, desultorily staring into a Styrofoam cup with a half inch of lukewarm coffee dregs in the bottom that he was swirling around.

  I felt like a clock with its spring wound too tight. Inside my guts were thrumming, and yet at the same time I also felt spent, as if just holding up half a conversation was almost more than I could handle.

  “Do you know how the town of Dunboro was founded?” John asked me, or perhaps his coffee cup, out of nowhere.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but threw him a shrug anyway.

  “It was a mistake.”

  “What?” I replied, my ragged mind trying to pull together bits of what he was saying.

  “Some land grant cartographer missed when the lines were drawn for Brookline and Milford, New Hampshire. There was a gap between their borders, and in 1745 the Fifth Earl of somewhere or other noticed it and claimed it as his own. He named it Dunboro after his favorite polo pony.”

  A part of me had always wondered how a town as small as Dunboro had been founded, though admittedly not enough to actually look it up. It’s a little less than six square miles and as of the last census had 937 residents. Were this the movie Arthur, Dudley Moore would likely make a joke about having the whole place carpeted. In 1770 a similarly-sized town named Monson had been divvied up among its neighbors, but somehow Dunboro had endured.

  Likewise our fire department is small, I thought as I looked around at the empty chairs that had held our twenty-eight members. Our police department is even smaller: the Sheriff, two patrolmen, and a secretary.

  “What the guys were saying about the Sheriff earlier, the Barney Fife cracks. What’s that about?” I asked John.

  He didn’t answer me at first, staring into the cup he held as if it contained great secrets, then he sighed heavily. “I knew Bobby Dawkins as a kid. He grew up here in Dunboro. Some of the younger guys on the department went to school with him. Give him a football and he could break a defensive line easier than a farmer plowing a furrow in a field, but no one ever accused Bobby Dawkins of being the sharpest tool in the shed. Do you know how he was elected Sheriff?”

  I shook my head.

  “His uncle, also named Bobby Dawkins, had been the Sheriff for about forty years. A good man, a solid cop. The year he retired Bobby squeaked through UNH with a criminology degree; his family planned it that way. He ran his election using his uncle’s campaign posters, and it was entirely possible many voters didn’t even realize they were not voting for his uncle.”

  Small town politicking at its best and exactly the kind of thing that makes people from the city label us as bumpkins. Still, the man deserved the benefit of the doubt. “That doesn’t mean he’s not a good Sheriff,” I commented.

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed, “and for a town like Dunboro he really is a pretty good Sheriff for most of what we need. He’s affable, fair, and simply too big to fuck with. I’ve seen him stop a drunken brawl just by walking into the room. You need someone to write a speeding ticket or deal with some vandals, he’s your man. But a murder?” He frowned.

  “How many has he solved?”

  John gave a hollow laugh. “How many has he had to solve? None. Just like his uncle before him. I can’t think of a single murder that has happened in this town in my entire lifetime, and I asked my dad and he couldn’t either.”

  Ernest Pederson was the second oldest person in town, nearly ninety-seven years old. I wondered if a town that had gone almost one hundred years without a murder was some kind of record.

  “But he’ll have help solving it, right?” I asked.

  “From who?” John replied with a question of his own.

  My hometown was in the wilds of northern New Hampshire, a town so small that it had had no police force of its own whatsoever. My recollection was that it had worked some kind of deal with the Staties for coverage. I had no ide
a how small town police departments worked, but I had to believe that there was some mechanism either at the county or state level that would prevent an inexperienced Sheriff from bungling a murder investigation. “From the arson guys,” I ventured.

  “They’ll investigate the fire, but they don’t solve murders, not unless how the fire was started leads them to it.”

  “What about the State Police then?”

  “Dawkins can call them in, but he’s trying to fill his uncle’s shoes. Calling in the State boys would be the same thing as admitting he can’t solve it on his own.”

  “Which you don’t think he can,” I interrupted

  John closed his mouth and looked away, the muscles of his jaw working. When he continued there was tension in his voice. He wasn’t any happier about this than I was. “What I think doesn’t matter. The case is his and his alone until he calls for help.”

  He placed his hand on my arm. For an old-time New Englander like the Chief, and a guy who wasn’t touchy feely, that modest contact meant a great deal. “Look, Jack, this one has gotten under your skin. I can see that. And Lord knows someone should pay for what happened to that poor girl. But Bobby Dawkins,” he shook his head sadly. “You did everything you could in that fire. You found her fast and you tried to get her out. I don’t want you thinking for an instant that there was anything you or any of us could have done better. You did what you were supposed to do. What happens next is not our job.”

  I was surprised by a momentary flush of anger that surged through me at the thought that the person responsible for her death would never be caught. Then it passed, leaving a raw ache in its place.

  John lifted his hand from my arm and slowly leaned back in his chair, his eyes watching me steadily as if he sensed I might be about to do something crazy.

  The Sheriff came into the meeting room. “Jeff,” the Sheriff said.

  “Jack,” I corrected him.

  “Jack,” he checked the papers in his hand to see if somehow I had been wrong about my own name, “You’re next.” He turned and left.

  I glanced at John as if there was more to our conversation hanging in the air. He looked at me with concern and said quietly, “I’ve heard people in this town say that Dawkins is as much a mistake as Dunboro was when they founded it. Even though they might be right, you’ll be better off if you just let this go.”

  Four

  John had loaned the Sheriff his office to conduct the interviews. Bobby Dawkins opened the door and ushered me inside. As I stood next to him in the small room, I had a Jack and the Beanstalk meets the giant moment, but he had a wide, kind face and calm, hazel eyes which belied his imposing physical size. The hand that swallowed mine whole was rough, but the handshake squeeze was gentle as if he had learned long ago to gauge his strength to keep from hurting people. I looked down at his feet and wondered if some company actually stocked work shoes in his size, or if he had to get them custom made.

  He took the Chief’s chair and gestured with a hand that was full of papers to the other chair in the office, so I closed the door behind me and sat down. Placing the stack of papers on his lap, he fumbled with them for a moment and then pulled a blank pad from the bottom of the pile and placed it on top.

  “I’ve read your written statement,” he began, referring to the incident report I had completed upon returning to the station last night, “but I’d like to hear about it again now that you’ve had a chance to sleep on it, see if anything else may have occurred to you since the report.”

  So I told him.

  First bolt cutters had been used to try and free the woman from the bed. While they made quick work of the chain on her ankles, the hardened steel of the handcuffs proved beyond them. A paramedic came in, moving awkwardly in the unfamiliar fire gear he had borrowed from someone outside, and began to administer CPR to the woman while she remained chained to the bed.

  It was like a nightmare; the sounds of the fire, the noises of the crew fighting it, the cursing of the EMT and the rapid shush and click of his breathing regulator as he gave CPR. At some point a vent fan was set up and the smoke slowly dissipated which if anything increased the eeriness of the scene as the thinning smoke, like some kind of cursed fog, first obscured and then gradually revealed dark, shadowy figures moving about.

  The thing I remember, the thing I first saw clearly as the smoke dissipated, the thing that is going to stay with me for a long, long time, was the sight of her hands. They hung limply from the handcuffs as if in resignation, the skin coated with soot making them a far darker grey than the usual color of death. She had struggled, the metal bracelets tearing into her wrists, rivulets of dried blood streaking her forearms and dotting the pillow around her head. Her right thumb was broken badly at the joint where it joined the hand, and it canted off at a crazy angle.

  Someone brought in a chain saw, and I first thought, sickly, that her hands would be severed to free her. The headboard slats were cut, and the woman was carried out on a stretcher with the handcuffs still on her wrists.

  Additional crews arrived to continue to search the house.

  Initially we had believed that we were looking at some kind of sex scene, and no one was thinking murder; at least I know I wasn’t. We had expected to find another person, her lover, somewhere in the house. That might sound odd to someone who has never been in the fire service, but after you’ve been called in to help free a four hundred pound man in a pink leotard who has gotten his head stuck in an old-style brass and glass diving helmet, which had happened to me just three weeks after I had joined the department, you become less surprised at what goes on inside your neighbors’ houses.

  When the search was completed we determined she was alone. The apparent origin of the fire, the living room, was far away from the action in the bedroom. The mood changed as we realized this was likely no innocent sex act.

  I had run down to the truck and retrieved the digital camera from the glove box of Engine 2 and taken pictures of everything – the living room, the bed, the chain wrapped on the footboard, the padlock used to secure it, the orderly pile of her clothing on the floor of the bathroom. There was a folder of prints in the stack on the Sheriff’s knees; I could see the edge of the photographs from where I was sitting.

  While I spoke Bobby listened, but took no notes. That wasn’t surprising as my witness statement had covered three pages, on both sides, in small, dense print.

  Once the fire was out and the woman was in the ambulance, that was it. We packed up our gear and headed back to the station.

  When I came to the end he asked, “Did you see any other cars there that night?”

  “Just the blue Nissan. That was hers, right?”

  He nodded. “And no other people?”

  “Firefighters. And later some neighbors showed up at the end of the driveway. And the police. And as we left a news van was setting up; I think it was Channel 9. But no, nobody particularly suspicious if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  He jotted something on the corner of the pad, but instead of trying to read it I hung my head and closed my hot, grainy eyes. A vision of her hands floated in front of me and I felt somehow close to exploding, as though I just wanted to sweep all the shit off the Chief’s desk and tear the posters off the walls and rip the books from the shelves. Infused with a righteous fury, I knew that if the person responsible were in front of me I would have gotten violent. The power of the sensation, the hair-triggeredness of it, was frightening.

  Bobby’s voice came to me as though from a very great distance. “Notice anything unusual at all?”

  Unbidden that anger flashed to the surface. My head snapped up and my voice climbed in volume, very nearly to a shout. “Unusual? You mean besides a woman chained to a bed?” The Sheriff merely blinked at me. I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to envision the stress inside me as some kind of toxic black smoke I could just exhale and expel from my body.

  I felt a razor’s edge of control return and lowered my vo
ice. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I’ve been through Homeland Security training: be observant, the criminal sometime likes to watch so look for him thing. Honestly, I’m completely vapor locked. All I can think about is her hands, when the smoke started to clear and I could see her hands-” I choked a little and swallowed, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes until splotches of color burst behind the lids. “I suspect when I start sleeping again at night, and I’m not sure when that’s going to happen, I’m going to dream about it.”

  “I’m sure you did everything you could,” he said softly.

  I let my hands drop and felt my mouth form into a twisted smile. “The Chief said the exact same thing to me not five minutes ago. It doesn’t change how I feel, though. How does a person chain someone to a bed like that to suffocate on smoke?”

  “Not that it makes it any better, but what makes you think the smoke was supposed to kill her and not the fire?”

  “It’s . . .” I began, but at that moment I remembered and understood the fire guttering on the living room rug and the residue on my mask. “Just a second,” I got up, opened the door, and bolted from the room. I returned with the bag containing the damaged mask and handed it to him.

  He looked at it through the plastic. “A respirator mask?”

  “That’s the one I was wearing that night. I tried to clean it today and there was something on the faceplate which wouldn’t come off.”

  He opened the bag and took out the mask. He sniffed at the residue and dug at it with his fingernail. “What is it?”

  “The rug in the living room was saturated with heating oil or diesel fuel, something like that, and it was set on fire. When I came through the door and hit the fire with the hose, the backwash of steam carried droplets of it which stuck to my mask.”

  “So the fire was started using diesel fuel?”

  I shook my head, “Diesel fuel doesn’t burn like that. Neither does home heating oil. Both have to be atomized to become flammable.”

  “Then why pour it on the carpet?”