by Paul Doiron
I was baptized and received my First Communion at the Church of Saint Sebastian in the gritty papermaking town of Madison. I said my first penance there, too, whispering through a screen to a priest whose role in this arcane ritual I didn’t comprehend. I had known Father Landry all my young life, but I was now supposed to believe that he wasn’t actually present in the confessional. The heavyset man who seemed to glide down the aisle during Mass had been transformed into God’s earpiece. At age eight, I couldn’t figure out why the Lord needed a surrogate, especially since my previous conversations with Him in prayer had been so direct. But I surrendered myself to the sacrament, promising not to trespass again and saying the ten Hail Marys that Father Landry gave me as punishment for my childish sins.
I emerged from the confessional, unsure of what had taken place. The unsatisfying ceremony made me feel more distant from Him, rather than less. Still, I continued in my Catholic faith, taking my father’s name, John, in confirmation.
It was only many years later, when I had real sins to confess, that I began to wonder where God was hiding. One of us had gone missing, but I couldn’t have told you which.
By the time of my father’s rampage, I had parted ways with the supernatural. In the weeks following my return from Rum Pond, when the Warden Service chaplain, Deborah Davies, first came to see me, I remembered feeling vaguely sorry for her. She seemed like a kindhearted person, and I was glad that she derived comfort from her beliefs. But when she asked me if I’d spoken to my parish priest recently, it was all I could do to keep from rolling on the floor.
I did not believe in ESP. I did not believe in ghosts or crystal balls or future events foretold in tea leaves. If she had asked me, I would have told her that the prophets of the Old Testament were schizophrenics and that the voices that spoke to them out of the desert were electrochemical misfires in the brain. Human beings are not transmitters of their intentions, I would have said. Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. Those were the articles of my adult faith.
So how could I explain the deep foreboding that preceded my discovery of Ashley Kim?
When I arrived at Hans Westergaard’s house, I didn’t suspect the woman was dead or fear she was dead. I knew she was dead. The certainty had been with me for hours—like an animal lurking beyond the campfire light—but I hadn’t recognized the premonition for what it was. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself the meaning of the portent. I didn’t want to open the confessional door after so many years and find God present once again, but in a shape I no longer recognized.
* * *
With a grip like eagle talons, Charley pulled me from the Westergaards’ bedroom. He guided me back down the stairs, his voice soft in my ears, encouraging me to retrace my original footprints, until we were once again standing beside my truck in the driveway.
“It’s a crime scene now,” my friend said. “We don’t want to muck it up any more than we have.”
In the sharp, cold air, my senses returned. I found my cell phone in my jacket pocket. I started to key in the direct number for the Knox County dispatcher, when I heard a car coming down the drive behind us. Flashing blue lights made hallucinatory patterns in the trees. Then a blinding spotlight snapped on, pinning us both in place. An electronically amplified voice boomed out, “Don’t move.”
Charley and I exchanged befuddled looks. How had a cop gotten here so fast, before we’d even called in the homicide?
A car door slammed and I heard a familiar voice. “Bowditch?”
Trooper Curt Hutchins came striding toward us out of the light. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“There’s a dead woman inside,” I said, as if that were any explanation.
“What?”
“We came over here looking for a missing woman whose car struck a deer last night,” said Charley in an even tone. “We had reason to think she might be inside this home. We found her body upstairs. She seems to have been sexually assaulted before she was killed.”
“It’s Ashley Kim,” I said.
“You need to get an evidence team over here, sonny,” said Charley.
“Who are you?” Hutchins asked.
“Charley Stevens, Maine Warden Service, retired.”
The big state trooper had positioned himself so that we couldn’t see his expression; he was just a silhouette against a wall of light. “I know you—you’re that daredevil pilot.”
I squinted to see his expression. “How the hell did you get here so fast, Hutchins?”
“You triggered the silent alarm. What were you doing, breaking down the goddamned door?”
“I looked in the windows and saw signs of a struggle,” I replied. “I was justified. Blood was in plain view.”
“But what we’re you doing here in the first place?”
“Will you just stop asking us questions and call for some fucking backup here? There’s a dead woman inside who’s been raped and mutilated.”
There was a heavy pause. “I’m going to go take a look.”
“We already disturbed the crime scene,” said Charley. “Please take our word for it, Troop. The evidence-recovery techs need to cordon off this entire building.”
“I’m going to go take a look.” He breezed right past us, moving purposefully up the walkway.
“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m calling Dispatch.”
Lori was working again. As briefly as I could, I told her where we were and what we’d found. “You need to get some detectives down here ASAP,” I said. “And the state police CID, too.”
“You said it’s the same woman who hit the deer last night?” asked Lori.
“I think so.”
“And there was a word carved in the body?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God,” the dispatcher said mysteriously. “Not again.”
After I’d hung up, Charley brought out his own phone. “We need to tell the women we’re going to be late.”
I listened as Charley fibbed to my girlfriend. “Oh, he’s fine, Sarah. But we’ve stumbled onto a pretty bad scene here, and the police are going to need our statements. I don’t know how long this process is going to take.”
He then moved out of earshot to converse privately with his wife.
“You should have been a diplomat,” I said when he returned.
“I was—every time I met a man with a loaded gun.” He gestured toward my arm. “It looks like you cut yourself back there.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You should have an EMT look at it all the same.”
My head was spinning in circles. I closed my eyes and tried to make it stop. I visualized a roulette wheel slowing. The wheel landed on a red number.
“Westergaard,” I said.
Charley understood. “There was no sign of him, unless he was hiding in a closet.”
I dialed information and asked for the hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A minute later, I had my answer.
“There’s a conference going on all right,” I told Charley, “but Westergaard isn’t at it. He canceled his reservation two days ago.”
“That makes the professor the prime suspect, I’d say.”
“But why carve that word into her?”
The old pilot glanced up at the lighted windows. “I’ve been on this earth nearly seven decades, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand the abominations men commit against women.”
Hutchins came down the walk slowly, with his wide-brimmed hat in his hands and his face empty of meaning. Looking at him, I felt an upwelling of anger at this arrogant, incompetent man. He tried to slide past us, but I blocked his way.
“Good work, Trooper. Nice job finding that missing driver.”
“Shut up, Bowditch.”
“‘She was probably shit-faced and called a friend before the cops showed’? That’s what you told me. Maybe if you had actually looked for her, she’d still be alive.”
&n
bsp; He looked down at me, eyes flat, jaw tight. “You smell like booze.”
“Boys,” warned Charley. He knew where this was headed.
For an instant, I thought Hutchins might punch me. Instead, he turned one of those wide shoulders into my chest and flicked me aside like a bull tossing a picador. I practically fell over into the snowbank as he stormed back to his cruiser. We could overhear him on his police radio, although his exact words were lost to us.
“I’m not sure that was called for,” said Charley.
“He just pisses me off.”
The wind shifted direction and swept in suddenly off the sea. Charley’s teeth began chattering like castanets. “I’m guessing we’re going to be out here awhile.”
“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”
“I’m not sure who dragged who into what,” said my friend with a humorless smile. “But I’m thinking I’d better buy myself a rabbit’s foot, quick. My luck’s definitely taken a left-hand turn since I made your acquaintance, Warden Bowditch.”
* * *
It was Charley’s idea to meet the detectives at the top of the driveway. “They’re going to want to spray wax on the tire tracks,” he told me. “And we don’t need any more cars coming down this hill.”
We left Hutchins standing like a statue beside his cruiser and pushed our way uphill through the broken-branched trees, taking a circuitous route and checking the thinning snowpack with our flashlights every few feet to be certain that no one else had recently come this way. It had begun to dawn on me how thoroughly I had contaminated the crime scene by breaking into the house.
The first responder to arrive was a Knox County deputy. Another soon followed. The police lights made revolving blue shapes in the spruces, turning all our faces blue.
The county sheriff himself was the next to show up. He was a short man with two chins and smoothly shaven cheeks. He had recently won election to the job after working at a desk in the Maine State Prison. Somehow, back in November, he had managed to convince a majority of voters that his background in corrections qualified as sufficient law-enforcement experience. Most of the jail guards I’d met didn’t have a clue about the niceties of community policing. I wasn’t optimistic Dudley Baker would be the exception to the rule.
“Tell me what happened,” he said, peering out at us from behind photochromatic eyeglasses.
“The house belongs to a Professor Hans Westergaard of Cambridge, Massachusetts,” I stated. “There’s a dead woman named Ashley Kim inside, but no sign of the professor. We think they were lovers. If I were you, I’d put an APB out on Westergaard immediately.”
He was wearing a fur-lined parka with the hood up. The effect of which made him look like an Eskimo. “You’re Bowditch, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re Charley Stevens.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
He glanced back and forth between us, frowning. “You need to explain this to me. What the heck are you guys doing here? Why did you break into this house?”
“Maybe we should wait for the state police before we get into all the gory details,” Charley said in an amiable voice. “There’s no point in us telling our story twice.” In Maine, with the exception of the largest cities, all homicides are investigated by the state police’s Criminal Investigation Division. The sheriff’s department would merely assist in the case.
Baker sniffed and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Fine,” he said. Then he went off to speak with his underlings.
“You need to put an APB out on Westergaard!” I called after him.
It took another half hour for a state police detective to arrive. As he climbed out of his sedan, my stomach did a flip-flop. Even in the swirling light of the police cars, I recognized the spark-plug physique and do-it-yourself crew cut. Detective Antonio Menario recognized me, too. “Bowditch,” he muttered, not bothering to hide his contempt.
“Detective.”
He glared at Charley with coal black eyes. “You’re a long way from home, Stevens.”
“I’d say the same for you,” said the old pilot.
Maine state police detectives are assigned to designated regions, and it was my understanding that Menario worked out of the western foothills and mountains, given the role he had played in investigating my father’s case. The detective had never wavered from his theory that my dad had killed those men, and he had treated me with disdain when I’d argued for the possibility of other suspects.
“What are you doing on the coast, Menario?” I asked.
“I’m on temporary assignment so Pomerleau can have another kid. Explain to me what you two are doing here.”
“We found the body.”
Menario tilted back his head and breathed out steam. “Of course you did.”
Sheriff Baker returned and launched into a situation report for the detective. “We’ve put up a perimeter. Your man Hutchins is down at the house, but no one besides these two wardens has gone down the driveway or otherwise disturbed the crime scene. The medical examiner is on his way. My DA is down in Portland, so I’m not sure when we’ll see him tonight. I put in a call to Assistant Attorney General Marshall.”
“What do you mean, they disturbed the crime scene?”
“I guess we should explain what happened,” Charley offered.
“Now would be the time,” said the detective.
* * *
I left it to Charley to tell the tale, figuring Menario hated my guts already, so what was the use? The detective listened with arms crossed, occasionally asking a curt question to clarify a point, sometimes sighing audibly in disgust. He appeared to me like a man with a terminal case of constipation.
After Charley had concluded, the detective fell silent. Then, out of the blue, he said to me, “What did you do to your arm?”
Blood was dripping to the ground, but I felt no pain whatsoever. “Oh, I cut it on the glass door.”
Menario scowled. “We’re going to need samples from both of you,” he said. “Blood, hair, fiber, DNA, boot prints. The evidence-recovery techs will take those at the jail. Tomorrow, we’re going to need you to go through the video we shoot of the house, so we know exactly which rooms you fucked up.” He turned his basilisk gaze on me. “We’re impounding your truck, in case you carried any contaminants from it indoors.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Signed statements. And keep your mouth shut about what you saw here until I say otherwise.”
A deputy stepped out of the shadows. “The caretaker’s here.”
“Let him through,” the sheriff replied.
The deputy brought over a very tall, very thin man with small eyes and a bony face. He was wearing a black watch cap pulled over his ears, a dark peacoat, oil-stained work pants, and heavy rubber boots. I thought I recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t recall the circumstances of our meeting.
“This is Stanley Snow,” said the deputy.
Menario measured the man from head to toe, as if trying to guess his exact height. (I would have estimated six-five.) “You’re the caretaker?”
“Yes, I am.” Snow had a higher-pitched voice than I would have expected, given the acne-scarred roughness of his features. “Can you tell me what’s happened here? I was asleep when your dispatcher called.”
“When was the last time you spoke with Hans Westergaard?”
“He called three days ago and asked me to get the house ready.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“Make sure the driveway was plowed and sanded. Check the pipes and furnace.” He smiled in a way that suggested the answer should have been self-evident to anyone. “Hans or Jill always call me before they drive up from Massachusetts.”
“By Jill, you mean Mrs. Westergaard.”
“Yes.”
“Did he say he’d be bringing anyone with him?”
“No.”
“How did he sound to you?”
Snow cocked his head, a
s if he was having a hard time hearing Menario clearly. “I don’t understand the question.”
“You didn’t notice anything unusual in the tone of his voice? He didn’t say something that struck you as out of the ordinary?”
“No,” the lanky man said. “We only spoke for a few minutes. He asked how my winter was going—it was just small talk—and then told me he was coming up for a couple of days and needed the house to be ready.”
“When was the last time you visited the house?”
“Three days ago, like I said.”
I’d been listening to the interrogation with a growing sense of impatience. When was Menario going to cut to the chase? “Do you know a woman named Ashley Kim?” I asked point-blank.
Because he had no neck to speak of, Menario had to turn his entire body to fix me with a reprimanding glare. I think he’d been so focused on grilling the caretaker that he’d forgotten all about us. My unwelcome question had broken that spell.
“I don’t think so,” Stanley Snow said in answer to my question.
Menario raised his hand like a traffic cop signaling a car to halt. “Hang on a second, Mr. Snow. Sheriff, can you arrange for the wardens to get a ride to the sheriff’s office to give their statements? Their presence here is no longer required.”
11
The office of the Knox County sheriff is located in the same building as the jail, down the end of an obscure road near the sulfurous Rockland city dump. The deputy who drove us there, Skip Morrison, was a friendly acquaintance of mine, a freckle-faced beanpole prone to chattering. Charley rode in the passenger seat, while I was stuck in back, where the doors had childproof locks.
“So it looks like Westergaard is the perp,” said Skip, speaking loudly over his shoulder.
“I think it’s too soon to say that with certainty,” Charley said.
I realized that my old friend was technically correct. The circumstances appeared damning for Hans Westergaard, but at this point, who could say where the evidence might lead?
Skip was not persuaded. “I’ll give you odds right now that Westergaard’s our guy. In these things, it’s always the boyfriend.”