by Paul Doiron
KC
“It looks recent,” Tate said in her fake-gruff voice. “Like someone just scratched it here. Do you think it’s a headstone marker? The baby’s initials or something?”
I had no idea. The one thing of which I was certain was that I had shone my flashlight on that very same beech when I’d scouted the wallow two evenings earlier. I knew for sure because it was the tree the pigs had been using to rub the dried mud from their hides. And the letters had not been there at the time.
4
An hour later I stood beside my truck in a parking lot filled with law-enforcement vehicles and watched the death examiner carry out in his own arms a small black bag containing the remains of the half-buried infant. He was young for the job but already balding, dressed in a sweat-stained oxford shirt and flat-assed chinos, and I knew at once that he must be a parent himself because the agony in his face could only have belonged to a man imagining his own child wrapped in that airless plastic bundle.
In Maine, all homicides, outside of those committed in the larger cities, are investigated by the state police. The detective assigned to this case was a fortyish woman named Ellen Pomerleau, who worked Major Crimes out of the same barracks as Tate. Pomerleau emerged from the woods behind the coroner, her white blouse and slacks spattered with mud and pig shit. She had a pinkish complexion, pale eyes, and tangled hair that was so blond it was the color of piano ivory. She had applied white zinc to her lips to keep them from burning.
She and I watched the medical examiner and his assistant drive off in their black van, headed for the autopsy lab in Augusta.
“What kind of evidence did your guys find?” I asked.
“Aside from those initials on the tree?”
“Aside from those.”
“You know that pink cloth you thought was a baby blanket? Get this. It was a pink T-shirt, pretty well shredded. There was a tag inside the collar—said it was an official souvenir of Major League Baseball—so maybe that will lead us somewhere. The crime lab will do a DNA test, but even then…”
She didn’t need to say anything more. Every person who is involved with the investigation of homicides knows how films and, especially, television have misled the public about the wonders of forensic science. Juries now expected all sorts of wizardry from the prosecution based on myths they’d learned from Hollywood. To show up in a DNA database, the mother or father of the buried baby would’ve had to have been convicted of a violent sex crime.
On the other hand, I had also heard that human DNA had been successfully extracted from maggots four months after they’d fed on a corpse. So who could say what the techs might discover?
“How are you going to investigate this?” I asked.
“We’ll do some knock-and-talks to start. Canvass the houses along the road. Ask the neighbors if they’ve seen anything suspicious.”
“What do you say to people? ‘Excuse me, did you happen to see a person parked here carrying a dead baby and a shovel?’”
“Something like that. The higher-ups will probably want to do a press conference. Get the word out. Maybe a hiker or mountain biker saw something. I wouldn’t put money on it, but you never know.”
I glanced around the parking lot. “How about hiding a few game cameras somewhere? Record the plate numbers of whoever parks here?”
Pomerleau gave me a wry smile. “Because the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime?”
The detective was teasing me, but she knew as well as I did that the old saying has roots in reality. Not all criminals return to the scene, but many do. Arsonists, for example, frequently show up in the crowds outside the buildings they set afire. Burglars, having successfully robbed a house, might try their luck again if they suspect the owners have subsequently replaced their valuables. And I had read that certain notorious serial murderers had made a habit of revisiting the locations of their crimes—the abductions, the killings—as a way to relive the thrill of the experience.
“I don’t mind putting a camera up for you,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of them.”
“Thanks, but we’ve got this, Bowditch.”
“I was surprised your techs don’t want to take the sow that was feeding on the cadaver.”
“Maybe if the pig had eaten more. It sounds like she’d just started chowing down when you shot her. The ME should be able to get what he needs from the corpse itself. He’ll probably have to call in the forensic anthropologist, though. To determine how old that little girl was.”
“Well, just so you know, I’m going to need to go back in there. Either at dusk tonight or at first light tomorrow.”
Pomerleau cocked a white eyebrow—and waited.
“To shoot the piglets.”
She put her hands on her narrow hips, above the belt with her gun and badge. “I sometimes forget what crazy jobs you wardens have.”
I shrugged. What was there to say?
Stacey had retreated inside my pickup and had been turning on the ignition periodically to run the air-conditioning. I thought that she was just making it harder on herself. A few minutes of coolness made the day that much hotter. But I knew that starting up the engine was also a not-so-subtle signal that she was eager to start removing pigs. I’d already called my butcher to tell him that we would soon be arriving with three hogs. After a brief pit stop at the emergency room, that was, so Stacey could have her wound attended to.
“One thing I’ve been wondering,” I said. “Assuming the best-case scenario—”
“And what would the ‘best-case scenario’ be?”
“I don’t know. Say it was a teenage mom and the baby was stillborn. What’s the exact crime here?”
“Deciding questions like that is what district attorneys are for,” Pomerleau said. “But I can tell you one thing for certain.”
“What’s that?”
“Never assume it’s the best-case scenario. You and your girlfriend can remove your pigs now. Have fun and good luck shooting your piglets.”
With that, Pomerleau departed, along with everyone else on the scene who might have lent us a hand.
Not that I could blame them.
* * *
It was dirty work dragging the pigs out of the woods. Dead bodies are awkward, unhelpful items to move. The pigs didn’t smell as bad as I had thought they would and certainly didn’t reek as deer do with their foul tarsal glands. But I couldn’t say I enjoyed getting up close and personal with those pigs.
Both sows weighed almost as much as Stacey, and the boar must have run close to 250 pounds. I had brought a polyethylene sled that I used for deer and moose hunting, but the heavy carcasses still had to be wrestled into it, and we could only move one hog out at a time—which meant three trips back and forth during the hottest hour of the day.
I ran out of drinking water between the second and third hog.
Both Stacey and I had put on work gloves for the job, but I had trouble getting a good grip on the boar’s cartoonishly thin legs and ended up using my bare hands, and then the sled had to be hauled out of the low-lying wallow, through the underbrush, and down the trail. I tried pulling with the tow rope over my shoulder, and that worked fine until we reached the downslope. The weighted sled picked up speed and slammed into the backs of my legs so hard I nearly fell back into it. I had a brief vision of sliding down the hill (just me and the boar sharing a toboggan) before I regained my footing.
A swarm of carrion flies—eager to lay their eggs—joined the mosquitoes and deerflies accompanying our little cavalcade of death. Between trips, we paused at the truck to apply fresh coatings of bug repellent to our skin, rubbing it in hard behind our ears, knowing that it would drip off anyway, as sweaty as we were.
Neither of us was in a mood to make conversation.
I kept thinking of an article I had read about scientists who were genetically modifying pigs to serve as organ donors for humans. Our two species, it seems, are remarkably similar under the skin. I tried to imagine what it would be
like walking around knowing that you had a pig heart beating in your chest—whether it would make you feel like some sort of mutant monster.
I had no idea what similarly odd thoughts might be churning inside Stacey’s head. She kept her sunglasses on until her body heat fogged them up for the umpteenth time. Eventually we manhandled the last sow into the pickup bed. She ran her forearm across her bug-bitten forehead and blinked to refocus her vision.
I brushed my bare hand against the side mirror and managed to give myself a second-degree burn. “Where have you been, Stace?”
“What do you mean?”
“What have you been thinking?”
“That I will never eat bacon again as long as I live.”
I smiled at the joke until I realized her deadpan expression wasn’t an act.
* * *
She kept quiet as we set off to the nearest hospital, where she could have her leg cleaned and stitched.
“I don’t see why I need stitches. My leg is barely bleeding.”
“What if it gets infected? Have you ever seen gangrene in real life? Have you ever smelled it?”
“As a matter of fact, I have. I’ve seen lots of horrible things I haven’t told you about, Mike.”
The words were meant to chasten me, and they did. I changed the subject. “The last time I visited the Bridgton Hospital was for stitches, too. Remember? Of course I had only been stabbed by a deranged woman and not gored by a boar.”
She picked at the black dirt beneath her fingernails. “When’s Carrie Michaud’s trial, anyway?”
“Who knows. Her lawyer’s dragging it out. They’re hoping I might resign or die in a car crash—anything that means me not testifying.”
“I still say you should have shot the bitch. That’s what I would have done.”
Once, I would have agreed with her. But that was before I knew what it was like to kill another human being. In my career I had been directly responsible for the deaths of at least three people, all of whom had arguably deserved it. But that didn’t lighten the weight of the beam I carried across my shoulders.
One of the key differences between Stacey and me was that I knew what it meant to take a life.
We’d both had difficult childhoods and troubled young adulthoods. My parents had divorced when I was nine years old, and I had been estranged from my emotionally abusive father up until his death. Stacey’s parents were two of the kindest, sanest people I knew, but at the center of their marriage was one horrible day when her father, Charley, had tried to teach her mother, Ora, to fly a small plane. He had been the longtime chief pilot of the Maine Warden Service and more at home in the air than a peregrine falcon. He had wanted to share his love of all things aerial with his earthbound wife, but something had gone wrong during one of their lessons, and they had plummeted to the ground. The crash had left Stacey’s mother with a broken spine, paralyzed from the waist down. And it had left Stacey’s father with a sense of guilt so painful you could see it in the looks he gave his wife.
It had taken years of my knowing Stacey for me to begin to understand the effect the accident had had on her. I had come to believe that she had two warring halves to her personality: the natural optimist and the nurtured pessimist. As a result, she couldn’t enjoy a moment of happiness without anticipating its imminent end. In my experience, people who always expect the worst usually have a way of making it come to pass. So it was with my girlfriend.
“I’ve been thinking what would have happened if I hadn’t been there with you today,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Whether you would have found that baby on your own or whether the pigs would have finished it off without anyone ever knowing the truth.”
“I’d say it was a good thing you were with me. It’s always a good thing when you’re with me.”
“I suppose so. But I can’t help feeling like I just opened Pandora’s box.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud when she was already feeling so shaken, but I thought she might be right.
5
My “butcher” was a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout named Ricky Elwell.
Ricky was the son of the late Richard “Dick” Elwell, who had been a backwoods legend in his time, having disassembled thousands of deer, moose, and bear for hunters across the state of Maine. Dick had been a small man with a caved-in chest and a caved-in face who looked twenty years older than he was. He was an unrepentant chain-smoker who used to sip from a pint of Allen’s coffee-flavored brandy while he ran his bone saws. By the time the cigarettes finally choked the life out of him, he had been down to seven fingers and half a thumb.
I therefore shouldn’t have been surprised by the sight of Ricky as he emerged from the darkness of the barn where he continued his father’s trade. He had put on an apron that still bore bloodstains from the previous fall’s hunting season. When he waved hello, I saw that he had lost his left ring finger since I’d last seen him.
“Jesus, Rick,” I said, “what happened to your hand?”
He was a skinny, black-haired kid with a head that belonged on a person twice his size. His hair was cut in a heavy bang that fell like a crow’s wing over one dark, mischievous eye. He examined the intact digits of his right hand with a puzzled expression.
“Your left hand,” I said.
“You mean this finger?” He wiggled the stub at me.
“How did you lose it?”
“Didn’t lose it. I cut it off deliberate.”
Stacey didn’t know Ricky, but she should have realized that Dick’s boy would have inherited his old man’s desert-dry wit. “What? Why?” she asked.
“My girl wanted to put a ring on it. I figured cutting it off was the only way to shut her up about us getting hitched.”
“Did it work?” Stacey grinned, finally catching on.
“You bet it did. Next thing I knew, she’d gotten herself knocked up by Chip Emmons. His dad owns the autobody at Six Corners. I could’ve warned the poor bastard about Brittney if only he’d asked me.” Ricky pasted a cigarette to his lower lip and lit the end with his old man’s Zippo. “So let’s have a look at these cob rollers of yours.”
Ricky was too petite to peer over the side of the Sierra, so I was forced to open the bed for him. As he hopped up, I noticed he was wearing basketball shorts under his apron and flip-flops with white athletic socks. He poked and prodded the dead hogs as if he were a doctor performing a yearly physical on them.
“Well?” I said.
“They’re pigs all right.”
“We appreciate the confirmation.”
“I always figured wild boars would’ve looked wilder somehow. But I guess these are hairier than normal hogs. And the boar’s teeth are longer than average. How about you let me keep those? My mom makes wicked cool jewelry out of teeth and bones. She never worked with wild boar before, as far as I know. And her birthday’s coming up.”
“I think we can make a deal,” I said. “So this means you can butcher them for us, I take it?”
“Oh, sure. I been sawing up pigs since I was a kid.”
“That long, huh?” Stacey said.
The family farmhouse was connected by an ell to an enormous barn. I backed the pickup into the gaping-mouthed structure, while Ricky waved me on with the ember of his cigarette glowing orange in the darkness. He’d turned on just a single light inside, maybe because he thought it would be cooler.
Chains and hooks hung from the rafters. Before he passed, Dick Elwell had replaced the old dirt floor with hard concrete, and he had installed drains so he could spray down the inevitable blood. There were wooden butcher blocks and stainless steel tables attached to deep sinks. Half a dozen freezers and refrigerators hummed in the shadows. In the fall and the winter, those appliances would be jam-packed with wrapped packages of ground moose meat, bear sausages, and venison backstraps, but this time of year, I wasn’t sure what they contained or why Ricky kept them running.
My predecessor in
the district had warned me that Dick Elwell had been known to do butchering jobs for poachers. Allegedly, he’d charged three times his usual rate, if not more, for illicit work. That was the local gossip, anyway. But I’d never found any illegal deer meat inside those freezers when I’d asked the butcher to open them for me. My bet was that Dick had another one somewhere—down cellar, under the house itself—where he kept his frozen contraband.
Had Ricky picked up that part of his father’s business? I wondered. The black-market meat market?
It was a question for another day. At the moment I had enough to worry about.
“Do you need help?” Stacey asked him.
“Heck, no, ma’am. I’m a licensed professional. But you’re welcome to stand back and watch me work. You can even applaud if you feel like it.”
Stacey shook her head at me, smiling. I was glad to see her good humor returning.
Ricky winched the boar out of the truck first. The chain was fastened to an overhead pulley system that would have made Rube Goldberg’s eyes pop out of his head. The butcher boy flicked his switch to lift the pig free of the vehicle, then swung the heavy carcass clear of the pickup. He put on a pair of gloves that went all the way to his armpits and selected a gutting knife from his collection of blades.
“I ain’t used to having to do the field dressing,” he said. “Is the state gonna pay me extra for it?”
“I’ll talk to the governor about it,” I said.
“Give him my regards when you do.”
This kid had learned more than butchering at his father’s knee.
“You sure you don’t need a hand?” Stacey asked.
“Well, I suppose you can wrap your arms around him while I cut—hug him like he’s your lucky boyfriend here.”
Ricky began by grabbing the boar’s hairy penis in his left hand, then began making shallow cuts around its tiny testicles. I felt a sympathetic pang in my groin as he pulled the genitals up and away from the body so he could knot off the urethra with a slip tie.