by Sarah Graves
He thrust the victim’s wallet at her. Inside she found a State of Maine driver’s license and a college ID.
“Looks like somebody’s going to miss a few classes,” Cody Chevrier said sourly, reading over her shoulder.
“Yeah.” She handed them back to the EMT, who zipped them into the property bag. Someone at the hospital would be calling this kid’s parents. “He say anything?”
The pair of EMTs hoisted the gurney into the boxy emergency vehicle’s lit-up interior. “Nope. Out for the count.”
She’d set up flares and a row of orange flashers to warn oncoming traffic. Now the wrecker from the little gas station in Bearkill backed slowly across the deepening snow and the driver hopped out, scrambling down to attach the towing cable to the wreck.
“What was he doing out here at this hour?” According to the home address on his license, the victim’s obvious route would’ve been this way, along Route 1, so he was in the right place.
Just at the wrong time. The wrecker’s winch engaged with a metallic whine, pulling the mangled vehicle up from the ravine.
From the rear, the car looked fairly normal.
But from the look of the older sedan’s demolished front end, it was anyone’s guess whether or not the crash victim would be able to tell them why he had chosen to drive through Bearkill so late.
“No idea,” said Chevrier, shaking his head.
The tow truck’s driver leaned down from his window. “I’ll put it in the lot out behind my place, okay?”
Since arriving in town, her purchases at the Bearkill Gas-o-Mart had included a set of tires and one of windshield wipers, several tanks of gas, and an air freshener; Rascal’s Eau de Hound had returned soon after his bath at Trey Washburn’s place and now battled a pine-scented cutout Christmas tree dangling from the Blazer’s rearview mirror.
“Yeah, thanks, Bradley,” she began. The Gas-o-Mart’s owner-operator was so glad for the steady patronage, he’d given her a free set of floor mats.
But then she thought again. “Hey,” she yelled as he pulled away, “Brad, wait. Run it down to the impound yard in Houlton for me, will you?”
Ordinarily, leaving the wreck in Bearkill overnight would be no big deal. It wasn’t as if the vehicle had to be secured as evidence. But—
“Problem?” Chevrier asked, hearing the exchange and coming up beside her.
“Excess of caution, that’s all,” she said, not ready to admit she didn’t know why she wanted the car in custody, only that there were still questions about the accident.
And if the car sat out in an open lot, all chance of getting them answered—or using the answers in court, should that be necessary—would be gone.
After the wrecker departed, Chevrier helped gather the flares and flashers and scan the travel lanes for debris. One of the other deputies left for the hospital to finish writing up the accident; a third headed to Houlton to check the injured driver’s record from a nice warm office instead of out here in the snow.
She aimed the flashlight, making her way through the piled snow to the edge of the embankment. Below, a massive old spruce had taken a direct hit, a deep gash in it marking the place of impact.
Maybe the kid had simply been visiting a buddy around here and got started back to school late. But in that case …
She frowned back up the embankment. In that case, he’d been going in the wrong direction. She blinked flakes from her lashes, peering down the steep slope again, then caught a glint in her flashlight beam at the base of the big tree.
“Lizzie,” Chevrier protested as she started down the rest of the way. He’d only called her out here, she knew, so the other officers wouldn’t imagine her home in bed and get resentful.
But even the deputy in charge of the scene hadn’t slid down to slop around in the slush, so why should she? The driver had smelled strongly of beer; maybe he’d just been drunk and/or asleep.
Case closed, probably. But chewed-up grass and muddy ruts marked the trail the errant car’s tires had cut through the snow, and at the end of it something—
Twinkled. Crouching to reach for the object in the snow, she stopped herself. Small, metallic, with a round, shiny ball at one end and a thin metal stem at the other …
“Hey, Cody?” she yelled back up the embankment. He stood at the top. “Got any evidence bags?”
She waited while he vanished for a moment, then made his way down to hunker beside her. “What?” he demanded irritably, holding open the plastic bag.
She plucked it up with the plastic tweezers from the kit and dropped it in. “It’s a nose stud. Like the kind for pierced ears, you know? Only you wear it in—”
There were millions of them in the world, probably. But her new helper Spud Wilson had one, didn’t he? And Dylan Hudson had a case, the one about the dead girls in Bangor …
And one of the victim’s friends had mentioned that some guy from the County might be involved, Dylan had said.
“You wear it in your nose,” she finished. “And I hope that I don’t know who it belongs to.”
NINE
When she got back to the house, the sky was getting light, the overnight snow diminishing to a sprinkle of flakes tiny and dry as salt, and Dylan was gone.
A rumble from the utility room unnerved her until she found he’d stripped the bed, started the sheets in the washer, and put on fresh ones. A pot of coffee waited in the kitchen.
Thanks, he’d scrawled on the notepad by the phone.
She tore the page off and crumpled it into the trash; no time now for any worrying about Dylan Hudson or who might’ve been waiting for him at the motel or anywhere else.
That was his business, she instructed herself. Hers was figuring out how Spud’s nose stud got into a drunk driver’s crashed car …
If it really was his, a question she considered answered an hour later when she arrived at her little storefront office on Main Street to find him already there.
No nose stud. Without the bit of jewelry, the hole in the crevice of his right nostril was a tiny dimple, unnoticeable if you didn’t already know about it.
“Spud,” she began. She could just ask him about it, of course. But then on impulse she decided not to; if he lied, she’d have no way to prove any different. And—
Don’t spook him, she thought, again out of an excess of caution. But you didn’t get do-overs on these things. “How was your evening?” she asked instead.
He’d come in to put up bookshelves; she’d decided to store her library of textbooks and other law-enforcement reading here at the office.
“Not great,” he replied. His face looked drawn and tired, as if he’d been up all night, but his hair was freshly washed and no longer twisted up into those silly-looking dreadlocks.
“Had a big fight with my dad,” he said. “I threw,” he added, “a beer can at the TV.”
He sounded sheepish. “Busted it. Had to go out with my mom and get a new one.”
“I see.” The rest of his jewelry was all in place: a lip ring, a silver loop through his earlobe, and a small silvery eyebrow ring she hadn’t seen before. “That must’ve been inconvenient. Was your father angry about it?”
Bent over his lumber—she was going with painted planks laid on brackets fastened to the wall studs, and he was measuring the planks’ length—he grimaced dismissively.
“I guess. He started it. They find that missing kid?”
“No.” By now the whole town probably knew about the baby vanishing from his crib. “Why, do you have some insight to offer?”
It came out more sarcastically than she’d intended; she didn’t like the uncertainty she was suddenly feeling about this young man. But he just shook his head.
“Uh-uh. You want these second-coated?”
The shelves with paint, he meant. “Yes, please.”
She’d heard enough alibis in her life to know that he’d just given her one for the early part of his evening. The later part, though, was still anyone’s guess
. She found cash in her wallet.
“Here, you can use this to pay for the extra paint.”
He nodded, meanwhile drawing a thick, dark pencil line on the plank with the aid of a carpenter’s rule. She wondered what he’d say if she asked what he’d done after buying the TV.
Instead: “So listen, remember when you approached me in the Food King?”
Just over a week earlier, but it felt already as if months had passed. “You asked if I paid for tips. And I was wondering, what did you mean by that?”
Probably he had nothing to do with Dylan’s case, himself. What were the odds, after all? But he might know someone who did, might have been in that little car with them last night before it crashed and lost his jewelry item in it.
Spud looked up warily. “Yeah, well. Just forget about what I asked you, okay? It was stupid. Sometimes I’m a real dumb kid.”
He lumbered to his feet, absently shoving his sweatshirt sleeves up over his tattooed forearms, then hastily pushing them down again. It was as if he hadn’t wanted her to see the twining dragon, eyes bright with yellow ink and scales deep green, that wrapped sinuously around his flexor and snaked up to his biceps.
Or the livid red scratch that ran through it, from his elbow nearly to his wrist. As she considered this, the Bearkill squad car pulled up outside.
“Hey, Lizzie.” The redheaded officer’s name, she had learned, was Ralph Crandall; the other one was Fred Willette.
And Crandall was indeed a decent cop. “Hey, you want to ride out and see a meth lab bust? DEA’s gonna bring the hammer down on ’em—”
He glanced at his watch. “Any time now.”
Spud kept his head down, intent on his work. Lizzie thought about staying, noodling a little more at the kid.
Because that scratch bugged her. She’d seen a few like it in the past, mostly on people who’d been in fights.
You clutch your attacker’s forearms, he pulls away … but it was Dylan’s case, she decided finally. She’d tell him about all of this and let him decide what he wanted to do about it.
It was what she’d want if their situations were reversed, and Spud wasn’t going anywhere, after all. He never did.
“Sure,” she told Crandall.
In the past couple of weeks, she’d seen some of the best that Maine had to offer: good food, decent people, pretty scenery, and weather that yet hadn’t turned quite as viciously wintry as she’d feared, though she supposed it still would.
Grabbing her jacket to follow Crandall out, she figured she might just as well also get a load of some of the worst.
Unmarked sedans with beacons on their dashboards lined the road outside the suspected meth lab, which from the look of it as Lizzie made her way up the dirt driveway was no longer merely suspected.
“Aw, man,” complained a weedy-looking little guy as he was escorted downhill past her. Then as he caught sight of Crandall:
“Hey, Ralphie, come on, man, can’t you do something for me here? I thought we were pals!”
“Yeah, we’re pals, all right,” Crandall muttered, keeping pace with Lizzie. “If you want to call arresting someone about a million times being pals.”
They continued up the driveway until they reached a sort of compound laid out on a rough lot. Kids’ plastic toys, a fifty-five-gallon drum overflowing with charred trash, a rusting car up on cinder blocks, its doors hanging open and stuffing spilling out of its torn seats.
Most of the mobile homes she’d seen here in Maine were just that: homes, with well-kept yards and interiors. This was way out of the ordinary, and so were the people now being escorted from various outbuildings:
Six in all, they marched glumly in single file, not one of them wearing any kind of warm clothes; the two girls wore fuzzy bedroom slippers, and one of the guys was barefoot.
Lizzie looked away, spotted Cody Chevrier across the trash-strewn yard, and picked her way through it to join him.
“No hazmat?” she inquired, not seeing any hoods or suits on the technicians swarming the place. Meth labs were toxic waste dumps of chemical by-products; a site where the stuff had been cooked could be unsafe to live in for years.
He shook his head. “Not making it here. Packaging went on in the house and out back. Christ, there were kids living in there.”
A final occupant emerged from the trailer’s front door, her arms firmly in the grip of two female officers. Small, elderly, with matted gray hair and wild eyes, she appeared confused as she allowed the officers to help her down the concrete-block steps.
“That’s the mom,” said Chevrier. “The sons moved in here and took the place over. We found her locked in a back room. Skin and bones,” he added in disgust, kicking at a sodden Elmo doll on the ground.
It was snowing again, the sky dark and featureless, the color of lead. “They took the kids out first,” he added.
Two federal officers in DEA jackets waved a white van up the driveway, backing it toward a metal shed. Techs hopped from the van, clad in hazmat lite: paper shoe covers, zippered suits, hair covers, latex gloves, and goggles.
If it had been a manufacturing area, they’d have worn moon suits and respirators. “How’s the Brantwell thing going?” she asked, watching the techs pick their way through the litter.
Those paper shoe covers were just about useless in snow, she noted. “Nowhere,” said Chevrier succinctly.
“Or on your shootings in Allagash, either,” he added before she could ask. “They’ve got the shell casings in the lab.”
To see if they could match them with any other crimes, he meant. “But there’s no other evidence. And listen, that hunter from Nussbaum’s camp who went back to New York? Turns out he got it with a thirty-eight, cops down there are running it all down, but—”
“What?” She stared at Chevrier. “I thought that was a—”
“Hit-and-run?” He grimaced sourly. “Yeah, well, there’s a new twist on that. They did the postmortem, big surprise, they found a bullet in him. Someone shot him, then ran him over.”
“Oh, man.” She exhaled dispiritedly for him. “Ballistics?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. And I’m not holding my breath.”
“Right. Not like on the TV shows, is it?” There, the killer always made a mistake or left a clue that some crazily perceptive lab tech or computer-nerd-slash-genius picked up on. Science, logic, and an insane amount of dedication won the day—possibly aided by a few thrown punches or well-aimed bullets—and did it before the final commercial, too.
But not in real life, where most of the time working a case was more like trudging through glue-laced quicksand.
They turned back toward the Bearkill squad, where Crandall was on his cell phone. He looked up as they approached.
“Cody, my wife wants to know was Izzy Dolaby in there with those other jerks.”
Chevrier rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Izzy was there. Tell your wife her no-good cousin needs a kick in the nuts, maybe he won’t leave any more of his spawn all over the County.”
Crandall sighed. “Yeah, honey, he’s here,” he said into the phone, then held it, wincing, away from his ear until the outraged squawking stopped coming out of it.
“Crandall’s wife was a Dolaby before she got married,” said Chevrier as they walked toward the metal shed where the suited-up techs had gone in. “Still is one, you ask me,” he added.
Just then one of the techs came out. “Sheriff, you gotta see this,” she said, shaking her head. “You can go on in, nothing’s spilled or leaking. Just the opposite, actually.”
She waved at the van, which had been idling in the driveway, signaling it to come on back, also. Lizzie let Chevrier go ahead of her, heard his whistle of astonishment, then stepped in, too, and saw the reason for it.
“Wow,” she said inadequately. Shelves like the ones Spud was putting up in her office lined the walls, from the rough plywood floor to the ceiling. Long fluorescent fixtures, their faint hum the only sound, lit the windowless shed.
Some already had been, with ziplocked plastic bags. Inside the bags were tinier bags packed with bluish-white crystals.
She turned to Chevrier. “They were packing these in the trailer?”
“Nope. Not enough room. This here is a storage facility.”
He glanced around. “Looks like a lot of small-time cooks just lost a hub in their distribution network. Somebody bought from them. Izzy must’ve been warehousing the stuff here and then someone picked up from him, sold it on to someone bigger.”
Despite the exhaust fan, the place still stank faintly of ether and ammonia. They stepped back outside, the fresh air a bracing relief, as from the end of the yard Dolaby’s harsh whine cut through the falling snow. “Come on, man!”
His wrists were in plastic cuffs. One of the DEA cops lit a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth like a pacifier, whereupon he shut up and let himself be helped into the back of another van that had pulled up while Chevrier and Lizzie were in the shed.
“Shouldn’t be too long before they get the next rung up on the ladder ID’d,” Lizzie observed. “Just let Izzy get a nicotine jones going, sounds like he’d give up his mother.”
“That is his mother,” said Chevrier, meaning the pathetic older woman now seated in the Bearkill squad car. Lizzie waved at Caldwell to let him know he should go on without her.
“Yeah, that Izzy’s a little pissant,” Chevrier went on when Wally had gone. “And he’s gonna find out those DEA folks are not as tenderhearted as we are down at the jail in Houlton. I give him maybe an hour in custody before he flips.”
And then they’d know who the courier was. “You have any idea this was going on here?” she asked as they climbed into his Blazer.
Just then Trey Washburn went by in his big pickup with the winch on the back. Taking in the scene, he raised a finger off the steering wheel in brief greeting.