by Paul Doiron
“He was just a deputy warden at the time, not even an anointed law enforcement officer. The warden who’d brought him on as a helper was retiring, which meant that Chasse was losing his job, too, unless he could distinguish himself somehow. It’s kind of a miracle he managed it. Most deputy wardens never go on to have careers with the service. You must know him.”
Chasse Lamontaine was the closest thing the Maine Warden Service had to a heartthrob. He had a cleft chin and piercing eyes. He was pushing fifty now, but in his younger years, he could have played Captain America with that cartoonishly masculine face.
“I’m surprised Chasse even wanted a job with the Warden Service,” I said. “It sounds like the whole Valley was up in arms after what happened in St. Ignace.”
“Given how hot emotions were running, I highly recommended to Chasse that he take his talents elsewhere, but he said people knew him and trusted him because he’d grown up there. That was how he won over the hiring panel—through his bold naiveté.”
In my own limited interactions with the man, I had found him to be earnest to the point of humorlessness, prone to self-righteous speeches, a teetotaler who made everyone in his orbit uncomfortable holding a beer. His nickname among his fellow wardens was Dudley Do-Right.
I jigged my line, raising the weighted chenille nymph up in the water column and then letting it settle again into the silt.
“It was because of Chasse that I sent in an investigator to begin with,” said Kellam. “I think it was a clumsy ploy to get a full-time job, his complaining about how the Valley wardens were overwhelmed. But it was true that the locals were poaching everything that moved and smuggling drugs back and forth into New Brunswick. From St. Ignace you can throw a baseball across the river into Canada. Have you ever been there?”
“I must have driven through with my girlfriend after we’d finished paddling the Allagash, but I don’t remember it.”
“You wouldn’t. Is that the same girlfriend who’s Charley’s daughter?”
“Stacey, yes.”
“I remember when she was working on that moose survey out of Clayton Lake. We saw each other in the Ashland IGA. She was a spitfire, everyone said. Beautiful eyes, though. Smart, too. I don’t know if you were a damned fool for letting her get away or the luckiest man alive.”
I had once asked myself the same question, but since Dani and I had gotten serious, it had become moot. As Kathy had recently reminded me, I had a good thing going for once in my life.
“Anyway, Michaud and his crew—I’m talking about Pierre Michaud, not his jackass sons—they were running circles around my wardens. It made us look like the Keystone Kops. In those situations, all you can do is send in an investigator. Has DeFord had you work undercover yet?”
“He says my profile is too high.”
Kellam grunted his agreement. “It was my decision to try young Pellerin. He’d infiltrated a poaching ring down in Dresden, on Merrymeeting Bay, and secured convictions across the board. Also did good work in coordination with the Rhode Island Department of Fish and Wildlife on an interstate case, involving some guys who used to come up here from Providence to poach. That being said, I had doubts about him. You want a beer?”
“No, thanks. What kind of doubts?”
“He was too damned cocksure, in my estimation. To give you an example, he made hundred-dollar bets with guys in my division that he’d complete his investigation and secure indictments in a month. This was before he’d even met the Michauds.”
I thought I felt a tug on my line, but it was only a submerged branch.
“His cover name was Scott Paradis,” said Kellam. “You always want to use your real first name to avoid slipping up when you’re tired or distracted. And then you choose a last name that’s close to but not the same as your real one. You already know this. I can tell I’m boring you.”
“No.”
“His cover story was supposed to be that he lived in Rhode Island, because he’d spent time there when we’d worked that interstate case. Plus he had a sister in Providence. He claimed to be a commercial fisherman who’d been ‘injured’ on the job and was collecting fraudulent disability checks. When he was getting to know the Michauds, he gave them some frozen stripers he said he’d caught off Block Island to help back up his story. He said he was interested in shooting a black bear even though the season wasn’t open. He asked around if there was a guide in town who might bend the rules. Pierre Michaud thought for sure he was an undercover warden and tested him, but damn if Pellerin didn’t win over the SOB.”
“What kind of test?”
“Oh, you know. They all went out together at night, drinking and driving along the logging roads behind the gates, and when they happened on a deer, they jacklighted it. The doe was mesmerized by the spotlight. Pierre Michaud gave Pellerin a rifle and told him to shoot the deer to prove he wasn’t really a warden. Of course, Pellerin had been pretending to be drunk all night. He’d been pouring out beers when they weren’t looking. So he deliberately missed by a mile, and they thought it was because he was shit-faced.”
I had begun to sweat under my rainjacket. Despite the occasional storms, the humidity seemed to be ever building, never breaking.
“Do you remember the names of the guys in Michaud’s crew?”
“Pierre’s twin sons, Roland and Zacharie. We pinched Roland on some misdemeanors the night of the raid. He did thirty days in jail. Zacharie, though, was a felon prohibited by law from owning a firearm. Zach hanged himself in county lockup while awaiting trial.”
“He committed suicide in jail?”
Kellam’s smile lasted the briefest instant. “That was the state’s official finding.”
A law enforcement officer had disappeared and was presumed to have been murdered, and one of the suspected cop killers had taken his own life—it hadn’t taken a spoonful of sugar for the public to swallow that story.
But at least it cleared up which of Pierre’s sons Angie was dating. It could only be Roland.
“The fourth member of the ring was a guy named Egan,” said Kellam. “Little guy. Reminded me of a red squirrel. You know how chattery they are and absolutely unafraid of anything. He was a felon, too. Sex criminal. Afterward, he did a stint in the Maine State Prison for the evidence Pellerin gathered. Drug stuff, in his case. Selling to teenagers. But like Roland, he stonewalled us and got away with it.”
“And Pierre escaped,” I said.
“Would have escaped if not for Charley.”
Just then, I felt a jerk on the line, and the reel—my sturdy old Hardy—let out a series of clicks as the fish I’d hooked took off away from the boat. I lifted the rod tip to keep tension on the tippet and watched yard after yard of my line disappear beneath the pewter surface of the pond.
“What test leader have you got on?” Kellam asked, growing red with excitement.
“It’s 4X.”
“He’s going to break you off.”
“Like hell he will.”
“I’ll bet you twenty bucks he does.”
There are techniques to playing a big fish, but ultimately, it all comes down to what the fish decides to do. If it dives deep, it can snap your leader or tippet at its weakest point—usually the knot. If it circles and charges back toward the boat, it can create slack that allows the fly to work free. If it jumps into the air, it can shake the hook from its jaws in dramatic fashion.
This one tried all three strategies.
It dove hard, which made me think it was a lake trout (or togue, in local parlance).
Then it swung around with such speed that it had me thinking it was a landlocked salmon: the fastest fish in Maine waters.
It was only when it leaped clear of the surface and I caught a flash of orange along the belly that I realized it was my favorite of all species: a native brook trout. This one just happened to be the size and shape of a football. It fell back into the pond with a tremendous splash but still attached to my hook and line.
“
That’s got to be a four pounder!” Kellam exclaimed.
“Closer to five.”
My blood was up, my forearms were burning, and my vision had darkened along the peripheries.
I had no idea what made me look up.
For some reason, I raised my head and glimpsed the unmistakable outline of a man on the shore of the lake. He was half-hidden in the alders. The low mist made him impossible to identify, but the silhouette removed any doubt that I might be mistaking a stump for a human being. He seemed to be wearing a brimmed hat.
In the same instant, the trout made one final effort to escape. He used all his remaining energy to give one last leap. If luck had been on my side, he might have plopped into Kellam’s outstretched landing net. Instead he fell sideways into the water and spit out the fly.
“Damn it!” said Kellam.
I reeled in the line while I sought out the spot where the man had been standing. There was no sign of him.
“You owe me twenty dollars, Bowditch.”
“What?”
“We bet you wouldn’t get that trout onto the boat. I said you wouldn’t. You said you would. Time to pay up.”
26
We stayed on the lake for two more hours until the drizzle turned to rain and the rain turned into a torrent. My allegedly waterproof gear was no match for the cloudburst. Although he talked constantly, not once did Kellam mention St. Ignace. We caught a few fish, brookies mostly, but nothing close to that first lunker, also a three-pound lake trout, which Kellam killed by whacking its head with the spine of his knife. The togue gave a visible shiver and went still.
“Those lake trout are loaded with toxins,” I said.
“Edouard doesn’t care. To him, they’re the best-eating fish in Maine.”
“Have you explained about acid rain? How mercury builds up in their livers? How the oldest fish are the most poisonous?”
“The man grew up in Haiti, Mike. In Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. That’s the poorest neighborhood in the poorest city in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. He assesses risk differently from people like us.”
People like us.
I had almost forgotten that Stan was using Edouard Del-homme’s shaky immigration status to rationalize near total control of the man’s life. Just when I came close to liking the retired lieutenant, he would say something to repulse me.
Kellam was a complicated man, to say the least. A woodsman who also happened to be an intellectual. A career cop who thought nothing of breaking laws for no other reason than they personally inconvenienced him. Somehow this old crank had managed to romance a beautiful, intelligent woman half his age and persuade her to relocate to the geographic middle of nowhere.
I didn’t trust him, and so I deliberately failed to mention the shadowy man I had seen along the shore.
Had it been Edouard? If so, he had acquired a hat since we’d left the dock. And why would he have been spying on us from the woods?
Unless he’d been armed with a sniper’s rifle and told by his employer to take me out on cue.
But that was paranoid thinking.
There was a good chance the man I saw had been the driver of the silver Jeep. People did fish and hike in the Maine woods. Most did so without malevolent intentions. But Moccasin Pond was not known as a destination fishery. Maybe if word got out that it held five-pound trout, it would become one.
Could that mystery man have been Charley? My first thought was no. My friend was too bushcrafty to give his presence away in such a clumsy fashion. There is a line from a book I like that could just as well apply to my friend: “You will not see a tiger that does not choose to be seen.”
Charley Stevens was a tiger.
A hatless, water-logged Edouard waited for us to motor up to the dock. “Anything?” he called.
“Togue!”
The Haitian rubbed his palms together in excited anticipation.
As I clambered with my fishing gear onto the slick dock, Kellam said, “You’re staying here tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Do you have a room booked at the Madawaska Four Seasons?”
“I have people I need to speak with. I’ve been off the map all day.”
“Use my signal.”
“You have service here?”
He pointed to a forested ridge overlooking the pond. “See that odd spruce up there that’s taller than the others? That’s actually a cell tower. We’ve got line-of-sight access to it from the house.”
Kellam had been nothing but welcoming, but I had an itching sensation that it would be wise to leave before the sun went down on Moccasin Pond.
“I told the gatekeeper I was coming out at dusk.”
He sniffed. “If you don’t want my hospitality, I won’t force it on you, but I thought you might like to review my files on the St. Ignace operation.”
“You have the documents here?”
“My own personal copies of the files. At one juncture, I’d considered using the botched operation as the jumping-off point for my dissertation. Maybe even write a book. You always learn more from failures than successes. That’s a life principle that law enforcement rejects more than any other profession—the media excepted.”
Kellam knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review the original reports. Despite what he’d told me at lunch, I had only the vaguest concept of the undercover operation he and Pellerin had conducted, its scope and duration, as well as the circumstances around the blown warden’s disappearance. About the aftermath—the burning of St. Ignace, Pierre Michaud’s escape into the woods, Charley’s shooting of the fugitive cop killer—my information was sketchy at best.
As Kellam and I regarded each other from beneath our rain hoods, it occurred to me that his seeming lack of curiosity about my investigation had been a ruse. He was desperately curious to know what I knew. Offering me the files was the opening gambit of a game he intended to play to checkmate.
“In that case, I’ll accept your offer.”
Of course you will, his smug expression seemed to say.
* * *
Vaneese showed me how to get online. Evidently, the construction of the tree-shaped cell tower had been a precondition of hers before she agreed to join Stan Kellam in his North Woods redoubt. She showed me to my guest room—already prepared—and gave me the WiFi password.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.
“You want to know if I get lonely here?”
“That wasn’t the question, but I can’t deny it’s been on my mind. I’m a loner by nature, but even I need people from time to time.”
“I have Edouard.”
“True, but—”
“You’re not married, I can see from your finger. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“She’s the first person I need to call.”
“And you love her? No, I shouldn’t ask that question. Let me ask instead. Would you be lonely in this beautiful place if you were together with the woman you loved?”
“It would depend.”
“On what?”
“On whether my dog was here, too.”
I decided not to mention the wolf’s complicated genealogy to avoid having to answer twenty more questions.
She laughed. “Is he a big dog like Ferox?”
“Bigger.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? Is he dangerous, too?”
There was something about this woman that compelled me to be utterly truthful with her. “Yes.”
“What is his name?”
“Shadow.”
“He is black, then?”
“I wasn’t the one who gave him that name,” I blurted out.
Her smile became one of amusement at my expense. She and I were close in age, but I couldn’t help feeling that her life experience had made her wiser than I would ever be.
“Fantôme. That would be his French name.”
“I like it better.”
“I prefer Shadow.”
She left me alone to change out of my wet clothes.
* * *
As was always the case when my phone had been off, I was greeted by a series of bell chimes as message after message announced itself in my queue.
Major Shorey had left me a summons to appear in Augusta in two days to present my report to the full hiring panel. My written summary of the covered-up assaults committed by Wheelwright had not proven sufficient to torpedo the pilot’s application. I wouldn’t have put it past the disgraced pilot to have appealed his case directly to Shorey.
Logan Cronk had provided me with another serving of Fantôme in the form of a picture showing the wolf pressing his dark muzzle against the steel fence. His eyes—as yellow as powdered sulfur—revealed nothing about his canine intentions. I worried what treat the boy might’ve offered to draw the animal in close for photographic purposes.
Stacey had left me a text message:
I know this is going to sound insane, but I’ve been thinking about the chief pilot position. Yeah, yeah, the department fired me. I have no law enforcement background, but neither did Wheelwright. What do I have to lose by applying? Talk me out of this, please.
The prospect of Stacey Stevens returning to Maine awakened so many conflicting emotions I had to perform a deep-breathing exercise I used at the shooting range to calm myself.
There were no inquiries from Ora. As worried as she might be, she would wait for me to contact her, because she trusted that I would share whatever news I had. How I loved that dear woman.
Most worryingly, there was still nothing from Dani—not a text, not an email, not a voice message.
She didn’t pick up the first time I called. I left a message telling her where I was and that I had a signal and she should call me back as soon as possible. A minute later, she did so.
“Sorry, I was asleep.”
I glanced at my watch. After having worked the overnight for a year, she had been transferred to the day shift. “You’re not at work?”
“They sent me home.”
So much for my internal steadiness. “Why?”