by Paul Doiron
“Yes.”
“Can you wait here, please?” He tended to huff out his words, as if each one required its own expulsion of breath.
“What for?”
“We’d appreciate it if you’d wait here for a few minutes.”
I shrugged and sat down on a bench, wondering what I had done now. Billy and I hadn’t shaken hands or otherwise broken the no-contact rule. I wasn’t smuggling contraband in any of my body cavities.
The fat guard stood over me, unsmiling, for a solid ten minutes, and then my phone made a buzzing sound.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
The guard frowned at me.
I rarely used the texting feature, so I was shocked to see that the message had come from Stacey. Bard told me your friend was the warden sergeant who was wounded. I hope she’s OK. I’m sorry about the way I acted that night at Weatherby’s. Sometimes I’m just a bitch.
I was grinning from ear to ear and trying to come up with a clever response when the locked door opened and a man appeared. He was wearing a navy suit specially tailored for muscular guys, a red tie with a tie clip, and polished cap-toe shoes. He also wore his hair short, but he was growing a goatee, which so far, consisted of little more than a brown shadow under his nose and around his mouth. I recognized Angelo Donato from his speech at the televised protest outside the Maine Warden Service headquarters.
“I heard you wanted to see me,” he said flatly.
It had to have been Billy, I thought. What trouble had my friend stirred up now?
“I think you’ve been misinformed, Sergeant.”
“Then maybe you can inform me. My office is through that door.”
He signaled to the admissions guard to buzz us through a locked door. I followed him down a hall to a windowless office devoid of personal items of any sort. He removed his coat and hung it from the back of his chair, revealing that his dress shirt had also been fitted to accommodate his weight lifter’s physique. He took a seat and indicated that I should do the same.
“I don’t know what Billy Cronk told you,” I said.
“He said you were a friend of Jim Gammon. You’re the game warden, right?”
“I used to be.”
“Jim told us about you.” His eyes had heavy dark lashes, as if he wore mascara, but they seemed to be natural features. They gave his face a feminine quality that was at odds with the rest of him. “He talked about the four of us going hunting sometime when we got home. Do you know what was funny about that?”
Obviously, there was nothing funny about it, but I let the former MP continue.
“The funny thing was that he kept talking about it,” Donato said. “When I used to visit him at Togus, he’d say things like ‘So when are you and Monster going hunting with me and Mike?’ His face had been blown off by an IED, along with part of his brain, but he still thought we were all going to shoot pheasants together. Every time Smith and I visited him, he would talk about it—as if the plans were already in motion. ‘The shooting party’ is what he called it.”
I could tell that Donato was going somewhere with the story and that he expected me to clear the tracks.
“Do you know when I realized he was losing it?” he said. “When he stopped talking about the shooting party.”
There was a round clock on the wall that made a ticking sound as each second went by. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a clock do that. High school maybe—the vice principal’s office.
“I have a question for you,” he said after a while.
“Go ahead.”
“Did you ever once visit him after he got home?”
“I never heard he’d been wounded,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was back in Maine.”
“You don’t read the papers?”
I wasn’t going to divulge my own troubles with a man who didn’t care to hear them. “All I can say is that I missed the news, and that I’m sorry. Jimmy was a great guy. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”
“You want to know how it happened?” he asked. “How he got injured?”
I assumed he was going to tell me in any case.
“There was this trash heap outside one of our battle positions.” He waved his hand as if he wanted to strike what he’d said and start again. “It was really more of a mountain of trash. The contractors would dump all of the shit from Sabalu there, and every day crowds of Afghans would descend all over it like a bunch of vultures. They’d take every piece of plastic. Something like this pen.” He held up a disposable ballpoint. “To them, it was like finding buried treasure, even if it was out of ink. Christ only knows what they used it for.”
He began twirling the pen between his fingers.
“One day,” he said, “there was a riot. These two guys started fighting over a bungee cord. The next thing we knew, everyone on the mountain was hitting someone. Through our scopes, we saw kids being trampled. So I decided we needed to break it up. I told Jim to drive us out there, and I ordered people to back off or we’d start shooting with our turret gun. Well, they didn’t, and I wasn’t going to open fire on a mob of women and children. The bottom line is, we broke the first rule and ended up getting out of the truck. Smith and I went one way, and Jim went another. It turned out the whole thing had been a set up by the terrorists. Jim was helping one of the kids who’d been trampled when the boy’s body exploded. They’d cut the kid open and planted an IED inside his stomach. Then they’d sewn him up again.”
He opened his desk drawer and found a roll of Life Savers and popped one in his mouth. He didn’t offer me one. I heard it crack between his teeth when he bit down on it.
“And that was how I gave the order that got Jim Gammon wounded,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that. I might even believe you if it wasn’t for the smear campaign.”
“What smear campaign?”
“The one against Jim,” he said. “It wasn’t enough that two of your people had to kill him in cold blood. You also had to ruin his reputation. The guy was a fucking hero.”
I measured my words carefully. “So is Kathy Frost.”
He leaned across the desk, giving me a whiff of the peppermint on his breath. “And that’s another thing. Do you know how offensive it is to me as an MP to be accused of shooting a fellow officer? It’s beyond offensive. It’s fucking vile is what it is. I fought for my country. How’d you like to have state police detectives show up at your house one night and start interrogating you—in front of your wife and kids—about your whereabouts on the night a game warden was shot? Are you people that desperate to close ranks?”
“I’m not even a warden anymore, Donato. I have nothing to do with Lieutenant Soctomah’s investigation.”
He laughed at what he took to be a pretty brazen lie. “So you were just here to visit your scumbag murdering friend? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like you came here to yank my chain.”
Billy could be such a well-meaning fool. He thought the detectives were making a mistake by questioning members of the 488th in the shooting of Kathy Frost. He believed that Donato was a brave and honorable man who didn’t deserve to have his own integrity called into question. And so, to prove his point to me, Billy had said something stupid to a guard, and that comment had led to a pointless confrontation. Who knew what grief my friend had caused himself by instigating this meeting?
“I have no idea why Billy Cronk told you I was here,” I said calmly. “He gets odd ideas in his head sometimes. I just think he wanted us to meet because he respects your service to our country. Please don’t take your anger out on him.”
He laughed again and leaned back in his chair hard enough that his suit jacket dropped to the floor. “You’re afraid I’m going to have him punished?”
“He doesn’t even belong in the SMU.”
“That’s good, because we value your opinion.”
I stood up. “It’s probably best if I leave now.”
“In that we ag
ree,” he said. “I’d tell you to let yourself out, but you can’t.”
He bent over and gathered his coat from the floor. He wrestled his big arms into the sleeves and brushed off the dust from the pockets. He walked me back down the hall and through the locking door that led to the lobby. I didn’t expect to hear another word from him, but he surprised me again.
“You’re probably thinking I’m going to have your name removed from the visitors’ list now,” he said.
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“That shows how little men like you understand men like me.”
I left the prison thinking that Donato was undoubtedly right. The values by which a soldier lived his life were a mystery to me and always would be.
27
Kurt Eklund’s Oldsmobile guzzled gasoline the way its owner consumed alcohol. I burned through the better part of a tank driving the eighty miles to Portland. I tried not to think of the boy with the bomb inside his stomach, but it was a hard image to get out of my head.
I turned my mind to other things. Donato had interrupted my texting conversation with Stacey. I had never replied when I had the chance. And now my window of opportunity had slammed shut.
All in all, it seemed to be a fitting reflection of how badly my day was going.
I parked in the hillside garage on Congress Street, the one attached to the hospital. To find a space, I had to drive all the way to the top. Fat-chested pigeons swooped through the openings between the levels, looking for hidden ledges on which to roost. The iridescent birds scattered when I slammed the car door, but they flapped back as I headed for the elevators connecting the garage with the ER admitting desk. The pigeons were accustomed to the comings and goings of the sick and the grieving.
I am not a superstitious person. Nor do I enjoy visiting places where hundreds of people have died. However, Kathy Frost had stayed by my side on the night my mother had passed away in this very place. At the information desk, I identified myself to the receptionist as a colleague of the injured warden and asked if she was permitted to have visitors yet. The kind-faced woman made a call to the Special Care Unit. She lowered her voice so I couldn’t hear her questions.
“You should speak with your major,” she said.
“Is he here?”
“I wouldn’t know. Maybe you can give him a call?”
I started to walk away, then returned. “Can you do me another favor? Sergeant Frost’s brother might be on his way here to see her. Will you alert security that he is intoxicated and unstable? His name is Kurt Eklund, and you might have a problem with him if he demands to see his sister.”
The receptionist appraised me with clear brown eyes that had seen hundreds of people in every emotional and pharmacological state imaginable. My tired, scab-covered face couldn’t have offered her many assurances.
“I’ll let them know,” she said.
I decided to buy myself a cup of coffee in the cafeteria while I tried Major Malcomb’s cell.
I was looking for a private table when I caught sight of Dani Tate. As usual, she was seated by herself, and she’d already spotted me wandering around with my coffee and Danish. Her expression hardened.
Without being invited, I took the chair across from her. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing the last time we’d met: flannel shirt in a Black Watch pattern, carpenter’s pants, scuffed-toed work boots. Her blond hair had acquired a greasy sheen. I wondered if she’d even left the hospital. How long could she have been here? Close to forty hours? She was holding an empty plastic water bottle.
“What do you want?” Her throat sounded in need of more water.
“I’m hoping to see Kathy.”
“She’s in a coma, if you haven’t heard.”
“Lieutenant Soctomah told me.” I knew she’d find the comment provocative.
A dent appeared in her chin when she made a certain contemptuous expression. “So what are you? Part of the investigation now?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Did you know that Kathy’s brother, Kurt, was living with her?”
Looking at Tate up close, I could tell that her nose wasn’t naturally flat; she had broken it some time ago. Maybe those rumors about her Brazilian jiu jitsu matches were true. “She never mentioned having a brother.”
“So you wouldn’t know where he was the night she was shot?”
“I told you: She never mentioned him.” She stood up from the table. “Excuse me.”
“You and I have more in common than you think, Tate.”
“That’s doubtful.”
“I used to have your district. Maybe we should have lunch sometime, and I can fill you in on the local hooligans.”
“What makes you think I need your help? There’s a reason you’re sitting there looking like a homeless person. Good-bye.”
She began making her way through the narrow, knee-knocking spaces between the tables.
I called after her: “For someone who acts so sure of herself, you get defensive pretty fast.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
I pointed at the chair she had just vacated. She sat down at the edge of the seat, as if she was prepared to spring at any second.
“Tell me what Kathy has been up to lately,” I said. “Has she been looking into anything unusual?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Anything out of the ordinary.”
She crossed her arms under breasts that were pretty much invisible beneath her man-sized shirt. “Interfering with a criminal investigation is obstruction of justice under state law.”
“All I’m doing is giving the state police a list of names to check out. Does the name Marta Jepson meaning anything to you?”
“Should it?”
“She’s an old woman who died on Saturday up in Aroostook County. She fell down a flight of stairs. Kathy printed out a newspaper article about her death. I found it in a waste basket inside her house.”
“You’re amazing,” she said. “Everything I’ve heard about you is true.”
“The rule book is only going to get you so far, Tate. You’re going to make your arrests and be in line for promotions. But sooner or later, you’re going to realize that the best wardens aren’t the ones who can quote you Title Twelve, chapter and verse. The best wardens catch bad guys and make a difference in people’s lives.”
She rose to her feet again, this time with force. “Kathy was totally right about you.”
“About what?”
“Being an arrogant asshole.”
Dani Tate’s intent had been to insult me, but I was past that point. Even if Kathy had used those exact words to describe me—probably in exasperation, after I’d given my notice—it didn’t change the fact that she was lying in a hospital bed while somewhere a violent man was still at large. If “arrogant” meant that I trusted my own intelligence over the collective wisdom of the state police, then I would have to plead guilty. If “asshole” meant I didn’t care whose feelings I hurt to achieve my goal, then I would accept that label as well.
One positive aspect of not having a career anymore was that I no longer needed to worry about it.
I drank my coffee, chewed on my pastry, and thought about what I could do next. Not much, unfortunately. Without Dani Tate’s help, I would have a hard time identifying alternate suspects—unless I could enlist the aid of one of Kathy’s other district wardens. Tommy Volk was a hothead. Maybe he’d share information with me about some bombshell case Kathy had been quietly pursuing.
My mind kept coming back to the fact that Kathy had been shot with a turkey gun, loaded with ball bearings, rather than by a high-powered rifle firing a hollow-tipped bullet. Snipers almost never use shotguns. It was an odd detail, and in my experience odd details often proved significant. Was her neighbor Littlefield that big of a fool as to parade through her yard with the same weapon he’d used to slaughter Pluto h
ours earlier?
If only I could figure out where Kurt was hiding. What had he meant when he cried, “It’s all my fault”? I’d assumed he’d been lapsing into alcoholic self-pity again. He seemed to have this fucked-up idea of himself as a bringer of misfortune—someone so cursed that he infected other people with bad luck. But what if he’d been speaking literally? What if the shooter’s target that night had been Kurt Eklund?
* * *
I was readying myself to call Major Malcomb, hoping I could persuade him to let me in to see Kathy, when the man himself appeared at my table in the hospital cafeteria.
He looked like he’d lost fifteen pounds since I’d last seen him. He badly needed a shave, and the smell of cigarettes emanated from his green uniform. The Maine Medical Center complex—from the hospital building to the parking garage—was off-limits to smokers. I wasn’t sure where he’d been sneaking off to satisfy his craving.
Out of habit, I stood at attention. “Major.”
“Tate told me you were here.” His voice was rough and raspy, as if his vocal cords had been scarred by some corrosive chemical.
“Oh, yeah? What else did she tell you?”
“That you were meddling with Soctomah’s investigation. She said you were grilling her about Kathy’s recent cases.”
“Curiosity wasn’t a crime the last time I looked.”
He frowned at me. “Don’t be a wiseass, Bowditch. You have no idea what I’ve been dealing with over the past few days.”
“Colonel Harkavy?”
He stared at me with bleary eyes that didn’t give away his thoughts. “Where’d you hear about it?”
I had no intention of narcing on the Warden Service’s chaplain. “The grapevine.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear through the grapevine.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything Dani Tate tells you, either.”
“She’s not the one with the lengthy history of insubordination.”
I could hardly take issue with that statement. “Can you get me in to see Kathy?”
“I don’t make those decisions,” he said. “The doctors do.”
“Have other people been allowed to see her?”