by Paul Doiron
“Can you believe those freaks left that box of files in my truck?” I said by way of conclusion. “I’m the last person anyone should want defending an accused man’s innocence.”
“You’ve become the Saint Jude of hopeless criminal prosecutions.”
Pluto, meanwhile, had fallen asleep and was in the midst of a vivid dream that caused him to growl and twitch. We both looked at him with eyebrows raised in amusement.
“You know Pluto and I were the ones who found Nikki Donnatelli,” Kathy said, licking doughnut grease off her fingers.
“I wanted to ask you about that.”
“All of our K-9s are extensively trained for SAR. But Pluto is primarily a cadaver dog, meaning that he’s good at sniffing out dead people. We only take him into the woods these days when we’re pretty sure we’re dealing with human remains instead of a living, breathing person. Some animals are just better suited to one or the other-recovery versus rescue. Pluto has a nose for death.”
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like me. I think I must carry the smell of it or something.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. He also eats his own shit. Still, he’s got one hell of a morbid gift.”
We both glanced at him again, but the dog’s dream had passed and he was snoring peaceably again.
“What was it like coming across her body?” I asked.
She switched to her stern sergeant’s voice. “Promise me you’re not going to get involved with this Erland Jefferts conspiracy. The guy’s guilty. There might be some copycat thing going on here, but another girl getting tied up with tape doesn’t mean pretty-boy Jefferts is innocent.”
“I just want to hear what happened.”
“Let me make more coffee.” She turned on the tap, filled the teakettle, and set it on a burner. When the flame ignited, an acrid smell wafted through the room. Kathy was an infamously bad cook. From the odor, I deduced that she had burned some cheese-related dish and never cleaned it up.
We reused the Styrofoam cups for our instant coffee and sat down again at the antique table, and then Kathy told me her version of Maine’s most infamous murder case.
“I’m assuming you know the general outline of the story. How the Donnatelli girl disappeared on her way home from work and then the next morning they found Jefferts passed out in his truck in the woods? Well, the state police brought us in pretty quick. They have their own K-9 people, but they know we’re better at searches. One problem we had right away was that it began to rain like Mother Nature was taking a wicked piss. No dog can track well under those conditions. And it’s no picnic for the searchers, either.”
A sudden gust of wind shook the kitchen windows. The day seemed to be getting dimmer, although the clock hadn’t yet struck noon. Through the glass I watched snow showers blow past. The brown fields in the background looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
“You’ve been on those searches,” Kathy continued. “You know the drill. We had about a hundred volunteers-personnel from the Brunswick Naval Air Station, the Rockland Coast Guard station. The National Guard sent a helicopter with a Forward Looking Infrared camera so they could search for Nikki’s body heat from treetop level.
“Malcomb was in charge of designing the search criteria, based on what we knew about Nikki and the rough time line the state police had established. One logical place to begin the search was where Jefferts had parked his pickup. And we needed to double-check the shore path. There are quarries all over that peninsula, too, and we didn’t know if she might be at the bottom of one of those disgusting pits. As always, the problem was, Where do you start looking?”
None of this came as news to me. I’d been trained extensively in the science of finding lost persons. But I wanted to hear the story, in light of how I’d discovered Ashley Kim.
Kathy was lost in her own memories now. “The setup of the search had to be defined, maps drawn up, assignments given. Every team needed to know its waypoints and specific instructions about ground to be covered, as well as the general details-like the spacing for the grid searches. Anyway, the overall situation that day was the usual controlled chaos, with the rain not helping. You always get lots of hits with the K-9s, but most are false alarms. Each time, though, you have to figure out if it’s a bust or not. There are just all sorts of bad smells and dead critters out there for the dogs to find.”
Kathy had spoken with me about becoming a dog handler-district wardens often acquire an area of specialization, in addition to their usual responsibilities-but I was leaning toward the dive team. Charley, meanwhile, wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a warden pilot, but I found his several near-death aerial experiences less than inspiring.
“We gave Pluto a good whiff of Nikki’s clothes, but that didn’t do the trick,” she said. “In those circumstances, you try all kinds of things. Her shampoo, perfume, soap. Ultimately, it was the rigging tape that did it, the roll from Jefferts’s truck. I smelled the tape myself. It had a strong fishy odor, like it had come off a lobsterboat.
“That first day was just a blur. It seemed like her body should have been somewhere right there, along that dirt road, but it wasn’t. God, the weather was miserable, hot and rainy. The mosquitoes were plenty happy we were out there, though. Malcomb called us in after dark. Pluto and I could have kept searching-we wanted to-but that wasn’t our call. The Donnatellis were waiting at the command post with Deb Davies. I’ll never forget the look on the father’s face. It was as if someone had ripped his heart out of his chest and he hadn’t yet realized it.”
She excused herself to use the bathroom, leaving me in the drafty kitchen listening to the windows rattle in their casements. Retelling this story had robbed Kathy of her high spirits. I felt bad about that, knowing she’d just returned from a much-needed vacation.
After a few minutes, she returned and squatted down next to Pluto on his rug and began scratching his throat. “So the next day, we went back out again,” she said, “and it was still raining like Noah should have been building an ark somewhere. We were all exhausted by midafternoon. The adrenaline leaves your bloodstream, and all those hours in the field catch up with you. Well, suddenly we got a message over the radio. It turned out someone had made an error assigning the search areas. We’d missed this big swampy swatch of forest. They shifted my group south to have a look at it. Within half an hour, Pluto started running a track. He nearly pulled me off my feet. When he hit that hard, I knew it was Nikki.”
She paused and collected herself before continuing.
“She’d been tied with her arms around the tree, so he could get to her from behind, if you know what I mean. I remember seeing her white body through the rain and thinking she might be alive. She was on her feet and sort of looked like she was resting her shoulders against the trunk, but that was just the way he’d tied her. I told my search party to stay back. I wanted to preserve a single path to the crime scene and keep everyone from trampling over the evidence.”
Exactly what I had not done at the Westergaard house.
“Her jeans were pulled down around her ankles. The rest of her clothes had been cut away, none too gently. She had all sorts of bloody little wounds on her, and this red mark on her forehead where Jefferts must have clobbered her. They never did find her underwear. Her eyes were wide open, but the flies had already been at them. She’d died knowing she was suffocating, and she still had that look of terror and disbelief you see with so many corpses. Death is never real to some people until the moment they realize it’s happening to them.
“I called her name, but I knew there was no point.”
She took a breath, and I saw the toll it was taking on her to revisit this day, which had been one of the worst in her life. I wanted to ask her a question, but I felt inhibited by the grief I was witnessing, so I just sat there and waited for her to continue.
“My partner from the state police radioed in the Code Blue to the command post,” she said. “The next time I saw her, she
was in a bag strapped to a stretcher.
“The trial was a circus, as you know. But fortunately, I wasn’t the focus of the defense’s attention. Jefferts’s lawyer-I forget his name-was a total doofus. On cross-examination, he tried to suggest that I might have fucked up the crime scene in some unspecific way. Time of death was what he was arguing-that it would have been impossible for Jefferts to commit the murder, since he was somewhere else when Nikki died, based on the ME’s own testimony. But Danica Marshall squashed that argument like a bug. I was surprised that the AG had assigned her to such a high-profile case, since she was just a kid at the time. But when I saw her in the courtroom, all my doubts went out the window. Jesus, that little cutie has bigger balls than you do.” She paused for comic effect. “No offense.”
“Offense taken,” I said.
The joke had loosened her mood again. She leaned her elbows on the old table, which caused it to creak in complaint. “It sounds like whoever killed this Kim woman took a few pages from Jefferts’s playbook, but I can tell you we nailed the right perp seven years ago. Erland’s exactly where he belongs-at the prison. If I were you, I’d drop that box of files they gave you in a Dumpster on your way home.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not joining the J-Team.” I cracked my knuckles while I considered whether I had the guts to ask her the question buzzing in my head. “What word did Nikki Donnatelli have written on her body?”
Kathy looked as if I’d just punched her in the solar plexus. “What?”
“Ashley Kim also had a profanity carved into her skin.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
I could see the color rising beneath her tanned cheeks and knew I’d struck pay dirt. “Just tell me the truth, Kathy. I promise you I’m not on another mission to prove anything.”
“It was slut. ” When she spoke again, it was in a tough voice she reserved for arrests. “That was the word on Ashley, right? So I’ve indulged your curiosity. Let’s talk about your job. What the hell have you been up to anyway?”
I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some ATV vandals harassing Hank Varnum.”
“So are you planning on catching them or what?”
“That’s why I came over here,” I said. “Can I borrow your four-wheeler?”
21
The snow was turning to sleet as I drove my overloaded truck along the sloping, slippery roads from Appleton to Sennebec. Kathy had helped me set up two boards to drive her ATV up into the bed of my pickup. The weight of the four-wheeler gave my truck excellent traction, but it made me feel a bit top-heavy whenever I rounded a curve, which was every thirty seconds or so.
I wasn’t sure if the snow made it more or less likely that Barter would be venturing out again this evening. Hopefully, the new powder would serve as an enticement. There wasn’t quite enough of the white stuff anymore for snowmobiling, but a person could have some fun skidding around on an all-terrain vehicle.
The story Kathy had told me about the search for Nikki Donnatelli kept intruding on my thoughts. I looked over at the passenger seat, where I’d moved Ozzie Bell’s box of files. Kathy had advised dumping them in the trash on the way home, but somehow I had managed not to do so.
Kathy’s pursuit ATV was a real beast. It had a 71-horsepower engine with an auto-locking front differential and dynamic power steering. She told me that, if properly handled, her Can-Am/Bombardier could go as fast as the fastest four-wheelers on the trails. She’d emphasized the words properly handled when she’d given me the keys, as if she doubted the likelihood of my delivering her prize toy back to her in a single piece. She had reason to worry. Like most overgrown boys, I loved the sensation of going really, really fast.
I parked my truck in the woods half a mile from Varnum’s place and inspected the armor Kathy had loaned me. Her plated riding boots wouldn’t fit, so I was stuck with my own field boots and work gloves. Fortunately, I could squeeze my big head into her helmet and goggles. I knew my uniform was going to get trashed from flying mud and roost-the grit and rocks an ATV’s wheels churn up-but there was no way around that.
I unfastened the tailgate and propped up the ramps Kathy had given me. Then I climbed up into the bed and started the engine. The machine gave a large, harsh growl.
Traveling backward on a four-wheeler is a funky art. I could just imagine explaining to Kathy how I’d flipped her ATV over while getting it out of my vehicle. Like most quads, hers had a winch on the front to pull it out of mud holes, but that wouldn’t do me any good if I found myself pinned beneath the machine.
I did a couple of circuits on the nearest stretch of trail, trying to regain my muscle memory. Posture is everything when riding an all-terrain vehicle, and I needed to get loose, relaxing my shoulders and elbows and tilting my knees into the gas tank. The machine fought against my efforts to master it. The handlebars pulled against my forearms when I tried to turn them, and the vibration from the engine sent a shock wave up my spine that crashed against my cerebellum. The sleet, mixed now with freezing rain, began falling more heavily, screwing with my vision through the plastic goggles.
After getting comfortable in the saddle, I turned the ATV in the direction of Barter’s farm and revved the throttle. The woods were a blur as I raced along the cold-hardened trail. The forecast for the coming week was for warmer weather, but two nights of subzero temperatures had hardened the mud into shit cement. The conditions made for a jarring ride. The freezing rain was sliding its cold, wet fingers down the back of my neck. And it was getting dark.
As best as I could tell from my DeLorme GPS, Calvin Barter had only one direct-access point into the trail system that connected his property with that of the Varnums. A single path exited his farm before forking off in several directions across the peninsula. When I arrived at the fork, I paused and looked around. The local trees were all hardwoods-maples and oaks mostly, with their usual tatters of dead leaves-affording me little in the way of cover. But there was a knoll to one side of the trail that I could perch atop. Dressed as I was in an olive uniform and riding a mud-crusted machine, it was unlikely Barter would spot me if he came racing past at forty-five miles per hour. I leaned forward and downshifted to climb the little hill, then swung the ATV around in a tight circle until I was facing the fork in the trail. I turned off the engine and removed my goggles and helmet.
The freezing rain pelted my bare face like bird shot. It took several minutes for my hearing to return to normal, and even then a ghost echo of that loud engine lurked behind my throbbing eardrums. I became aware of the sound of the icy rain on the frozen snow-an insistent shhh, as if the sky were telling the earth to be silent.
I removed a glove and reached inside my soaked parka for my cell phone. I tapped in Wanda Barter’s number and waited.
“Hello?” The voice was female, Wanda’s daughter maybe, the one with the baby.
“This is Warden Bowditch. I want to talk with Calvin Barter.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Tell him I’m coming with a warrant.” I wasn’t certain I got out the last words before she hung up.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. The prospect of actually catching Barter in the act of vandalizing Hank’s place seemed pretty remote, so this was the only way I could see to play things. Maine law provided a nice assortment of offenses-from speeding to suspicion of operating under the influence of intoxicating liquor-that I could use to stop Barter on the trail. After that, I’d have to hope he said something stupid or otherwise provoked me in such a manner that I could make a bona fide arrest. It was possible I could connect his ATV tire treads to the prints I’d collected at the Varnum house, so the district attorney would feel confident pressing charges, but I doubted it.
I didn’t have long to wait. In the distance I heard the insect whine of engines. The noise began to grow. I was definitely hearing two machines-Barter and who else? I put my helmet and goggles back on and restarted the ignition. The ATV sent a shudder through every bone in my skeleton.
In less than a minute, I saw the lights. The first figure was very large, almost too large for the vehicle beneath him. The second was ridiculously small, riding what looked like a toy version of a four-wheeler-like something out of a cereal box.
I kept my lights off until the last possible second, when they were just about to fly past me, I hit the pursuit lights.
I saw the two riders turn their heads in my direction and then, without even a pause to consider the situation, they took off.
Bending forward so that my weight was over the back of the seat, I started down the slope. The machine seemed to slide beneath me, and I squeezed the brakes hard, swerving to avoid a tree that seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
Barter and the other, smaller rider-it had to be the teenage boy, Travis-were already disappearing into the distance. Between the driving ice and the trees themselves, the visibility absolutely sucked, but clouds of snow and smoke lingered behind the two machines, and their tire tracks showed clearly in my headlights. I realized I might have trouble overtaking them, but I could certainly follow. At the moment, the riders were headed for Hank Varnum’s land.
In front of me I could see their lights growing smaller. I gunned the engine. I’d forgotten how physically exhausting it was to drive one of these quads. The process seemed to involve long-forgotten muscles in my thighs and lower back.
Suddenly, with just a split second to act, I noticed a huge log in the path. Barter and the boy had turned off into the woods to avoid it, but I was flying along at a speed too fast to do the same. I stood up in the seat and throttled hard. For an instant, I felt a lifting sensation in my stomach, as if I were about to tumble ass over teakettle across the handlebars, but then the front wheels grabbed the bark and I found myself launching into space. I threw my weight back when the rear wheels hit, landing so hard, I almost veered off trail. I had to yank the handlebars back in line to avoid smacking into a birch.