Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (13 page)

Warden Investigator Bilodeau made his presence known again. He had a habit of slithering out of sight for minutes at a time and reemerging only when you’d forgotten about him. “He is a convicted poacher, and he knows the combination to the gates,” he said in his papery whisper. “You said he touched at least one of the casings, as if to deliberately leave his prints on it. That suggests he was worried about being linked to the shells and was looking to have an explanation.”

“I think he was just being careless,” I said. “Billy’s like that.”

“We have testimony from Morse’s other employees that Cronk regularly complains about his job,” said Bilodeau. “And his eagerness to focus attention away from himself and onto Khristian might be considered suspicious.”

“You’re drawing the wrong conclusions,” I said. “Billy is desperate to keep his job. He’s worried that Morse will fire him for negligence.”

“He can stop worrying,” said Rivard.

My heart dropped down around my liver. “She fired him?”

“I suggested it was unwise to keep him around under a cloud of suspicion.”

“There was no reason for you to do that, Lieutenant,” I said.

The crowd parted as the L.T. moved toward me. “What did you just say?”

“Billy Cronk’s a good guy.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“Yes, sir. It is.”

The room itself was already sweltering, with all the bodies packed inside, and now the temperature had seemingly risen ten degrees higher. “I want names,” barked the lieutenant. “Who else is on our shit list? Who else do we know with a beef against Elizabeth Morse? I’ve asked McQuarrie to cross-check our MOSES database against the people who wrote letters to the newspapers complaining about her national park. Later today, I’m meeting with Zanadakis of the Maine State Police. He’s investigating the death threats she has received.”

Beside me, Charley cleared his throat. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Stevens,” said Rivard. “I didn’t see you there in the back. How nice of you to join us this morning.”

My pilot friend offered a friendly smile. “I figured you might need my airplane to look for other kill sites and such.”

“We have our own pilot,” the lieutenant said.

“Yes, sir. But their salaries and gas money come out of the division budget. I’m just an unpaid old geezer who’s happy to help.”

Mack leaned close to Rivard and said something into his ear. “All right,” said the lieutenant to the old pilot. “Talk to Sergeant McQuarrie and me after the meeting, and we’ll discuss it.”

I raised my hand. “I’d like to volunteer to go up with Charley, Lieutenant.”

“That’s good of you to volunteer, Bowditch,” said Rivard. “But we have something else we’d like you to work on today.”

14

The sun burned through my windshield as if through a magnifying glass and made the steering wheel too hot to touch. I tried flipping down the visor, but it did no good. When I rolled down the windows to let cooler air inside, a logging truck rumbled past, and the cab filled with choking dust. I didn’t have enough gas to run the air conditioning all morning and afternoon while I waited for hunters to appear.

Rivard had stationed me at a checkpoint on a private logging road still owned by the Skillen family, in the heavily cut timber to the northeast of Morse’s vast property. My assignment was to inspect rifles and collect bullets. The hope was that the men who’d killed the moose were still skulking around in the backwoods. Maybe they were camped somewhere on the nearby Public Reserved Lands, or maybe they were locals who spent their Saturdays prowling the forest, taking potshots at squirrels. I did a quick calculation and factored the odds of the shooters actually appearing at my checkpoint as somewhere less than zero. Whenever a vehicle approached (which was seldom), I was tempted to cry out, “Halt! Who goes there?”

The first vehicle I stopped held a party of upland bird hunters being led by a guide I knew from Weatherby’s Sporting Lodge in Grand Lake Stream. Jeff Jordan was an athletic, middle-aged guy driving a rugged white SUV. His passengers—two men and a woman—were dressed in khaki and orange clothing. A Brittany spaniel was riding in a dog crate in the back of the vehicle.

The guide rolled down the window as I approached. “What’s going on, Mike?”

“Hey, Jeff,” I said. “Had any luck this morning?”

He had a copper-wire beard and was wearing a blaze orange ball cap. “We’re just heading out.”

“How’s the season been for you so far?”

“Better than last year. The birds like this warm weather.”

“What’s going on here?” asked the man in the passenger seat. He was an older gentleman with a thick head of silver hair. He was wearing yellow shooting glasses, which disguised his identity. It took me a moment to realize that he was Merritt Skillen, the father of Stacey’s fiancé and the owner of the local lumber mill.

I addressed Jeff Jordan. “I don’t suppose you or your passengers have a twenty-two in the vehicle.”

“Who shoots woodcock with a twenty-two?” asked the man in the backseat. He had heavy thighs and a thick Texas accent, and was seated beside a handsome older woman with frosted hair.

“I’ve got a twenty-two pistol in the glove compartment,” said Jordan.

“I know this might sound strange,” I said, “but would you mind giving me one of your bullets?”

Merritt Skillen lowered his voice. It was an impressive baritone that matched his aristocratic demeanor. “I’d like to know what this is about, Warden.”

Jordan studied my deadpan expression. “This has something to do with those moose shootings, doesn’t it?”

“What moose shootings?” asked the wife in a twangy accent. She leaned between the front seat, so I could see her heavily made-up face.

I ignored her. “We’re collecting twenty-two rounds, looking for a match. It’s nothing personal.”

Jordan chewed on his lower lip for a while. Then he reached across Merritt’s broad chest and opened the glove compartment. He ejected the magazine of a .22 Ruger and handed it to me so I could remove a cartridge. “Be my guest.”

I put on a pair of latex gloves from the case on my belt. “Thanks.”

“I’m doing this because I appreciate your honesty,” he said, “but I kind of resent the request.”

I kept my mouth shut and thumbed a cartridge from the magazine and tucked it into my shirt pocket, being careful not to smear whatever fingerprints might be on the brass. The forensics lab would dust it and then fire it into a synthetic target so they could compare the lead to the bullets we had dug out of the bodies of the moose.

“Whatever in the world is this about?” asked the wife.

“We’re investigating a wildlife crime in the area,” I said.

“Well, that’s no explanation at all!”

“You’re not being particularly courteous, Warden,” said Merritt Skillen.

“I apologize for the inconvenience, Mr. Skillen. As I said, we’re checking every vehicle that comes through here.”

The old man turned in his seat to address the couple behind him. I wondered if they were friends or business associates of his from down south. “I’ve never been stopped like this in all my years living in this area.”

“So everyone around here with a gun is a suspect?” asked Jeff Jordan as I handed him back his pistol magazine.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, but the words felt like a lie when I heard them aloud. “If you’re after woodcock, there’s an alder thicket about two miles south of here where I flushed a bunch of birds last week. You’ll see the covert after you cross that new bridge over Sandy Stream.” I tapped the brim of my black hat. “Good luck on your hunt, folks. Nice seeing you, Jeff, and thanks again.”

I watched them drive off, trailing a glittery cloud of dust behind their wheels.

Jeff Jordan was one of the most ethical outdoorsmen I knew. Now his name would be added to Rivard’s “shit list” merely because he owned a .22 and had been good enough to give me a bullet. The interchange had left me feeling vaguely sick to my stomach. I debated tossing the bullet into the weeds but decided against it.

My BlackBerry chimed as I returned to my truck. It was yet another bizarre e-mail from my mom:

“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.”

—François de La Rochefoucauld

I was certain that my mother had no clue who François de La Rochefoucauld even was. What the hell was going on with her?

It was then that I remembered my stepfather’s voice mail from the night before. Neil Turner and I had never been particularly close. He was a careful, emotionally reserved man: a rare specimen of WASP that seemed to have gone extinct everywhere during the 1960s except at select yachting clubs, upscale boarding schools, and certain northeastern Episcopal congregations. My hero worship of my estranged father hadn’t made it any easier for us to create a bond during my teenage years, and once I’d gone away to college at Colby, Neil had given up trying. But I had come to see my stepfather as a fundamentally decent man who deserved some sort of medal for bringing my perpetually unsatisfied mother as much happiness as he could.

I didn’t want to call him now, not when a pickup full of hunters might come roaring past at any moment, but these weird messages from my mom, coupled with Neil’s out-of-the-blue voice mail, were beginning to make me worry.

*   *   *

By the end of the afternoon, I had collected exactly three more .22 cartridges and been told to go to hell twice.

The day wasn’t a total loss: I had written up a summons for a hunter who had too many woodcock in his possession and another to a kid who had mistaken a protected spruce grouse for the more common ruffed grouse. When I told him the fine for shooting a “fool hen” was five hundred dollars, he looked like he might drive off a bridge. Part of me wanted to confiscate the bird and let him off with a warning, but I had resolved to begin living my life according to the Warden Service manual. And so I wrote the kid up.

Out of boredom, I phoned McQuarrie, and he informed me that Charley Stevens had located another kill site, a cow moose shot to death along the southern edge of Morse’s property. The animal had been found a hundred yards from the road, hidden behind a swale of young birches and poplars. Like moose A, it had staggered into the underbrush before the blood had drained from its enormous heart. Wardens were on the scene now, examining it for evidence.

“How are things going?” Mack asked.

“The shooters haven’t come by yet, but I’m sure they will any second.”

My sergeant took a moment to respond. “It might not feel this way, kid, but you’re earning points here. Every hour you spend eating shit counts in your favor with the brass. The L.T. needs to know he can trust you to do your job.”

“I’ve done my job for two years,” I said. “You know my conviction rate, Mack. None of those guys Rivard has working the case has a better one.”

“Yeah, but you also have this … reputation. Look, I can see that you’re trying here. You might be a smarty-pants college boy, but I know you’ve got some grit in you. Let me keep working on the L.T. He’ll come around eventually. Why don’t you head down to the HQ and turn in the bullets you collected?”

The dashboard clock came on as I started the engine. I had lost nearly ten hours of my life manning that checkpoint. The realization made me gun my engine as I headed toward the village of Grand Lake Stream. I didn’t care about the rocks banging against my truck’s undercarriage or the damage inflicted to my already-worn shock absorbers. All I wanted was to beat the long shadows that signaled the end of another day in the woods.

Grand Lake Stream was a village of sporting camps and tidy little houses built along a swift-flowing river of the same name. The stream was famous for its landlocked salmon, which dropped down out of West Grand Lake in the autumn when it came time to spawn. Ted Williams had fished the Hatchery Pool, and so had Dwight Eisenhower. Their photographs hung in places of honor on the wooden walls of Weatherby’s beside taxidermied fish—salmon, trout, and bass—so fantastically huge, it was hard to believe they were real.

I crossed the bridge over the stream and saw a crowd of fly anglers upstream at the Dam Pool. Combat fishing had never been my thing, so I tended to avoid the river during its more popular months, but I never crossed that bridge without feeling a desperate desire to pull on the waders and cast a Black Ghost out into the current.

The store at the crossroads constituted the beginning and end of the village’s commercial district. It served the multiple roles of pizzeria, fly tackle shop, hardware store, gas pump, tagging station, and gossip hub. If you wanted to know what was going on anywhere in the woods of northern Washington County, it paid to shoot the shit at the Pine Tree Store.

I gassed up my vehicle and then went inside to order a meatball sandwich. The blonde behind the counter tried to pull some information out of me concerning the moose shootings—the massacre was the talk of the town—but I refused to bite. I politely paid for my dinner and headed back outside to the parking lot, feeling proud of my professional restraint (I had a tendency to blab too much to blondes), only to find a very fat man leaning against the door of my truck.

He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. His face was like a ball of bread dough before it has been rolled flat. Tiny gray eyes were pressed into the soft flesh, and a wispy red goatee decorated the topmost of several chins. The beard was the same color as his long hair. The big man had hitched his size fifty-something jeans halfway up his enormous belly with the help of suspenders, and he wore a faded black T-shirt over B-cup breasts. The shirt bore the words
PASSAMAQUODDY INDIAN DAYS 2011
, framed by two eagle feathers.

“You’ve got to help me, Mike!” said Chubby LeClair in a huffy, heavy-breathing voice I recognized from his frequent phone calls. “They think I killed them moose.”

“Did you?”

“Heck no! My people believe moose are, like, sacred omens. The elders say that if you dream of a moose, you’ll live a long time.”

“The Passamaquoddy tribal manager says you’re not a real Indian.”

“He can’t see into my heart. The blood flowing through my veins is totally
wolamewiw.
It’s authentic, man, one hundred percent.”