Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  “I don’t suppose the fire marshal has had a chance to begin searching for bodies.”

  “Not yet. Which means we need to proceed with the idea that the Cobbs are still alive.”

  “Except no one has ever seen Frank Cobb, as far as we know.”

  “So let’s start with his wife, then.” Pomerleau removed her ballpoint from her blotter and began clicking it. “Tell me about her. Tell me about Becky.”

  “I thought we were going to do a sketch on the Identikit.”

  “We will. But right now, I’d like you to describe the encounter you had with her last night. What did you say to her? What did she say to you?”

  I closed my eyes to bring back Becky’s hard face. I saw her keen eyes and her pointy chin. In my imagination her raggedy lips began to move.

  “She said, ‘What do you want?’”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I asked about the pigs.”

  It took me half an hour to summarize a conversation that had lasted all of a few minutes. Pomerleau didn’t let anything slide; as far as she was concerned, no detail was unimportant. The process was trying, but it made me respect her even more as an investigator.

  She tapped the pen against her teeth. “So this second, younger woman, Becky’s so-called sister—she didn’t speak at all?”

  “Not a word.”

  “But you said she looked familiar. You think you might have met her before?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more like I saw her picture.”

  Pomerleau’s screen saver had come up on her monitor while she’d been interviewing me. More photos of her children. The detective smiled as the images flashed before us. “And a picture is worth a thousand words.”

  “What are their names?” I asked.

  “My kids? Isaiah and Imani.”

  “They’re good-looking.”

  “They got their looks from their dad. Fortunately, they got their brains from me. You don’t have children, do you, Bowditch?”

  “None that I know about.”

  Her face went blank.

  “That was a joke.”

  The detective raised her whitish eyebrows and pulled her computer keyboard out from the hidden shelf under her desk. “And on that note, we shall turn to the Identikit.” Police used to employ actual artists to help witnesses create a likeness of a suspect (and some departments still did). Later, they moved to a system that was closer to a children’s game. The witness would reconstruct a face using strips of preprinted paper that displayed a panoply of features—all manner of eyes, ears, chins, cheekbones, moles, eyeglasses, and facial hair—overlaid atop an oval shape. But as with everything else these days, computers had taken over from print. The current Identikit programs were so comprehensive they let you add facial jewelry and headwear to your composite. Not only could you decorate your purse snatcher with a do-rag, you could choose the color and the pattern.

  Pomerleau had planned to ask me questions about the women’s faces and then call up options on the screen for me to approve or discard, but it quickly became apparent that it would be easier if I simply took her place behind the keyboard and mouse.

  “Start with Becky,” she said. “The way you described her, she sounds like someone who might’ve had a run-in with the criminal justice system before.”

  That was the ultimate value of Identikits in the modern world. Police had formerly used sketches to create wanted posters and mug books. Now we made images that could be scanned with facial-recognition software and matched against the photographs of thousands of missing persons and convicted criminals.

  I have a decent memory for faces, as I said, but when you have a program capable of re-creating the physiognomy of any human being on the planet, the options become so overwhelming as to make you begin second-guessing every detail.

  Eventually, I had an image that fairly well matched my memory of the hostile woman—right down to her crimson bangs. I tilted back in my chair to study the portrait, then showed it to Pomerleau. “I don’t suppose you recognize her?”

  “I think I would remember that devilish little chin.”

  The detective moved me aside so that she could upload the odd-looking facial collage to a database. She also printed a handful of copies to circulate around the barracks.

  “You want to take a pee-pee break?” she asked.

  “Is that how you talk to your kids?”

  “It’s how I talk to their father.”

  I stood up and stretched my arms. Being thrown to the ground by the explosion had done a number on my back and leg muscles. Sitting for an extended period had made them tighten up. I felt as stiff as I had on the mornings after high-school football games.

  I followed Pomerleau’s directions to the restroom. It was my first chance since the morning to check myself out in a real mirror. I still had faint smudges at the corners of my mouth and beneath my nose from having breathed in smoke. When I glanced over my shoulder into the glass, I could see the singed hairs on my neck and the black-edged hole in the fabric of my ballistic vest. I cleaned up as best I could, then stepped back into the hall to check my phone.

  I had a voice mail from Stacey: “You almost got blown up? Jesus, Mike! How do these things keep happening to you? And why didn’t you call me immediately? You are such a … man. Well, thank God, you’re all right. When I think about what might have happened—”

  Pomerleau emerged from a break room with two bottles of Poland Spring water and two bags of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. “Ready?”

  I would listen to the rest of Stacey’s message later. “Yeah.”

  We settled back into our office chairs and opened our bags of potent-smelling chips.

  “Have you heard anything from the medical examiner? Anything about the baby?”

  Some detectives would have chosen to watch the autopsy in person, but not Pomerleau. “You know Kitteridge. It’s always a few days before Walt issues a report.”

  “In my experience, he’s pretty loosey-goosey when it comes to speculating about cause of death.”

  Pomerleau grinned as if I’d just solved the riddle of the Sphinx. “Kitteridge had his anthropologist take a look, and they’re certain it wasn’t a stillbirth. She was about two weeks old when she died. Walt says it’s too soon to determine cause of death, though.”

  “What about DNA results?”

  “It always takes longer than you’d like.” Pomerleau licked the grease from her fingers. “Let’s have a look at the little sister.”

  We got back to work on the Identikit.

  As I should have expected, the second face was more difficult to reconstruct than the first. I’d only glimpsed the younger woman twice and both times from a distance. Her eyes had been large, brown, and widely spaced. And she had that distinctive beauty mole on her cheek. Her lips were unusual, too. There was a term for their shape. What was it? A cupid’s bow?

  Piecing her features together made me realize what a pretty girl she was. Once again, I had that itchy feeling of having seen her before.

  The image on the screen in front of me still wasn’t right. It had a vague, anonymous quality that brought out the frustrated artist in me. Her face was full—she almost had a double chin but not quite—and there were sickly shadows under her eyes. She had heavy eyebrows, I remembered. Most girls her age plucked them down to delicate shapes, but hers were lush.

  The last thing I did was to add the wig.

  Pomerleau stood over my shoulder. She rested a hand absently on the back of my chair. She didn’t speak, but after a few seconds I felt her grip begin to tighten. The plastic actually creaked.

  “What?”

  “Holy—”

  “You recognize her?”

  Without a word she disappeared down the hall.

  While she was gone, I studied the image I had created. The sensation of having an elusive name at the tip of my tongue was stronger than ever, so much so that I began to doubt the girl I had made. Was she the actual person I h
ad glimpsed or a model I’d seen in a magazine ad?

  A minute later Pomerleau returned with a detective I’d never met. He had ginger hair and a cleft in his jaw that looked as if it had been left by a tomahawk. She introduced him only as Finch.

  “What do you think?” Pomerleau’s tone was pitched higher than I’d ever heard it. “It’s her, isn’t it? It’s got to be.”

  Finch massaged his freckled chin. “Can you lose the wig?”

  I removed the hair; for an instant, she was as bald as a Hare Krishna.

  “Try her with dark hair—”

  “Brown or black?”

  Pomerleau broke in, “Black. Straight. Shoulder length.”

  I followed her instructions. Felt the two investigators go rigid behind me.

  “Holy shit,” said Pomerleau.

  “What?” I said.

  “The eyebrows are wrong,” the male detective said, but without conviction, “and the face is too fat.”

  “That’s her, Finch! Tell me it isn’t her!”

  “Isn’t who?” I asked.

  Ellen Pomerleau’s eyes were filled with awe and fear. “A girl who died four years ago.”

  15

  Finch folded his arms across his muscular chest. “I don’t see it.”

  Pomerleau seemed ready to leap out of her skin. “How can you not see it?”

  “It’s not her, Ellen.”

  I swiveled around in the chair. “Not who?”

  But Pomerleau’s attention was fixed on her partner. “Tell me this isn’t Casey Donaldson.”

  And in that moment I realized why her face had looked so familiar.

  Everyone in Maine knew the story of Casey Donaldson, who had disappeared on a rafting trip down the Saco River four years earlier: the college girl who had vanished in a thunderstorm under the most mysterious of circumstances and was assumed—after months of fruitless searching—to have been murdered; her body hidden somewhere far from where her friends had last seen her.

  “I thought Casey Donaldson was dead.”

  “She is,” said Finch.

  “But what if she isn’t?” said Pomerleau. “What if she’s been alive all this time?”

  Most of my friends in the Warden Service had taken part in the search. My former sergeant Kathy Frost had headed up the K9 teams that roamed the banks for miles and even rode along in canoes, scenting the air for some trace of the missing girl. I alone seemed to have been excluded from the operation.

  That year, I had been stationed 250 miles away in Down East Maine. During the previous winter, my career had reached its deepest, darkest bottom, and I was fighting every day to claw my way back into the sunlight. While most every warden I knew had done shifts searching for Casey, I’d been left to my daily duties, most of which involved driving long patrols while I brooded on the disaster that was my life.

  I had seen pictures and videos of the missing girl, but she had remained as remote to me as a celebrity I knew only from television or movies, not so much a real person but a projection of one. Which was why I’d had such trouble recognizing her as Becky’s dead-eyed “sister.” If only I had paid closer attention to the story of her disappearance. Then again, self-absorption had always been my original sin.

  “We need to tell Barrett,” Pomerleau said.

  “Tell him what exactly?” her partner asked, his face beginning to redden. “That the warden says he saw someone who looked like Casey Donaldson. What do you think the lieutenant is going to say to that? You know what he’ll say, that it’s one hell of a coincidence.”

  The two detectives were so intent on their argument that they paid no attention as I leaned over the keyboard and opened the Web browser. I typed Casey Donaldson into the search field, and immediately a grid of images flashed onto the computer screen. I clicked on the first file.

  The photograph showed an attractive black-haired girl with wide-set eyes and a mole on her cheek. Tan and athletic, she looked to be the picture of health. I opened a new window with the Identikit sketch side by side with the photo.

  “That’s her.” I pointed at the illustration. “That’s Casey Donaldson.”

  “There might be a resemblance,” said Finch. “But that doesn’t prove anything. All we’re going on here is a game warden’s unreliable memory.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No offense, Bowditch, but you know how worthless eyewitness identifications are. What were the results of that famous study? Seventysomething percent of all convictions overturned by DNA testing were originally made based on faulty witness testimony. Even cops have been shown to reconstruct their memories if they’re biased toward a suspect.”

  “How can I be biased? I wasn’t even part of the search for her.”

  “Yeah,” Finch said, “but you’ve seen her picture before.”

  “I thought she was dead, too. Why would I claim to have seen a woman who I assumed was murdered?”

  The ginger-haired man shook his head. “I’m not going to delve into possible motivations you might have.”

  Pomerleau let out a burst of air from her nostrils. “We need to bring in Barrett and show him this, Finch. It’s not for you or me to decide how this goes forward.”

  Finch glanced at his wristwatch. “Well, he won’t be back for a half hour. He’s at the meeting in Portland.” Finch’s face turned even redder. “Oh, shit, I just thought of something.”

  “What?” asked Pomerleau.

  “Menario.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What if he finds out about this, Ellen? How do you think he’ll react? Casey Donaldson was his case.”

  “His obsession, you mean.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you guys talking about Tony Menario?”

  Neither of them seemed to hear me.

  Maine State Police detective Antonio Menario was an old adversary of mine. He’d investigated two murder cases I’d been involved with early in my career where my methods had been called into question. Even though I’d been cleared of misconduct both times, he’d always seemed to look at me with the anger of a bull facing a red cape. But I had heard Menario had retired—or been forced to retire. The accounts of his departure from the force were unclear.

  “Tony can’t find out about this,” Pomerleau said. “Not until we’re sure.”

  “And when will that be?” asked her partner.

  “When the DNA results come back.”

  “If they’re conclusive, you mean. I’m going to go grab a sandwich before Barrett gets back. You want anything?”

  “No thanks.”

  I massaged my bristly burned neck. “I’m telling you the woman I saw is Casey Donaldson. Let me talk to your lieutenant, and I can convince him. I’m even willing to talk to Tony Menario if you want.”

  The suggestion seemed to horrify Finch. “You do that and we’ll have a repeat of the Dakota Rowe incident.”

  “Who’s Dakota Rowe?”

  “I know this is confusing,” said Pomerleau. “It sounds like we have half an hour before Barrett gets back. Let’s go outside, and I’ll explain what happened—what wasn’t made public during the search for Casey. At this point, I could use some fresh air.”

  * * *

  There was a picnic table at the end of the building, in the shade of some red pines that gave a resinous aroma to the yard. Pomerleau and I sat across from each other. The ground beneath our feet consisted almost entirely of sand, with a few wispy blades of grass drying in the sun.

  “Casey Donaldson was a student at the University of New Hampshire when she died,” the detective began. “Or maybe I should say when she was presumed to have died. She lived in Westbrook with her stepfather. He’s a plumber. Her mom had died in a car crash when she was ten or eleven.”

  “I know the story, Pomerleau.”

  She shook her head so violently that a strand of ivory hair came loose. “Not all of it. Do you want to hear what really happened or not?”

  “I do.”

  She began a
gain. “The summer before Casey’s senior year—four years ago this month—she decided to go rafting on the Saco River with some friends. You know what a party scene that is. Thousands of drunk and drugged-out kids canoeing and float-tubing for miles together. Camping out on the sandbanks. When I was a trooper, the same age as Tate, I used to get at least one call a night during bikini season—sexual assaults, regular assaults, lewd conduct, theft, vandalism, overdoses, at least one drowning every summer. July and August were two months of nonstop hell. But no homicides, though. At least not while I was patrolling that area.”

  I let her continue.

  “You know that section of the Saco? From New Hampshire down to Great Falls in Hiram? I don’t know how many miles it is, but it’s got to be the most confusing river in New England. It’s this maze of channels and oxbow lakes and horseshoe ponds. Not to mention you’ve got the Brownfield Bog in the middle of it all, which is like a labyrinth made of water.

  “There was another girl and three guys on the trip. None of them from Maine, as far as I remember. Or maybe one of them was. It wasn’t my case, either. I was still on maternity leave.

  “What happened was that Casey and her friends had rafted up their canoes—tied them together to make them stable enough to stand up in. I’ve seen a few of those rafts with platforms that look like Thanksgiving Day parade floats. Or maybe Mardi Gras is the better example.

  “So they’re floating along on the third morning of their trip, letting the current carry them, when Casey realizes she’s lost her dead mom’s engagement ring. She freaks out—and this is where I think intoxicating substances played a role—and she starts raving about how she must’ve left it back at the sandbar where they camped the night before. Oxbow Island. The only problem is that it’s three or four miles back upstream, and right in the middle of the marshes, so it wasn’t like they could just drive back later to look for it.

  “Anyway, Casey announces that she’s going to take one of the canoes and paddle back to search for the ring. The problem is that none of her friends are in any shape to go with her. They want to because they’re worried about her safety, but the guys are majorly hungover, puking in the river, and the other girl has tennis elbow or something and can’t really paddle.