Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  I worried that Tom Donaldson might hug me again, but this time we just shook hands.

  “How did a game warden get caught up in this?”

  “Trouble has a way of finding me.”

  I raised my hand in a wave good-bye as he pulled out of the parking lot. He smiled and nodded.

  As I returned to the barracks, I noticed the Nasons’ Cadillac SRX parked in a handicapped space near the door. Beside it was another brand-new Caddie sedan. The two vehicles had identical bumper stickers supporting the reelection of the current governor: the blowhard politician Charley Stevens had nicknamed the Penguin.

  Now I understood why Finch had called Pomerleau away so suddenly. Was it possible that Christopher Nason had convinced his mother and brother to come in for an interview?

  How?

  Why?

  Any lawyer worth his salt—and Nason had impressed me as a capable attorney—would have kept Steven Nason as far as possible from a police interrogation room. So why had they come in to be grilled?

  37

  I had become such a fixture at the Troop B barracks that none of the troopers or detectives even glanced at me as I roamed the building. I found Pomerleau’s office unoccupied. I settled down in a still-warm chair to wait.

  I heard heavy footsteps hurrying down the hall.

  Detective Finch stopped in midstride. “You’re still here? We thought you’d left.”

  “I figured Pomerleau would want to talk with me. Anything new on the Fales homicide?”

  “We’re exploring a few leads.” He seemed in an inappropriately cheery mood for a man investigating a murder. “If you’re planning on waiting for Ellen, she’s going to be a while. We’ve got the Nasons in the conference room.”

  “I saw their vehicles out front. Is Steve Nason confessing?”

  “You’re not going to believe this, but Brother Stevie has disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “His mother and brother say he must have taken off last night. They don’t know where he went. They want our help finding him. They’re worried about the son of a bitch!”

  No wonder Finch was so animated. By running off, Steve Nason had done his best to incriminate himself. Theoretically, an adult American citizen is free to go where he pleases when he pleases without informing his family, let alone the authorities. Practically, however, the state police could use Nason’s sudden, unannounced disappearance to begin searching for him—“out of concern for his mental state.”

  “That’s wild,” I said.

  “It gets better. Chris Nason brought in another lease agreement he said they discovered in a file cabinet. Brother Steven rented a different house to the Cobbs last year!”

  I wanted to ask where, but Finch was already on the move again.

  I sat in the empty office feeling like Elmer Fudd after he has been clobbered in the head. Little birds were circling my skull.

  I had to hand it to Chris Nason. It wasn’t often you saw an attorney switch his defense strategy from obstruction and straight-out stonewalling to preemptive damage control. He must have realized the danger to his family’s reputation if the existence of the other lease was leaked.

  Where had Steve Nason gone? Where did he think he could hide? Menario had described the man as having a double-digit IQ. The police were bound to find him soon enough.

  Or would they? All along, the investigators had operated under the belief that the older Nason brother lacked the smarts to abduct and imprison women as sex slaves without being caught.

  But in well-documented cases, monsters had secretly jailed women and girls for years on end: the man in Cleveland who’d held three women as slaves in his basement before one escaped to alert authorities; the convicted sex offender who kept Jaycee Dugard in a series of shacks on his Antioch, California, property for eighteen years; the Austrian engineer who’d forced his own daughter to give birth to seven children in the twenty-four years he held her in a homemade dungeon. None of these men had been described by the police as a criminal mastermind.

  They had been smart enough to outwit the authorities, however.

  Maybe Nason was more cunning than anyone gave him credit for being.

  I wasn’t as confident in my belief in God as Tom Donaldson. My prayers tended to bounce off some invisible wall between the earth and the heavens. But I prayed now that Casey would survive the coming hours.

  I felt an impulse to share the news of Steven Nason’s flight with Stacey. Then I remembered that she had left her phone at home, on the kitchen counter.

  Instead I leaned across Pomerleau’s desk and scrawled a note on her sticky pad: Congratulations.

  I felt both frustration and relief as I stepped outside. Frustration that my part in this bizarre and horrific case might be drawing to a close. Relief that I would be freed to focus on doing the things I’d joined the Warden Service to do. I planned to keep the police radio turned up loud, in any case. Who knew what strange twist this uncanny day might take next.

  * * *

  Sebago Lake—water supply to most of Greater Portland and playground to thousands of boaters—represented the eastern edge of my district. It is the deepest lake in Maine; also one of the largest. In the summer I patrolled Sebago whenever I could. Given the heat and humidity, I thought I might haul my Jet Ski down to the water. Drunk boaters and unethical fishermen tended to watch out for wardens in patrol boats. Posing as another yahoo on a Jet Ski, I could sneak in close enough to catch them in their illegal acts.

  On the drive home, I put in a call to Dani. I wanted to be the first to tell her that Steven Nason had taken flight. “Wait till you hear this.”

  “Sorry, I can’t talk.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Menario drove out to the Rowe family compound on Kezar Lake to confront Dakota over what he did to his Mustang. Shots were fired.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Menario got winged in the arm. And Rowe took off before we could respond.”

  “So he’s on the run, too? What’s going on this morning? Why isn’t this all over the radio?”

  “It will be soon.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We’re all thinking Rowe’s lawyer will walk him into a police station before the day’s done. It sure looks like he acted in self-defense. Menario is in deep shit, Mike. I think he’ll go to jail for this.”

  Despite our many clashes, I derived no pleasure from the prospect of the retired detective’s being prosecuted. What I was witnessing was the complete disintegration of a human being, not a man I’d call my friend, but someone who had devoted his life to public service. For a cop, even an ex-cop, to go to jail represented a uniquely brutal form of self-destruction, since the punishment inside the walls had the potential to be far more severe than that suffered by other inmates. For the first time I could remember, I found myself pitying Antonio Menario.

  “Steven Nason has gone missing, too,” I said. “That was the reason I was calling.”

  “What?”

  “His family says he took off in the middle of the night.”

  “When it rains, it pours.”

  “I know. It’s pretty damning.”

  “You realize this makes you the only person who can identify this so-called Becky Cobb.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me. “I’d been thinking of taking my Jet Ski out for a lake patrol. With all this craziness going on, maybe I should stay on dry land. Just in case one of these chases turns into an all-units event.”

  “Probably a smart idea.”

  “Every once in a while I have one of those. I take it you haven’t located that couple I told you about, Prudence and Jackson Smith.”

  “Not yet, but I’ve got my eyes open. Listen, I’ve got to run.”

  “Be safe, Dani.”

  She mumbled something as she signed off.

  I turned up the radio and waited for the broadcast alerting every available officer to be on the lookout for Dakota Rowe in whatever ve
hicle he was thought to be driving.

  Chances were, though, that Dani was right. If Rowe had acted in self-defense (despite having provoked Menario), then he would have called his family’s attorneys right away, and they would be negotiating with prosecutors for their client to turn himself in.

  What a day.

  Ask any cop about the so-called lunar effect, and he or she will tell you it’s for real. The science is disputed whether crime increases during full moons, but as far as I am concerned, the theory is grounded in stone. Maybe it’s that there’s more light on nights when the moon is full, and more light means more opportunities to commit crimes. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. Maybe the moon exerts some sort of pull on the human soul, the same way it does with the ocean tides. All I know is what I have seen firsthand. Visit a precinct lockup or a hospital ER on a night when the moon is at full power, and you’re probably going to find it crowded with hairless werewolves.

  Sometimes you don’t even need the moon to be full for things to go haywire. Kathy Frost called these “what-the-fuck days,” because there was no making sense of why unrelated people decided to melt down at the exact same moment.

  This seemed to be one of those days.

  On WTF days it paid to be ready for anything because anything seemed liable to happen.

  * * *

  Even though I no longer planned on fetching the Jet Ski, I decided to stop in at the house for a sandwich and a talk with Stacey. I wanted to tell her about all the insane things going on. A deeper discussion about our future together could wait for a calmer afternoon.

  What surprised me, on pulling into the driveway, was that there were no signs she had returned from her run. Her Subaru wasn’t there. Her phone was still on the counter where she’d left it. I even poked around the clothes hamper to check for her sweaty running clothes.

  Nothing.

  We had plenty of groceries and leftovers, so there would have been no reason for her to stop at the store. She should have been home. She should have been home hours earlier. It made no sense.

  38

  My phone rang as I was brushing bread crumbs from the cutting board into the sink. I wiped mustard from the corner of my mouth and answered the call. The number came up as blocked.

  “Game warden.”

  “Is this the number to call if I’ve seen a feral pig?” It was the voice of an old woman. She spoke so softly it might as well have been a whisper.

  “That’s right.”

  “I saw a wild boar, I think.”

  “Where?”

  “In a field behind my house. At the edge of the field.”

  “What’s your address?”

  She gave me a number on the Horseshoe Pond Road in Birnam. The location wasn’t far from the Knife Creek Trail. I wondered if the animal she’d seen might be a pig from the same sounder as the one we’d eliminated at the wallow. The odds were good, given the proximity. If another hog was roaming around, separated from its group, how had I missed seeing the signs?

  “When did you see this pig?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “I’ll try to get over there this afternoon, but I can’t promise it. Will you or anyone in your family be around if I come by?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Martha Tarbox. Do I get a reward if you kill it?”

  I recognized the name. Tommy Volk had warned me against Mrs. Tarbox as a lonely old widow who made baseless calls to the Warden Service in order to receive visits from handsome wardens. “There’s no monetary reward, but you will have the gratitude of the state of Maine.”

  “Gratitude won’t pay the rent.”

  “I’ll try to get over this afternoon. Don’t approach the hog if you see it again. Feral swine can be dangerous, Martha.”

  “OK.”

  It made no sense to drive out to the Horseshoe Pond Road now. Big mammals such as deer and moose don’t move around much in the heat of the day. I had to suppose that feral pigs displayed the same behavior. Yet she said she’d just seen it.

  I had thought of waiting around until Stacey arrived home. I could only think that she had pushed herself to go for a longer run. Stacey ran half-marathons regularly. Maybe she was taking out her anger with Barstow on the trail.

  Still, I felt an urge to drive over to the trailhead to check for her car. I went upstairs and changed my undershirt, buttoned the same short-sleeved uniform shirt over it, then tightened the Velcro straps on my ballistic vest again. Between the time that I left the house and the time my truck’s air-conditioning kicked in, I was already soaked in sweat.

  The Mountain Division Trail was a rehabilitated railroad line. Unlike most rail trails, this one continued to carry freight trains from Portland to the White Mountains. Conservationists had built an exquisite gravel path along the tracks to be used by runners and mountain bikers.

  Given the heat and the time of day, it didn’t surprise me to find the parking lot empty. If Stacey had been here, she had moved on. It annoyed me that she hadn’t taken her phone when I had so much news to share.

  As I was swinging my truck around, the phone buzzed on the console. It was Captain DeFord. Had Casey been found? What about Steven Nason? Or Dakota Rowe for that matter? I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice as I pressed the answer button.

  “I heard from Pomerleau about what’s going on down there,” he began.

  “It’s pretty nutty.”

  “I also heard that Stacey lost her job. It’s unfortunate.” His tone and his word choice did not signal that he disagreed with the commissioner’s decision.

  “Yes, it is.” I was waiting impatiently for him to break some kind of news about Nason or Rowe.

  “I’m actually calling on another matter.”

  My heart dropped in my chest. “Oh?”

  “The colonel and I would like you to come up to Augusta in the morning to discuss the investigator’s position.”

  The events of the past few days had distracted me from thinking about the promotion I’d applied for.

  “Absolutely! Sure! What time?”

  “Eight hundred hours.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “We’ll see you then.” He hesitated before he spoke again, as if debating with himself whether or not he should tip his hand. “Congratulations, Mike.”

  As soon as I tapped the end button, I shouted out my happiness. Thank goodness no one else was within sight of my patrol truck. They would have thought me a lunatic. After five rocky years in the Warden Service, I had climbed out of the seemingly bottomless pit I had dug for myself.

  My first thought was to share the good news with Stacey—until I realized that I had no clue where she was.

  My second thought was even more crushing than the first: if Stacey really felt she had to leave Maine, I wouldn’t be going with her.

  * * *

  Not knowing what to do with myself, I decided to go check out Martha Tarbox’s feral pig sighting. Tommy Volk had warned me the old woman was a loon. He used to laugh about the time she had summoned him to deal with an injured “seagull.” What he’d found, when he’d arrived, was an injured bald eagle. A naturalist, Martha Tarbox was not.

  The Horseshoe Pond Road was little more than a wide, barely maintained ATV trail. The town of Birnam hadn’t bothered to grade the frost heaves and fill the potholes after the spring thaw. I doubted if the public works department even plowed the road in the wintertime.

  The first residence I passed was a mobile home with a junker on cement blocks in the drive and plenty of signs posted on the property warning about a dangerous dog. I never saw the canine, which must have been locked inside the trailer. But from the volume of its guttural barking, I judged the signs to be understated in their message.

  My GPS said that the address Martha Tarbox had given me belonged to the next house. I drove a couple of hundred yards down the corrugated road. Then the woods opened up into a field of vivid wildf
lowers—pink lupines and orange daylilies and purple loosestrife—with an old farmhouse and barn in the center. Even by the low standards set by many homes in the area, this place seemed to be a shambles. The clapboards had shed the last flecks of paint someone had once applied to them, and the roof had the scabrous appearance that develops when the shingles start blowing off. But the barn door was yawning open and I saw a little red hatchback parked inside, in the shadows. After all these years in rural Maine, it shouldn’t have surprised me to see falling-down houses that were haunted by the living and not yet the dead.

  I pulled into the rutted drive and turned off the engine. The ragged tree line behind the building was a hundred yards away, and the Saco River was probably another hundred yards beyond the edge of the forest. I could imagine a feral hog ranging happily in that narrow tract of wet, sandy woods.

  I adjusted my gun belt on my hips and my ballistic vest on my shoulders as I climbed out into the midday heat. I headed for the mudroom door of the house, but was stopped by a creaky female voice calling from the barn.

  “Hello!”

  I changed course. I could see the outline of a Toyota Corolla hatchback where the sunlight met the dark. A woman moved in the shadows as I approached. Roosting pigeons cooed overhead, unseen in the rafters.

  Why was she hiding? What exactly was going on here?

  Suddenly my own words came back to me: They’re not stupid enough to come after me.

  Instead, they had tricked me into coming to them.

  I reached for my handgun. My thumb pressed the button that released the heavy SIG P226 from its molded holster.

  Just then, the girl stepped into the sunbeam. At first I didn’t recognize her. Without the wig and with her dark hair a mess of knots, she seemed an entirely different person. Then I saw the mole on her cheek.

  “Casey?”

  She lifted her right arm and I saw something metallic flash in her hand. Reflexively I pulled my sidearm, but it was already too late. From a distance of ten feet, Casey Donaldson sprayed me full in the eyes with a burning blast of pepper spray.