by Paul Doiron
“Hail, Fartacus!” one of the men said.
Foss opened and closed his hands, as if to keep the blood circulating through those sausage-size fingers. “Enough!”
It might have ended there if not for Hawken. “What’s the matter, Dudson? You have a better job offer than cutting trees?”
Dudson flushed a shade brighter. “You think it’s funny, but you’re not working outside all day in the freezing cold, waiting for a tree to fall on you like it did on Lovejoy.”
Who was Lovejoy?
“That’s enough, Dudson,” said Foss.
“Yessuh, massa!” said the sex offender.
“I said that’s enough!” The floor shook as Foss stepped down off the dais and crossed the room to Dudson’s table. He seized the soft-looking man by the arm and pulled him away from the table.
“Ouch! Ouch!”
Each of the other sex offenders in the room had frozen in place, as if playing a game of statues.
Foss looked like he could have flung Dudson into the next room if he had chosen to. The man was seriously angry. “The rest of you, remain here,” he boomed. “You’ll be called when it’s your turn to be interviewed. You have my permission to step outside briefly if you need to smoke. But don’t force me to go chasing you.”
There could be no doubt: The men who worked for Foss were terrified of him.
Foss dragged Dudson into an adjoining room. Clegg and Hawken followed close behind. The door swung shut.
I could hear the sound of breath being exhaled.
“What are we supposed to do?” I whispered to Pulsifer. “I thought we were going to be part of the interviews.”
“Hang out for a minute while I go see what’s up.”
Pulsifer disappeared through the far door. The men began to whisper among themselves and cast furtive glances in my direction. I had dealt with enough felons to know that most of them had no fear of law-enforcement officers, but these ex-cons were as timid as jackals. That Dudson character might be defiant, but the rest were frightened of doing anything that might result in their probation being revoked.
And why shouldn’t they be frightened? As long as he had Shaylene Hawken backing him up, Foss could work these men into the ground and risk no fines from the government, because who among them was going to report that their work conditions were unsafe or they weren’t being paid a minimum wage? As long as POs like Hawken kept sending him warm bodies, Foss would turn a profit.
If Adam had been even half as rebellious as I was, he wouldn’t have stood for it.
While I waited for Pulsifer to return, I took the opportunity to poke around. A fetid odor hung in the air: a combination of grease, wood ashes, burned coffee, and Murphy oil soap. The room had all the charm of a cash-strapped summer camp for troubled boys.
I made eye contact with an old man sitting by himself at a corner table. He had crazy hair that stood up in every direction like a cartoon character who’d just been struck by lightning. It took me a few seconds to realize that I recognized him.
“Wallace Bickford?” I said.
“Yeah?” He was missing assorted teeth.
“It’s Mike Bowditch.”
Not a flicker of recognition showed in his eyes. He just kept smiling his jack-o’-lantern smile.
“Jack’s son,” I said.
He seemed to suck in his stomach. “Jack’s dead.”
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “I was with the police that night they raided your cabin looking for him.”
Wally Bickford had been one of my father’s several sidekicks, a former logger who had received a traumatic head injury in the woods and had made his living thereafter as a trapper and collector of roadside cans and bottles. The last time I’d seen him had been during the manhunt. Search dogs had tracked my dad to the squalid shack where Bickford was then squatting. The brain-damaged man had been wounded during the ensuing police assault on his cabin, but my father had already managed to slip through the closing net.
I remembered hearing that the district attorney had drawn up accessory charges against Bickford for aiding my dad in his escape but that a judge had ruled Wallace wasn’t mentally capable of understanding his crime. So how had he ended up in Pariahville?
“What are you doing here, Wally?”
“I work for Don.”
“Did you come here from jail?”
“I got probated out of Windham last year.” He twisted his little finger inside his ear to remove some wax.
“Why were you incarcerated?”
“For looking at pictures.”
“Pictures of kids?”
“They looked old enough. Those photos don’t come with ages on them.” He began to rise from his chair. “I need to take a piss.”
The judge who had sent him to jail on a child pornography rap must not have had the same qualms about his limited mental capacity. I pressed my hand on his bony shoulder and pushed him back onto the bench. For years, I had felt sorry for Bickford, but I was having trouble summoning sympathy for a collector of child porn, brain-damaged or not.
“Tell me about Adam Langstrom,” I said.
“He ran away.”
“What else?”
“He called Don names. They fought.”
“You mean physically? With fists?”
He ran his fuzzy tongue over his lips.
“Foss gave Adam a black eye,” I said, assuming he’d correct me if I was wrong. “Did Adam have any other enemies here? People he was afraid of?”
“I mind my own business.” He began to push against my hand. “Don said I didn’t have to answer questions.”
I tried smiling. “You and my dad were friends.”
He had rheumy eyes. They blinked very slowly. “Used to be. He took my ATV and never gave it back.”
“Foss is lucky to have someone with your logging experience working for him.”
His broken smile made a reappearance. “Some of these guys—they don’t know—they don’t know shit about what they’re doing.”
“There must be accidents all the time.”
“Some.”
“Like what happened to Lovejoy.” Dudson had referred to a man by that name having been crushed by a falling tree. “Was Adam Langstrom here when Lovejoy was killed?”
Bickford closed one eye but kept the other open. The nature of his mental disability made it hard to figure him out. He usually seemed slow-witted, but I felt I might be seeing a glimmer of some residual intelligence.
“I need to take a piss,” he said again.
After I released my hand from his shoulder, he just about ran to the bathroom.
Year after year, logging appeared on the list of most dangerous professions in the nation, second only to commercial fishing—and far ahead of law enforcement. By all rights, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should have done an investigation of any deaths that occurred at this company. But Pulsifer had suggested that Foss ran his operation off the books with the complicity of POs like Shaylene Hawken and other government employees whose hands he might have greased.
I had no proof that the dead man was connected in any way to Adam or his decision to run off. Had he and Foss fought over the safety conditions of the workers in the woods? Had he threatened to go public? It would explain why Adam went looking for his Glock at his mother’s house.
I found myself yearning to imagine my brother in something other than an ignoble light.
When Pulsifer finally returned, I could see that he was steamed. He motioned me toward a quiet corner.
“Foss won’t let us talk to any of his guys,” he said.
“Won’t Clegg go to bat for us?”
“He tried,” Pulsifer said. “But this is Foss’s property. He doesn’t have to allow any of us here without a warrant.”
“But I need to tell Clegg about the gun Adam got from his mom’s place,” I said.
“Call him later. If you went marching in there now, Foss would terminate the interviews i
n a heartbeat.”
“Even Foss can’t stop Hawken from talking to her clients.”
“What does she care? There are ten more Adam Langstroms who need jobs and housing. Foss makes her job a hundred times easier. Why would she want to mess up a good situation?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” I muttered.
“I should have known coming here was a stupid idea.”
“It was Clegg’s idea, not mine.”
Pulsifer’s ill temper seemed to be rising from its cobra basket again. “What is it about you that causes serious lapses in judgment? Is it some sort of contagious condition you carry around, infecting everyone you meet?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“It means I’m ready to get out of here.” Pulsifer faced the room with his lip twisted in disgust. “I can’t even stand breathing the same air as these scumbags. It makes my skin crawl, thinking about the shit they did to end up here. I wish someone would take a match to this place and burn it to the ground.”
Where had I heard that sentiment before?
“What a colossal waste of time this was,” said Pulsifer.
Speak for yourself, I thought.
24
Snow was falling from the high boughs of the evergreens as Pulsifer and I walked back down the road toward his truck. I could hear the clumps dropping in the woods around us. The crossbills were still up there in the treetops, chittering at one another and feeding on cones, although I could no longer see the birds.
Glancing through the barred shadows of the trunks, I saw the Ford Explorer Interceptor parked beside Pulsifer’s Sierra. Officer Russo was down on one knee in the snow, examining something amid the litter of fallen needles. Instead of the uniform he had worn at Widowmaker, he was wearing a midnight-blue snowmobile suit, but he had pinned his badge to the front and had his gun belt strapped around his waist. The snowsuit made him look inflated, and he was already a large man.
He straightened up when he heard the crunching of our boots and wiped the snow from his gloves.
“Russo,” said Pulsifer.
“Hey, Gary.” The man’s smile, like all of his other features, was so mild as to be unmemorable.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Saw you guys pass by before and thought I’d come up and see if you all needed help.”
In addition to being a security guard at the resort, Russo was a sheriff’s deputy, so it was possible he had heard about Langstrom’s truck and knew that Clegg was planning to pay Foss a visit this morning. The detective wouldn’t necessarily have kept the plans secret. Still, I found his presence on the scene to be suspiciously coincidental.
“Do you remember Warden Bowditch?” Pulsifer asked.
“I am afraid Mike and I got off on the wrong foot. My apologies.” He said this without a hint of contrition in his voice.
“What were you looking at?” I asked.
“Just some animal tracks, trying to figure out what they are.”
Pulsifer stepped over and gave the ground a quick glance. “Those are from a mink.”
In fact, the prints had been left by an ermine—a long-tailed weasel—but I decided not to correct Pulsifer, knowing the foul mood he was in.
“So we saw you parked outside Logan Dyer’s house before,” I said.
“I wanted to see how he was doing.”
The thing about Russo’s face, I realized, was that it had the artificial softness of a sculpture, as if Madame Tussaud had tried and failed to fashion his likeness from wax.
“Is Dyer sick?” I asked.
“That’s what I wanted to know. He’s missed a lot of work lately, called in sick, but Elderoy doesn’t want to terminate him without cause.”
“So you came out here to see if he was faking?” I said.
“You know how the job is,” he said, meaning police work. “You never know what the day will bring.”
My work had never involved checking up on employees who had claimed to be ill.
“So is he faking?”
“He says he’s been getting migraines. That’s hard to double-check. He told me he thinks he might have a brain tumor. He is certain he is dying.” The security guard shook his head in a robotic gesture that was supposed to suggest sadness. “I told him to see a doctor if he was so concerned. I tried to talk some sense into him, but there is a limit to Logan’s ability to understand things.”
I remembered Pulsifer asserting that Dyer wasn’t dumb but that his speech impediment made people assume he lacked intelligence. I thought he might jump in to defend Logan. Instead, Pulsifer changed the subject. “How did you do in Florida? I never heard.”
“Fifth place,” said Russo. “I had an off day. I should have finished in the top three.”
“World Speed Shooting Championships,” explained Pulsifer. He waggled his thumb at me in typical mocking fashion. “Bowditch is always the slowest draw on the course.”
Russo turned his doll-like eyes on me. “You need to stop thinking before you shoot.”
I had heard that advice before—in many contexts.
“Your brain is your enemy in competition,” Russo continued. “You need to make every move automatic.”
“Thanks for the tips.”
The security guard pointed into the woods, in the direction of the dining hall. “How’s it going up there? Clegg getting anything useful?”
“Foss kicked us out,” said Pulsifer. “He’s only allowing Clegg and Hawken to interview his workers. You’d better not let Foss see your vehicle, or he’ll go full volcano.”
“Too bad,” said Russo. “I’d love to poke around this place. I’ve never been past the gate.”
“No?” said Pulsifer with a perplexed expression. “What about when that Lovejoy guy got crushed?”
“That’s right,” said Russo, “but that was in the woods. I never got a tour of the compound.”
“Maybe someday,” I said.
“How long are you sticking around?” Russo asked me.
“Undecided.”
“Enjoy your stay.”
No one could be this banal unintentionally, I thought.
* * *
Pulsifer waited for Russo to leave first; he didn’t explain why. Then we started back down the slippery slope.
Logan Dyer was in his open garage, tinkering with his snowmobile as we drove by. I was surprised to see him outside, since Russo had claimed he’d called in sick.
Pulsifer slowed to a stop and rolled down his window.
Dyer dropped whatever tool he’d been using and ambled out to meet us. His sleek Plotts, which must have been sleeping inside the garage, ventured out into the plowed drive, baying like hellhounds before their master silenced them with a command.
Dyer hadn’t changed out of the clothes he had been wearing the day before, I noticed. His unshaven cheeks looked even scruffier and his eyes seemed even more deeply set into his skull.
“Morning, Logan,” Pulsifer said.
“Hey, Warden.” Dyer leaned on the side mirror. The gesture struck me as presumptuous and disrespectful. If it had been me, I would have told him to get his grimy hands off my truck.
“I understand you’ve met Warden Bowditch.”
“Came by with Mink last night,” he said thickly. “Never met a hero before.”
From anyone else, I might have interpreted his constant references to me as a hero as a sarcastic insult. But Dyer was hard to figure.
“Hello again,” I said.
“So what’s with the cop convention this morning?” Dyer tilted his chin toward the hilltop. “Did one of those perverts ass-fuck another without permission?”
Pulsifer barked out a laugh. “A cop convention! See, Mike, I told you Logan was a clever guy.”
“Sounds like my ears should’ve been burning,” said Dyer. “But I guess it’s too cold for that.”
“We ran into Russo just now and he said he came out to check up on you. He said you’ve be
en having migraines.”
“Feels like there’s a golf ball between my eyes.”
I leaned forward. “Maybe that’s why you didn’t recognize that picture I showed you of Adam Langstrom.”
A muscle twitched in Dyer’s hairy neck. “I remembered who he was later. Used to see him around the mountain before he went to prison. My memory needs to be jogged sometimes.”
Pulsifer tugged on one of his earlobes; it was red from the cold. “Have you gotten any coyotes yet this season?”
“Some,” he said. “I got one last week. A thirty-pounder.”
Evidently, his migraines hadn’t slowed down his hunting. I looked past him at the two Plott hounds lying in the driveway, focused entirely on their owner. They were big, streamlined animals with fierce eyes and muscles that rippled beneath their brindle coats.
“With the dogs or over bait?” Pulsifer asked.
“With the dogs.”
“What did you use to get him?”
“Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Whisper.” Dyer turned his attention from Pulsifer to me. He ran a dirty hand through his filthy hair. “Russo said they found that missing guy’s truck. Said there was blood all over it.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Don’t be surprised if a detective named Clegg knocks on your door later.”
“Me? What for?”
“He’s handling the criminal investigation into Langstrom’s disappearance and will want to get a statement from you.”
“Me? I didn’t see nothing.” His speech became harder to understand the more agitated he became.
“You might have,” I said. “You might not have realized it at the time. Everyone going in and out of Foss’s drives by your front windows. And you said your memory needs to be jogged from time to time.”
Dyer took a step back from the window, his shoulders tightening. “Those perverts shouldn’t even be running around loose. Who cares if they kill each other?”
“Not me,” said Pulsifer, reaching for the shift. “You take it easy, Logan.”
We drove in silence for fifty yards, until Dyer’s house had disappeared behind the trees. Then Pulsifer swung his head around to look at me through his mirrored glasses.