by Paul Doiron
From my first weeks in the Warden Service, I had learned how political law enforcement could be. Competing departments engaged in constant turf battles with one another. The state police were notorious for bigfooting our cases. What added to the frustration was that, in homicide cases such as this one, they were entitled to do so by law. Game wardens were not murder police.
“I’m not ready to turn this over to Klesko yet,” I admitted.
The old man grinned at me like he once had, back when we’d first recognized each other as kindred rebels willing to bend the rules to the breaking point.
“You know,” he said, “there’s no law that says we need to share our uncorroborated suspicions.”
“Uncorroborated?”
Charley had never finished high school, but every once in a while he revealed his well-kept secret: the folksy bush pilot was an autodidact.
I marked and videoed the gob of tobacco spit and the hiding place behind the shadbush. Then we continued on, finding nothing else of note, until we hit the road north of the cottage.
Pausing there on the gravel, out of sight of the building, with only the sound of the wind and the gurgling croak of a raven eyeing us from aloft, I found it easy to indulge the sensation that Charley and I were utterly alone on Maquoit.
He reached into his trapper basket and produced a thermos of coffee and a sealed bag of moose jerky. It might have been deer jerky. Or possibly bear jerky. He’d once fed me jerky he’d made from the tail of a beaver. It wasn’t bad.
Behind me, I heard a laboring engine, a perforated muffler, the rustle of tires on crushed stones. A blue pickup rounded the corner. Two men were inside. The passenger was wearing an orange cap.
“I’m guessing that one’s Crowley,” I said.
I had no clue who the driver might be.
7
Both Radcliffe and Reed had described Kenneth Crowley as a kid. But the man who emerged from the passenger side of the newly arrived pickup was easily six-three, well muscled, and sporting a chin beard any billy goat would envy. If he was a child, then I was a senior citizen.
Crowley was wearing a black hoodie two sizes too big with the hood pulled down over his head and the brim of his hunting cap peeking out. The hat, faded from hours in the sun, was more grapefruit colored than blaze orange. Underneath his sweatshirt, he wore sweatpants tucked into the brown XtraTuf boots that seemed to be the footwear of choice for Maquoit lobstermen.
As requested, he’d brought along his hunting rifle. The Winchester 94 lever-action was almost certainly chambered for .30/30 caliber bullets. The short barrel and open sights made it ideal for hunting in dense cover. That make and model gun had probably killed more deer in the Maine woods than any other ever manufactured.
The driver of the pickup was taking his sweet time getting out.
“Kenneth.” I advanced toward him. “My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service.”
There was a bulge the size of a golf ball in his cheek. The impressive wad of chewing tobacco gave him a speech impediment of sorts. “How’s it going?” came out as “How shit going?”
“Not very well or I wouldn’t be here.”
Crowley seemed unaware that his rifle barrel was bouncing around as he shifted his weight. It was currently aimed at my shins.
Nothing escaped Charley. “Would you mind pointing your barrel at the ground, young feller?”
“How about I take it?” I said. “I promise to give it back.”
The young man flipped the sling off his shoulder and presented me with the Winchester. The safety was on, but a round was in the chamber. I cleared the action and caught the cartridge that jumped out of the breech with my gloved hand. “This was the gun you were hunting with this morning?”
“I don’t know whah you hurt, but I dint shooter.”
He spit a brown stream onto the gravel. Some of the juice dribbled down his goat beard. A discolored streak there suggested he hadn’t yet mastered the fine art of expectoration.
I let the rifle hang by my side. “Can you do me another favor and take the wad out of your mouth. I’m having trouble understanding what you’re saying.”
Crowley coughed out the lump of tobacco into his palm and tucked it into the pouch pocket of his hoodie. A stain began seeping through the black cotton.
Without the chew, he sounded like a normal teenager. “Check my gun if you think I shot her. You got my permission. I never even fired at nothing all morning.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I don’t see why I’m under suspicion when I was the one who found her and ran to get help.”
I believed, based on what I had seen so far of Harmon Reed, that he had prepared his nephew-in-law for a police interview. Harmon had probably rehearsed with him a series of short, easy-to-remember answers to expected questions.
I let my eyes go soft, my voice go calm. “Who said you were ‘under suspicion,’ Kenneth?”
My response seemed to baffle him. “How come you hauled me out here if I ain’t?”
“I was hoping you could show me where you were standing when you spotted her. I’d like to hear in your own words what happened. It would be a huge help to my investigation.”
Finally the driver of the pickup decided to show his face.
The man looked so much like a younger version of Harmon that he had to be his son. They were of the same height, and he had the same powerful chest and back, but his hair was dark and windswept, and his muttonchops had been shaved short to resemble the feral superhero Wolverine. He wore a “denim leisure suit”: blue jeans and a jean jacket. But nothing about this hard-faced lobsterman suggested he’d enjoyed a day of leisure in his life.
“Kenneth has a right against self-incrimination,” he said with a slight slur. “He has a right to an attorney.”
“And you would be?”
“Hiram Reed.”
The Reeds seemingly had a predilection for archaic names that began with the letter h.
“Kenneth was going to show us where in the woods he came across Ariel Evans,” I explained.
Crowley stared at his friend the way a scared puppy might at his new owner who was leaving the house.
Hiram refused to relax the sneer on his face. “I’m just saying he has constitutional rights you’d better respect. Kenneth’s a minor with no one to look out for his well-being. If you try to entrap him, I will know about it, and there will be hell to pay.”
“So noted,” said Charley.
“After you, Kenneth,” I said. “Wait here, Mr. Reed. I promise I won’t entrap him until we come back.”
Crowley wasn’t the most graceful of woodsmen. He simply bulled his way through whatever lay in front of him—low-hanging branches, evergreen boughs, thorn bushes—with the result that I received a switch across the face as a limb snapped back behind our oblivious leader.
Five minutes later, we came upon a well-worn path leading from the abandoned orchard south past Gull Cottage.
Crowley pointed to the north. “I came from that way.”
I directed my iPhone’s video camera at him. “What time was it that you got here?”
“I don’t own a watch.”
“What about a cell phone?”
“Forgot to charge it last night. When I woke up, it was dead.”
“Well, what time did you leave your house this morning?”
“I don’t have a house. I have a room over the Lazy Lobster.”
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Charley suppressing a grin. “Your room then.”
“Six o’clock, maybe. It was still dark, I remember.”
“How long were you hunting, do you think?”
“Three or four hours.”
As the sun slipped behind a cloud, the temperature took a nosedive, the way it does in the woods, in the autumn. The sky in the southeast was now the color of wet ashes. From the looks of it, I doubted if we would see the sun again.
“Can you show us wher
e you first spotted Ariel Evans?” I asked.
Crowley plunged into the bushes. I was heartened to see that he was making for the spot behind the puckerbrush that Charley and I had identified. Sure enough, he came to a halt practically in his own boot prints.
I put an arm out to stop him. “If you can stand back a little, I’d appreciate it.”
I didn’t explain that Ronette Landry would soon be pouring quick-hardening dental stone into the impressions to preserve a cast of the boot print. Nor did I tell Crowley that we’d need to borrow his XtraTufs to take photographs of the soles. That so many lobstermen wore that particular make might prove to be a complication in matching the cast with Crowley’s, but usually specific scuffs and marks were unique to a pair of shoes or boots.
From his silence, it was clear that Charley was going to let me conduct the interview as if he weren’t present.
“What made you decide to leave the trail and bushwhack over this way?” I asked.
“I thought I heard a deer.”
“You didn’t come down here to get a peek at her?”
“What? No way, man.”
“You might have seen her through the windows. She was a beautiful woman.”
“Dude, she was old. Besides, it was foggy.”
“So you did sneak down here hoping to see her walking around the house naked?”
“I ain’t a pervert. And maybe I had a good reason to come this way. But you haven’t even asked me the question.”
“What question?”
“Whether I heard a shot or not,” he said smugly. “The answer is yes. I heard a shot.”
“How long was it between the time you heard the shot and the time you saw Ariel Evans lying in the yard?”
“Ten minutes max.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, because I was up on Cider Ridge when I heard the shot. I figured one of the guys had bagged a buck, and I wanted to see how big it was. When I got here, I saw that lady with her head blown in, and I was, like, ‘Holy shit, someone shot her by mistake. And what if it’s the Washburns and they don’t want any witnesses?’”
“Who are the Washburns?”
“Eli and Rud Washburn. They’re twin brothers. They were the ones who sunk Harmon’s boat. Their family has been out here longer than the Reeds. We don’t go on their land, and they don’t go on ours. Especially after what Harmon did to Eli.”
“You’re going to have to fill in the blanks for me.”
Crowley reached for the tobacco ball in his pocket and stuffed it back inside his cheek. He looked like a chipmunk with a mouth full of acorns. “I thought you cops knew all this shit. Harmon shot Eli after those Nazis sunk his boat.”
Charley couldn’t help himself. “Nazis?”
“The Washburns buy and sell German shit on eBay. Rud said they owned one of Adolf Hitler’s daggers. They’ve got swastika tattoos and stickers on their trucks that say ‘White Pride Worldwide.’”
This new information complicated the situation. Complicated it quite a bit.
I had a dim memory of the sinking and shooting Crowley had mentioned. One Maquoit fisherman had shot another during one of their perennial lobster wars. The victim had survived the encounter, while the aggressor was put on trial in Ellsworth on attempted-murder charges. The jury had acquitted the shooter after a mere six hours of deliberation. The prosecutor had failed to paint the Nazi boat-sinker as a figure deserving of sympathy. Not that I could fault him for that.
Ariel Evans had written a bestselling exposé on neo-Nazis.
On the other hand, Harmon Reed had a vested interest in seeing his enemies incriminated or at least brought under suspicion. I had to assume that he would have prompted his nephew to put me on the scent of Maquoit’s white supremacists.
“Thanks, Kenneth,” I said. “You’ve been helpful.”
“Civic duty, man.”
When we’d managed to bushwhack back to the road, we found that Hiram Reed had gone on to the house.
We followed his tire tracks around the bend to Gull Cottage.
Radcliffe and the Reeds were gathered together in a knot beside Harmon’s gleaming truck. Whatever the topic of their conversation was, they abandoned it. The constable broke away from the others and hurried toward us.
“There you are! Detective Klesko has been asking for you. He says he found something.”
We left Crowley to the care of the Reeds and made our way under the crime-scene tape and around the side of the cottage.
Klesko was standing over the corpse, still speaking into his telephone. When he spotted us, he pointed at Ariel’s bare feet. “Look here.”
I squatted down and began scanning the delicate white ankle.
“Between the toes,” he said.
I squinted and saw the tiny red pinpricks. “Ariel Evans was a junkie?”
“Seems so,” said the detective.
“That doesn’t fit with her reputation,” I said. “How many investigative reporters are heroin addicts?”
Charley stroked his chin. “She might have been shooting coke.”
Klesko held his hand over his phone and lowered his voice as if we were in danger of being overheard. “These wounds are recent. Definitely made since she arrived on the island. So did she bring the drugs with her, or did she acquire them here?”
More important, I thought, were they the reason someone had killed her?
8
With the medical examiner still talking him through every action, Klesko opened a body bag to one side of the corpse. Then Charley and I carefully turned the still-rigid cadaver over so that she was faceup. I use the term faceup loosely since the dead woman was missing much of hers.
The fatal bullet had punched a hole through the bridge of her nose, causing her eyes to tilt inward toward the wound. It made her appear almost comically cross-eyed. The corneas had dried out after the tear ducts ceased to function. Beneath the cloudy surface, the irises were a distinctly tarnished-looking shade of blue.
After death, when the heart has stopped pumping, and the lifeless body can no longer resist the relentless pull of gravity, the skin discolors where the blood begins to pool. If a corpse is face up, you will see lividity in the back, buttocks, and along the hamstrings. If a corpse is facedown, you will see the opposite. Sometimes, as with Ariel, a dead person can appear to be flushed, as if they’d died of eating ghost peppers. This process—livor mortis—is yet another means of determining time of death.
“Lividity appears to be fixed,” said Klesko. “She’s definitely been dead more than six hours.”
In life she must have been beautiful. Blonde hair, blue eyes, and the full lips that I have heard described as bee-stung.
“She looks younger than I’d imagined,” I found myself saying. “In some of her publicity photos her skin looks weathered.”
“Maybe she gave up some unhealthy habits?” offered Landry, who had paused in her documentation to look upon the face of our victim. Numbered evidence markers were arranged all over the yard. Ronette had been busy.
“And took up heroin?” I said.
“The toxicology tests for this one should prove interesting,” said Klesko.
“It will make up for a total lack of ballistic evidence.”
Klesko responded with a bitter laugh. “I’m sure the rifle that was used to shoot this woman has already been hurled into the sea.”
“I suspect Steve is right about the firearm.” Ronette paused to sneeze. “But I wouldn’t give up hope yet of finding the bullet that killed her.”
The procedure for investigating a hunting homicide, when there are no witnesses, is to begin by surveying the death scene to get a general sense of the circumstances.
The next step is to cordon off the site.
Establish paths into and out of the scene to prevent disturbing any additional areas that might contain evidence. For us, it was the well-worn trail that led from the front of the cottage, around the building, to the clothesline.
/> Then, if necessary, take action to preserve the corpse against the elements until it can be thoroughly photographed and measured.
All of this, we accomplished with a handful of officers.
But the next series of action steps made me miss the dozen or so wardens who make up the Evidence Recovery and Forensic Mapping Teams. Instead of having a platoon of specialists at my disposal, I had less than a squad. And the inside of the cottage remained to be searched. It didn’t help that my phone only seemed to have a signal intermittently.
I spent ten minutes bringing Klesko up to speed. He clearly disapproved of my having spoken to our material witness without him, but the only way we were going to conquer our tasks was to divide them up, I said. As it happened, he had made good use of his time while Charley and I were beating the bushes.
“While you were gone,” Klesko said, “Kitteridge had to sign off to use the bathroom.”
“The prostate is a cruel master,” proclaimed Charley.
“I used the interval to make some calls. I’m afraid I’m going to have to fly back tonight. I was hoping to reschedule a court appearance, but the attorney general says he can’t make it happen. I was the primary in the investigation of that Barter woman who hacked up her husband in his sleep and is now claiming self-defense.”
I’d seen the headlines, but not read the articles. Only now did I make the connection. “Wanda Barter?”
“You know her?”
“Better than I wish. I knew her husband, too.”
“The guy was a registered sex offender so no one’s shedding tears he’s gone. But the AG wants to make a statement that you can’t just behead your sack-of-shit husband when he’s passed out drunk and drugged.”
“I’m surprised you were assigned this investigation if you need to testify tomorrow.”
“We thought we had the confessed killer, remember?”
It was after three o’clock, and the sky was already darkening in the east.
“What time do you have to leave?”
“Whenever Charley says we still can.”
I’d seen my friend fly in pitch-black conditions that would have intimidated an owl. If he knew the length of the runway, he could get his Cessna airborne. Whether Klesko’s hair turned white in the process was an open question.