by Paul Doiron
“Never in a million years would Hans have an affair with Ashley.”
I exhaled. “Mrs. Westergaard—”
“Let me tell you about Ashley,” she said, showing her teeth. “She was a funny girl. Hans said she drew political cartoons for the Yale Daily News when she was an undergraduate. We had her up here last summer, and I enjoyed her company. When she had anything to drink, her speech got surprisingly profane. You would never have guessed it, given what a little mouse she was normally.”
“She was attractive,” I ventured.
She flicked her fingers at me, and I noticed that her manicured nails were painted maroon. “She was a nerd. You know how some of those Asian kids are.” She caught herself. “She had no social life, no social skills. She was extremely intelligent, and she could be witty, yes, but there is no way that Hans would ever have desired her. There was nothing remotely sexual about the girl! He would never have chosen Ashley Kim over me, for God’s sake.”
It was no surprise that she was vain or that she was in denial about her age. The Botox, the breast implants (those things couldn’t possibly have been real), the care she took managing every aspect of her appearance—somewhere beneath that elaborate facade lived a secret fear. Was it any wonder that she was deluding herself about her husband’s extracurricular activities and maybe about his capacity for violence?
“Mrs. Westergaard,” I said. “I don’t mean to be blunt, but I think you should consider the possibility that you’re letting your love for your husband cloud your judgment.”
“You think that’s what I’m doing?” She was incredulous.
I’d never intended this discussion to become an argument. “I’m just cautioning you against leaping to conclusions.”
“That’s quite ironic.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You don’t know the first thing about my husband. Yet you’re already convinced he’s a cold-blooded sex killer.”
I’m sure my face had grown red. “Well, I hope I’m wrong about him, but it would be better if he turned himself in to the authorities and made his own case.”
“You really don’t get it, do you? Something has happened to Hans. Has it even occurred to the police that my husband might have been abducted? I’m terrified out of my mind right now.”
She believed he was another victim.
“Do you have any idea who might have killed Ashley?” I asked.
“No.”
“What about your caretaker, Stanley Snow?”
She gave me another of those imperious smirks. “Stanley is the gentlest person I’ve ever known.”
“He has the keys to your house.”
“And that somehow makes him a killer? Why don’t you accuse me of murdering them while you’re at it? You people really are a bunch of bumpkins.”
You people? I knew I shouldn’t let this unpleasant woman push my buttons, but if she held me in such contempt, I no longer felt protective of her feelings. “Well, someone raped and murdered Ashley Kim, and the evidence points to your husband.”
She squared her shoulders. “Get out.”
I opened the door. “Go talk to the detectives, Mrs. Westergaard. Tell them what you told me.”
“I intend to.”
I rested my hands against the cold roof of the SUV and peered back at her brittle mask of a face. “I hope you’re right, and that they find your husband safe and sound.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
17
I went back into the building and retrieved my truck keys without any rigmarole from the attending deputy, which was lucky for him. My blood was already boiling.
How had I ever pegged Jill Westergaard for a damsel in distress?
It was entirely possible she would rat me out to Detective Menario and AAG Danica Marshall, informing them that I had violated my duty as a material witness not to talk about the case. Christ, I was an idiot.
It would be better if I made myself unavailable for a while. As I drove back toward Sennebec, I punched in Charley’s number and waited for him to answer.
“Howdy do,” he said.
“I can’t believe you told that woman where to find me!”
He chuckled. “I’m assuming you’re referring to Mrs. Westergaard.”
“Of course I am.”
“I thought an encounter with her might be a good test of your tree fiber.” In the background, there was some soft murmuring that must have been Ora. “You and I need to talk, young feller.”
“I’d say so.”
“How about we get some lunch?”
The clock on my dashboard said it wasn’t even ten o’clock. But I knew that Charley rose religiously before dawn, so for him, this was already the middle of the day.
“Why don’t I meet you at the Square Deal,” I said. “That way, I can say good-bye to Ora before you drive home.”
“I was going to suggest the very thing.”
* * *
The sky had a gray and arbitrary cast. In March, the daily question was always whether the next batch of precipitation would fall as snow, ice, or rain. Every morning, Mother Nature rolled the dice.
I barely recognized my formerly messy truck. It was as if the cleaning fairy had waved a magic wand and transformed it from a pumpkin back into a proper law-enforcement coach. That’s one benefit of having your vehicle impounded for inspection, I thought.
As I drove, I summoned the courage to telephone my division commander. Lieutenant Malcomb was on his way to a meeting with the Warden Service colonel in Augusta. As such, he was already in a pissy mood. The two men disliked each other intensely from having worked together for twenty-plus years in the field. Or so my sergeant, Kathy Frost, had told me. Malcomb himself would never have confided his personal sentiments to a rookie warden, especially one as trouble-prone as me.
“How the hell did you get wrapped up in this investigation?” he demanded before I could squeeze in two words.
“I don’t know, Lieutenant. It just seemed to happen.”
“That’s always the way with you.” He was a chain-smoker, and you could hear the damage to his lungs in his every utterance.
When I mentioned how Charley Stevens had gone with me to the Westergaard house, the lieutenant let loose with a gravelly groan. He and the warden pilot were dear friends, but he believed that Charley and I goaded each other on to deeds of greater recklessness. We were mutually bad influences, in his opinion.
“If it’s any consolation,” I said, “the AAG says she’s pretty much done with me—until she goes to trial.”
“Good, because Frost is back tomorrow. She can be your liaison with the state police going forward. You’ve got enough on your plate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just do your job for once.”
That last comment stung. For all my occasional misadventures, I’d begun to consider myself a competent law-enforcement professional. I had a high conviction rate on my arrests. My activity reports were all up-to-date. And the only formal complaint against me—by an obnoxious boater from Massachusetts named Anthony DeSalle, who had accused me of harassing him and his son last summer—had collapsed under its own weight.
Of course, this glowing assessment of my character conveniently failed to take into account my maverick actions during the period of my father’s manhunt. Among the power players at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, hearing that Warden Mike Bowditch had bumbled his way into another murder investigation would be nobody’s idea of a surprise.
* * *
At the Square Deal Diner, heads turned as I walked through the door, and every conversation in the room stopped. The gruesome murder on Parker Point was undoubtedly the topic of the day. And now who should arrive but the man of the hour himself.
Charley had settled down in a corner booth, as far from the lunch counter as possible. I’d expected that Ora would be with him, since the motel was just behind the diner, but he was alone. No one said anything to me as I cro
ssed the room, but you could feel the curiosity quotient rise by ten degrees.
“Goddamn you, Charley,” I said in a hushed voice.
He rose to shake my hand—he always shook my hand when we met—and nearly crushed my metacarpals. “I am here to beg your forgiveness.”
“Granted.”
His expression turned solemn. “How did your interview go?”
“You mean my interrogation?” I unrolled the paper napkin from around the knife, spoon, and fork and spread it across my knee. “I’m assuming Menario brought you in earlier to go over your statement.”
“They showed me some video.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s a bad business, no doubt.” He studied me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “You seem to have survived your encounter with Mrs. Westergaard with gonads intact.”
“The less said about that, the better.”
Ruth Libby came over with a coffeepot and a down-turned mouth.
“Everyone’s talking about what happened on Parker Point,” she said.
“What are they saying?” asked Charley.
“That a girl got killed in one of them new mansions. And that there was some gross sexual stuff.” She lowered her voice. “So you guys found the body, huh?”
“No comment,” I said.
She glanced at the men seated along the counter. “That’s what I’ve been telling the peanut gallery. I told them that cops are sworn to silence. But you know how those guys are.”
“What else are they saying?” It was predictable that Charley would throw discretion to the wind.
She turned our cups over and poured them full of black coffee. “Everybody’s talking about Erland Jefferts. They said this girl died the same as Nikki Donnatelli. Some people say it’s a copycat. Others say it just proves Erland was wrongfully accused the first time.” Her eyes flitted back and forth between us, looking for confirmation, but neither of us responded, so Ruth decided to take a new tack. “Those Westergaard folks come in pretty regular in the summer.”
Charley raised the cup to his mouth. “Do they now?”
“They always come in Sunday nights for pie and coffee. I guess they think we’re kind of quaint.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Charley.
“They told my mom we’re kind of quaint. That’s OK, though. In Maine, Mom says, being quaint is good for business.”
“How is your mother?” I asked.
Once again, Dot was nowhere to be seen. She was such a constant fixture at the diner that her absence seemed all the more unnerving.
“She’s waiting for the test results. She thinks it’s probably cancer.”
Like her mother, Ruth was one of the most genuine people I’d ever met. But even I was taken aback by her bluntness. I couldn’t imagine Sennebec without Dot Libby’s garrulous, sprightly presence.
“Tell her that I’m thinking about her,” I said.
She nodded but said nothing.
Charley leaped boldly into the void. “I’m curious about those Westergaard folks. How would you describe them, in your uncensored opinion?”
“Well, he’s foreign,” Ruth said. “And they’re very rich, but that’s nothing unusual around here. They both drive Range Rovers the same sandy color, his and hers. And they dress kind of Town & Country, if you know what I mean. My mom thinks he’s handsome for an older dude, and his wife is very glamorous. She’s taller than him. I know she bleaches her hair, because she came in once with the roots showing a little. I told her about Wendy at Shear Perfection, but she didn’t thank me or nothing.”
“You’ve got a good eye for details, young lady,” said Charley. “You should consider becoming a detective.”
“I don’t need the hassle. What can I get you?”
I ordered an egg sandwich and a molasses doughnut, since it was still breakfast time by my reckoning. Charley requested the tripe.
“You don’t see it on menus much anymore,” he observed.
“For good reason!” I said.
“When I was a youngster, we had tripe twice a month.”
“Well, you’re the first one who’s ordered it in a while,” Ruth replied with characteristic candor.
Charley shook his head in mock sorrow. “What’s wrong with tripe?” he asked once Ruth had left.
“It’s fallen out of culinary fashion.” I swirled the cream around in my coffee and decided to stop procrastinating. “Jill Westergaard is in total denial about her husband. She told me he’d never cheat on her with a ‘mouse’ like Ashley Kim.”
He dabbed the corner of his mouth with the napkin. “Under the circumstances, I’d cut the woman some slack. She’s had a terrific shock, you know.”
I frowned in disagreement but moved on anyway. “What do you make of the similarities to the Erland Jefferts case?”
“That’s a can of worms no one wants to open.”
We both sipped our coffees. The warm cinnamon smell of baking pies drifted out of the kitchen as Ruth Libby opened and closed a door.
“I thought Ora was going to join us,” I said.
“She’s got a wicked headache.”
“I hope she’s not coming down with something.”
“It’s not that kind of headache.”
The wooden booth creaked as I leaned back against it. Something Sarah had said the night before flashed in my mind. “So how are your daughters doing?”
He winked at me, impressed by my powers of deduction. “Ann’s husband just got a promotion over to Bath Iron Works, making destroyers. As long as people keep blowing each other up, he should be comfortably employed.”
I remembered meeting Ann’s husband at Charley’s hospital bedside: a tubby, neatly barbered guy with an American flag lapel pin and a tone of certainty in his every utterance. My guess was that Charley and I shared the same view of him.
“What about Stacey?” I asked.
Stacey was the younger of Charley and Ora’s two daughters, the one I’d never met. My understanding was that she blamed her father for the terrible plane accident that had left her mother paralyzed. As a result, they hadn’t spoken for a number of years. I was curious whether her father’s recent brush with death had changed the equation.
“She’s been getting her graduate degree in biology at the University of Colorado. She was studying mountain lions. Leave it to Stacey to have a soft spot for fierce creatures.”
“Sounds like her old man.”
“Fortunately, she takes after her mother in the looks department.”
“So what’s happened?” I asked.
He threw back his head and guffawed. “You’re like a hound dog on a scent when you get going.”
“It’s not all that mysterious, Charley.”
“The long and the short of it is that Stacey got kicked out of the university.”
That explained Ora’s headache. “What happened?”
“She punched out her faculty adviser. Knocked him cold, in fact.”
“What happened?”
“She says he groped her, but there’s no proof, since she never filed a grievance. She just clocked him. That makes her the aggressor, according to the university.”
“Can’t she appeal?”
“My estimation is that she was looking for a reason to come back to Maine.” He looked over my shoulder at nothing in particular. “It’s causing Ora fits, in any case. We owe the school some money, and the Boulder DA is still considering an assault charge. Before you came in here, I was just thinking that Kim woman was the same age as Stacey.”
I’d wondered how long it would take for us to return to the matter at hand. “What did the detectives ask you this morning?”
“The usual questions. That Menario is some hotheaded character. He makes a bull look timid by comparison. But at least he doesn’t play games. That pretty prosecutor is another story.”
“Danica.”
His eyes widened in such a way that I could tell my use of her first name had caught his at
tention. “She’s a sweet peach,” he agreed. “But don’t assume that she’s on your side just because she’s a prosecutor.”
I recounted my ordeal in the training room that morning. He listened, stroking his chin the way he did when he was mulling over a problem.
“So what should I do?” I asked.
The old pilot cleared his throat carefully. “I’d advise you against talking with Mrs. Westergaard to start.”
“Too late.”
“Menario’s going to be looking at Hans Westergaard as the perpetrator until such time as the professor is located. But your DNA evidence also places those Drisko fellers at the crime scene.”
“I think it will, yes.”
“In that case, you’d do well to give them a wide berth.”
“That will be difficult if they really are the ones tearing up Hank Varnum’s land with their ATVs.” Ruth arrived with our plates. I watched Charley slather ketchup on his tripe and instantly lost my appetite. We waited for the waitress to leave before I continued. “I don’t see how the Driskos could have done it anyway. If the medical examiner is correct, then I was at their trailer just before the murder.”
“You’re assuming they didn’t have her stashed somewhere. For all we know, they had her tied up back at the Westergaard house and were just waiting for dark.”
“I guess that’s possible. But they didn’t seem like two guys who were about to go rape and murder someone.”
“How did they seem?”
“I don’t know. Happy?”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, I hate to tell you. Who else do you reckon was at the scene?”
I nibbled my sandwich. “There’s the anonymous guy who phoned in the accident to nine one one.”
“There’s something queer about that call. I hope Menario pokes around a bit. Who else?”
“Me and Stump Murphy. I could add Hutchins to the list.”
The old pilot sucked on his teeth. “I think that’s one theory you’re better off keeping to yourself.”
“Hutchins has a stick up his ass. Wouldn’t you agree?”