by Paul Doiron
For the first time, I was impressed with my new sheriff. The puffy little man was voicing my exact objections to Kitteridge’s theory.
“Calm down, Dudley. I’m not saying it’s what definitely happened.”
In the dim light of the trees, Baker’s photochromatic glasses had grown clear, and his eyes were wide and fierce. “Are you prepared to tell the media that Hans Westergaard raped and murdered his girlfriend in a manner identical to the Donnatelli homicide, and then he drove to the exact spot Erland Jefferts was arrested, only to commit suicide?”
“Maybe Westergaard had some sort of fascination with the Donnatelli case,” offered Danica. “It could have been a sex game that went wrong, and he killed himself out of remorse.”
“That’s absurd.”
“For whatever it’s worth, there’s an empty bottle of brandy in the vehicle,” Menario told Danica. “The guy was pickled when he died.”
I had a sudden memory of Jill Westergaard’s frantic voice and tear-filled eyes. From the first, she’d believed her husband was a victim. I owed her an apology.
A cell phone rang among us. All three of my colleagues reached instinctively for their pockets. It turned out to be Danica Marshall’s BlackBerry. She didn’t bother to excuse herself, just walked behind my Jeep, out of earshot.
“Come on, Menario,” I said softly after she’d left. “You know this thing is a crock.”
“Stay out of this, Bowditch.”
“Let him talk,” said Baker.
“You’re a professional,” I continued, trying some flattery for a change. “This setup with the Range Rover is obviously meant to distract you from the real killer.”
The detective crossed his powerful forearms. “Are you guys deaf? I’m just reporting what Kitteridge told me offhand. Nothing has been decided here.”
“Both Marshall and Kitteridge have an interest in closing this case.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Neither of them wants the Erland Jefferts investigation dredged up again. We all know they cut corners to convict him. The last thing they want is for the media to start asking overdue questions or for Jefferts to get a new trial.”
“That’s right,” said the sheriff, flying his J-Team flag for the first time. “They have a conflict of interest.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this baloney,” said Menario with palpable heat. “You think the state medical examiner is going to call a homicide a suicide to save himself from embarrassment? I’ve known Walt for fifteen years.”
I decided to play my trump card. “Don’t let a murderer outsmart you.”
Menario didn’t answer. His face was brutal with anger, but I thought I detected some doubt in his rapid blinking.
“I said the case was still open,” he replied finally.
Danica had finished her call and strode purposely back to us with a down-turned mouth. Whatever news she’d just gotten hadn’t been happy. “That was the attorney general,” she said. “He wants a full status report. I have to drive back to Augusta.”
“We’ve got to wait on the autopsy anyway,” said Menario.
Danica glared at me with those magnetic eyes of hers; no matter how hard you fought, they inevitably pulled you into them. “Don’t be surprised if you get a personal call from the AG,” she warned me. “He’s as puzzled as the rest of us why you keep popping up at crime scenes before anyone else does.”
The prospect of that conversation gave me heartburn. Being hauled in front of the attorney general was not my idea of fun. Lieutenant Malcomb had already warned me about meddling in this case. There was a good chance I could be fired here.
“I’m prepared to justify my actions,” I said flatly.
“That’s good,” Menario said. “Because you’re going back to the sheriff’s office now to give another statement. You’re going to be there awhile.”
30
Darkness was falling by the time I finally left the sheriff’s office. I’d just given my statement to a young detective with the same crew cut, musculature, and bad attitude as his boss. I knew that I had embarrassed Menario’s team by finding Hans Westergaard, but I wasn’t going to make excuses for using my brain.
As I stepped outside, I saw a bird shoot up from the alders across the parking lot. It rocketed high into the air and then came spiraling down, making a twittering call that sounded like a rapidly dripping faucet. It was a male woodcock showing off for the females. Every species has its own bizarre mating ritual.
It took me a few minutes to muster the courage, but I finally called Sarah.
“Where are you?” she asked with audible concern and anger.
“I’m at the Knox County sheriff’s office.”
“Why? Did something happen to you?”
“Something happened, but not to me.” The only thing to do was explain my day from the start. “Please listen to the whole story before you get mad at me.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get very far.
“Wait a minute,” she said, interrupting me. “You mean you’ve been driving with a broken hand? Mike, you’re taking Vicodin.”
“I know it sounds bad, but let me explain.”
I tried to paint my crusade in a positive light, but I received no understanding or forgiveness for my efforts.
“Mike, this is just so amazingly self-destructive,” she said. “It’s everything I asked you not to do.”
I confessed that none of it probably made sense.
“You shouldn’t drive while you’re taking a narcotic,” she said. “I’m going to come get you.”
“I haven’t taken a pill in hours.”
“Just come home, then. And do not take another Vicodin. Your judgment sucks enough as it is.”
“I love you,” I said.
“So you keep telling me.”
* * *
Whoever killed Hans Westergaard and Ashley Kim was still at large.
I believed Menario when he said that Dr. Walter Kitteridge would never submit a dishonest autopsy report, but if Bell’s files proved anything, it was that Maine’s elderly medical examiner was prone to lapses in concentration. I had less faith that Danica Marshall would conduct an objective investigation. Her career would be ruined if it came out that she’d railroaded Erland Jefferts while the actual murderer escaped, only to kill again seven years later.
As for Detective Menario himself, I had no idea. He’d promised the sheriff that he was continuing the investigation. With Westergaard dead, that meant reviewing other suspects. But how doggedly would he follow up with them?
The almost illegible note I had scribbled with Dane Guffey’s address sat on my dusty dashboard. The fact that he had resigned as a Knox County deputy shortly after the Jefferts trial seemed significant. Something had driven the man to become a virtual hermit.
My right hand had begun to throb again, and I heard again the siren song of the painkillers in my pocket. The instructions said not to take more than six pills in twenty-four hours, but I had lost count during the long day. Despite what I’d told Sarah, the chemicals were still screwing with my head.
Fuck the pain, I thought.
I started the engine and set a course for the seedy corner of Seal Cove: the unlighted crossroads where Dane Guffey’s street intersected with the Driskos’.
* * *
I promised myself that it would be a quick detour. I would stop briefly at Guffey’s house and ask him a few blunt questions. Most likely, he would slam the door in my face, and then it would be straight back home to Sarah.
It’s astonishing the lies we tell ourselves.
On the drive down the peninsula, a barred owl swept across the hood of my Jeep. It swooped down out of the black trees, its body thick, its wing beats heavy, and then disappeared into the darkness across the road. The occurrence happened so suddenly that, for a moment, it seemed like another of my recent hallucinations. To the ancient Greeks, owls were symbols of wisdom, but I doubted this interpretatio
n applied to my own unwise quest.
When Morrison had given me the address I knew exactly which house belonged to the Guffeys; I’d been past the dump many times, wondering who lived there and whether it might be abandoned. So many of the old ones in town had been given over to ghosts. Theirs was an ugly two-story building that had been painted white many decades ago and then left to mold and rot in the salty sea fogs that invaded the peninsula at night. The windows were all shaded, but one room on the first floor emitted a sickly yellow glow.
As I crossed the lawn to the front door, I noticed the shadow of a big barn behind the house. Was that where Dane did his wood carving? The temperature had dipped below freezing; I knew because the grass crackled under my boots.
On the door, there was an ancient cast-iron knocker that should have had Jacob Marley’s face carved into it. With my good hand, I used it to announce my presence. The sound echoed off into the darkness.
I waited a long time for someone to answer.
Eventually, I heard a faint shuffling, as if someone was descending a flight of stairs. Then a light snapped on above my head. The door opened a crack but was impeded from further progress by a chain. Looking through the illuminated slit, I found myself facing an old man wearing a drab bathrobe.
I could see only one side of him, but I recognized at once that he had Parkinson’s disease. The single eye that examined me was nearly all pupil, and his entire body was shaking like a streaker at the North Pole. He had a shiny dome for a head and a set of oversized yellow teeth that might have been dentures.
“Mr. Guffey? Is Dane at home?” I saw my breath shimmering in the cold air.
“No-o-o-o.”
“Do you know where he is?”
The man made a gurgling noise.
I tried another question: “Do you know when Dane will be back?”
“No-o-o-o.”
“I’m Mike Bowditch, the district game warden.” I fumbled in my pocket for one of my business cards. It was a white rectangle that bore the seal of the State of Maine. “When your son gets home, can you have him call me at the bottom number? That’s my cell phone.” Why am I speaking to this man as if he were a child? I wondered. Parkinson’s doesn’t affect the brain. “Please tell him it’s important.”
I tried to hand the card to Mr. Guffey, but it slipped through his quivering fingers and drifted like a leaf to the floor. It was still lying there when he closed the door on me. In the silence that followed, I heard a bolt shoot home.
* * *
The pain in my fingers and wrist was excruciating. The temptation to pop another Vicodin whispered to me from the back of my skull. What’s the purpose of needless suffering? it hissed.
I turned on the ignition and reached across my body to shift gears while bracing the wheel with my splint. As I pulled onto the paved road, my headlights lit up the dirt drive that led to the home of Dave and Donnie Drisko. Since my journey to the Guffey house had been such a bust, I felt a sudden urge to check in with my two game thieves.
If I hadn’t recognized it before, I should have realized then that my thinking was seriously impaired.
During my convalescence, I figured, the Driskos needed to know they were being watched. Already I was certain that word had gotten around that the local warden was out of commission. A surprise visit, I reasoned, might give them a healthful shock.
Stupidly, I headed up the rocky road, past the homes of a couple unfortunate neighbors who probably lived in fear of the local hell-raisers. If I had a house near the Driskos, every window would be barred, and I’d keep a bazooka in the umbrella stand. I crept quietly forward until my lights just touched the edge of their property line.
I unlocked my glove compartment and found the pistol I kept there. It was a Walther PPKS .380 that I’d purchased on my eighteenth birthday because—hilariously, in retrospect—I’d wanted to be like James Bond. Today, it served as my off-duty carry weapon. Every so often, Sarah and I would be traveling somewhere, and she’d want something from the glove compartment—tissues, maybe, or a mint. When she’d see the pistol, she’d give a shriek, as if it were a big spider.
I ejected the magazine and checked the chamber. With a set of five butter fingers encased in a bulky splint, even this simple task became a difficult and painful act. There was no way I could accurately discharge the weapon with my right hand, and as a lefty, I’d never been able to hit the broad side of an aircraft carrier. With the Driskos, though, you could never be too careful.
The moon was nearly full, but the pale disk was shrouded by clouds and it cast a pellucid light on the road. I’d taken only two steps or so before the Driskos’ pit bull began growling from the other side of the fence. Some dogs bark viciously, as if they very much wish to bite you. Vicky sounded like she wanted to dismember me limb from limb. I half-imagined her breaking through the fence, leaving a dog-shaped opening like you see in old cartoons.
A heavy padlock hung on a chain wrapped around the handles. Because the gate was locked from the outside, it meant that my friends, the Driskos, were not at home. I had a feeling the swinging singles might be out on the town.
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce where Dave and Donnie might be at this hour. The Harpoon Bar was a quick jaunt down the road.
* * *
When I got back to the Jeep, there was a new message on my cell phone. The unfamiliar voice belonged to a man, and from his first words I could tell he was apopleptic: “This is a message for Warden Bowditch. This is Nick Donnatelli—Nikki’s father. I’ve heard you’re one of the bastards trying to set Erland Jefferts free. The man is a psychopath! He raped and murdered my baby in cold blood. It’s bad enough for my family to be subjected to seven years of harassment by lunatics. But you’re a law-enforcement officer, for God’s sake! Who the hell do you think you are?”
I pushed the erase button. Someone must have contacted him. Maybe Danica Marshall thought a phone call from the grieving father would appeal to my conscience and dissuade me from my quixotic quest.
I should have returned Mr. Donnatelli’s phone call, if only to explain my intentions: I was on a mission to discover the truth, not just for Ashley Kim’s sake but for his own daughter’s, too. It was the only way for justice to be served and for both women to rest in peace. He needed to know my heart was just.
I should have called Nikki’s father back, but I didn’t.
31
The houses in the fishing village of Seal Cove clung like barnacles around a perfect vase-shaped harbor. Mariners knew it as a hurricane hole: a safe haven where they could tie up their boats if ever a monster storm came crashing down the coast. In August the cove would be a watery parking lot where sloops and lobsterboats angled for every available mooring, but in March the only boats were a few lonely commercial vessels glowing white in the moonlight. You could fish for lobsters year-round along the Maine coast if you didn’t mind scraping ice off every hawser and venturing out on subzero mornings through breath-stopping clouds of sea smoke.
But now with spring officially here—on the calendar, if not in fact—more lobsterboats would begin to emerge from beneath their shrink-wrapped skins. Soon the harbormaster would motor out to set the summer moorings. One morning the cove would be placid and empty; the next it would be dotted with floating volleyballs.
The Harpoon Bar occupied an entire wharf on the waterfront. It was a sprawling dead whale of a place that looked like it might someday slide back into the brink. When I got there that night, the parking lot was full, and the joint was jumping. During mud season, there wasn’t much to do in this ghost town but drink.
Close to the water, the air felt raw, but the smell of the ocean was stronger than I remembered: another seasonal sign of change. That pleasant briny odor was caused by breeding plankton. In July you could breathe in the sea from miles away, but in the winter it was just a faint scent that drifted like a windblown memory of some long-forgotten summer.
Even before I opened the door, I could hear
loud rock music and shouted conversations. I stepped into the bar and paused on the threshold to absorb the maritime spectacle.
The Harpoon took its nautical theme seriously—fishing nets were hung decoratively from the ceiling, and the walls were made of weathered panels that might have been salvaged from wrecked pirate ships. It was the kind of place where the bathroom doors were labeled BUOYS and GULLS. The signature harpoon itself hung above the fully stocked bar, which was where I seated myself.
Despite all the packed bodies inside the bar, the air was as cold as a fish locker; it smelled of fried seafood, spilled beer, and various strong perfumes and colognes.
The bartender took a while to find his way to me. He was engrossed in a spirited conversation with a middle-aged woman wearing a UConn sweatshirt. The TV above their heads showed a fast-paced basketball game. I was so caught up in my own obsessions that I’d forgotten about the other March madness.
I spun around on my stool. All the tables seemed to be full. I recognized many of the faces—men and women I’d arrested for growing pot or driving drunk—but there were just as many people unfamiliar to me. I spotted the mustachioed Driskos in the far corner. They were seated with a balding man who sat with his back to the room.
“What’ll you have?”
The bartender leaned across the damp bar. Despite the cloistered chill of the room, he wore a T-shirt that exposed his massive biceps, one of which was emblazoned with a United States Marines tattoo. I guessed him to be in his late thirties, maybe early forties, a veteran of the first Gulf War. He might have been handsome if not for the flattened nose and thinning sandy hair.
“A beer and a menu,” I said.
“What?” He needed to shout to be heard above the thudding bass of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
“Allagash White!” I shouted back. “And a menu!”
He poured me a pint and returned with a grease-slicked menu. “What happened to your hand?”
I wriggled my black fingers for him. “Crashed my ATV!”
He bobbed his eyebrows at me. “You’re that game warden!”