Maine Crime Writers

Arlo Topp knew that folks called him Muffin behind his back, but couldn’t care less. It fit in with the persona he’d cultivated for more than thirty-five years, twenty-five of them as a special investigative agent for the FBI. His clear Ben Franklin spectacles, the occasional use of a corn cob pipe, and his penchant for wearing cords and a faded flannel shirt, had lulled many a soul into thinking he was dumber than dirt. He was anything but.

After his retirement from federal law enforcement, he’d moved to Maine, having found he liked the people and their tendency to accept him at face value when he’d been assigned temporarily to the Bangor office. His camp, as the locals called it, was a fairly new ranch on ten acres overlooking one of the rivers flowing through western Maine. It gave him privacy, great fishing, and still allowed for high speed internet, something he required for his second career.

After getting settled, Arlo had out a discrete word through Maine law enforcement channels that he was available as a professional consultant. It wasn’t long before that feeler brought an inquiry from a small police department in Washington County. His successful solution of the case soon led to more business than he could comfortably handle. Arlo had to make a decision. Ultimately, he chose to take cases on the following basis; how interesting or challenging they were, and whether their location was somewhere he had yet to visit in the state. His secret goal was to solve at least one crime in every county and then write a book inspired by the actual crimes.

He was finally at that point, having just wrapped up a case in Sagadahoc County. Now he just needed to decide which sixteen were the most interesting.

Arlo decided to select cases in alphabetical order by county. The Androscoggin Arsonist certainly fit the bill. Twenty-three fires were set before desperate law enforcement officials brought him on board. At first, he was as puzzled as they were, until he followed one of his famous hunches. It led him to a right-wing chat group where he found mention of every single building that had been torched. Once he began monitoring the chatter, it wasn’t long before his fellow officers, at his suggestion, nabbed the suspect when he attempted to torch one of the buildings mentioned in the online chatter.

After his solution of the Aroostook bank robbery caper, Arlo made himself a promise, only accept cases north of Lincoln in the months between May and October. A week of staking out banks in twenty below weather made that decision easy. That the poor soul who had been responsible for a dozen bank heists, only to bury the money in his late mother’s grave, had believed she’d need it now that she couldn’t collect Social Security, still had him shaking his head every time temperatures dropped.

Of course there has to be at least one alliterative crime, and it happened in Cumberland County. Even more interesting was the perpetrator, one Arlo couldn’t arrest, even while solving the crime. Everyone in southern Maine law enforcement still refers to it as the Cumberland Crab Caper. It started when local seafood dealers reported small, then larger numbers of Maine crabs vanishing from holding tanks on the wharves in the Old Port, but it soon spread to smaller dealers in other nearby towns. It wasn’t until Arlo caught the thief on infrared video, that the crime was solved and the very skilled harbor seal, recently escaped from an aquarium in Massachusetts, was captured and returned to the custody of the aquarium’s extremely embarrassed staff.

The Franklin Forger was another unusual case. Forgery generally involves counterfeit bills, wills, or doctored deeds. In this instance, the forged documents were ski passes at the big ski area named after the mountain where it operated. At first Arlo thought the authorities were pulling his leg until he saw how expensive ski passes were. It took some serious good guy, bad guy role playing with a local law officer named Sandy, interrogating several of the college students caught using forged passes, before one of them cracked and implicated an elderly woman in Kingfield. When arrested, she was more amused than upset, telling Arlo, that at least being incarcerated wouldn’t exhaust her pitiful social security check, and she’d get regular meals.

The Hancock Hair Heist came during a very slow time, crimewise. Arlo was dancing on the edge of boredom when the chief of police in one of the coastal towns called to ask for help. Someone was stealing hair, not only from beauty shops, but even going as far as sneaking up behind inebriated patrons of local bars and clipping off long hanks of hair before the startled folks could react. It definitely had to go in the book as the culprit’s motive was quite bizarre, their being obsessed with weaving a weeks worth of hair shirts.

Kennebec’s most memorable caper involved kidnapping, but not people. Puzzled police in the two largest towns turned to Arlo for assistance when the number of ferrets, guinea pigs, and hamsters reported stolen hit a hundred. Arlo solved that one quickly, but not without a twinge of sympathy for the criminal who ran an animal refuge, but couldn’t afford to keep his menagerie fed.

Knox County’s most memorable crime required Arlo to go on stake-out with night vision goggles. Someone was sneaking into prime blueberry fields and high grading berries at night. What made that case memorable was the number of mosquitoes and deer ticks he had to deal with. It made going into the woods almost impossible for months afterward.

The Lincoln land feud seemed pretty straightforward at first. That was until Arlo followed up on local gossip and discovered the real reason two families were fighting over an old cemetery. Why not go to court and have a judge decide was his initial thought, but when he started digging, he couldn’t stop. If what he found was accurate, the two families were not only fighting to own the cemetery, but the ghost of a woman whose mythical inheritance was rumored to be secreted in one of the graves.

Oxford County provided one of the more bizarre drug cases Arlo had ever encountered, and during his FBI years, he thought he’d seen it all. What he found after agreeing to investigate, was a group of organic farmers who’d discovered and then cultivated an exotic strain of bacteria that, when added to maple syrup after it had gone through the evaporation process, made users not only susceptible to suggestion, but mildly addicted to the altered syrup. They had a grand, albeit cockeyed plan to convert large numbers of customers to a vegan diet.

Arlo wished he could forget what happened in Penobscot County, but that wasn’t likely to happen. His ample backside twinged every time he thought about all the miles he’d had to travel over extremely rutted dirt roads on that case. All of it nearly in vain until he picked up a fairly intoxicated fellow who was attempting to hitchhike on one of the more remote logging roads. All Arlo had done, once the fellow, who desperately needed a bath, had gotten into his pick-up, was ask where he was headed and the poor soul began talking, literally giving Arlo the piece of the poaching puzzle he’d been missing, proving that luck and good listening skills, were key to solving some crimes.

Piscataquis County’s most memorable crime involved theft, multiple times of the same item. Even stranger was that the victims were linked by a couple physical characteristics they all shared. All were in their teens, had blonde hair, and generous bottoms. The thief’s target in every instance was their underwear. Since most of the thefts took place in more rural areas (although there really wasn’t much in the county that wasn’t rural), where folks hung their wash on clotheslines to dry, such thievery was easy. It wasn’t until Arlo was on stake-out thanks to another of his hunches, that he got to the bottom of the case when the thief, took a muddy corner way too fast, rolling numerous times and spilling plenty of evidence when the trunk popped open.

Sagadahoc’s lone case involved verbal threats. Arlo was ready to bust things wide open until he discovered that the alleged threats involved two very opinionated women in the same quilting group. He was able to convince the district attorney that telling the perps they could be banned from the group if they didn’t restrain themselves would be sufficient punishment. That, coupled with the humiliation heaped upon them by local lobstermen whenever they showed their faces, was sufficient to get things settled.

The absolute stupidity of two sports from away he’d apprehended in Somerset County, was something that Arlo still chuckled about. However, had the two idiots gone through with their ill conceived plan to stun game fish behind Wyman Dam by tossing in half a dozen sticks of dynamite right above the spillway, it might have turned stupid into tragedy. When the federal agents arrived right after Arlo had conned the pair into thinking they’d bought fake explosives, offering to get them real dynamite if they let him take possession of what they were ready to use, things got tense. Guns were drawn and It wasn’t until Arlo was recognized that tensions ebbed. Had the explosives been used, the aging dam could well have breached, flooding countless homes downstream.

Arlo had to give the fellow he arrested in Waldo County credit. It it wasn’t for the number of fender benders caused by the criminal’s suddenly appearing in a colorful striped costume, looking eerily like a famous character in childrens’ literature, Arlo might have cut him some slack, but the man was so convinced he was the character, he ended up involuntarily committed to a state psychiatric facility., and then everyone could find Waldo easily.

Washington County isn’t exactly a hotbed of technology, so Arlo was intrigued when he was called in to help solve the case of the purloined fir tips. Bough tipping was an important source of seasonal income for many in the county. When tips started disappearing in huge quantities with no sign of human involvement, Arlo had to ponder any unusual possibilities. It wasn’t until he stopped at the county airport on a hunch and discussed a theory with the airport manager that he was able to solve the case. When the fellow mentioned the large number of tiny blips on the airport radar, Arlo put two and two together. After requisitioning a powerful drone from Maine Drug Enforcement, and using it to intercept half a dozen smaller ones outfitted to cut and retrieve fir tips, he was able to track them to a warehouse and put the balsam thieves out of business.

York County didn’t seem like a true part of Maine to Arlo, until he was asked to help solve a real case of street crime in a small town near the New Hampshire border. After the fourth instance of an auto falling into a huge crater in one of the town’s dirt roads, all resulting in injured drivers, he put on his ‘offbeat thinking cap’ as he’d come to call it. Over a hearty breakfast, he asked patrons at the local diner if anyone local had come into money recently. Two days later, he caught Finley Buzzell, a recent lottery winner, drunk as a skunk. He was playing with a new excavator he’d bought with his winnings. A search warrant for his property turned up piles of purloined gravel scattered around his back yard so his kids could race go-carts. “More proof that money without brains is a dangerous combination,” he said to the county sheriff as he watched Finley entering a cell.

“Yup,” was the cop’s response, “kinda like Augusta and Washington, DC.”

Now, good readers, This long blog is a way of asking those who are regular members of MCW whether they think we might want to write a collaborative county mystery collection. Wadda ya think?