by Paul Doiron
Behind her came Dexter Albee, who was dressed more formally: pressed button-down shirt, chinos, tasseled loafers. Put a necktie and blazer on him, and he would have been ready to testify in front of a legislative panel. Albee didn’t seem to be holding up as well emotionally, though; the absence of color in his cheeks made it seem like he was coming down with the flu.
Jack Spense hung in the doorway, a square-shouldered silhouette, not fully in the room but close enough to eavesdrop on everything.
“Thank you for coming,” Morse said in a slightly hoarse voice. “Please be seated.” She gave me a special nod. “Good morning, Warden.”
“Ms. Morse,” I said.
“Before we get started, I would like to say something,” said Rivard, emphasizing each word as if he’d practiced them before a mirror. “On behalf of the entire Maine Warden Service, I want to extend my deepest sympathies on the loss of your daughter.”
She looked at him with that inscrutable catlike smile I’d gotten to know so well. “I didn’t lose her, Lieutenant. She was taken from me. There’s a considerable difference.” Aside from a strangeness in her voice-as if the back of her jaw were wired shut and she was having trouble getting out her words-there was nothing in her body language that revealed her inner grief. “But I understand that you are trying to be kind, and I appreciate your sympathies. I am sure you have questions for me, and I have questions for you, so let’s begin.”
Zanadakis removed a notebook from his jacket and leaned forward on the couch where he had perched himself. “Briar told Warden Bowditch that she was being chased by a pickup truck last night. She had previously reported another incident like that several nights earlier. Do you have any idea who the driver might have been-any idea at all?”
“You’ve seen my file of death threats.”
“I have,” said the detective. “But I’m wondering if there were any unusual instances you can recall. Were you and Briar ever at a store or restaurant together and noticed someone looking at you in a menacing way?”
“Many times.”
Zanadakis tried again. “Maybe there was a truck parked outside your property recently-on the road to Grand Lake Stream-and you assumed it belonged to a hiker? Sometimes people notice a detail that doesn’t seem important at the time.”
“Sorry. No.”
“Is it possible that Briar was meeting someone outside the gate?”
“My daughter despised this place and the people here.” She paused and flicked her eyes at me. “With the exception of a certain game warden.”
I felt my face flush.
Zanadakis wrote something in his notebook. “According to Warden Bowditch, Briar could only describe the truck as ‘dark’?”
“That describes half the vehicles you see around here. I take it no one was detained last night in such a vehicle.”
“No, ma’am,” said Zanadakis.
“What about physical evidence?” said Morse, clawing with several fingers at the fabric of her armchair. “Can’t you take tire marks from the road?”
“The road there is gravel, so it doesn’t show prints that are usable,” he said. “We were able to determine that Briar did apply her brakes and she overcorrected as she lost control of her car. She was traveling at a high rate of speed.”
“Overcorrected,” said Morse, almost to herself. “What is it with police officers and euphemisms?”
“There’s nothing else?” said Dexter Albee, raising his voice suddenly. “You can’t find any other evidence?”
Zanadakis flipped through his notebook, but he already knew the answers. “Her car shows no sign of having been sideswiped. There are no dents or scuff marks on it to indicate another vehicle actually pushed her off the road. I have some men out there this morning searching the foliage up and down the road. It’s possible that the pickup might have scraped the trees and underbrush alongside the road. If so, we’d hoped to find some paint we could match to the truck.”
Elizabeth Morse stretched her arms along the top of the chair and planted her feet wide. It was very much the posture of a monarch on a throne. “There’s really no reason for optimism, then.”
“You shouldn’t give up hope,” said Rivard.
She glared at him with those handsome hazel eyes. “Warden Bowditch can tell you how I feel about being patronized, Lieutenant.”
Albee shot to his feet. “Well, what about the rest of this-the killing of those moose, and the attack on Elizabeth’s house? Are you saying none of this is connected? Because it strikes me as the work of the same sick individual.”
“We’re investigating that possibility,” said Zanadakis, looking up at him calmly. “At the very least, we have gathered some high-quality ballistic evidence that we can use to match the firearms to the two incidents.”
“Those firearms are at the bottom of a lake,” muttered Spense from the doorway.
Rivard frowned in his direction. “We don’t know that.”
The bodyguard didn’t budge. “You won’t find them.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a warden,” Rivard said, “it’s that criminals can’t keep their mouths shut. Sooner or later, these guys are going to get drunk and start boasting about what they did. When they do, word will get back to us.”
Elizabeth pushed her highlighted hair out of her face. “So the best-case scenario involves you hearing some drunken gossip in a bar and piecing together a case out of circumstantial evidence.” Her eyes fixed on mine. “How reassuring would you find that approach if you were me, Warden Bowditch?”
“Not very reassuring, ma’am.”
I felt Rivard’s shoulders tense beside me.
Elizabeth gave me an affectionate smile. “My brave teller of truths. I have too few of those in my life. It’s the price of being rich. People start telling you what they think you want to hear.” She returned her attention to the arm of her chair, which seemed to require more scratching. “So what should I do now, then? Should I order Mr. Spense to continue fortifying my bunker while I wait for some drunk in a bar to confess he killed my little girl?”
“Is there somewhere else you can go for a while?” asked Zanadakis.
She gave a snort. “Because my presence here is a provocation? I’m not the type to back down from a fight, Detective.”
“Just temporarily,” offered Rivard.
“It’s what I have been advising, ma’am,” said Jack Spense. “The first rule of conflict prevention is to do everything you can to avoid it.”
“It’s a little late for Sun Tzu, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Spense?”
I had a feeling that Jack Spense’s services would be discontinued very soon.
Dexter Albee circled around a coffee table until he was standing over his patron with his palms up in a beseeching gesture. “Betty, you can’t let these bastards win! What you have planned for this national park is historic. It’s your legacy. We’ve worked so hard and invested so much to make your vision a reality. I can’t believe that Briar would have wanted-”
She raised a single index finger. “My daughter didn’t give a shit about Maine, Dexter, and you know it. In fact, it would probably have given her pleasure to know her death made me give up on this godforsaken place.”
“Betty, please, don’t make a snap judgment you’ll live to regret,” said Albee.
She pushed herself up to her feet, using the arms of the chair for support. “I need to be alone. I need to think about what’s important to me from now on.”
The rest of us also rose. It was clear we were being dismissed.
But Elizabeth Morse wasn’t done with me. She called to me at the door. “Warden Bowditch?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I hope we meet again.”
“Me, too, ma’am.”
Rivard decided to use this opening to make a case for himself again. “We’re going to find the person who did this, Ms. Morse.”
“Tell me something, Lieutenant,” she said, her eyes flat and hard. “
When I put up that reward for information about the killing of those moose, didn’t you tell me then that criminals can’t keep their mouths shut? I believe you said we’d get a flood of tips.”
“And we did,” Rivard said with more heat than he intended.
“None of which seem to have panned out. So if I offered twenty thousand dollars for those moose, how much do you suggest I put on my daughter’s life?”
We found Leaf Woodwind waiting for us in the shady place where we had parked our vehicles. If Elizabeth Morse had internalized her grief, then her former partner was wearing his emotions for all the world to see. His hair was an uncombed mess, his eyes were raw, and there was gunk in his beard that had dribbled out of his nose and mouth. He looked like one of those mourners out of the Bible: a wild, wailing man on the verge of rending his tie-dyed garments.
“Well?” he screamed at us. “Have you found them? Have you found the fuckers?”
I had no doubt he had spent the night dosing himself with THC-the smell was baked into his skin-but the pot had done nothing to blunt his sharpened nerve endings.
Zanadakis and Rivard seemed taken aback by the display, so I stepped forward.
“Leaf,” I said. “Please calm down.”
He balled his hands into knotty fists. “Don’t tell me to be calm! That’s all you’ve been saying ever since you got here. ‘Be calm. Let us do our jobs.’ And instead, everything’s all gone to shit, man. You guys are fucking useless!”
Rivard’s nose twitched, and I had a bad feeling that my lieutenant was going to arrest the man because he felt personally offended. “I think you need to go sleep off whatever magic carpet ride you’re on, sir.”
I positioned my body so that I was between Leaf and the other men. “Betty needs you, Leaf,” I said.
“The fuck she does. She never has.”
Whatever reconciliation they’d experienced last night hadn’t survived the wee hours of the morning. “I think you should get some rest,” I said.
“And I think you should get out of my face,” he replied.
I’d always sensed an undercurrent of rage beneath that mellow smile and those glassy eyes. It seemed important to remember that this seemingly comical man was a former soldier; he had fought in a land where rice paddies contained hidden land mines and punji traps opened up under your feet. Back in Maine, a warden pilot had busted him for cultivating marijuana on his back forty. Out of desperation, he’d been forced to become the gopher to a cold woman who had shared nothing-neither her wealth nor their daughter’s affections-with him. What did I really know of the darkness in Leaf Woodwind’s heart?
“Get the hell off my land!” he said.
Zanadakis at least seemed to realize that we weren’t accomplishing anything by further antagonizing the distraught man. My lieutenant, however, could never let any perceived insult go unanswered. The prick.
“It’s not your land, sir,” said Rivard through his truck window. “Never was.”
“Fuck you, man.”
As we drove off, I saw Leaf stoop for a handful of pebbles, which he hurled harmlessly into the bed of my truck. “Pigs!” he shouted.
I had been insulted hundreds of times in my job, but this blast from the past was a new one for me.
33
The lieutenant radioed me from his truck. The colonel had summoned him to Augusta for a briefing. He didn’t say more than that, but I could guess what was happening behind the scenes. Powerful people inside and outside the government had begun asking questions about Marc Rivard and the investigation he’d been running for the past week. No doubt the national networks had begun calling, too, since Elizabeth had just made the rounds of morning TV shows. This story was exploding into a full-blown scandal. When you are a state employee, it is almost always a bad thing if your name begins to surface repeatedly in conversations. I knew this from personal experience.
If I knew Rivard as well as I thought I did, he would have already started searching for someone to blame. For once, that scapegoat wouldn’t be Mike Bowditch. One advantage to being pushed to the periphery of the moose investigation was that no one could accuse me of having screwed it up. My suspicion was that the lieutenant intended to throw Bilodeau-or maybe McQuarrie-to the wolves. Being a political animal himself, Rivard would claw and bite to survive.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.
“Go with Zanadakis and see if you can help him reconstruct the crash scene,” Rivard said. “He’ll want to know where Briar went after she left the property and where she saw the pickup.”
“I already shared that information with him.”
“Just do whatever you can to assist the Crash Reconstruction Unit. I promised them full cooperation.”
Even over the radio, which tends to distort your voice in the worst way, he sounded like a man headed to the dentist’s office-or the torture chamber.
“Good luck today, L.T.,” I said, trying not to sound too phony.
“Ha,” he said.
* * *
I followed Zanadakis back to the place where Briar had hit the tree. The road was still cordoned off, and a skinny Washington County deputy had been given the thankless task of detouring traffic around the lake. A team of state and local officers were already on the scene from the Forensic Mapping Unit. They’d done some of their analytical work the night before-as much as could be done in darkness using two-thousand-watt spotlights-but this morning they had brought along a Leica Total Station, a one-eyed contraption that looked like a surveyor’s computer mounted atop a fluorescent yellow tripod. In a nearby garage, another team of police vehicle technicians and civilian mechanics from the Vehicle Autopsy Unit would be tearing apart the remains of Briar’s roadster to inspect the brakes, suspension, and steering components for clues. And in Augusta, the medical examiner would be running a tox screen on her blood to determine whether she’d been drunk or drugged at the time of death.
Because district wardens are charged with reconstructing boat accidents and snowmobile collisions, we are taught the basics of crash reconstruction at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. We learn terms like occupant kinematics and vehicle dynamics. Our instructors quiz us on the three phases of a collision: precrash, at crash, and postcrash. We are trained to calculate approach vectors and determine velocity by using distance-based positioning analysis. We diagram fatalities using CAD software the same way architects design the contours of new patios.
The science of death is an awesome thing, I thought.
But what difference was technology going to make? All of these experts, all of this precise measuring equipment, and none of it was worth a damn thing compared to a single eyewitness to the event. Briar Morse had lost control of her car and driven into a pine tree. No computer in the world could tell me more than my own eyes.
“Everything will be fine,” I had told her. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”
Zanadakis did have questions for me. He wanted me to plot out on a topo map where I had been when I’d spoken with Briar: the first occasion, when I’d told her to head east toward Grand Lake Stream, and the second time, when we reestablished contact again. One of his officers would probably retrace my path to test the signals.
The detective seemed to sense my weariness. Maybe he shared my cynicism about the limits of technology to solve the mysteries that occur when neurons misfire in the brains of sociopaths. If there is one thing every cop learns, it is that humans are understandable and predictable constructs-until the moment they go completely haywire.
“So she couldn’t tell you the color of the truck that was following her?” he asked me again.
“All she could see were its headlights. It could even have been an SUV.”
He let out a sigh, His breath smelled of cinnamon chewing gum. “How about the size?”
“She said it seemed ‘big.’”
“So more like an F150 than a Ranger?”
“I doubt Briar could have told the dif
ference,” I said. “I’ve gone over every word she used to describe it, and there’s nothing to narrow it down.”
He sighed again and scribbled something else into his notebook. Then he told me to wait while he conferred with his technicians.
My ex-girlfriend Sarah used to joke about my being a Luddite. She’d made fun of my ineptness using a computer or setting the time on the oven when the clocks fell back in the fall. I couldn’t even program a special ringtone to play on my cell.
“You really are the second coming of Davy Crockett,” she used to say with a laugh.
But it wasn’t as if I was mechanically incompetent. I understood how my Bronco’s engine worked. I could fix balky electrical wires in a wall without electrocuting myself. It was more that I had a deeply seated suspicion of miracles of all sorts, technological and otherwise. My mother had raised me as a Catholic, and she professed to be observant, but temperamentally, she had always been more a person of doubt than of faith. She had no more confidence that science was going to cure her cancer than I had confidence that science would lead us to Briar’s murderer.
A brown creeper landed on the shattered pine and began working its way up the off-kilter trunk, investigating the cracks in the bark for insects. The little bird paid no attention to the uniformed men below with their high-tech gear. The fact that a young woman had collided with the tree and lost her life was of no consequence to the creeper. All it cared about was finding the bugs. I found nature’s indifference to my cares and concerns oddly consoling. If I ever started sinking into despair, I need only step outdoors and look around at the glorious green world.
I was leaning against my truck, thinking deep thoughts about the uselessness of science and the false promises of miracles, when Zanadakis returned with a big pearly smile. He carried his cell phone tucked into the palm of his hand. “You’ll never believe this,” he said. “Bilodeau just arrested Karl Khristian outside the Cigarette City in Calais.”