“Splash some of this on your face.”
Pell cupped his hands under the spout and splashed the water on his face.
“This’ll only last for a week or so,” Chris said. “Drying out’s tough.”
Pell wiped his hands on his pants and said, “I hope you’re right.”
Chris didn’t have the heart to tell him that it would get much worse before it started to get better, and would most certainly take longer than a week – probably more like a month. They stared at the mountain in silence for a minute before Chris said, “I was thinking about that report that we got last night and I think I might have come up with something.”
Some color had returned to Pell’s face, his eyes clearer as he said, “What’s that?”
“The last paragraph about Ngamy. I think it makes perfect sense that they would pick a place like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. If they were going to test this virus out, what better place to do it? It’s pure speculation, but there’s probably no organized medical infrastructure there to piece this sort of thing together. I bet there is a population there that could be one big laboratory – a human guinea pig farm.”
The thoughts hadn’t been completely organized in Chris’ mind, but as he spoke, it all came together. The more he heard himself talk, the better it sounded.
Pell stared off in the distance. A last drop of water fell from his chin and he idly traced his jaw with his thumb and forefinger. His head nodded in time to his caress.
“It sounds kind of far-fetched. I mean, it’s possible, but like you said, it’s all speculation.”
“Maybe so,” Chris replied. “It’s going to be difficult to check out without having someone in the area verify it for us. With it being overseas it’s going to be out of the FBI’s jurisdiction.”
“Not necessarily,” Pell said. “We do actually operate outside of the US. We have Legal Attachés attached to most US embassies doing training and information gathering. They get involved in investigating crimes and terror threats in the country as well. I have no idea if we have anyone in that area of Africa but we can check. Let me think about it for a bit. Let’s get going.”
They rode in silence for the next hour until Chris said, “We’re coming up on the Wild Bear lodge.”
They came around a turn in the road, and Pell slowed the car down. All that was left of the Wild Bear was a burnt-out shell of the building.
“What the…?” Pell said as he whipped the car into the driveway.
“Jesus Christ. Did they say anything about this to you on the phone this morning?” Chris asked as he stared at what was left of the building that was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. He had been in there just two short days ago.
“Not a thing.”
“It’s for real.”
“Yeah,” Pell said quietly as he backed out of the driveway, and sped down the road.
Fifteen minutes later they turned off Route eleven and wound down some dirt roads until they came to their second fire scene of the day. A couple of state troopers’ vehicles, a game warden’s pickup and a hearse sat in the middle of the driveway.
As they stopped the car and got out, a tall state cop came over to meet them.
“Agent Pelletier?” He asked.
“Yes,” Pell said as they shook hands.
“I’m Detective Martin,” he said and turned to Chris. “And you are?”
“Chris Foster.”
“You with the FBI too?” Detective Martin asked.
“No he’s not but he’s good though. He’s with me and I can vouch for him. So what have you got here?” Pell asked.
“Like I told you this morning on the phone, it would appear that we’ve got a dead officer, Bert Nadeau. The only reason I even called you was because Peter Clemens, the commander up in Houlton, suggested that I do it.”
“Appreciate it,” Pell replied. “So what do we have? Can we look around?”
“This whole place is a crime scene now,” the detective cautioned. I can show you around but we are still waiting for the crime scene investigators and forensics team so I will need to ask you to respect that.”
They walked over to the closest burnt-out building – a charred foundation, heaps of ash and not much else.
“Is the other building in the same shape?” Pell asked studying the scene.
“Yes. There’s nothing left of it either. Must have been some sort of a chemical fire – something real hot. We’ve got a technician from the crime lab in Augusta flying up this afternoon to do some testing. Whoever set this knew how to make one hot fire.”
Pell nodded.
He walked out onto the slab foundation to where the middle of the room would have been and cleaned off a small section of concrete with his shoe. He pulled out his pistol. Aiming it at an angle away from himself and into the woods, he fired a bullet at the slab.
“What the hell are you doing?” The detective asked. “This is a crime scene. You can’t be doing this.”
Pell glanced at him briefly as he bent down and touched the concrete around where his bullet had hit. Chris walked over to him and stared at it. The bullet had created concentric rings in the cement, and Pell’s hand running over the surface caused it to crumble as if it were just packed-down sand.
“This was one hot fire all right,” Pell said as he stood up. “A couple of thousand degrees at least; definitely not an accident. How’d you guys find this?”
“A ranger in a fire tower down in Baxter State Park saw it. He said it went up around three-thirty this morning. Only burned for half an hour though. He sent someone down to investigate, and they found this mess and that state police vehicle.” He pointed to a cop car across the lawn. “And Bert Nadeau is no place to be found.”
“So you think he was in one of these buildings?” Chris asked.
The detective nodded.
“Why do you think that?” Pell asked him.
“I can’t prove it, but he was working on a double homicide that happened day before yesterday. Someone blew up the Wild Bear lodge. Killed the owner and his wife.”
Chris shot Pell a glance.
Detective Martin continued, “I think in the course of his investigation he somehow ended up down here, and then this place gets torched just like the Wild Bear and Bert is nowhere to be found.”
“You’re telling me that there was a double murder here this week, too?” Pell asked. “How do you know that the fire at the Wild Bear wasn’t an accident? What makes you think it was murder?”
The lanky Detective’s face flushed and his pitch rose up a notch. “I know it was a murder because there was residue from plastic explosives at the scene. Someone used some kick-ass explosives – C4 to be exact – to blow Annie and Stu into little itty-bitty pieces, and now we’ve most likely got another homicide, of a state trooper no less, on our hands right here.”
“It looks like you’ve been doing a thorough investigation,” Pell said. “Do you know who owned this property?”
“We’re trying to get that information now. It could take a while.”
“Why’s that?”
“This is Great Northern land. Look around, and for as far as you can see in any direction, the land is all owned by a consortium of timber companies. They let people lease plots from them, and figuring out who is leasing what can be a big pain in the ass – people sell their leases or die. Christ, I’ve even seen people lose them in card games. It’s a big mess”
“You’ve got people working on that now?” Pell asked.
The detective nodded.
As Chris listened to their conversation, he swept his foot through the fine ashes on the floor. Something ground under his shoe. He bent down and picked it up. After cleaning it off, to his disgust, he saw that it was a human tooth – charred but undeniably a tooth.