The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (13 page)

“Better?” he asked.

I still felt like my knees might buckle. “Yeah.”

“Good, because I need to know what happened here. Give me as much detail as you can.”

Despite the ringing in my skull, I did my best to recount the entire sequence of events. Soctomah took notes the whole time. I told him about my earlier visit to the house, the argument I’d had with Kathy, and then her call to apologize. I told him how Pluto had begun barking and how we’d ended our conversation abruptly. I demonstrated where I’d stopped the Bronco when I’d first seen the dead dog, then pointed out the route I’d taken to seek cover behind the stone wall, showing him exactly where I’d pressed my body into the weeds. After that, we walked toward the house—avoiding the evidence techs at work—and I showed him how I’d entered the hall.

“It seems like you might have surprised the shooter before he could finish the job.” Soctomah glanced at my pockmarked Bronco. “How long do you think you kept him occupied?”

“Long enough for the ambulance to get here.”

“It’s lucky the station is just down the hill in Union,” he said.

I felt the mist beginning to shift to something with a heavier, downward trajectory. I wondered if the helicopter could beat the rain to Portland.

“Will they call you if Kathy dies en route to the hospital?” I asked him.

He laid a hand on my shoulder in a friendly way. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“It’s not ‘power,’” he said. “It’s ‘courage.’ Why don’t we focus on what we can change here? I’ve got evidence techs searching the blueberry fields for spent shells. The major has loaned me a K-9 team to backtrack up the hill to those trees. Is that where you saw the headlights when you were leaving?”

“There’s a parking lot on the far side of those pines. It’s the entrance to an old apple orchard. Kids sometimes park there to smoke pot and fool around.”

“Does it seem like the vehicle was parked there?”

“I think so.” I tried to retrieve the memory, but it was eluding me. “The headlights seemed high off the ground, so I would say it was a pickup or a Jeep, maybe even with a raised suspension. Like a truck someone had altered to go mudding.”

He jotted something in his notebook. “She didn’t say anything else before she hung up on you—something specific?”

My head and face still felt like fire ants were crawling around under the cotton batting, but my leg muscles had regained some of their sturdiness. I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t have circulatory shock.

“She was getting death threats. I’m sure you’ll find them on her computer. Hopefully, the guy who did this e-mailed her first, because then you’ll have an electronic trail to follow. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Why?”

“This all feels too deliberate and careful. Whoever shot Kathy had been scouting her house awhile. He’s going to be hard to catch.”

The detective wasn’t about to divulge any of his suspicions, least of all to me. “I’m going to need to borrow your Walther. I’ll give it back to you after we do a ballistics test.”

I reached around to the back of my jeans, where I’d tucked the pistol. Then I cleared a round out of the action and ejected the magazine. I handed him the gun in pieces.

A state trooper wearing a long, dark raincoat and hat with the plastic wrap they use to cover their brimmed headgear strode up toward us. He was holding a Baggie with a single crimped shotgun shell in it. The plastic was burnt-orange and as long as my finger: HEVI-Shot Magnum Blend.

“What kind of sniper uses a turkey gun?” I asked.

“I have a red-dot scope on my boy’s Ithaca at home,” the trooper said. “He doesn’t miss a bird with it.”

“If our guy is a turkey hunter, he’d be on the list of people who tagged one,” I said.

The detective nodded. “That’s a pretty long list.”

The drizzle was falling more heavily now, hard enough that I could see individual drops bounce off the trooper’s hat.

“Has anyone called Danielle Tate and told her what happened to Kathy?” I asked.

“Major Malcomb did, I believe.”

“Because whoever shot Kathy might be going for a twofer tonight.”

Soctomah’s head snapped around toward the trooper, and without either of them saying a word, the tall policeman waded through the weeds toward his cruiser. He would be paying Warden Tate a visit.

“I can’t think of anything I haven’t told you,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go see Kathy now.”

“We can take him!”

It was the female EMT. I hadn’t realized she’d been eavesdropping on our conversation. She’d changed out of her own blood-soaked clothes and was sipping what looked like hot coffee from the lid of a thermos. The ambulance could have left after the LifeFlight helicopter had taken off, but the paramedics had spent nearly half an hour fighting to keep Kathy alive. They probably even knew her, given that their lines of work often intersected. After a night like this one had been, it’s not so easy to pack up your gear and go home.

I walked halfway toward the waiting ambulance; then I remembered I was still wearing Soctomah’s jacket. I pulled my arms loose and was preparing to hurl it back to him, but the detective held up his hand.

“Hang on to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to freeze to death.”

I put the jacket back on over my naked shoulders and snapped the buttons to keep some of the damp out.

Portland was more than an hour south of Appleton. It was a long detour for the paramedics to make for the sole purpose of giving me a taxi ride.

“You’re not going to charge me for this?” I asked, climbing again into the back of the ambulance and sitting down on the familiar gray vinyl seat.

“That depends,” said the EMT with a smile and a wink. “Do you have insurance?”

16

We arrived at Maine Medical Center close to midnight. I’d asked the EMTs to let me know if they got word of Kathy’s condition, but nothing had come over the airwaves. They’d given me a T-shirt to wear under Soctomah’s borrowed police jacket.

The ambulance had clearance to use one of the hospital’s emergency bays. The wounds on my scalp had stopped bleeding, which was a promising sign, but the EMTs said I still might need stitches. The woman whispered something to an attendant at the door and then waved me forward.

“Marcus is going to take you to triage,” she said.

“Thanks for the lift.”

“We’ll be praying for her.”

My own prayers didn’t have the best track record. They certainly hadn’t helped my mother. The last time I’d visited this hospital was the night of her death.

Marcus, the admitting nurse, or whatever he was, escorted me to a room the size of a phone booth and took my blood pressure, measured my pulse rate, shined a light in my pupils, and peeked under my bandages. He must have determined that my death was not imminent, because the next thing I knew, I was being escorted back to the waiting room of the ER.

I checked in with the receptionist, who had me fill out a form and take a seat. She didn’t need to give me instructions. For an otherwise-healthy young man, I’d spent a fair amount of my life in hospitals.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me the condition of a friend of mine who was brought in by LifeFlight?” I asked the clerk, already knowing the answer.

“Are you a relative?”

“No.”

She had a sad, understanding smile. “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to release private information.”

The wardens, my former colleagues, began to appear before my name was called. The local guys arrived first, the ones from Division A, which patrols the southernmost part of the state. Kathy was a Division B sergeant from central Maine. But the Warden Service is a small, tight-knit corps—a hundred field officers, more or less—and everyone knows everyone.

I recognized each anguished face. There was Sergeant Ouelette and Tommy Volk; David DiPietro and John Taylor; Patrick Flynn, who had been in my class at the Academy. They passed through admitting on their way to the waiting room outside the surgery unit. Not one of them glanced in my direction; not one of them recognized me under my bandaged, bearded face.

Eventually, my name was called.

I followed another guy in nurse’s scrubs through the door into the examination room. I must have waited forty-five minutes for the doctor to appear. He was a lean man with a salt-and-pepper beard and the smallest hands I’d ever seen on an adult. He glanced at the chart the nurse had left and then began asking me questions about my medical history. I rattled off my life’s injuries: seven broken bones, some from childhood, others from a more recent ATV crash; eighteen stitches in three places incurred over twenty-seven years; two concussions, including one caused by a crowbar to the back of the skull; residual frostbite damage to my fingers, toes, and both ears; a nonpenetrating gunshot wound to the chest; and now these lacerations from a windshield that had exploded in my face.

He waited to make sure I had finished with my list. “You’ve lived a dangerous life.”

I couldn’t disagree.

The doctor used his tiny hands to pick shards of glass out of my face and skull with tweezers, remarking twice how lucky I’d been that they’d missed my eye, as it to make a broader point about my general indebtedness to good fortune in light of the many abuses my body had suffered. He placed three stitches above my ear, bringing my life’s total of sutures to twenty-one. And then he bandaged me up again. He worked with such speed and precision that I almost missed my chance to ask him the only question that was on my mind.

“Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“A game warden named Kathy Frost was brought in here by helicopter. She was shot by the same person who shot me. Please tell me: Is she alive?”

“You’re not a member of her family?”

“No, but she’s my friend.”

“I’m really not supposed to say, you know.” He stuck his hands into his pockets and looked at the floor. “But what I heard wasn’t good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

*   *   *

Now that I was stitched up, I was free to leave, but I had no intention of going anywhere until I heard how Kathy was doing.

I returned to the ER waiting room and took a seat. Once again I had a clear view of the doors leading to the parking garage. A woman entered the building, dressed in brown cords and an orange turtleneck sweater. I recognized her immediately. She had gray hair cut in a short and spiky style, and she was wearing blue-framed eyeglasses. The Reverend Deborah Davies never looked much like a warden chaplain even when she was wearing a clerical collar under her uniform.

She gave a brief glance at the waiting room, started forward, then stopped, looking me straight in the eyes.

“Mike?”

I rose stiffly from the chair. We met at the edge of the carpet.

“It is you,” she said.

“Hello, Reverend.”

She reached out her arms and gripped my shoulders. “How is Kathy? Have you heard anything?”

“Only that she’s in surgery. She lost a lot of blood.”

She brought her fingers up to touch my bandages. “How are
you
?”

“A few stitches.”

She surveyed the room. “Where is everyone?”

“Waiting down the hall, I think, in the room outside surgery.”

“Why are you out here by yourself?”

“I’m not a warden anymore.”

“Poppycock.”

I had forgotten what a natural goofball Deb Davies was.

“Come with me,” she said.

She didn’t give me a choice.

*   *   *

There were close to twenty wardens, half in uniform, the rest in street clothes, gathered outside surgery. The guys in jeans and T-shirts had been off duty, at home with their families, maybe even on vacation. But from the first day at the Academy, you pledge yourself to an unwritten, unspoken oath: When a fellow warden is in trouble, you put aside whatever you are doing and you go.

Deb Davies pulled me into their midst, as if I were a shy child. Major Malcomb was in the center of the group. The wardens fell silent at their chaplain’s arrival.

“Anything?” she asked.

“She’s in surgery now,” Malcomb said.

The chaplain addressed the group. “I’m going to say a silent prayer for her, if anyone would like to join me.”

She could have spoken the words out loud and no one would have objected, but Deb Davies was a politically correct twenty-first-century minister. She was sensitive about her role as a religious officer in a secular governmental institution. Overly sensitive, some said. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, and we all did the same. In the silence that followed—not really silence, because the hospital was very noisy—I tried to conjure up something like a coherent prayer.

“Please, God, let her live” was the best I could do.

The sentiment seemed inarticulate, the exercise ineffectual. I felt no stirring of the supernatural in my heart. Kathy would live because her body was strong enough to resist the damage caused by losing so much blood, or she would die because help hadn’t come in time to save her.

I opened my eyes and saw other wardens still praying, a few moving their lips.

“Amen,” said Deb Davies.

“Amen,” replied the wardens.

There was an awkward minute where no one seemed ready to talk. Then Deb Davies broke the silence. “Do the state police have any suspects?” she asked the group.

“It’s got to be one of Gammon’s buddies,” Tommy Volk said. He was a big, blunt guy who never had a problem sharing his opinions. “Or just some crazy vet pissed off about the shooting, looking for revenge.”

“Let’s not make assumptions,” said his sergeant, a man named Ouelette.

“I’m a Marine.” Volk tapped his own sternum hard. “If a buddy of mine got shot, I wouldn’t care if they called it ‘suicide by cop.’ I would go looking for payback. Whoever shot Kathy was trained to take out targets from a distance. What does that tell you?”

“Come on, Volk,” someone behind me said.

“You don’t think it’s a vet?”

“I just hope I’m there when they corner the fucking son of a bitch,” John Taylor said.