In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  The snow lay like a layer of grease over the road. The truck eased forward, and Marcou gasped as one scale shot like an artillery shell from beneath its tire, arcing against the trees and landing in a cloud of snow and frozen dirt twenty yards down the road. “He didn’t tell me it would come out like that,” Marcou said. “The damned thing could break your leg.”

  Lord told him that some drivers play games with those scales, rolling onto them and then hitting their brakes in a manner timed to kick them out and possibly ruin them. “But I know all these guys—which ones are easy, which ones are jerks,” Lord said. “That guy didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Marcou was a man of documented courage, wiry and agile, but he liked heights less than he liked the cold. He remembered the first time he and Lord stopped a logging truck that looked to be piled too high. Lord told Marcou to climb up there, fourteen feet or so, stand on the outermost log’s round slope, and hold one end of a tape measure. With his heart in his throat, Marcou—then in his forties—climbed to the top, but he couldn’t force himself out to that edge.

  “Les swears at me and tells me to get down off the truck. I told him he knew I was afraid of heights. ‘Well, you’re gonna have to get used to it,’ he says. He climbs up there like a monkey, still swearing—but not really mad, you know, he’s always jolly—and says, ‘Yep, he’s over height.’”

  Later Lord gave Marcou an early Christmas present: a four-foot surveyor’s stick that could telescope up to sixteen feet and measure with its operator’s feet safely on the ground. “I loved him for it,” Marcou said. “Immediately everybody else in the bureau wanted one too.”

  Together they had charge of the North Country for Highway Enforcement, and when they were joined by a third officer—Frank Prue, formerly of the Lancaster Police Department—the men formed a tight-knit trio known variously to their peers as the Three Musketeers, the Three Amigos, or the Three Northern Renegades. On occasions when the Amigos rode a little too deeply into Renegade territory, they were known euphoniously to state police major Dave McCarthy in Concord as “Lord and Prue and that idiot Marcou.”

  Each of them was assigned to a different part of the region, but they worked together two or three days a week, and—Musketeers-like—each had his respective role. Lord was the front man who had that sweet knack for keeping things friendly. Prue, a brawny weight lifter, was more rules-oriented, the guy more inclined to go by the book and who could play the bad cop when necessary. Marcou liked to keep his uniform clean and handle the paperwork while the others crawled under trucks to check for broken springs.

  In fact Lord relished the role of grease monkey, loved diving under trucks, and didn’t care for that crisp green uniform worn by Highway Enforcement officers. He preferred to work in fatigues or jumpsuits, even took special pains to avoid being photographed in what Concord wanted him to wear. Eventually the Amigos also earned nicknames pulled from an old Saturday morning cartoon: Lord was the trickster Yogi Bear, Marcou was his wide-eyed sidekick Boo-Boo, and the straight-minded Prue was cast as the Park Ranger.

  And Boo-Boo and the Ranger couldn’t help but envy Yogi’s easy way with their clients. “A thousand-dollar ticket? He’d know everybody in the guy’s family by the time he passed it through the window, and they’d both be chuckling,” marveled Prue. “If it was me or Gerry and a ticket for a lousy hundred bucks—knuckle city.”

  All the Musketeers, though, subscribed to the same pragmatic philosophy—even Frank Prue, though sometimes he was in minority dissent. “Concord’s mentality was for us to go out and hammer these guys and write a lot of tickets,” said Marcou. “But up here it’s hard to make a living, and that’s all that most of these truckers are trying to do. We knew we had to keep the roads safe, and we also knew who the bad guys were and we targeted them—guys with rocks rolling out of their dump trucks, loggers whose rigs were so overloaded they couldn’t control them. But we’re not going to ticket somebody who’s just missing a fire extinguisher or write such a big ticket that it puts a good man out of business. And it’s easier to deal with truckers, you know, than it is with drivers. They understand that we have a job to do, and it’s important, and there’s more mutual respect. If we break down or slide into a snowbank, we know the truckers are going to be the first guys to help out.”

  Most of the trouble they got into was at Lord’s instigation. Prue remembered a time when too many truckers from Maine were bringing wood chips to a mill in Shelburne, New Hampshire, right near the border, with their plates out of order or their lengths too long. That needed to stop, and Lord saw no call to be sneaky about it. The three set up a table at the side of Route 2, between that mill and Maine, complete with umbrella, a boom box, and extra ticket books, daring the outliers to try a delivery. Yogi Bear picked blueberries from roadside bushes as deliveries to the mill fell sharply enough to disturb management. “Complaints were filed, and finally McCarthy called,” Prue sighed. “Things got worked out, but we had to take down that table.”

  Prue recalled only one occasion when he saw Lord lose his temper. They had stopped a truck on Route 116, near Whitefield, and Prue stayed in the cruiser while Lord went to talk to the driver. “The next thing I knew, Les had that guy out of the truck, and Jesus, he was mad,” Prue said. “I got out fast and stepped between them. ‘Les, what the hell are you doing?’ He just turned around and walked away.”

  The driver was mad too. “Good thing for him you stepped in,” he told Prue.

  “No, it was a good thing for you, buddy,” Frank said.

  Lord was a bear of a man—240 pounds or so, hard and bulky, “and with hands like baseball mitts,” Marcou said. Nonetheless, he had his qualms, enough to ensure that secret sympathy with Marcou’s fear of heights. He had a touch of claustrophobia and an Indiana Jones fear of snakes, once resorting to his handgun to defend himself from a harmless species. Nor—for all his fighting prowess—did he stand up well to the sight of blood. Dave Perry got a call from his dispatcher one night. A motorist had hit and killed a moose near Lake Francis and had left the meat to the State of New Hampshire. Tom Carlson, a Fish & Game conservation officer as well as fire chief, needed help dressing the animal off. Perry drove up there and noticed Lord’s cruiser parked next to Tom’s. “Down here!” Carlson yelled.

  Perry descended into some brush and found Carlson with his hands in the moose’s gut, pulling out the entrails. “Where’s Lucky?” Perry asked.

  “Why do you think I had the dispatcher call you?” Carlson said. “He’s off in the bushes puking. He’s no help.”

  Nor was he much of a marksman—“He could hit you, but it would take several tries,” Marcou said—and lawmen still tell the story of the time Lord set about teaching Brad Presby, who worked for the Bureau of Trails and dealt only rarely with criminal work, how to put handcuffs on a suspect. Lord ended up locking himself into a pair for which he had no key.

  But he was a genius at the wheel of his cruiser, a hurtling fusion of man and machine who hated traffic lights for the constraints they imposed, hated straight roads for how little they challenged him. One day the dispatcher at Troop F called Lord to say he was needed at a certain location. Twelve minutes later, Lord reported his arrival. “Jesus,” the dispatcher said. “How’d he get there in twelve minutes?”

  Scott Stepanian was at the dispatcher’s side and offered an explanation: “Well, he must have stopped for a sandwich.”

  Lord loved it, loved getting up and going to work with soul-mate buddies, driving fast whenever he could, and keeping his truckers in line—until 1996, when Concord took the Bureau of Highway Enforcement out of the Department of Safety and folded it into the state police. The Renegades’ primary responsibility remained motor vehicles, but now they got involved much more often in criminal incidents and investigations.

  John Barthelmes, the colonel in charge of the state police, was a former North Country trooper. In fact, on his first day of duty there some years before, Barthelmes had made the rookie mistake of
asking Lord to show him around the area. Yogi took him on back roads twenty miles over the border into Maine. “Imagine my shock as a young trooper, to find out that not only was I out of my patrol, I was in another state and didn’t have a clue where I was or how to get back,” Barthelmes wrote in New Hampshire Trooper. “When I relayed my alarm to Les, he did what he always did—he laughed and he laughed.”

  Barthelmes, dubbed Mr. Clean, was enough of a straight arrow to make Frank Prue seem bohemian, but in 1996 Mr. Clean could only laugh himself when Lord—in front of several other troopers—came into the colonel’s Concord office, fell into a chair, threw his boots up on the desk, and said, “Well, John, I hear I’m working for you now.”

  Lord put a good face on it, but he was serious about those boots on the desk. He had little use for the spit and polish of state police culture—if you left your Stetson lying around, Lord would turn it upside down and leave a thumbprint in it; if your shoes were too shiny, Lord would accidentally step on your toes and scuff them—and he took no pleasure in finding himself back in the middle of the criminal stuff he thought he had left behind. One night he was called to a domestic disturbance in North Stratford. An enraged husband had tried to assault his wife and the guy he had caught her with. Lord wrestled the husband into the back of his cruiser, but then the man kicked out a rear passenger window and escaped. Lord chased him down on foot, thinking all the while, “I’m too old for this.”

  Lord was still driving his cruiser from the Department of Safety, a vehicle that didn’t have a cage around the backseat. Nor had any of the Amigos been issued rifles, shotguns, or body armor. “In 1997 the three of us got together on the night of August 18th, Monday, at the Groveton P.D.,” Marcou remembered. “We were talking about those very problems, and I’ll tell you we weren’t happy. Les had just been issued a brand new cruiser, which did have a cage, and he was pleased about that. But none of us had any of that other stuff, and Les was joking around that he could get killed the next day or the day after anyway, cage or no cage.”

  Brad Presby and his wife regularly rode their snow machines with the Lords in the winter, and he had tried to talk his friend into retiring. Lord was then president of the Pittsburg Ridge-Runners, a snow machine club whose volunteers maintained trails throughout the northern part of the county, and in January he had succeeded the retiring Tom Carlson as Pittsburg’s fire chief. Presby told Lord that if he quit the day job, he’d be the most likely choice to head up a new state agency looking after recreational snow machiners.

  But Lord didn’t want to gamble on that. He preferred to put in a little more time on duty in order to qualify for the next level of retirement benefits. “Besides, this is Coös County,” Lord laughed. “What could go wrong?”

  Gene Ehlert, the managing editor of the Coös County Democrat in Lancaster, knew he wasn’t going to get done on time on this Tuesday the nineteenth, the way things were going. So he telephoned the boss up in Colebrook. “Nancy’s sick,” he told John Harrigan. “Or actually her dad’s sick, but she can’t come in. Could you get down here and give us a hand?”

  John had just finished his editorial column. He handed a printout to Susan Zizza, telling her to do whatever she wanted to it, and explained the situation at the Democrat to her and Dennis. In terms of the things that often go wrong on Tuesday, he thought, this was pretty mild.

  Then he popped into Vickie’s office. “Who’s Nancy?” she asked.

  “She’s the ad manager down there, but she also does a lot of the pasteup work. And that’s what they need help with, Gene says.”

  “So you’re gone the rest of the day.”

  “Yeah, and tell your dad I can’t make it for fishing, okay? We’ll reschedule.”

  “Sure.”

  John had caught her en route to somewhere, and he couldn’t help noticing how pretty she looked in that white blouse, how well it set off the chiaroscuro of her eyes and hair. “I’ll see you later then,” he said.

  “More like tomorrow, I guess. I’ll be gone when you’re back.”

  They hugged briefly, like siblings, something they always continued to do, even as they grew apart. Maybe this hug lingered a moment longer after their dancing over the weekend. Her shoulders were thin, and she felt frail, John thought. But she still had that scent in her hair of meadow grass and blue sky.

  He went out the front door to the Lincoln thinking he needed to get up to her place more often—cook her some real meals and play cribbage.

  7

  CODE 3

  SCOTT PHILLIPS WONDERED if Les Lord had anywhere he had to be this afternoon. It was 12:45 p.m. in the squad room of the Colebrook police station, which was in the town hall’s basement. “Not so far,” Lord said.

  “You heard about Carl and Vickie?” Phillips asked.

  “Drega? I know he likes to sit outside her window in that shit-bucket truck of his. So maybe he’s in love?”

  No, Lord hadn’t heard about that encounter on Main Street last Friday, the threats and obscenities. Drega’s pickup was a particular embarrassment to Lord, who still handled a lot of the traffic stops in Colebrook and who was among those who had issued warnings about it. Not even Yogi Bear had ever coaxed a smile out of Drega—or any action on that truck. The next step, pulling its plates and keeping it off the road, had been deemed, by general consensus, not worth the trouble. Drega had another truck in his barn, a new pickup that he used when he traveled to jobs, and grounding the Dodge would just give him one more thing to stew about. On Friday, though, Drega had raised the ante in this poker game they were all playing, and Phillips didn’t like this latest development with Vickie. He told Lord, “So she took a restraining order out against him—”

  “Oh, well, problem solved.”

  Phillips smiled. Behind them, Dan Couture—a young Colebrook cop who had recently hurt his ankle and was in civilian clothes that day—came in and occupied one of the empty desks. “Yeah, we know what that’s worth,” Phillips said. “So I figure I’ll just have a little chat with Carl about Vickie and about this situation, and if it sounds like he might be ready to back off and really stay the hell away from her, I’ll just give him another warning.”

  “Sure—as if that’ll happen. You trying to scare him or sweet-talk him?”

  “I don’t know.” Phillips shook his head. “Yeah, it probably won’t work. He’ll just cuss—and I’ll pull his plates. Well, that’s something. I can’t hear about shit like that and just sit on my ass, waiting for a 911 call. I’m tired of getting there too late.”

  Lord didn’t know what Phillips meant by that, but Norm Brown would have. Phillips still felt sick about a recent sexual assault case that had gotten thrown out of court. Maybe there was more, but whatever the trouble, it was enough for Mr. Wonderful to confess to Brown while jogging the day before that he wished he had become a firefighter instead.

  “Is Mr. Drega on the watch list?” Lord wondered.

  “It might be time to put him there, don’t you think?”

  “And I take it you’re going to look for him today.”

  “I actually had Steve Hersom lined up for backup, but he’s stuck at an accident scene somewhere.”

  “So I’m not even your first choice.”

  Phillips smiled again. “You’ll have to do. So can I call you if I see him, buddy?”

  “‘Buddy?’ What’s up with that?”

  Dan Couture, twenty-four, had been a cop for just a year in 1997, and he was still learning, but he could see that it was hard on the whole town for a department with four full-time cops and several part-timers to depend on just one cruiser. If the cruiser was in the shop for an oil change, say, and a call came in for help, the department couldn’t respond. He’d seen it happen.

  Couture had grown up in a town that straddled the Canadian border—Sherbrooke on the Quebec side, Norton the Vermont. He went to high school in Canaan, drove a school bus for three years for his father’s transportation company, and then earned a criminal justice deg
ree at Hesser College in Manchester. Police work seemed like a good way to stay in the area near family and friends. He got hired part time in Colebrook in May 1996 and went full time when somebody quit. He had only a week of field training, and in his second week on the job he found himself in the middle of a disturbing—and delicate—sexual assault investigation. The victim was a three-year-old girl, and the rookie cop knew he was in over his head and asking the wrong sorts of questions. Like a town with one cruiser, he was just trying to muddle through.

  In the early afternoon on August 19, that cruiser was getting washed outside the town hall and department headquarters. Couture had sprained his ankle during a foot chase on the night shift, and he was on light duty, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, handling a lot of department paperwork, and now helping fellow patrolman Steve Breton restore some gloss to the cruiser. Breton was a regular on the night shift, but he was working days now while Colebrook police chief Mike Sielicki was on vacation.

  Overhead, what farmers called a haymaking sun hung high in the sky. Couture saw Dennis Joos come out of the News and Sentinel Building and limp—just the way Couture was limping, but this didn’t look like an ankle injury—to the Lazerworks shop on this side of the street. A few minutes later the newspaperman limped back with something in a small paper bag. Then Couture saw Vickie Bunnell’s dad go into the building with a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

  The radio was quiet and the two cops were taking their time. They were only halfway through when dispatcher Lynn Jolin had a call for Steve, a report of domestic violence somewhere out on Route 145, up toward Stewartstown Hollow. Breton jumped into the cruiser and pulled onto Bridge Street with his blue lights flashing and soapsuds streaming from the fenders.

  Couture stowed the hose and bucket, limped past two parked state police cruisers, and returned to his paperwork inside. Scott Phillips and Les Lord were downstairs talking about pulling over a guy Couture didn’t know. The young cop sat down and held his peace—which he always did with these two. They didn’t put on airs—in fact, Phillips was the closest thing to a real field training officer Couture had—but they were each the sort of cop Couture wanted to be someday.