Widowmaker (24 page)

Pulsifer took no notice. He made his way to the door and rapped on it three times.

No answer.

When he glanced back at me, I pointed to the snowy ground outside the door. There were boot prints all over, as you would expect, but three distinct sets of fresh tracks led farther down the road. I set off in that direction while Gary hurried to catch up.

Pulsifer didn't strike me as a poor woodsman, exactly. He just seemed to be wearing blinders all the time. He was so focused on the job at hand that he failed to notice disturbances in the landscape around him. The more time I spent with him in the field, the more I understood how my poacher father had managed to outwit him for so many years.

 

23

Up ahead was a complex of buildings: garages, a dining hall, a bunkhouse, and assorted sheds. The usual construction equipment, too: skidders, crew vans, pickups, a bulldozer, and a flatbed truck for hauling logs. In short, Pariahville resembled just about any other logging operation you might find in the forest.

Pulsifer and I approached the dining hall. A single voice was issuing from inside the building. Loud, resonant, and commanding—it belonged unmistakably to Don Foss. Pulsifer didn't bother knocking.

When he opened the door, the room went quiet. Nine or ten men seated at picnic tables turned to see who had let in the sudden blast of arctic air. Beyond them, on a raised stage at the end of the hall, stood Don Foss, flanked on either side by Jim Clegg and Shaylene Hawken.

Foss was wearing an outfit that Paul Bunyan himself might have bought off the rack, and in the same size, too. The big man turned to Clegg. “What's going on here? Who are these men?”

“The wardens are here at my request,” said the detective.

Clegg had on his brown-and-khaki uniform and was holding his drill sergeant's hat at crotch level, as if to protect his privates from the imaginations of the assembled sex offenders.

Shaylene Hawken appeared strong enough to wrestle a moose calf to the ground. She had a hard red face that looked as if she scrubbed her skin with steel wool, and gray-brown hair that she had probably cut herself. She was dressed in civilian clothes appropriate for tromping around the woods but was wearing a ballistic vest with a badge pinned to the fabric. A semiautomatic pistol rested in a holster on her hip.

“Should we expect additional visitors?” asked Foss.

The men at the tables had contorted themselves to look at us. Most of them had faces that were young and bearded; they were the same age, more or less, as Adam. The older ones among them look prematurely aged by bad habits and more recent exposure to the elements. Almost without exception, they looked dead-tired.

“Please continue, Don,” said the detective.

Foss's natural tone of voice seemed to be a bellow. “Detective Clegg and Officer Hawken will be speaking with each of you privately in the bunkhouse. I have their assurance your conversations will be confidential unless—” He turned and looked down again at the detective at his side. “I fail to see how this concerns the Warden Service.”

“The wardens are assisting our department in the search for Langstrom,” Clegg said patiently.

I counted ten men in all seated at the tables. So there had been eleven in the camp when Adam was here.

One pudgy, pink-cheeked guy raised his hand. “Why are we being interrogated if Langstrom was the one who skipped?”

“These are interviews, not interrogations,” said Detective Clegg. “We're asking for your help.”

“What kind of help?”

“Information—what do you think?” said Shaylene Hawken. She swayed from side to side, her hands clasped behind her.

“So we don't have to talk?” asked another man.

“Fuck yeah, we do,” said a third. “You think they won't violate your ass back to Bucks Harbor if you don't say nothing?”

Foss raised his huge hands in a placating gesture. “The officers have given me their word this isn't a pretext to violate anyone's probation.”

“Sure, they say that now, but what happens when you ain't there?” asked the suspicious one.

“I will be in the room for each interview,” said Foss.

I heard one man at the nearest table whisper to another, “He just wants to hear everything we say.”

Foss continued: “I've told the officers I'm prepared to end the interviews if there is any coercion.”

“Are they going to search our lockers, too?” asked the pink one.

“We'd prefer not to have to do that, Dudson,” said Hawken.

I could tell that the implied threat rubbed Foss the wrong way. “As all of you know, the officers have the right to inspect your belongings at any time. But given that the focus of these interviews is the whereabouts of Adam Langstrom, I see no need for a sweep of the bunkhouse. Isn't that right, Detective Clegg?”

“All we're asking is that you answer our questions truthfully—no bullshit, no evasion—and we'll be on our way.”

“Yeah, right,” said one of the men at the tables

“This is bullshit.”

“You know someone's going out of here in handcuffs,” whispered the quiet man near me. “They're just looking to violate one of us so we don't take off like Langstrom.”

Beside me, Pulsifer had remained quiet, but I could sense the tension in his muscles, the same way you can sense when someone beside you in bed is still awake.

Hawken had reached the end of her already-limited patience. “Don't be shy, boys. Someone's got to be first.”

The pudgy man, Dudson, stood up. He articulated his words carefully, striking every syllable. “I'll go first. Worst thing that can happen is they send me back to Bucks. At least my cell there was warm and didn't smell like farts all night.”

“Hail, Fartacus!” one of the men said.

Foss opened and closed his hands, as if to keep the blood circulating through those sausage-size fingers. “Enough!”

It might have ended there if not for Hawken. “What's the matter, Dudson? You have a better job offer than cutting trees?”

Dudson flushed a shade brighter. “You think it's funny, but you're not working outside all day in the freezing cold, waiting for a tree to fall on you like it did on Lovejoy.”

Who was Lovejoy?

“That's enough, Dudson,” said Foss.

“Yessuh, massa!” said the sex offender.

“I said that's enough!” The floor shook as Foss stepped down off the dais and crossed the room to Dudson's table. He seized the soft-looking man by the arm and pulled him away from the table.

“Ouch! Ouch!”

Each of the other sex offenders in the room had frozen in place, as if playing a game of statues.

Foss looked like he could have flung Dudson into the next room if he had chosen to. The man was seriously angry. “The rest of you, remain here,” he boomed. “You'll be called when it's your turn to be interviewed. You have my permission to step outside briefly if you need to smoke. But don't force me to go chasing you.”

There could be no doubt: The men who worked for Foss were terrified of him.

Foss dragged Dudson into an adjoining room. Clegg and Hawken followed close behind. The door swung shut.

I could hear the sound of breath being exhaled.

“What are we supposed to do?” I whispered to Pulsifer. “I thought we were going to be part of the interviews.”

“Hang out for a minute while I go see what's up.”

Pulsifer disappeared through the far door. The men began to whisper among themselves and cast furtive glances in my direction. I had dealt with enough felons to know that most of them had no fear of law-enforcement officers, but these ex-cons were as timid as jackals. That Dudson character might be defiant, but the rest were frightened of doing anything that might result in their probation being revoked.

And why shouldn't they be frightened? As long as he had Shaylene Hawken backing him up, Foss could work these men into the ground and risk no fines from the government, because who among them was going to report that their work conditions were unsafe or they weren't being paid a minimum wage? As long as POs like Hawken kept sending him warm bodies, Foss would turn a profit.

If Adam had been even half as rebellious as I was, he wouldn't have stood for it.

While I waited for Pulsifer to return, I took the opportunity to poke around. A fetid odor hung in the air: a combination of grease, wood ashes, burned coffee, and Murphy oil soap. The room had all the charm of a cash-strapped summer camp for troubled boys.

I made eye contact with an old man sitting by himself at a corner table. He had crazy hair that stood up in every direction like a cartoon character who'd just been struck by lightning. It took me a few seconds to realize that I recognized him.

“Wallace Bickford?” I said.

“Yeah?” He was missing assorted teeth.

“It's Mike Bowditch.”

Not a flicker of recognition showed in his eyes. He just kept smiling his jack-o'-lantern smile.

“Jack's son,” I said.

He seemed to suck in his stomach. “Jack's dead.”

“Don't you remember?” I said. “I was with the police that night they raided your cabin looking for him.”

Wally Bickford had been one of my father's several sidekicks, a former logger who had received a traumatic head injury in the woods and had made his living thereafter as a trapper and collector of roadside cans and bottles. The last time I'd seen him had been during the manhunt. Search dogs had tracked my dad to the squalid shack where Bickford was then squatting. The brain-damaged man had been wounded during the ensuing police assault on his cabin, but my father had already managed to slip through the closing net.

I remembered hearing that the district attorney had drawn up accessory charges against Bickford for aiding my dad in his escape but that a judge had ruled Wallace wasn't mentally capable of understanding his crime. So how had he ended up in Pariahville?

“What are you doing here, Wally?”

“I work for Don.”

“Did you come here from jail?”

“I got probated out of Windham last year.” He twisted his little finger inside his ear to remove some wax.

“Why were you incarcerated?”

“For looking at pictures.”

“Pictures of kids?”

“They looked old enough. Those photos don't come with ages on them.” He began to rise from his chair. “I need to take a piss.”

The judge who had sent him to jail on a child pornography rap must not have had the same qualms about his limited mental capacity. I pressed my hand on his bony shoulder and pushed him back onto the bench. For years, I had felt sorry for Bickford, but I was having trouble summoning sympathy for a collector of child porn, brain-damaged or not.

“Tell me about Adam Langstrom,” I said.

“He ran away.”

“What else?”

“He called Don names. They fought.”

“You mean physically? With fists?”

He ran his fuzzy tongue over his lips.

“Foss gave Adam a black eye,” I said, assuming he'd correct me if I was wrong. “Did Adam have any other enemies here? People he was afraid of?”

“I mind my own business.” He began to push against my hand. “Don said I didn't have to answer questions.”

I tried smiling. “You and my dad were friends.”

He had rheumy eyes. They blinked very slowly. “Used to be. He took my ATV and never gave it back.”

“Foss is lucky to have someone with your logging experience working for him.”

His broken smile made a reappearance. “Some of these guys—they don't know—they don't know shit about what they're doing.”

“There must be accidents all the time.”

“Some.”

“Like what happened to Lovejoy.” Dudson had referred to a man by that name having been crushed by a falling tree. “Was Adam Langstrom here when Lovejoy was killed?”

Bickford closed one eye but kept the other open. The nature of his mental disability made it hard to figure him out. He usually seemed slow-witted, but I felt I might be seeing a glimmer of some residual intelligence.

“I need to take a piss,” he said again.

After I released my hand from his shoulder, he just about ran to the bathroom.

Year after year, logging appeared on the list of most dangerous professions in the nation, second only to commercial fishing—and far ahead of law enforcement. By all rights, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should have done an investigation of any deaths that occurred at this company. But Pulsifer had suggested that Foss ran his operation off the books with the complicity of POs like Shaylene Hawken and other government employees whose hands he might have greased.

I had no proof that the dead man was connected in any way to Adam or his decision to run off. Had he and Foss fought over the safety conditions of the workers in the woods? Had he threatened to go public? It would explain why Adam went looking for his Glock at his mother's house.

I found myself yearning to imagine my brother in something other than an ignoble light.

When Pulsifer finally returned, I could see that he was steamed. He motioned me toward a quiet corner.

“Foss won't let us talk to any of his guys,” he said.

“Won't Clegg go to bat for us?”

“He tried,” Pulsifer said. “But this is Foss's property. He doesn't have to allow any of us here without a warrant.”

“But I need to tell Clegg about the gun Adam got from his mom's place,” I said.

“Call him later. If you went marching in there now, Foss would terminate the interviews in a heartbeat.”

“Even Foss can't stop Hawken from talking to her clients.”

“What does she care? There are ten more Adam Langstroms who need jobs and housing. Foss makes her job a hundred times easier. Why would she want to mess up a good situation?”

“I've been asking myself the same thing,” I muttered.