The Precipice

by Paul Doiron

  “That sounds right to me.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible they were killed by coyotes?”

  “Possible, but unlikely.”

  The waitress arrived with our plates. I waited until she had finished refilling our mugs to return to the conversation.

  “In that case, who do you think killed them?” I said.

  Kathy doused her hot cereal with milk. “They could have just fallen.”

  “Both of them?”

  She sighed, glanced around at the nearby booths and tables, then leaned over her bowl.

  “If I tell you something, I need you to keep it a secret. Remember that FBI agent who was at the command post the night you came back from Chairback Gap, the man who never blinked?”

  “Genoways?”

  “You didn’t wonder why he was there?”

  I lowered my fork. “Don’t tell me the rumors about the serial killer are true.”

  “Over the past five summers, there have been a series of strange deaths and disappearances on the AT. It started when a young guy in Virginia was found dead in a creek, as if he’d gotten carried away by a flash flood. The only problem was, he had no water in his lungs. The next year, a couple of day hikers in Pennsylvania came across a woman hanging by a bungee cord from a tree. It looked like a suicide, but her family said she had no reason to kill herself. There were similar unexplained incidents in the Adirondacks and Vermont. And then there was the Iraq vet who disappeared in New Hampshire last summer.”

  I hadn’t heard of the other occurrences, but I knew about the missing Marine. He had lost one of his legs in an IED attack in Fallujah and was hiking the Appalachian Trail on his prosthetic limb to raise awareness about the plight of wounded warriors. The man had vanished without a trace in the Presidential Range during a stormy week when New England was being battered by the remnants of a tropical hurricane. The working theory was that he’d wandered off the trail and fallen into a gorge.

  “The FBI thinks all these incidents are related?” I asked.

  “They aren’t sure. Except for the fact that they’re all unexplained, there isn’t anything to tie them together.”

  “Other than the northward pattern.”

  “Right. After Vermont and New Hampshire, Maine would be next. With the hiking season almost over, it was looking like the connection had fallen apart. Then Samantha and Missy disappeared.”

  I tried a forkful of omelette but the chili had gone cold. “How come this is the first I’m hearing of this?”

  “Because the Bureau doesn’t want to start a panic. Hundreds of thousands of people hike the AT every year—either the whole trail or just parts of it. What would happen if word got out that a serial killer was loose out there, especially when there’s no concrete proof it’s even true?”

  “The FBI might not have wanted a panic, but that’s what they’ve got. The problem is that people are freaking out over man-eating coyotes.”

  In college I had taken a couple of courses in psychology, naïvely thinking it might help in my future career in law enforcement, and one of my instructors had given us tests where we were supposed to look for hidden images in television static. Most everyone in the class found something, but it turned out the experiment was rigged. There were no hidden numbers or words. It was all an illusion. The professor wanted to show us how the human brain searches for patterns where none exist. He said it was an evolutionary tool we’d developed to deal with uncertainty and helplessness—a way to find meaning in chaos.

  “That explains Genoways’s interest in Chad McDonough,” I said, pushing aside my half-eaten omelette. “The kid told me he was a section hiker. What do you know about his whereabouts over the past five summers?”

  “Genoways didn’t share that information with me.”

  “What motive would someone have to murder strangers and make it look like accidents and suicides?” I asked.

  Kathy shrugged. “Kicks? A sense of power? Knowing he was outwitting the hapless FBI? And who says the victims were strangers? The killer might’ve known one or more of them. He could have murdered the others as a means of misdirection. Didn’t you ever read Agatha Christie when you were a kid?”

  “I was more of an Arthur Conan Doyle fan.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Kathy winced as she settled back against the hard plastic booth.

  A depressing thought came to me. “If this is part of a pattern—if the same guy killed Samantha and Missy and the others—then we shouldn’t expect the medical examiner’s report to settle anything. All the other deaths have been inconclusive.”

  “It might absolve Stacey’s coyotes at least. My guess is it will.”

  Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the Franco guys who’d been arguing in the booth behind me had left.

  “I should apologize to her for not trusting her instincts,” I said.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do, Grasshopper.”

  “That would be a first.”

  Kathy gave me a wink and returned to her oatmeal. The waitress came by with the bill.

  * * *

  Before I drove back to my district, I sent Stacey an e-mail, asking if she wanted me to drive up to Monson after work. I could help out at the tagging station. Better to offer my apology in person, I thought.

  Kathy’s news had rattled me. When Dani Tate had brought up the rumors of a serial killer stalking the Appalachian Trail, I had laughed them off as delusional. Human predators were an obsession of Hollywood, but there hadn’t been a mass murderer apprehended in Maine for as long as I could remember.

  But what if Genoways was chasing a real person, and what if that person was someone I had met?

  In my mind, I saw Chad McDonough’s half-baked smile again. Where had McDonut gone? There had been no sightings of the pudgy section hiker after Troy Dow had dropped him in downtown Greenville. The last I’d heard, his car was still parked at the Abol Bridge Campground with a boot on the wheel.

  What about his mysterious man in the red tent? Was it just a coincidence that a camper had found a shredded tent in the river below Gulf Hagas?

  And then there was Nonstop Nissen, who had volunteered to search Chairback Mountain and had conveniently been the first to find the broken skeletons of Samantha and Missy below one of its cliffs.

  Even Caleb Maxwell suddenly seemed suspicious. The manager of Hudson’s Lodge had lied to me about being seen crying on a ledge above Buttermilk Falls. Maybe it had nothing to do with the dead women. But maybe it did.

  Not to mention the dozens of anonymous thru-hikers on the trail that week, of course.

  It was as if I was back in psychology class, staring into a fuzzy television screen, trying to connect the dots, looking for a pattern that might or might not be there.

  25

  While I was up north, I had received a voice mail from the executive director of a local land trust, asking if I could swing by several preserves the organization managed around Sebago Lake. He said that the parking lots were being used by men engaged in certain clandestine sexual acts.

  His message had a pleading, slightly embarrassed tone: “It’s really getting out of hand, Warden. We don’t want to get people arrested. But a mother was taking her kids for a hike at Standish Cove yesterday, and she came upon two half-naked men doing you-know-what behind a big oak tree. We’ve tried cutting back the bushes to give them fewer places to hide, but my stewardship director was there this morning, and he found used condoms all over the place. All we can figure is that the lot must be listed on some Internet site as a place for cruising. Can you just stop in every once in a while and chase off anyone who doesn’t seem to belong there?”

  From Lewiston, I followed the back roads to the Lake Region. The weather had turned cooler, more autumnlike, and there were new patches of gold and red on the hillsides. Sebago looked as hard as a sapphire in the morning sunshine.

  I found two pickups parked side by side in the Standish Cove lot: a newly washed and
waxed Ford F-150 and a beat-up Toyota Tacoma patched together with Bondo. The Ford had a Fraternal Order of Eagles decal on one of its windows. The Toyota was plastered with bumper stickers with slogans like COEXIST and LOVE OUR MOTHER. I pulled in beside the mismatched vehicles and turned off the ignition.

  In the distance, a red-breasted nuthatch tapped its bill against a tree. Shafts of dusty sunlight angled through the canopy onto the dead needles and fallen leaves. Small stumps, as wide around as broomsticks, showed where saplings had recently been. The land trust had spared only the towering evergreens and a few gnarled oaks. At the trailhead I saw a kiosk, similar to one at the entrance to the Hundred Mile Wilderness. I also noticed fainter paths winding away into the deeper woods. Each one, I suspected, led to a place of concealment.

  As I summoned the energy to start beating the bushes, a Cadillac turned in behind me. Glancing in my mirror, I saw the driver’s face as he spotted the word POLICE painted on my truck. With a strained expression of nonchalance, he swung the Caddie around in a circle and accelerated back onto the road, never once making eye contact with me.

  What a miserable task this was.

  Fuck it, I thought. I’m just going to sit here and let these guys finish.

  After five minutes, a skinny man with a brown goatee appeared from behind a tree trunk. His jeans were too big for him, and his flannel shirt was untucked on one side. He stopped when he caught sight of my patrol truck, fumbled for a pair of sunglasses, then proceeded confidently toward my half-opened window.

  “Good morning!” he said.

  “Nice day for a hike.”

  “’Tis.”

  “Have I seen you here before?” I asked, hoping he’d get the message.

  He started pawing around for his keys. “Gee, I don’t think so. Not from around here, you know. Just passing through. Have a good day, Officer.”

  His Toyota made a coughing sound when he started the engine. The rusted tailpipe scraped the ground as he drove away. The metal threw sparks when it struck the pavement at the edge of the lot.

  Moments later, another man appeared out of the woods. He was middle-aged, overweight, wearing a navy blue suit but no necktie. When he saw me, his face went tomato red.

  He took off like a frightened rabbit back into the shadows from which he’d come.

  Some wardens—I was thinking of Tommy Volk—might have found the sight comical. All it did was make me feel like a bully. These men were wrong to have taken over the land trust’s parking lot for their secret hookups, but I took no pleasure in shaming them.

  When I became a game warden, I imagined that my life would be one of nonstop derring-do. I pictured myself wrestling night hunters into handcuffs and going undercover to break up poaching rings. Not once did it occur to me that I would spend mornings policing parking lots for desperate, closeted men. I almost felt sorry for the naïve kid I had been.

  * * *

  I had just left Standish Cove when my cell phone rang. It was Warden Investigator Pinkham.

  “We found Chad McDonough,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dead. A guy was picking up recyclables along Route 15 and found his body in a ditch. It looks like he was hit by a truck.”

  I felt the skin tighten across my forehead. “When?”

  “Days ago. Probably around the same time you were looking for him. He had on the clothes he was last reported as wearing at Hudson’s Lodge. We found his backpack at the scene—and that ridiculous sombrero. The impact threw him into a patch of ferns about fifteen feet from the road. I don’t think anyone would have seen him lying there until the vegetation had died back.”

  My mouth had gone dry. “Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

  “Of course I do. But there’s no proof the hit-and-run had anything to do with what happened to Samantha and Missy.”

  “The timing is pretty damn coincidental. McDonough was running from someone, Pinkham.”

  “You also described him as a paranoid pothead. I know you won’t believe this, Bowditch, but I’m not a complete buffoon. I’ve been doing this job for twenty years without your expert assistance.” The words were harsh, but his voice had a merry ring in it, as if he were smiling. “Something else that might interest you,” he continued. “We’ve inventoried the items we found with the girls’ bodies—backpacks, clothes, et cetera. The scavengers had torn up a lot of it, looking for food. Guess what we didn’t find? Cell phones.”

  “Coyotes don’t usually eat electronic devices.”

  “Go on.”

  “You think the person who killed them took their phones. They owned Samsung Galaxies, right?”

  Pinkham chuckled. “Tim Malcomb was right about you.” He was referring to the Warden Service’s acting colonel.

  “How so?”

  “He said you’re smarter than you look. Don’t be offended. There are worse things for an investigator than being underestimated. I say that from personal experience. Missy’s mom told us that her phone has a Hello Kitty sticker on the back. I’ll let you know if something turns up.”

  After Pinkham had hung up, I puzzled over his comments about the perks of being underestimated. Had he meant that he saw a future for me as a warden investigator? Considering all the black marks against me, I never thought I would get the chance to pursue my dream job.

  Stacey needed to hear about McDonut and the missing cell phones. I called her cell twice but landed in voice mail both times. Even though she hadn’t answered my earlier e-mail, I decided to send a text: Just heard from Pinkham. Police found McDonut dead. Hit-and-run on Rt. 15. Looks like he died same day Dow dropped him in Greenville. Call me when u get this. XO M.

  The state owed me comp days for having worked the search during my vacation. I could think of worse places to hang out than in the North Woods. I called Sergeant Ouellete and told him I was taking the weekend off. He could reach me at the Monson General Store, where I would be helping the regional biologist catalog dead coyotes.

  26

  When I got home, I changed out of my uniform in favor of jeans and a T-shirt, clipped my badge and sidearm to my belt, and threw my duffel into the back of my patrol truck. By six P.M., I was on the Maine Turnpike, heading north. The sky had taken on a peach-colored hue after the sun had set, and the drivers hurrying home in the opposite direction were switching on their headlights.

  Stacey still hadn’t responded. I wanted to believe that she was busy with her work, or maybe she was just working through her anger. The worry manifested itself as a ticklish sensation inside my chest.

  My phone rang as I passed the exit to Lewiston. I hit my blinkers and pulled into the breakdown lane. When I saw the number on the screen, the itchy feeling spread to my spine.

  “I just got a call from Stacey’s boss, Tom Waterman,” Charley said. “He and I worked together at IF&W on that lynx project up north. He wanted me to hear the news from him.”

  “What news?”

  “Stacey blew up at him on the phone this afternoon. Told him she was done tagging coyotes, and if the governor wanted to hand out bounties, he could come up to Monson and collect the damned carcasses himself.”

  I could almost hear the conversation in my head: Stacey launching into a blistering tirade, followed by her supervisor’s exasperated response. No doubt she had dared him to fire her, knowing the union would protect her job. From personal experience, I knew how hard it was for the state to terminate a problem employee.

  “Have you spoken with her?” I asked.

  “Ora and I have been trying to reach her, but she won’t pick up the phone.”

  Before I spoke again, I waited a moment and gazed up at the darkening sky. I saw a V-shaped formation of geese outlined against the diaphanous clouds. The term for that flight pattern was a skein.

  “Maybe she’s driven off into the woods to cool down and she can’t get a signal. You know how hotheaded she can be.”

  It would explain
why she hadn’t gotten back to me.

  “The problem is, Ora has one of her feelings.”

  Woman’s intuition had once struck me as an outdated myth. Then I met Stacey’s mother. Ora Stevens had empathic powers that were downright spooky.

  “I’m actually on my way to Monson.”

  “Say again?”

  “Stacey sounded miserable the last time I spoke to her. I decided to take a couple of comp days and drive up there. I thought I’d help her out at the tagging station.”

  He murmured something to another person in the room with him. Ora, I assumed.

  “Can you give us a call when you find her?” he said.

  “How about I have her call you instead?” I didn’t want them to worry.

  “Good luck with that!” he said. “Stacey can make a mule seem accommodating when she doesn’t want to do something.”

  He didn’t need to tell me about his daughter.

  * * *

  The stars were out by the time I left the highway. In Maine the constellations become sharper the farther from civilization you travel, especially on a moonless night like this one. I saw Sagittarius drawing his horn bow, and winged Pegasus taking flight. The Big Dipper hung, as if from its handle, above the northern horizon. That was the direction I was headed. Into the wild.

  I filled my gas tank at the truck stop in Newport, feeling the eyes of the people inside—the truckers, clerks, and drunk drivers—watching me. The station burned with a bright, cold light. I put on the expensive Fjällräven climbing jacket my mother had given me the Christmas before she died. I found myself missing her intensely. She had never met Stacey, and so I would always wonder if she would have approved of her. At the very least, my mom would have appreciated knowing I was in love again. It hurt my heart to think that she had passed on when I was still alone, probably wondering to the end whether I would ever find the right woman.

  The road to Moosehead Lake passed through a series of derelict mill towns. The windswept parking lots outside the factories had weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt. Apple trees outside one stately house dropped their unwanted fruit onto the sidewalks for the raccoons to eat. Halloween was a month away on the calendar, but the ghosts were already in residence in Piscataquis County.