by Paul Doiron
The tall grocer had ashes in his whiskers. He stuck a long finger out in the direction of my splint. “I heard you crashed your ATV chasing Barter. How’s your hand doing?”
“It’s all right.”
“If that kid dies, that son of a bitch should be tried for manslaughter.”
“He’s already facing a slew of charges, including child endangerment and felony OUI.”
“What about the damage he did to my trees? How is he going to make restitution for cutting down those oaks?”
“Calvin Barter is going to jail, Hank,” I said, beginning to feel exasperated with his abiding anger. “And his son suffered a potentially fatal head injury.”
“I was sorry to hear about the boy,” he said, not sounding particularly sorry to my ears. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“I wondered if you could point out Dane Guffey to me.”
“Over there.” He indicated a man sitting on a stump, apart from the others. Guffey had removed his helmet but was having trouble tugging off one of his boots. Even from a distance, I knew I’d never seen the man before. He was a chunky guy with a weak chin and a forehead that extended beyond the peak of his skull. He was the spitting image of his old man.
I left Hank and walked through the black streams flowing from the charred mobile home down the hill. “Guffey?”
His cheeks were sooty and a strong smell of smoke came floating off his body. He was panting as if he’d just run a marathon. “Yeah?”
“I’m Mike Bowditch.”
He narrowed his eyes and spat on the ground. The spittle was black. “You’re the warden who came to my house last night. My dad gave me your card. He said you wanted to talk with me. What for?”
I chose not to answer his question. “I admire what you did back there. Going inside that burning building alone like that.”
“Tell the chief,” he said in a smoke-parched voice. “Milton says the internal attack team can’t go into the structure until he’s on the scene. So now I’m in the doghouse.”
“Why did you do it?”
He finally got his boot loose. He tossed it on the wet ground and pulled a rubber gardening shoe onto his stockinged foot. “I knew Dave and Donnie were inside. Their vehicles were out front. And those guys never walked anywhere they could ride.”
I tried to make my next question sound natural. “How did you know so much about them?”
“As you know, I live just down the hill. Are you ever going to tell me why you came to my house last night?”
“I met Erland Jefferts yesterday,” I said point-blank.
He didn’t roll his eyes, but his expression revealed the depths of his annoyance. “That’s one subject I’m done talking about.”
“I just have a few questions.”
“Well, I’m not going to answer them.”
“It has to do with that so-called murder-suicide on Parker Point. You must have heard about it.”
“I heard about it,” he said. “What does it have to do with me?”
“There were similarities to the Donnatelli killing.”
“So?”
His indifference to the death of two people shocked me. “You used to be a deputy, Guffey. The state police are trying to catch a murderer.”
“Yeah, I used to be a deputy. For about eight months.” He stood up from the stump he’d been sitting on, and I realized that I’d underestimated his size. He was much taller and a hell of a lot heavier than I was.
“It doesn’t bother you to think a man might get away with murder?” I said.
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ask your friends on the J-Team. While you’re at it, tell them to stop slandering me in the newspapers.”
“They’re not my friends. And maybe if you stopped lying about Jefferts, they’d get off your back.”
My jujitsu must have worked, because he poked me hard in the ribs. “Everything I put in my report was the truth. I can’t be held responsible for what Winchenback said.”
“What did he say?”
He ran his tongue across his teeth and spit again, but nothing much came out.
I repeated the question. “What did Winchenback say?”
Guffey began gathering his turnout gear and stuffed it into its oversize bag. Over his shoulder he muttered, “I told you I’m done talking about it.”
“Where can I find Detective Winchenback, then? I’ll ask him myself.”
He gave a snorty laugh. It reminded me of the sound a neighing mule makes. “Sennebec Cemetery. Six feet under. Cancer of the tongue, ironically.”
“So Winchenback lied in his testimony,” I said.
“I never said that.”
“But it’s why you quit the sheriff’s department.” It was a wild guess, but I knew instantly from the way his back muscles tensed that I was correct.
Guffey threw his turnout bag on top of a pile of planks in the bed of his pickup. “I quit for a bunch of reasons, and they’re none of your fucking business. What do you care about my life anyway?”
“I care because I was the one who found that dead girl, and I want to nail the bastard who raped and smothered her.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I don’t think you’re as cynical as you pretend to be.” Hadn’t Sheriff Baker said almost those exact words to me a few days ago?
“I’m going home now.” Evidently, Guffey was as jaundiced as he seemed. He reached for the truck door handle.
I felt my opportunity to learn something from him slipping away. Anger and desperation caused me to grab the top of the door as he slid behind the wheel. “I don’t know what happened to make you curl up inside a shell. But if this psychopath kills another person, you’ll have blood on your hands.”
He yanked the door closed so hard, I had to snatch my hand away to avoid having my fingers amputated. “Go fuck yourself,” he said through the window.
I had to shout to be heard above his revving engine. “You think Winchenback and Marshall railroaded Erland Jefferts, don’t you? You think someone else might have killed Nikki Donnatelli and planted evidence to incriminate Jefferts.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see if the coast was clear to back up. “Read my report.”
“If Jefferts didn’t do it, who did?”
“I’m sure your buddy Hutchins has some ideas.”
“Curt Hutchins? The state police trooper?”
To my surprise, he rammed the gearshift into park. The truck sat where it was, idling. Whatever dark secret Guffey was keeping wanted to come out. “Ask him why the J-Team hasn’t dragged his name through the mud like they did mine.”
I thought I understood what the ex-deputy was getting at, but I wasn’t certain. “Do you mean Curt Hutchins was living around here seven years ago?”
“Living around here?” Guffey snorted again. “He and his buddies were drinking at the Harpoon the night Nikki vanished.”
36
I’m not sure I staggered, but I definitely felt the mud slide beneath my feet. “Did the police ever look at Hutchins as a suspect?”
“Why should they?” said Guffey. “Winchenback had a ‘confession’ from Jefferts.”
I was stunned. “Well, what do you think?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think.” The ex-deputy threw the truck into reverse again. “That’s a lesson I learned seven years ago.”
I watched the former deputy swing his pickup around and then rumble down the wet hill and out of view.
Now what? I wondered. Should I call Menario and tell him what Guffey told me? But why would the detective listen to me about Hutchins or anything else? Sheriff Baker might believe me. I reached inside my jacket for my phone and instead encountered the grip of my pistol. I kept forgetting that I’d lost my cell.
I saw Morrison ambling down the hill toward his police cruiser. “Skip!”
He turned to wait for me. “Can I borrow your phone?”
Grinning, he offered me his cell. “You’re not going to call one of those phone-sex numbers, are you?”
It occurred to me that if I called the sheriff and mentioned Hutchins’s name as a suspect, I’d be incriminating him without any evidence—exactly what Ozzie Bell and the J-Team did to half the men in Seal Cove. For whatever reason, the trooper had allowed me to drive home the previous night. It seemed pretty low to repay his leniency by making him the subject of a homicide investigation based on nothing but Guffey’s hearsay.
“Maybe you can tell me,” I said to Skip. “Is Hutchins on duty today?”
“I heard they put him on paid leave while Internal Affairs finishes its proctological exam.”
“Ouch.”
“You got that right, brother.”
The only fair thing to do was talk with Hutchins man-to-man. I owed him that courtesy at least. I said good-bye to Morrison and started my Jeep.
But as I drove north along the crooked peninsula, I began to wonder about the wisdom of confronting the man in his own home when I was suffering from a broken hand and acute Vicodin withdrawal. If Hutchins really had murdered two young women, what did I imagine would happen—that he would just admit his guilt and accompany me to the Knox County Jail for booking?
* * *
As had been the case the previous week, I saw a state police cruiser parked in the drive. The Dodge Durango wasn’t there, but a set of wet tire tracks led across the asphalt to a closed garage door. The lawn was the same muddy mess, although a few green shoots were pushing up in random places and the red buds of the sapling maples had started to swell.
I climbed out of the Jeep and took a deep breath. Behind Hutchins’s house, mauve-colored hills rose in the distance. A kettle of turkey vultures—I counted twenty-one birds soaring in tight spirals—wheeled overhead.
When I looked down again, Hutchins was standing on his front step with the door swung open behind him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt with stained underarms. He was barefoot and unshaven. He didn’t look well. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.
“You didn’t have to drive all the way over here.” It sounded like he’d been expecting me.
“I thought I should.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Let me go get it.”
Then he disappeared inside the house.
Get what? I felt as if I’d wandered into the middle of a Shakespeare play.
There seemed to be something different about the place. Then I realized that all the shades were drawn. It made me think of the Driskos’ trailer. Lonely men liked to live in caves.
But Hutchins was married. I tried to remember the name of his wife. Katie, was it? I remembered her skittishness at meeting me, the sunglasses, the way she kept her face turned away when we spoke. Had she been hiding an injury?
I marched up the flagstone walkway to the front stoop and ran smack into Hutchins. I kept forgetting how big a bruiser he was until I found myself looking up at the cleft in his chin. Standing so close, I could tell he hadn’t applied any deodorant that morning.
“Here.” In his enormous hand was my cell phone.
“Where did you find it?”
He frowned, as if this question was one he’d already answered. “On the roadside after you drove off.”
“If you had the phone with you last night, why didn’t you just drop it off at my house? I know you followed me there.”
“I got a call from my troop commander, telling me I was suspended. I just called your house to tell you I’d found it. If you didn’t get the message, what are you doing here?”
“I just spoke with Dane Guffey.”
His smile was wide, and I detected the smell of beer on his breath. “‘Dane the Stain!’ That’s what we called him in high school. Where did you run into Dane? The guy’s a fucking hermit.”
“This morning, at the Drisko fire. It turns out Guffey’s a volunteer firefighter.”
“What Drisko fire?”
I realized that Hutchins hadn’t heard the news. From his disheveled appearance, he looked like a troglodyte who’d just emerged from a cavern. “The Driskos are dead. They burned to death in their trailer this morning.”
The look he gave me was pure, unadulterated surprise. “No shit?” He rubbed his stubbled skull. His crew cut was so short, he might have appeared bald from a distance. “Hey, do you want a beer?”
Before I could answer, he turned and disappeared back into the darkened hall. Did he expect me to follow him? My good hand drifted into the pocket of my coat and felt the reassuring heaviness of the Walther. After a long hesitation, I stepped inside the shrouded house.
Something about the place was different all right. And it wasn’t just the drawn shades.
The last time I’d visited, the rooms had felt empty, but now they literally were. Most of the furniture was missing. Nothing was hanging on the walls, and the floors were bare. I’d thought Hutchins and his wife were moving in. Now I realized that they were moving out. It was the second time that day I’d walked through a building in the process of being vacated in a hurry.
I found the trooper in his den, seated on a sofa in front of a huge flat-screen television. The sofa and the TV were the only furnishings in the room. The screen showed college basketball players racing up and down a parquet court. It was the NCAA tournament again. The sound was muted.
“Want one?” He held up a six-pack of dangling cans held together with plastic.
The room flickered with the bright red-and-blue light coming from the television. He unsnapped a beer from the plastic ring and held it out to me. I took the can and opened it, but I didn’t drink.
Hutchins cracked one for himself and continued staring at the screen. “On top of everything else, I’m losing a bunch of money on this game.”
“It looks like you’re moving out,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.”
That’s when the realization belatedly arrived. “Where’s Katie?”
“Who knows and who cares.”
I studied the scene in front of me carefully. Hutchins had his long legs stretched out in front of him on the bare floor. I noticed that the arm of the couch had been gnawed down to the wood. “She left you?”
“I kicked her out.” He swiveled his head around on his thick neck, giving me a heavily lidded look. “She was cheating on me. Can you believe that?”
“How did you know?”
“She kept denying it, but I knew she was lying,” he said. “Sometimes you just know things. You see it in their eyes. Like when you pull someone over and ask them if they’ve been drinking, and they say, ‘Yeah. I had two beers.’ Why is it that every drunk always claims to have had two beers? You ever wonder that?”
I remained motionless.
“I always knew Katie was going to be my downfall,” he said. “We should never have gotten married. I don’t think I ever loved her. But somehow we ended up getting married. I can’t even remember why.”
“What do you mean, she was your downfall?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
He gave me a look, like I was an imbecile. “I followed her. That’s what I was doing that night. She told me she was going to the movies.”
On the night Ashley Kim was abducted, Hutchins claimed he’d had car trouble—that was why I’d been rerouted to the crash scene—when in reality he’d been stalking his own wife. “I drove to the theater in Thomaston, but Katie’s SUV wasn’t in the lot. When I got home that night, she was asleep. I woke her up, and she gave me a bullshit story about the movies. That’s how I knew she was cheating.”
That explained the bruise on her face the next morning. I felt a sudden urge to pistol-whip the wife beater.
But Hutchins gave me an imploring look. “What would you have done, Bowditch?” He honestly seemed to want my opinion.
“I would have trusted her.”
His lip curled. “That’s a l
oad of crap. Wait until your woman starts fucking another man, and then come here and tell me how noble you acted when you found out.”
The thought that Hutchins believed we were blood brothers turned my stomach.
“Why didn’t you arrest me last night?” I asked.
“I felt sorry for you.”
“You felt sorry for me?”
“Look at you, man—you’re a fucking mess. We’re both fucking messes.”
My first impulse was to tell him he was wrong. But then I heard Sarah’s voice in my head, pleading with me to get help, and I remembered the contempt in Jill Westergaard’s voice as she accused me of being on a mission to atone for my guilty conscience; I thought of the Vicodin and the whiskey and all my troubled dreams, and the words choked in my throat. Hutchins was right: We were both fucking messes. It took staring into this ugly mirror to see how far I’d fallen.
He gulped down his beer like a man dying of thirst. “So what did Dane the Stain say about me?”
I wondered if he’d forgotten that earlier part of our dialogue. “He said you were at the Harpoon seven years ago, the night Nikki Donnatelli disappeared.”
“So what?”
“He suggested you might have had something to do with her death.”
“Dane thinks I killed that stuck-up waitress? That’s pretty hilarious.”
“I disagree. What do you mean, she was stuck-up.”
“She thought she was better than us natives. Jefferts said he got in her pants, but that was just another of Erland’s lies.”
“Tell me about Jefferts.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed and threw his empty can against the wall. I dropped my own beer on the floor and went reaching for my handgun. But then I saw that he was screaming at the basketball game on television. “These assholes can’t play defense.”
I looked down at the can on the ground, the puddled beer around my boots. Hutchins hadn’t seemed to notice the spillage.
“I guess it won’t be long before the newspapers start saying I murdered both those girls,” he muttered. “That’ll be interesting.”
I kept my hand on the butt of my pistol. “You might want to tell Menario yourself first.”