by Paul Doiron
That assertion was patently untrue. But I recognized that the retired warden had a secret reason, beyond defusing a tense situation, to remain here with Harmon Reed. It didn’t take a master detective to recognize that the harbormaster knew more about the circumstances surrounding Ariel Evans’s death than he had yet admitted.
5
Until you see the dead body, a homicide never truly seems real.
Ariel Evans lay facedown in the grass with a basket of wet clothes spilled beside her. The clothesline ran across the back lawn from an apple tree to a mountain ash on the opposite side of the yard. A single item of clothing was pinned to the rope: a pair of white cotton panties.
She was wearing a chocolate cardigan over a white T-shirt and khakis rolled up above her ankles. I saw that she was barefoot and that her toenails were painted a deep red that, horribly, ironically, matched the gore that had soaked the grass around her head. The back of her skull had been blown completely away—the bullet must have been a hollow point—which meant she’d been facing whoever had pulled the trigger. Her hair, where it wasn’t sticky with drying blood, was honey blond with a natural wave that brought to mind the antiquated word tresses. Physically, she was smaller than I’d expected. Petite even. I doubted whether Ariel Evans had stood much above five feet in height.
Undermanned and pressed for time, our priority was to do a 360-degree observation of the yard, the cottage, and the surrounding woods. A phrase came to my mind, something I recalled from a text on hunting homicides: The incident scene will speak to you.
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Then I opened them again. I turned in a complete circle. There was no back door to the cottage. Anyone wishing to hang laundry had to make their way around the corner of the building from the front yard. Nor were there other human trails visible. The house had three picture windows. None of them had been pierced by a bullet. With luck we would find a slug buried in one of the casements or cedar shingles, but not necessarily.
“That’s odd,” I said.
“What’s odd?” said Klesko.
“Didn’t you say it was foggy this morning, Constable?”
Radcliffe nodded like a bobble-headed toy. “Very foggy.”
“Why would she have been hanging wet laundry in the fog?”
“Maybe she was planning on going somewhere for the day and needed to get it up there. The fog was supposed to burn off later, as it did.”
The white underwear dangled from a single clothespin. The sheer cloth fluttered when the breeze touched it.
The most famous hunting homicide in Maine history took place in 1988. A young mother in the town of Hermon, outside Bangor, was shot to death by a hunter in her backyard. Karen Wood was a newcomer to the area; she and her family had moved to Maine from Iowa five months earlier. The shooter, a popular and well-respected man in the community, said he had mistaken her white mittens for the tail of a deer. Despite his admission of negligence, he was acquitted by a jury of his peers. The verdict—widely viewed as a small-minded act of victim blaming—sparked scathing news stories across the country. Captain DeFord told me that to this day, every time he traveled out of state to meet with his counterparts, a conservation officer would bring up the case. Karen Ann Wood had become a legend, not just in the state of Maine but among game wardens everywhere.
I said, “If you were Kenneth Crowley hunting back in those trees, and you saw what looked like an injured woman lying in the grass, what would you do?”
“Come running, I hope,” said Klesko.
“But there are no prints from that direction. The only prints are along the path Ariel used to access the clothesline.”
Radcliffe had fallen silent. He was standing apart from us with his hands folded over his crotch as if he was expecting to be kicked in the balls.
“Andrew,” I said. “Is the owner of the cottage currently on the island?”
“No, but Jenny Pillsbury is the rental agent out here. She keeps the cottages up and handles any emergencies that might arise.”
“Does she know about this emergency?”
He was as silent as a stone man.
I stepped into his personal space. “I need you to call her and have her come over with her keys. Tell her to bring whatever information she has on Ariel Evans. While you’re at it, would you mind relieving Charley and sending him in to take a look? Make sure Harmon stays where he is.”
“Will do.”
I had little confidence that Radcliffe could stop Harmon Reed from doing anything that Harmon Reed wanted to do, but I had no other choice. I waited for the constable to move out of earshot.
“So what do you think?” Ronette asked.
“I think I need to call DeFord. But before I do, I’d like to get a better sense of what we’re dealing with here. I expect you’ll want to call your own supervisor, Steve.”
Klesko ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “Want to call him? No. Have to call him? Unfortunately.”
“I need to walk the perimeter before Crowley shows up,” I said. “I’ve got to establish where the shooter was when he fired and also where Crowley was standing when he caught sight of the body.”
Ronette Landry had already put on her disposable blue nitrile gloves. “Provided those are two different locations.”
It was a good point.
“Too bad we don’t have a dog,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking that ever since we got on the plane,” Landry said. “Kathy Frost and her pup could have tracked our shooter to his front door by now. But I guess there’s no point dwelling on what we can’t do. We need to focus on what we can do.”
“Ronette,” I said, “start recording as much as you can. We don’t have much time to document this scene before we lose the light, and with the forecast for rain, I’m afraid of what might happen to the evidence here.”
“We could hang tarps over the yard,” said Ronette.
“It’s too big an area.”
“What can I do?” asked Klesko.
“Give Marshall a call for me and bring her up to speed.”
Marshall was Danica Marshall, the assistant attorney general who had caught this case, and not my favorite person in her office. Years earlier, as a district warden, I had stumbled into a murder investigation that revealed prosecutorial malfeasance on her part. She’d received a censure, and her career had never fully recovered.
Charley appeared around the corner of the house. He had his hands in the pockets of his wool hunting jacket to keep himself from touching something he shouldn’t. Even wearing emergency gloves, you can still smear fingerprints beyond recognition and contaminate evidence in innumerable ways.
I gave the old pilot a moment to take in the scene before him. I wondered how many crucial details I had overlooked.
“Any thoughts on where the shooter was when he fired the gun?” I asked at last.
The old man pursed his lips and scanned the tree line. “Hard to tell until you can determine the angle the bullet entered her body, but I’d suspect he was over in those apples.”
“Why do you think so?” asked Klesko.
“It’s not like on the mainland where the big bucks slink off into the woods a few days before the season opens. As hungry as the deer are here, you’re likely to find a trophy anywhere. And the one thing most hunters know is that deer like apples.”
I said, “I’m going to walk the perimeter, see if I can luck out and find a shell casing. Care to join me?”
Charley had lightened up since the plane ride, but he was still far from his garrulous self. He glanced at the sky, where fast-moving clouds were racing one another to be first ashore. The old pilot could probably gauge the wind speed by watching them cross the sun.
“I’d appreciate another set of eyes,” I said.
“What about the body? Shouldn’t someone get Walt on the phone before she starts to ripen?”
When you are at an unattended death and no medical examiner is on the scene, the protocol is to g
et one on the phone. I assigned Klesko to call Dr. Walter Kitteridge and have him walk us through a course of action. I had the sense the detective had done this before.
To our great surprise, the call went through on the first try.
While Ronette Landry hurriedly photographed and videotaped the area around the corpse, switching from one camera to the next, the detective explained our predicament to the medical examiner’s assistant. We waited for the doctor himself to get on the phone.
The wind had shifted, and now I could smell the ocean. In November the salt air is not as intense as in June, when the green waters of the gulf are fecund with plankton. But I could still taste the brine, and it awakened in me memories of the years I had lived with my mother in a house near the sea. For the first time since we’d landed on Maquoit, I was fully conscious of being on an island.
“Dr. Kitteridge says he’s ready when we are,” said Klesko.
“Then let’s get started,” I said.
The detective began by providing a summary description of the death scene. It quickly became a strange three-sided conversation with Klesko relaying information to Kitteridge and then communicating the coroner’s instructions and observations back to us.
Klesko carefully lifted one of the dead woman’s wrists with his gloved hand. “Rigor is still present. Kitteridge says the cold fog would have prolonged it, and he wants to see our pictures, but he thinks she was definitely shot this morning.”
“Any chance the body was moved?”
Charley chimed in, “The blood splatter seems conclusive that she died on the spot. What’s that in her hand?”
Clutched in Ariel’s fist was a clothespin.
“Could it have been placed there after death?” I said. “Before her hand stiffened up?”
Klesko tried to peel the fingers loose, but the dead woman was determined to hang on to her prize. “She was holding this when she was shot.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because it’s cadaveric spasm,” said Charley.
I had never heard of such a thing.
Klesko relayed our discovery to the medical examiner, then parroted back the coroner’s words: “It’s also called postmortem spasm or instantaneous rigor. It occurs during certain violent deaths. The muscles stiffen suddenly around any object—a gun barrel, for instance—a person is holding when he dies.”
“How do you differentiate it from rigor mortis?” I asked.
“Rigor’s pretty easily broken,” the detective translated. “Unless the body’s frozen solid, you can open a closed fist without too much effort. Cadaveric spasm resists being undone. It was how the cops in Seattle knew that Kurt Cobain had really killed himself, that it wasn’t a staged suicide. He was still clutching the shotgun he’d used to blow his head off.”
I couldn’t help but look at the clothesline and the pair of damp underwear. The rope was swaying, ever so slightly, in the breeze. “So she really was hanging laundry in the fog.”
“It doesn’t mean she was the one who hung up those panties, though,” said Klesko. “Her killer could have stage-managed the scene. He could say he’d mistaken those panties for a deer’s white tail. That would give him an excuse if he was ever caught.”
Clearly, Klesko had been thinking of the Karen Wood case, too.
I stepped aside to share our discoveries with Captain DeFord.
6
My supervisor said, “I’d hoped to get out there this afternoon. But my ride was called away. A lady with Alzheimer’s wandered off from her home in Levant. Chris Anson is doing an aerial search for her.”
“It’s been a hell of a day.”
“You can say that again.”
“For what it’s worth, I think we have things in hand here.”
DeFord couldn’t help but laugh. “I highly doubt it, Mike. Ideally we’d have twenty wardens on the ground. But who knows. Maybe I can send you some reinforcements sooner rather than later. Keep texting me your photos and videos and stay in touch, and I’ll direct you from my end.”
Pride has always been one of my character defects. Fool that I was, I wanted to solve this case on my own.
I gave Radcliffe crime-scene tape to tack up from one end of Ariel’s front yard to the other. It was a small thing, but the yellow cordon transformed the house from a quaint cottage to a haunted, grief-stricken place.
While Klesko assisted Landry in documenting the scene, Charley and I searched the woods in a clockwise direction, starting at the road and moving slowly, side by side, in concentric half circles. I followed the edge of the yard while he battled his way through the thicker, thornier cover. A distance of ten feet separated us. Any farther apart and we might miss a clue. The idea was that we would only stop if we came upon potential evidence: broken branches, crushed weeds, brass casings ejected from a rifle, hopefully boot prints.
As terrible as the circumstances were, it felt good to be working with my old friend again. Charley Stevens had taught me so much about the woods and waters, but he had taught me more about being a man. I had essentially grown up, both personally and professionally, under his tutelage.
If only Stacey’s shadow weren’t hanging over us.
We’d paced off close to a hundred feet when I heard Charley say, “There’s a deer trail here.”
As soon as he spoke, it was as if the formerly invisible path materialized before me. How had I missed it? I said, “I can see where the deer came out of the bushes and crossed the yard this morning. There’s a clump of hair snagged on the rose thorns.”
“Remember to check yourself for ticks when we finish up. I’ve already squished two of the little bastards I found climbing up my trouser legs.”
“Deer ticks or dog ticks?” The former were the ones that carried the horrible illnesses plaguing New England.
“Deer tick nymphs.”
“How did you even see them?” The arachnids were the size of a period at the end of a sentence.
“My vision’s pretty decent for an old fart.”
It was no boast. The old man, who had never exercised in the modern sense since basic training fifty years earlier, was a marvel of physical and mental fitness.
Five minutes later, after we’d entered the thicket of apple trees that marked the periphery of the orchard, he stopped again. “Found something here!”
“Can I come in?”
“Back up a few steps and then you should be able to crash through that shadbush pretty easy.”
The shrubs caught at the fabric of my pants, and I could almost feel the ticks launching themselves onto my clothing.
Autumn is the season of rot in the Maine woods. Out of the sun and wind, under the scraggly boughs of the apple trees, the light had an almost-sepia tint. The air was still and the odor of decomposition was strong. The miasma blotted out even the smell of the sea.
Soon I found myself standing beside Charley. He poked one of his knobby fingers at the lowest limb of the tree in front of us. Three branches had been snapped off. The breaks were clean. The sapwood under the bark was as soft as human flesh. Someone had recently been here.
“The entrance wound will tell you if the angle is right. But I reckon this is the spot.”
I turned toward the cottage, fifty yards away. Ronette Landry’s vest showed fluorescent orange in the waning sun.
Charley had turned his attention to the fallen apple leaves and the moldering cores left behind by the deer. “This is where our ‘hunter’ entered from the orchard. There’s a partial boot print in the mud.”
I dropped a marker beside the print and recorded both it and the recently disturbed underbrush. Charley searched in vain for a telltale brass casing. There would be time later to follow the trail deeper into the orchard. For the moment, we needed to establish that there wasn’t another spot along the tree line from which the shooter might have taken his fatal shot.
“Whoever he was,” the old man said, “he had the presence of mind to retrieve his brass.”
&
nbsp; In other words, the shooter hadn’t been so panicked that he forgot to pick up the ejected shell from the fatal round he’d fired.
We crashed along through the bushes and saplings for another five minutes before I called a halt. “I’ve got something.”
“So do I. But you go first.”
“Chewing tobacco. Someone spat out a stream of brown phlegm here. What about you?”
“I’ve got boot prints,” Charley said from his side of the puckerbrush. “Size twelve or so, judging from my Chippewas. They come up to the bushes and stop dead. Then they turn right around and take off in the opposite direction.”
“Kenneth Crowley?”
“Could be.”
“And here I thought he was lying about having stumbled upon the death scene,” I said.
“Stumbled I doubt. More likely he snuck in to catch a glance at the pretty stranger. Teenage boys on this island must be hard up, so to speak, to see females in the flesh.”
“So there were two men here, her killer and a Peeping Tom?”
“Seems like Crowley paused to take a gander at the cottage, dribbled some of his chew, and then saw something that made him go limp as a noodle.”
“A woman with her skull blown to bits might do that.”
“I hope it would!” said the old man. “The crucial part is that young Crowley didn’t hide his path, coming in or going out. And from the looks of things, he didn’t set his feet to take a shot. Not to say he didn’t, but it doesn’t appear that way to me.”
A gust of wind rattled the bony branches over our heads.
“Tell me honestly, Charley. What do you think happened here?”
“If the evidence points to murder, you’re going to have to hand the case over to Detective Klesko.”
“Does this point to murder?”
“A few boot prints and some tobacco juice? The attorney general would say this is just stuff and nonsense. He’ll want hard evidence he can bring to a judge and jury.” The old man gave me a searching look. “You’re the investigator, Warden Bowditch. What do you think it was?”