by Paul Doiron
When I’d called Ozzie Bell to arrange the visit, he’d been ecstatic. He’d heard the news about my fight with Stanley Snow, and although he voiced concern for my girlfriend and myself, he couldn’t suppress his giddiness. He was so upbeat, he didn’t bother asking me why I wanted to talk with Jefferts alone.
I didn’t have long to wait. The model prisoner came through the door with the biggest shit-eating grin I’d ever seen.
“My man Bowditch!” He looked neat and clean in his blue denim outfit. His wavy blond hair was wet and combed carefully back behind his ears. He surveyed my bandaged head and new sling and shook his head with amusement. “You look like half a mummy, dude.”
“Have a seat, Jefferts.”
The inmate and I faced each other across the table. He waited for me to start the conversation, but I was in no particular hurry.
“I guess I should start by thanking you,” he said. “I can’t believe it was Stanley. He was, like, the last person I ever suspected.”
I tried to remain still as I spoke. “Why was that?”
He gave me one of his patented movie star smiles. “He just seemed like this honest, hardworking type of guy. He never got too high or too low. ‘Steady Stanley,’ I used to call him. I don’t think I ever saw him drink a beer. But I guess that’s how psychopaths are—cold and calculating.”
“Some are,” I said. “But then you have killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, people who are complete alcoholics. My father was a drunk.”
He leaned back in his chair. I was certain he didn’t know what to make of my subdued manner. Maybe he figured I was sedated.
“Well, in any case,” he said, “Stanley wasn’t a drinker.”
“Do you remember the last time you saw him?”
“The dude never visited me. Not once in seven years. And he was my own cousin. But it makes sense now, in retrospect.”
I shook my head. The motion was like a flare going off inside my brainpan. “I meant the night Nikki disappeared.”
“He came out into the parking lot after Folsom tossed me out of the bar. He said I was too drunk to drive, but I told him to get lost. I guess he must have seen how wasted I was, and that was when he got the idea to pin the murder on me. It was probably when he stole the tape out of my truck, too.”
“You never mentioned in your court testimony that he was at the Harpoon.”
He brought his hands together, laying one over the other. “I was pretty wasted.”
“How do you think he found you passed out in the woods?”
“He must have followed me around that night.”
“When do you think he abducted Nikki?”
He gave a halfhearted shrug. “Good question.”
“It looks like you’ll be getting a new trial,” I said placidly.
He flashed that brilliant smile. “That’s what Ozzie says. There’s just no way they can railroad me again after what Stan did. It’s open-and-shut, man. Open-and-shut.”
“How so?”
He seemed bemused by my question. “It all makes sense now, right? At the trial, my lawyer argued that I couldn’t have killed Nikki, because she died while I was in police custody—on account of the rigor mortis evidence. Snow killed her after they arrested me, just like we always said happened. But that bitch Marshall was so hot to nail me, she denied the state’s own science. The newspapers are going to crucify her now.”
I sat there quietly.
Jefferts seemed to sense something was amiss. “Are you OK, man? You don’t look so hot.”
“No, I’m not OK,” I said. “Your accomplice just tried to kill me and my girlfriend.”
“My accomplice?” Jefferts tried to shake the accusation off by pretending he hadn’t heard me correctly. But he’d heard me all right.
“You remember the last time I was here?” I said. “I asked you what you did after you left the Harpoon that night, and you said something that struck me, but it took me a while to figure out what it was. You said you drove around and called some of your friends on your ‘CrackBerry’ to find out if there were any parties going on.”
He smiled again, but this time without showing his teeth. “I’m not following you.”
“Well, I remembered the inventory of items the police recovered from your truck. There was a lot of crap there, but no BlackBerry.”
Jefferts stared at me silently for a few moments, without expression. “I must have lost it.”
“Either that or someone stole it.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“There was another thing that had me puzzled. I read Ozzie Bell’s files, and Stanley Snow was never mentioned. All of your other cousins attended your trial or signed letters demanding that you be pardoned. Snow never did either of those things, and I wondered why.”
He adjusted his shirt collar but didn’t respond.
“The J-Team has been pretty aggressive in naming other people as potential suspects in Nikki’s murder,” I continued. “Calvin Barter, Mark Folsom, the Driskos, and half a dozen others. Why not Stanley Snow? The rigging tape used to suffocate Nikki had been exposed to salt water, so it might have come off his uncle’s lobsterboat, the Glory B. If your defense team was throwing darts against the wall, how come one didn’t hit your buddy Stan?”
His eyes were hooded now. “You should ask Ozzie that.”
“I asked Sheriff Baker. He said you told the J-Team to leave Stanley out of their witch-hunt.”
“Because I didn’t think he did it. He was my friend and I didn’t think he did it.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Simple as that.”
“All along, you’ve been presenting everyone with only two choices. Either you’re totally guilty or you’re totally innocent. Nobody ever considered the possibility that you might first have been complicit in Nikki’s abduction—and then later been played for a patsy by your cousin.”
Two bursts of color appeared on Jefferts’s cheeks. “Go to hell.”
I decided not to respond to the personal attack. “You did say one thing that I believed. I think you and Nikki did fool around a little. Mark Folsom said he threw you out of the bar that night because you grabbed Nikki, but I bet there was some history there. My theory is that you waited for closing time to apologize. I think that somehow you sweet-talked her into going for a ride with you.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“There’s no way Nikki would have gone anywhere with a troll like Stanley Snow.”
Beads of sweat had appeared along his forehead. “You’re just making this shit up.”
I continued my story. “You drove Nikki to your secret spot down lover’s lane, and then something happened. Maybe you tried to force yourself on her and she said no. Whatever happened, you knocked her senseless, because the coroner’s report said she had a wound on her forehead that no one could explain. She was hurt, and you panicked. That’s when you called ‘Steady Stanley’ for help.”
Jefferts restrained himself from flying across the table. “Fuck you.”
“When Snow showed up, he found you passed out from drinking a gallon of booze. Even better, Nikki was out cold, too. Here was this hot little waitress lying helpless in front of him, this stuck-up rich girl. I’m guessing it was then he realized he could rape her and pin it on you. So your good friend—the man you called for help—snatched her away and left you lying in your own puke.”
On the tabletop, his hands were balled into bony fists. “You can’t prove any of that.”
“The only evidence linking Snow to Nikki’s disappearance was the call you made to him from your phone, asking him to come help you deal with her. He needed to get rid of it. That’s why the police never found a BlackBerry in your truck.”
He settled back in his chair, composing himself. “That’s a nice story,” he said with a twitchy grin. “But I’m getting a new trial, Bowditch, and it’s all thanks to you. After Stanley killed those people, there’s no way they’ll be able to prove guilt bey
ond a reasonable doubt. Within six months, I’m going to be out of this shithole.”
I rested my good elbow on the table and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Do you want to hear a secret? When Snow was beating the crap out of me, he did something strange. I was too fucked-up to understand what he meant at the time, but he held up his cell phone and told me it was his ‘Get Out of Jail Free card.’ What do you think he meant by that?”
“Who the fuck knows?” he asked, but I could tell he did know.
“He kept your message, Erland, from the night you called him. It’s what he’s had hanging over you all these years, the reason you never gave him up to the cops. He told you that if you ever mentioned his name to anyone, he’d just play the message, and any hope you had of ever getting out of here would go up in smoke.”
Jefferts’s mouth went slack with disbelief. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Stanley Snow dropped his BlackBerry inside my house, Erland. Whose message do you think was on it?”
* * *
Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the prison. It was another dreary, misty day. A light rain had fallen near dawn, stopped for a while, and then started drizzling again. The extended forecast called for more of the same. It was mud season, after all.
My sergeant opened the door of her patrol truck for me and helped guide me inside. Then she went around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“I think I scared him.”
She started the engine. “So you told him about Snow’s cell phone?”
“Yep.”
She pressed on the gas and turned the truck in the direction of the prison gate. “I don’t suppose you mentioned that there was no message on it from Erland Jefferts.”
“I didn’t say there was—not in so many words.”
“His defense will subpoena it. They’re going to find out you were lying to Jefferts.”
“By the time they do, Menario’s going to have found the actual phone with that message. Snow must have kept it somewhere safe. It was his ace in the hole in case Erland ever tried to strike a plea bargain.”
I could feel her looking at me out of her peripheral vision. “That’s high-stakes poker, Grasshopper.”
The windshield was fogging up. I reached down and hit the defroster. “It’s my ass on the line, not yours.”
She scratched her nose absently. “My question is why Snow stopped killing for seven years and then started again. He must have had other opportunities. I guess we’ll never know what really happened.”
I’d thought a lot about this question over the past forty-eight hours, trying to piece together the sequence of events that occurred the night Ashley Kim vanished. Snow had known that Hans Westergaard was secretly driving over from Bretton Woods to meet his mistress, and he must have plotted an ambush. My guess was that he’d already attacked and tied up the professor before Ashley hit her deer. Snow had probably answered the phone when she called Westergaard asking for a ride. She knew him from her visit to Maine the previous summer, knew he was her lover’s caretaker, and thought nothing of blithely getting in his pickup.
What Snow hadn’t counted on was that the Driskos would arrive at the crash scene while he was there. Dave and Donnie weren’t the sharpest tacks in the box, but even those morons could put two and two together. And so father and son embarked upon their ill-fated scheme to blackmail him.
The medical examiner had determined that Ashley Kim and Hans Westergaard died within hours of each other. Snow had evidently kept them imprisoned in the house overnight while he repeatedly violated the young woman. Had he made Westergaard watch? My gut told me he had.
The next day, Snow had left the unfortunate couple alive in the house so he could set about creating alibis for himself. I had seen him at the Square Deal Diner that morning. Sometime later in the afternoon, he had returned to the cottage to rape Ashley Kim one last time before he smothered her to death. He’d then driven Westergaard’s Range Rover to that isolated road in the woods, where he’d cut the man’s throat with a kitchen knife. He removed whatever bonds he’d used to immobilize his captive and then hiked out of the forest. By the time I found the Rover, the ice storm had erased whatever footprints he might have left. Snow figured that if fiber evidence placed him inside the vehicle, he could always claim that the professor let him use the SUV from time to time.
The unanswerable question was what had incited this killing spree. Snow had already gotten away with murder seven years earlier. There seemed to be something about sexually active young women—Nikki Donnatelli, Ashley Kim—that brought out the demon inside his shriveled little heart. Kathy was assuming that the only murders Snow had committed were the ones in Seal Cove, but who was to say that investigators wouldn’t link him to the slayings of luckless women elsewhere?
“Maybe Snow secretly wanted to be caught,” I said. I’d read that some serial killers crave the celebrity that comes from being caught; they secretly want to be as famous as John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, and so they begin to sabotage themselves.
“Do you believe that?” Kathy asked.
“He was a lot more careless this time around.” I ran my fingers lightly across my bandaged skull and felt the bump on my head. “He knew he’d fucked up Westergaard’s fake suicide. He was boasting to me about his phony alibis and how dumb cops are. But he knew it was only a matter of time until Menario caught up with him. He was desperate, or he wouldn’t have come after Sarah and me.”
“What do you guess Westergaard’s wife’s role was in this?”
“Snow seems to have had a crush on her, but I don’t think she put him up to it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
We drove along without speaking, listening to the rhythmic back-and-forth swish of the windshield wipers. “How’s Sarah doing?” she asked.
“How do you think she’s doing? A madman broke into our house and tried to kill her.”
I didn’t mention the baby. Sarah had been sobbing uncontrollably for two days, and I couldn’t make her stop. Neither of us could bear to return to our house. Instead, Kathy and Sarah’s sister Amy had packed a week’s worth of clothes for us, and we’d moved into the motel behind the Square Deal. Eventually, Sarah and I would need to talk about our trauma, but neither of us had the heart to yet. I’d begun to wonder if we ever would. Maybe the Reverend Davies could help us. I had a counseling appointment with her to discuss the shooting.
“I heard the Barter boy came out of his coma,” Kathy said.
This was news to me. “What’s the prognosis?”
“He spoke to his mother.”
The St. George River came into view through the fog, a rushing wide brown expanse carrying tons of mud out to sea. I turned my head to face the window.
“Tomorrow’s the first day of open-water fishing season,” she said. “You’re welcome to ride along with me if you want.”
I felt a jolt of pain travel from my shoulder down to my fingers when I changed position. “Do you know what else tomorrow is?”
Kathy looked at me with her peripheral vision. “April Fool’s Day.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
EPILOGUE
The blackbirds were singing and the spring peepers were calling in the cattail marsh behind the Square Deal as I stepped out of my Jeep. I still hadn’t returned to active duty—the hard plaster cast on my right wrist had delayed that prospect indefinitely—but my bruises had begun to heal, and I could stand up in the morning without a lead weight pressing against the backs of my eyes. It seemed like a long time since Sarah and I had moved home from the motel, but I was surprised to realize it had been only two weeks. If nothing else, the leaves bursting from the trees and the bright violets sprouting underfoot suggested that we had finally turned the page on mud season, even if it was only a lie we told ourselves to reawaken our dormant hopes.
“Hey, Mike,” Dot Libby said as I came through the door.
She wore a bright orange wig to cover what the chemotherapy had done to her head, but there was a hint of color in her cheeks that hadn’t been there the last time I’d come in. From her energy level, you’d never have known she was battling breast cancer.
“How are you, Dot?” I asked.
“Right as rain.” The tangerine color of her wig made me think of the Barters, but Calvin was still in jail, his son was on the mend, and for the moment I could relax about those worries. “Your handsome gentleman friend is waiting for you.”
I was always surprised to hear a woman call Charley Stevens attractive, but maybe they saw his inner glow—like the candle inside a jack-o’-lantern.
Charley rose to his feet as I approached our regular booth. “Don’t you look an awful mess,” he said by way of a greeting.
“Thanks for coming down, Charley.” There was already a cup of coffee waiting for me. My body still ached every time I had to bend down to a sitting posture.
He sipped from the steaming mug. “I reckoned I’d visit the transportation museum while I’m here and take a look at those old biplanes. Maybe I can bamboozle them into letting me take one for a spin.”
“How’s Ora doing?”
“We’ve got Stacey living with us again. She’s helping us clean out the Flagstaff place, but she and the Boss don’t see eye-to-eye on most things, so it makes for some awkwardness. Stacey’s not quite domesticated in some respects. She’s hoping I can finagle a job for her as an assistant wildlife biologist, but that’s a tall order. At least that Colorado district attorney declined to press charges.”
“I’d like to meet Stacey one of these days.”
“I’m not sure that would be wise,” he said cryptically. “How are things back on the home front?”
“Better,” I said. “At first, Sarah was crying all the time. She didn’t want to move back into the house after everything that happened.” I took a sip of coffee to loosen my stubborn tongue. “But she’s been doing better this past week.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Charley said, but his expression remained concerned. “Do you know if it was a boy or a girl?”