by Paul Doiron
“She wandered off while the rest of us were listening to the lieutenant’s rousing speech.”
“Hopefully, we won’t need to send out a search party.” He spat toward the ground and accidentally hit his own boots. “Bard, I want you to drive out to the gate and get a statement from Billy Cronk.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one to do that?” I asked.
“The L.T. wants Bard to do the interrogation, since you and Cronk are so chummy. Tibbetts, your job is to inspect every gate along the Stud Mill Road. See if anybody’s fucked with any of them. We’re looking for signs of forced entry. I’m going to take the lieutenant around to the kill sites using Mike’s map.”
“Doesn’t it make more sense for Mike to do that?” asked Cody.
I was relieved that I didn’t need to ask the question myself.
“We’ve got another job for Bowditch.” McQuarrie looked me in the eyes and, without blinking, said, “We want you to check out the gravel pits.”
“What gravel pits?”
“All the local ones. You’re looking for anyplace where these guys might have done some target practice beforehand. Check around for twenty-two shell casings. If we can get a match on the brass these guys used, we might be able to link their guns to the ones used to kill the moose.”
I clenched my molars together to keep from spitting out an expletive.
Again, Cody Devoe did my speaking for me. “Isn’t that kind of a shot in the dark, Mack?”
“This case is going to live or die on whatever circumstantial evidence we gather.”
The other wardens turned their heads in my direction. For reasons that made no sense at all-beyond the fact that Rivard disliked me-I was being deliberately marginalized from my own case. Even more than that, I was being assigned a task so obviously useless that the insult was plain for anyone to see. The lieutenant wanted me to waste my time. His treatment of me was a warning to other wardens who might choose to think for themselves. But instead of telling Mack McQuarrie what he could do with his gravel pits, I turned and walked toward my truck.
“Hey, Bowditch!” said Bard, a classmate of mine from the academy who was widely known to be one of Lieutenant Rivard’s pet poodles. “We’re not done here.”
“Let him go,” I heard McQuarrie say. “It’s OK.”
I noticed the ravens circling high overhead as I drove back toward the gate, small black specks twirling against the deep blue sky. There were two of them again, probably the same two. And I knew they were ravens, because crows do not soar.
Hugin and Munin: Those were the names of Odin’s ravens.
My Viking friend could have told me as much. But as I passed into the shade of the conifers and peered forward at the closed gate, I saw no one standing guard. Billy Cronk had deserted his post. How was I supposed to get off the estate, or anyone else get in?
I stopped the truck and left the engine idling while I inspected the hunk of steel blocking my way. The heavy bar was set on a metal post and pivoted open and shut if you unlocked it and gave it a shove. It probably weighed several hundred pounds and looked like something scavenged from an abandoned military installation. Billy had told me that Morse’s first gate had been an expensive wooden affair, hand-crafted by an artisan in Bar Harbor, with leaping stags and calling loons engraved in the red cedar surface. It was a thing of beauty until some maniac had driven his truck, kamikaze-style, straight through it one night. Billy had spent the next morning collecting the splintered boards to burn in Morse’s lakeside fire pit.
The next gate, she told her caretaker, should be made of iron.
I scanned up and down the pine-needle road but didn’t see Billy’s blue pickup anywhere. Behind me, the serpentine belt screeched like a migraine. I got out my phone and was on the verge of punching in my friend’s number when it occurred to me to give the gate a gentle pull.
It moved.
I put the phone away and pulled with both hands. The gate groaned and swung heavily toward me on its axis. My absent friend had left the damn thing open.
Maybe Morse called him away, I thought. Billy spent his waking hours running fool’s errands for the woman. It didn’t matter that Rivard had asked him to help protect the integrity of the crime scene, not if Betty Morse had called and commanded him to drive into Grand Lake Stream for a case of Chateau Margaux. I couldn’t think of any other reason he would have left the gate unlocked, except that his employer had ordered him to do something, and he knew that wardens would need to drive in and out. He was already terrified of losing his job.
Unless the shooters had torn one down, then they had to have driven in through an open gate. But Billy swore that keeping the gates locked was Elizabeth’s rule number one at Moosehorn Lodge. You had to think that after all the death threats Morse had received, she would have impressed that point sufficiently on all the people in her circle. There was always the possibility that someone had forgotten, I supposed. McQuarrie had assigned Tibbetts to check the other gates along the Stud Mill Road. Maybe he would discover that one of them had been bulldozed to the ground overnight and that was how the shooters had gained entry to the killing ground.
Meanwhile, I had gravel pits to inspect.
There were at least a dozen in my district alone, deep holes excavated out of the forest to provide crushed rock to make logging roads. People had been using them for target practice for generations. The sheer number of spent.22 casings scattered amid all that sand and bottle glass made my head hurt. Did Rivard honestly expect the forensics guys in Augusta to dust all that brass for prints?
I was fighting a strong urge to drive to Charley Stevens’s house outside Grand Lake Stream and ask him take me aloft in his floatplane. We could fly low over Morse’s estate, looking for additional dead moose in the beaver bogs, and I would prove to the lieutenant that I was right about there being additional kill sites.
The only problem was that Rivard wanted me to go rogue. By sending me away from the action and giving me a fruitless task, he was hoping to goad me into disobeying a direct order. Then he would have another complaint against me, another piece of paper to add to my already-fat personnel file. I had never worked for a man I hated before, and the experience was testing me in ways I’d never imagined.
Not long ago, I would have taken his bait, but not this time. For once, I decided, I was going to be a good soldier. I would follow the chain of command even if it drove me crazy. There was one consolation I could cling to in all this, I realized: When Rivard learned that I’d actually carried out his absurd commands, thoroughly and without complaint, it would send his blood pressure through the roof.
I was smiling at the thought when I nearly ran over Stacey Stevens. She was standing in the leafy shadows at the edge of the road with her thumb out. I had to brake hard to keep from clipping her.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw my slack-jawed face through the driver’s window. Her pants were soaked and brown with mud all the way up to her waist. Her shirttail was hanging out, and there was a crescent of perspiration above her breasts.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Trying to catch a ride.”
“Seriously?”
She gave me a sour-lemon expression. “No.”
“Then what?”
“Get out of the truck, and I’ll show you.”
I followed her down the gravel road, trying to keep my eyes trained on her shoulders. Under the heavy boughs of the hemlocks and cedars, the air felt wetter and heavier than out in the open sun. Somewhere, off to the side of the road, I heard the musical sound of water tumbling down cascades in a hidden stream. A white-throated sparrow sang in the distance: a pretty, thin whistle that sounded like Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.
“Here,” Stacey said, pointing at a clump of fallen birch leaves.
It took me a moment to spot the shell casing.
I squatted down and poked at the brass with a twig. It was a.22 Magnum.
“This was where that fi
rst moose was shot,” she said. “I followed the blood trail from the meadow on Morse’s land through a beaver flowage and back through that cedar stand.”
“You tracked the blood through a beaver pond?” I asked in amazement.
“Not through the water. The moose stumbled along the edge for a while. And it left some blood on the pondweed out in the middle. You could see it from a certain angle.”
“I’m impressed.”
She shook her head as if I was being ridiculous and then knelt down beside me. I could smell her perspiration, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all.
I smiled at her, but her face was impassive as she rolled up her pant legs above her calf. It was tan and beautifully shaped. I didn’t know why she was showing it to me. Then she reached down into the top of her Bogs boot and extracted something black, red, and wriggling. It was a leech, swollen with blood. She nonchalantly flicked it off into the bushes. “Thought I’d missed one,” she said, rolling the pants back down over the boot.
“I need to call this in,” I said.
“Before you do, I should show you something else.”
She motioned me farther down the road. This time, she didn’t need to point to get my attention. Approximately ten feet from the shell casing, in a dry ditch that the road makers had carved to keep the road from washing out in the springtime, lay a crushed red-and-white piece of aluminum. It was a sixteen-ounce beer can.
“Do you think they’re connected?” Stacey asked. “The cartridge and this can?”
I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the Budweiser tall boy I’d seen on Billy Cronk’s picnic table three weeks earlier.
9
My first call was to McQuarrie, alerting him to the.22 cartridge Stacey had found. He told me to hang tight while he sent another warden to “assist.”
My second call was to Billy Cronk’s cell phone. There was no answer.
I tried his home number and got Aimee on the fifth ring. “Oh, hello, Mike,” she said. “Is everything OK?”
“Sure, Aimee. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”
In the background a child bawled in that unconvincing way a hurt-acting child tends to do. “Billy said he was meeting you this morning, and he sounded real upset over the phone-I can always tell-and I haven’t heard from him. Now here you are calling the house. It has to do with Ms. Morse, don’t it?”
To the unsophisticated eye of the city slicker, Aimee Cronk might have looked like a backwoods stereotype. She tended to giggle easily and blink rarely. Giving birth to four kids had given her the shape of a Mesopotamian fertility goddess. Her outfits were assembled from the aisles of Wal-Mart: white Keds sneakers, ill-fitting mom jeans, flannel shirts, and a scrunchie to hold back her hair when she cooked the kids’ Hamburger Helper. But she was a tack-sharp young lady who had the highest emotional IQ of anyone I’d ever met.
“Yeah,” she had once told me, “my dad was a drunk. And so my brothers and me, we got real good at reading his moods wicked quick, ’cause otherwise we might get a slap across the face before we even opened our mouths.”
It was no wonder she and Billy had ended up together. The world looked at him and saw only his wild hair and ice-blue eyes and the raw strength of that long body. But Aimee noticed the gentleness in the way her husband stroked a cat, and she saw the faint mist in his eyes when he looked at the sunset lighting up the mountain above their house. If she had graduated from high school, she might’ve made one hell of a psychologist-or a detective.
“You’re right, Aimee,” I said. “I am kind of worried about him. Someone shot a bunch of moose last night on the Morse property and Billy feels responsible somehow. He’s worried Ms. Morse might blame him.” There seemed no reason to withhold this information, since her husband shared everything with her, as best I could tell. “He was supposed to be waiting for some wardens at the Sixth Machias Gate, but when I went by just now, I didn’t see his truck. I thought maybe Ms. Morse had sent him on an errand.”
“Nah, that ain’t it.” The child’s crying petered out, diminished to a few poorly delivered sobs. And then Aimee Cronk said, “It’s more likely he’s gone for a drive. That’s what he does when he’s wrestling with something and ain’t sure what to do.”
“If you hear from him soon, can you have him call me on my cell?”
“I definitely will do that.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you worrying about him, too, Aimee.”
“Worrying never helped me none, so I just avoid it,” she said. “Besides, I got three loads of laundry to do, and there’s an apple pie in the oven.”
* * *
McQuarrie sent Jeremy Bard to photograph and collect the spent shell casing. He was Rivard’s favorite among my sergeant’s men: a rookie even younger than me, but with that hard-core attitude you often see in new cops. He wore his hair in a “high and tight” buzz cut and lifted weights twice a day. His neck was thicker than his head.
“You didn’t touch it?” His suspicious tone implied I had.
“The shell is lying where Stacey first spotted it.”
“It is,” she confirmed.
He scanned the leaf litter and clumped sand along the roadside, squinted into the alders beyond. The bushes were all tangled in shadows. “Hmm.”
“There’s probably another shell along here somewhere,” I said.
He had close-set gray eyes. “Why do you say that?”
“Moose A was shot twice,” I said. “In the jaw and the lungs. Two shots, two shells.”
“The shooter could have picked up his brass.”
“That doesn’t seem to be his modus operandi.”
Bard stared at me.
“Method of operation,” I said. “Do you want me to help you search these alders or not?”
“You’re supposed to be checking out gravel pits,” he said.
“The pits will still be there an hour from now.”
“No, I’ll find it.” Locating the brass on his own had become a point of pride now, and there was no reasoning with him.
“Good luck, then.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Stacey asked me, pointing behind us. “There’s a Bud pounder can ten feet down the road there.”
In truth, I had forgotten about the beer can-probably because I didn’t want to contemplate its association in my mind with Billy Cronk.
Bard frowned at me. “Anything else you forgot to mention?”
“You know what I know, Bard.”
“Have fun in the pits,” he said, grinning at his own joke.
I gave Stacey a vague smile and tried to keep all emotion out of my voice. “Do you need a lift back to McQuarrie? Because I can give you one-if you want.”
She worked a kink out of her neck forcefully with one hand. “Shit, I didn’t think about that part. Mak’s going to be busy for a while now, which means I’m stranded here. I don’t suppose you’re headed toward Wesley. I need to pick up my truck.”
“I could be,” I said. “Come on.”
She followed me back to my dusty, battered GMC but hesitated at the door. “I’m not quite dry,” she said, touching the back of her pants. “I’m going to get mud all over the passenger seat. The inside of your truck is going to smell like the bog I just waded through.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“What’s that noise?” she asked.
“I think it’s my serpentine belt.”
“Can’t you tighten it?”
“It comes and goes.”
“Matt’s been having the same problem. Must be a GMC thing.”
The police radio burped and mumbled. I hit the wipers, hoping to clear away some of the dust. When that didn’t work, I tried spraying some wiper fluid but succeeded only in smearing mud across the windshield, which made it impossible to see through it for several frightening seconds. I kept up a steady stream of blue fluid until the glass became somewhat transparent again. Stacey didn’t seem to notice my alarm.
“Wha
t did you think of the Butcher Brothers?” I asked, hoping to start a conversation that wouldn’t end in an argument.
It was as if she’d been half-asleep. “Huh?”
“Clay and Scott Butcher.”
“Those guys are real pieces of work. They had tags for every moose and deer hanging up in their coolers, but I know they must get in some poached animals, too. They were a little too relaxed about our visit, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Like they knew we weren’t going to find anything on the premises. They let us take some samples, like it was no big deal. The other butchers Mack and I visited-they were scared and suspicious as hell.”
“Around here, game wardens come in right below politicians and used-car salesmen on the trust scale.”
“Wildlife biologists don’t score much higher. If you’re driving a state or federal vehicle, you’re considered an automatic asshole.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Someone let a skunk loose in my trailer last winter.”
“Yeah, I remember that. You really stank that morning in my dad’s plane. Did you ever catch the jerks who did it?”
“It was Joe Brogan, the guy who used to own Call of the Wild Game Ranch.”
“My dad told me the ranch was for sale.” She kept massaging her sore neck. “I wonder what Brogan’s up to these days. Rivard’s probably going to want to check him out. A disgruntled ex-hunting guide-sounds like a suspect to me.”
“In Rivard’s book, everyone is a potential suspect.”
“What’s his problem with you anyway? I can guess, but I want to hear your version.”
The little jab she’d given me stung, but I didn’t let it show. “I was involved with the sister of that drug dealer who fell through the ice on the Machias River. She had a pretty serious substance-abuse problem of her own, it turned out. But the real reason is that I solved a homicide everyone thought had already been solved, and Rivard didn’t like me getting the credit. I’m just focused on doing my job these days. I’m not going to let myself get dragged into Warden Service politics.”