by Paul Doiron
In spite of my better judgment, I found myself siding with Skip.
* * *
At the jail, a state police evidence tech made us change into orange jumpsuits and slippers while he bagged our clothing and shoes. My forearm was still bleeding, so I found a first-aid kit, rinsed the wound under the bathroom faucet, and wrapped it tightly with a gauze bandage.
The state had our fingerprints on file, but the technician drew my blood, swabbed my tongue, and carefully plucked several hairs from my head. Then we were given access to computers so that we could type in our statements. Menario and his detectives would certainly question us about these documents, and AAG Marshall would need to sign off on them, as well. I felt a ponderous responsibility to choose my words carefully.
At the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, we’d been taught to fill out incident reports with short declarative sentences. Don’t elaborate. Don’t hypothesize. Just stick to the facts.
But what, exactly, were the facts of my involvement in this murder investigation? How was I to explain my daylong infatuation with the missing woman? Or my itchy mistrust of Hutchins?
When I reached the section in the report where I was supposed to describe my discovery of the body, my fingers hovered over the keyboard. The image of Ashley’s naked body, bound with rigging tape, cruelly sliced, and defiled by that disgusting profanity made me nauseous. Why the hell would Westergaard torture her that way? And why leave her corpse in his own bedroom? Was he trying to make it look like the act of a random psychopath? Under the fluorescent lights of the patrol office, my head began to ache. The hour was too late for so many questions.
I became aware of someone standing at my shoulder.
It was Sheriff Baker. His L.L.Bean parka was folded over his arm, and I saw that he was wearing a pressed oxford-cloth shirt tucked into pleated chinos. His hair was wet and freshly parted. He looked neater than any man should look at three in the morning.
“Can I have a word with you, Mike?” he asked. “If you’re done with your statement.”
From across the room, Charley raised his red-rimmed eyes at me without expression.
I followed the sheriff into his office. The dull walls were adorned with plaques and awards bearing the names of various fraternal and community service organizations. The air smelled of furniture polish: a lemon/beeswax aroma.
“Have a seat.”
He moved a pen from the stand beside his blotter and began turning it in his nubby fingers. “We’re going to want you to come back here tomorrow morning to look at some videos of the house.”
“That’s what Detective Menario said.”
The sheriff continued: “I put a call in to your division commander earlier to inform him of your involvement in the investigation. He said he’ll be in touch with you.” His chair gave a squeak as he repositioned his oversize rear end. “I didn’t realize you’ve only been a warden for such a short time. Lieutenant Malcomb thinks you have real potential.”
That was a backhanded compliment if ever I’d heard one. I could only imagine how irked the lieutenant would be over my involvement in another murder investigation. Once again, through my impetuous actions, I had managed to put my career under a cloud.
“Sheriff, how can I help you here?”
Baker smiled ever so briefly again before his features reset—in the law-enforcement trade, it’s called “a microexpression”—and cleared his throat. “I fully understand that the state police have jurisdiction in this investigation, just so you don’t misinterpret my interest. You mentioned that the victim was naked and bound with some sort of tape?”
“My guess is that she asphyxiated from having her mouth and nose taped shut, but that’s a question for the coroner.”
“And you said that she had a word cut into her skin?”
“Slut.” Even saying it made me sick to my stomach. “That was the word.”
“Interesting.” He blinked at me from behind his tinted glasses.
“Is that it?” I asked. “Is that all you wanted to ask?”
He inserted the pen back in its stand. “Detective Menario said I should send you home after you were done with your statements. But you need to go to the hospital first.”
“What for?”
“You’re bleeding on my chair.”
It was true; blood had seeped through the gauze bandage, staining the jumpsuit and dripping onto the floor. “Fuck,” I said.
“I’ll arrange a ride for you to Pen Bay.”
“Charley’s going to need someone to take him back to my house,” I said. “That’s where his van is, and his wife is waiting for him there.”
He picked up his desk phone. “Morrison can drive him.”
“So we’re done?”
He held the phone in midair, as if waiting for me to leave. “Thank you. Yes.”
I wandered back out into the patrol office, wondering what had just happened. Why did Baker seem so antsy? Maybe it was just the brutality of the crime and the prospect of having a sexual predator loose in his county for the first time since his election. But why did he ask me about those specific details? When he had mentioned the rigging tape, a fleeting memory had flashed in my head. There was something vaguely familiar about the circumstances of this murder.
I decided to get some coffee in the break room before checking back in with Charley.
The Knox County Jail was usually where I brought anyone I happened to arrest. Most of my cases seemed to be Class D or E misdemeanors. Rarely did I have an occasion to drag some idiot to jail in handcuffs. So I wasn’t used to hanging out in this part of the building, let alone dressed in inmate garb.
In the hallway, a middle-aged woman with saffron-tinted curls and wearing a sheriff’s uniform that squeezed her breasts and hips was washing a carafe in the sink. She did a double take at the sight of me.
“Mike! I didn’t recognize you.”
“Hi, Lori.”
Lori Williams was a dispatcher at the 911 call center. She’d been the one to radio me about the deer/car collision the previous night, and she’d taken my call from the Westergaard house when I phoned in the murder.
“They took my clothes for fiber samples,” I explained.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Just a cut.” I forced a smile. “Is there any coffee?”
“I was just making some.” She filled the carafe with water from the tap. “That poor woman! I’ve been thinking about her all day.”
“That makes two of us.”
She set the pot on the burner. “There was something about that anonymous caller that gave me the creeps.”
In the rush of the night’s events, I had almost forgotten how everything had begun—that a caller had phoned 911 to report a deer/car collision but refused to leave his name.
“Do you think the man I talked to was the killer?” Lori asked.
“It’s possible.”
At the moment, the focus of the investigation was on finding Hans Westergaard, so I doubted anyone would pursue this particular lead immediately. In any case, it would have been nonsensical for Ashley Kim’s abductor to report the accident. “I don’t suppose you recognized the voice?”
“I think he might have had a glove or something over the receiver,” she said. “His voice sounded muffled.”
“Then it won’t help the detectives to listen to the nine one one tapes.”
“You never know.” She looked up from the coffee machine, and suddenly her expression softened. “Oh, Mike, you look so tired.”
“I’m not a night owl like you.” Something Lori had said pushed its way into my thoughts. “Do you remember when we were on the phone earlier? I told you that there was a word cut in the victim, and you said, ‘Not again.’ What did you mean by that?”
She licked her rose-painted lips and glanced at the door as if afraid of being overheard. “I was thinking of the Jefferts case.”
“Erland Jefferts?”
Suddenly, I understood what it
was about the Ashley Kim killing that had seemed familiar. I’d just finished high school when Jefferts’s arrest and trial became front-page news across Maine.
“He used rigging tape to smother the Donnatelli girl,” Lori said. “And he carved a word in her body, too. I’m sure all those nuts who think Jefferts is innocent are going to pounce on this girl’s death.”
At that moment, Charley appeared in the hall. His brow was deeply furrowed and his eyes were baggy. “I’ve been looking over hill and dale for you,” he said.
“They’re sending me to the hospital to get stitched.”
He looked at my red and dripping arm and shook his head in amusement. “I would hope so!”
“Morrison is supposed to give you a lift back to my house.”
“Can I speak with you in private before we go our separate ways?”
“I need to get back to my APU,” Lori said. “Take care, Mike. Get some sleep.”
After she’d left, I said, “What’s up?”
“I thought you might like to see this.” He handed me a piece of paper printed from a computer; it was a screen shot from the Web site of the Harvard Business School:
Dr. Hans Westergaard is a Harvard Business School Professor of Management practice. He holds degrees from the the University of Copenhagen, the Harvard Business School (M.B.A.), as well as (Econ) from the London School of Economics (Ph.D.). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm School of Economics and is the author of the book Magt Fordærver: Svig og Fejl i de Multinationale Corporation (Power Corrupts: Fraud and Failure in the Multinational Corporation). Dr. Westergaard has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as one of the world’s most influential thinkers on leadership and accountability in the financial services industry in the context of the financial crisis.
The accompanying photo showed a dignified older man in a black suit. He had thick silver hair that looked expensively styled, a prominent nose, and puckish gray eyes. I wouldn’t have identified him as a European except for his open collar—no power tie for Hans Westergaard—and rimless eyeglasses.
“He doesn’t look like a sexual psychopath,” I offered.
“Most of them don’t.” Charley gestured for me to take a seat at the table in the training room. “You’re going to hear this anyway, and I figure it should come from me.”
“What is it?”
“Do you remember the Erland Jefferts trial?”
“Lori and I were just talking about it.”
“I didn’t want to spout off back at the house, because I don’t believe in leaping to conclusions. But there are certain resemblances between the two homicides.”
“But Jefferts is still in the Maine State Prison,” I said. “No wonder Baker is nervous. People have been claiming for years that he’s innocent. Either there’s a copycat killer out there or those fanatics were right and Jefferts was imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit.”
Charley fell silent. He leaned his knobby elbows on the table and pressed the fingertips of both hands together. It seemed as if he was searching for the right words to tell me some bad news.
“Is there something else?”
He nodded. “I heard a deputy talking. He was down to the Westergaards’ house when Walt Kitteridge was examining the body. You know Walt? He’s the state medical examiner. According to the deputy, Walt said that rigor mortis was still progressing in the deceased. It hadn’t reached its peak.”
In the back of my mind, a half-recollected textbook triggered an alarm. “What does that mean in terms of time of death?”
“It could mean a lot of things, but I guess there was still some residual body heat in the inner organs.” His voice was hoarse and he paused to get some saliva going. “The indication is that Ashley Kim didn’t die last night after the accident. She was probably killed sometime this afternoon.”
The realization was like a hand closing around my throat.
I could have saved her.
12
Seven years ago, a pretty waitress named Nikki Donnatelli disappeared on her way home from a late-night shift at the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove. The next morning, while searching for the missing girl, the cops instead found Erland Jefferts passed out behind his steering wheel on an isolated woods road.
A local lobsterman known for his dashing good looks and substance-abuse problems, Jefferts had been bounced out of the Harpoon for making lewd advances to Donnatelli. Fearing the worst, the Maine state police and game wardens began an extensive search of the surrounding forest. The hunt took the better part of two rain-soaked days, but eventually Warden Kathy Frost and her cadaver dog, Pluto, located the body of the lost girl. Nikki had been bound with rigging tape to a tree, tortured, and raped. Because of the presence of a petechial hemorrhage, the medical examiner determined that she had died from asphyxiation after Erland Jefferts taped shut her nose and mouth.
Or so the prosecution claimed. The defense argued otherwise, and there were certain inconsistencies in the evidence to back up Jefferts’s story. Problems with the autopsy, a plausible alibi placing the accused in police custody at the medically determined time of death, some shucking and jiving by one of the investigating detectives on the witness stand—there were holes in the prosecutor’s case, but not enough to persuade the jury of Jefferts’s innocence. When the judge sentenced the handsome and articulate lobsterman to life imprisonment in the Maine State Prison without the possibility of parole, a group of his supporters began organizing to prove his innocence and secure his release. They called themselves “the J-Team.”
For seven years, they’d worked with a pro bono legal team to hire private investigators, write letters to newspapers, and file friend-of-the-court briefs to secure a new trial. But it was all for nothing. Erland Jefferts was still rotting away in his cell. And no more beautiful girls had gone missing in Knox County in all the years since.
That was before Ashley Kim took a wrong turn on a fog-darkened road on Parker Point.
* * *
I still remember the morning I first read the story. It was the summer following my graduation from high school, a rainy July day. My stepfather, Neil, was at his law office and my mother was having lunch with one of her tennis friends when I shuffled into the kitchen. The Portland Press Herald was spread out on the breakfast table. The headline read
WAITRESS MISSING IN SEAL COVE
The story was sensational, but what caught my attention was the accompanying photograph. It showed an achingly beautiful brunette, a few years older than I was, smiling at the camera. I knew from the moment I saw her that Nikki Donnatelli was dead. My heart didn’t care. I was smitten by a ghost.
That summer, I was working as sternman on a lobsterboat out of Pine Point. The previous year, I had gone to work in a remote sporting camp in the North Woods, where my estranged father lived, to wash dishes and scrub floors. Mostly, I had gone to be with my dad. The experiment had proved a disaster. So the next year, I decided to try my luck at sea. The sternman acts as the lobsterman’s assistant, which means you do all the shitwork—emptying the rancid bait bags and throwing the decaying remains to the gulls, rebaiting the mesh sacks with “fresh” herring, coiling the algae-slick lines, stacking the brick-weighted traps. You don’t actually get to haul traps or pilot the boat, or at least I didn’t. And while my employer earned a small fortune, he paid me only a flat wage. Still, I preferred lobstering to selling sneakers at the mall.
Most lobstermen listen to country-and-western music while they work, but my boss preferred talk radio. All the news that summer was about the beautiful Nikki Donnatelli and her despicable killer, Erland Jefferts. As a result, I found myself following each development in the case as the story shifted daily.
Nikki Donnatelli was twenty years old. Her family resided most of the year in White Plains, New York, but they had a summer cottage in Seal Cove. I have a vague memory that her father was an investment banker at one of those too-big-to-fail firms. Whatever he did, the Donnatellis ha
d plenty of money.
The Harpoon Bar was a dive bar of a certain type you find in coastal towns. The decor tended toward lobster buoys and fishnets slung along plank walls. As the only saloon for miles, it attracted a diverse clientele. I always figured that the suntanned summer people got a thrill from drinking gin and tonics next to windburned guys who reeked of fish, sweat, and desperation. Fights broke out at the bar on weekend nights, but no one ever got shot or stabbed, so there was only a mild aura of danger to go with your fried clams. The appeal of dining and drinking at the ’Poon was that it made you feel like a local, even if you spent only a month in town each summer.
Nikki Donnatelli had just finished her junior year at Brown, where she was majoring in art history and planning a course of postgraduate study in Italy. She was described by various sources as intelligent, playful, and feisty: a young woman who had traveled alone across Europe and could take care of herself. The Harpoon’s owner, Mark Folsom, said Nikki enjoyed the attention she received from the younger lobstermen, but he claimed she confidently resisted their crude advances. She had a boyfriend in Florence, to whom she remained faithful, Folsom later testified.
Erland Jefferts was twenty-three that summer and a local kid. His mother’s family—the Bateses—had lived in Seal Cove since the town’s founding, and there were a number of landmarks in the neighborhood bearing their name. Little was known about Jefferts’s deadbeat dad. He had been a merchant mariner who had departed for seas unknown when young Erland was in diapers. The boy had largely been raised by his mother’s sizable clan. And when he later went on trial for murder, it was the Bates family who packed the courtroom.
From a young age, Erland had been called sensitive and intelligent. He’d started college at the Maine College of Art but dropped out after a year to follow the rock group Phish on its transcontinental wanderings. Eventually, he drifted back on the tide to Seal Cove. Before Nikki Donnatelli was murdered, he was working as sternman on a local vessel, the Glory B, owned by one Arthur Banks, and renting a room over the general store.