Bad Little Falls (29 page)

I tried to keep my mind off Jamie—the thought of her in jail was too damned heartbreaking—so instead my thoughts drifted toward George Magoon.

If Rivard had left the coyote skin and the note on my door, then who had sent me that threatening e-mail? To the best of my knowledge, Brogan was unaware that a prankster calling himself George Magoon was harassing me. Leaving that skunk in my trailer was an independent act of vandalism on his part. So who else knew about Magoon? I’d recounted the incident to Kathy Frost and Charley Stevens. I might have mentioned the name Magoon to Jamie at some point, but I didn’t think so. That left Doc Larrabee and Kendrick. But what reason would they have had to send me a harassing note? Doc had a definite alcohol problem, and Kendrick seemed like a merry prankster in the Earth First! sense. It was possible one of them had sent the message. I had a hollow feeling in my stomach that I was overlooking some detail that might prove significant.

The search dragged on until my team had studied every square foot of water and shoreline between Grove Street and the Route 1A bridges. A Forest Service helicopter appeared over the horizon at one point. It hovered low above the river, its rotors whipping cold water at those of us gathered along the banks, while, inside the chopper, our lieutenant directed a spotlight down at the channel. The lieutenant spent a long time inspecting the pile piers in the center of the stream, but eventually he gave up and the copter moved down below the falls.

As the afternoon progressed—or failed to progress—I found myself growing increasingly angry. I was mad at Prester for falling through the ice, mad at Corbett for chasing him there, mad at Munro for whatever the hell he was doing on the Heath, mad at Rhine and Zanadakis for not taking the matter seriously, mad at Jamie for getting busted, mad at Rivard for being a dick, mad at Brogan and Cronk and Kendrick and even that sourpuss Ben Sprague for making my life so damned difficult when all I’d wanted was to do my job quietly for once. Mostly I was mad at myself.

Rivard was right: I really was an arrogant fuckup who thought he was the smartest guy in the Warden Service. And look at all the good my attitude did me. This emotion no longer felt like self-pity, but, rather, an accurate assessment of my questionable fitness to do the job I’d been hired to do.

I’d just emerged from the Salvation Army trailer that had showed up to feed the assembled searchers, balancing a bowl of chili in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other, when my cell rang. For some reason, I knew it was the sheriff. Rhine had spent a couple of foot-stomping, hand-rubbing hours on the scene before she’d decided to seek warmth back at her office.

“How’s the search going?” she asked.

“We haven’t found him yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“There’s a line of snow squalls moving through Bangor. You probably have another hour before they get here.”

Even light snow would ground our chopper, meaning that unless the guys below the falls got lucky, we would be forced to suspend the search until conditions improved.

Rhine hadn’t called to give me the weather report. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? I’m kind of busy.”

“How well do you know Jamie Sewall’s son?”

“Not very well. He’s a weird little kid, as you saw for yourself.”

I watched searchers in reflective vests milling in the parking lot. Steam rose from their open mouths and white coffee cups.

“Well, it seems he’s run away,” said the sheriff. “The sister, Tammi, called us, saying she was scared because Jamie hadn’t come home. Given her brain injury, I asked DHHS to send a social worker to break the news about Jamie’s arrest and assess the situation. I know Tammi’s not competent to care for a child, so I figured DHHS might need to find temporary placement for them both.”

If possible, the Department of Health and Human Services was even more widely disliked in Down East Maine than the Maine Warden Service. My fears about Jamie potentially forfeiting custody of both her sister and her son acquired a new intensity. Losing Lucas, especially, would be her worst nightmare.

“So what happened?”

“The social worker—her name is Magda Mueller and I’ve worked with her before, a real pro—shows up and the boy immediately freaks out. He won’t listen to the aunt. Instead, he locks himself in the basement and won’t come out. The aunt says there might be a gun down there, so Mueller does the smart thing and gets them both out of the building. I send an officer out to have a look—”

“Not Dunbar?”

“No,” she said. “Corbett.”

If anything, that choice seemed worse to me, given my misgivings about the chief deputy.

“So what happened next?”

“By the time Corbett got there, he found the bulkhead door open. He said there were new tracks leading from the basement off into the trees. He wanted to pursue, but I told him to stay put until I called you.”

“You want me to go over there?”

“I have more confidence in your finding him. My guys aren’t trained to look for a kid in the woods. Besides, you already have a relationship with the boy. Just remember, he may be armed.”

“I need to ask Rivard.”

“With the snow coming, he’s about ready to suspend the search. He thinks you would be better off looking for the boy.”

I felt like a prehistoric animal that had fallen into a tar pit. No matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t extricate myself from the mess the Sewalls had created. “I need to stop by the jail first,” I said.

The suspicion in Rhine’s voice came through the receiver. “Why?”

“To talk with Jamie. Something tells me that she might know where Lucas went.”

The opportunity to see her again was no small incentive, either.

32

From the outside, you might have mistaken the Washington County jail for a new building, but inside, the ceilings hung low and the air had the stuffy chill of a mausoleum. The brick walls were the color of curdled cream and showed signs of having been painted innumerable times for the sole purpose of keeping inmates busy. Men had died in this building, and it didn’t take much of an imagination to sense their presence in the flickering lights and the sudden drafts that moved through the halls.

The grizzled captain who ran the jail met me at the door, along with a couple of slack-jawed guards who seemed to have nothing better to do. The sheriff had a meeting with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, the captain said in a tone that suggested the discussion would be an unpleasant event for everyone involved.

Jails tend to be loud, clanging places filled with shouts, echoes, and the slamming of metal doors. The guards made me secure my service weapon in a wall-mounted lockbox before they led me into the visitation room. The room smelled of disinfectant sprayed over every possible surface. A Plexiglas barrier running down the center of a table divided the inmates’ side from the visitors’. There was an intercom-type contraption in the glass to speak through.

“No sign of Prester?” the captain said.

“Not yet.”

“First the brother, now the sister.” He gave me that familiar world-weary expression that all law-enforcement officers eventually adopt. “Quite the family, them Sewalls.”

“Quite the family,” I agreed.

A lock clicked loudly, and the door opened on the visitors’ side of the barrier. A stout blond woman in a khaki uniform led Jamie into the room. She was wearing a jumpsuit the color of a moldering tangerine. The guard guided her, not ungently, into a chair facing me through the glass.

Jamie’s eyes were threaded with veins, her skin looked bleached, and her hair was a rat’s nest.

I recalled the seductive woman who had shown up at my motel door, the one with the soft curves who had curled against me in bed and confessed her desire to escape her depressing life for some tropical paradise. She was nearly unrecognizable as the suffering person seated across from me, and I was left to wonder what, if anything, had been real between us.

“Fancy meeting you here.” Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with sand.

“You look like you’ve had a hard night.”

“Gee. Do you think?”

“If you’d needed a ride, you should have called me rather than driving drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk.”

“The trooper who arrested you says you were.”

“I was buzzed.”

Her hands were trembling—either from nervousness or withdrawal from substances unknown. I realized I could smell the alcohol on her breath through the holes in the glass.

“What about the Adderall the trooper found in your purse?” I asked. “Did that get in there by accident?”

“Those were Tammi’s. She has a prescription. I picked them up for her at Rite Aid.” She lifted her cleft chin and showed her teeth to the assembled deputies. “Can we have some privacy here?”

I nodded to give my consent, and the men filed out.

I motioned to the wall-mounted camera above my head. “They can still see us, you know.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to look into their stupid faces.” She pushed a strand of greasy hair back over her ear. “You don’t have to be such an asshole, you know? I didn’t do anything to hurt you. You shouldn’t treat me like I did.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice quavered. “Have you found Prester yet?”

“We’re still looking.”

“Let me know when you do, please.”

I felt sorry for her in her intoxication and her grief and that pathetic jumpsuit, but I was still angry. “If you didn’t want to talk with me, couldn’t you have just gone to a meeting or called your sponsor last night?”

“Why? So she could talk me out of it? I
wanted
to get drunk. I
wanted
to get high. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”

I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin. “Jamie, you’re in serious trouble.”

She began to blink back tears. “Don’t you think I know that!”

“If you’re found guilty and sent to prison, the state is going to remove Tammi and Lucas from your house.”

“They can’t do that!” Her voice broke as she spoke the words.

“They can, and they will.” I needed to tell her that Lucas had run away, needed to find out where the boy might have gone, but one unanswered question kept pushing its way to the front of my brain. “If I’m going to help you,” I said, “I need to know the truth about something.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“I went to Wyman Hill last night, over in Township Nineteen. Do you remember how I told you I saw a snowmobile out on the Heath the night Randall was murdered? I know whose sled it was now.”

She brought her hands together in a praying motion but remained silent.

I leaned forward. “Mitch was the one Prester and Randall were meeting on the afternoon of the blizzard, wasn’t it? He was buying drugs from them.”

She looked up suddenly. “That’s not what happened.”

“So tell me the truth.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you want Prester to be remembered as a murderer? Is that what you want for your brother?”

“Mitch is Lucas’s father.”

“That won’t stop me from taking him down.”

“Mitch didn’t kill Randall. I swear to God he didn’t.” Tears streamed down her face. “This is all my fault. Everything that happened is all my fault.”

She had said these same words before, and I had assumed she meant it in the sense of bad karma plaguing her for past misdeeds. “What happened?”

She wasn’t so stoned that she didn’t give a glance at the wall-mounted camera. “Randall beat up Lucas. He knocked him to the ground and bruised the whole side of his face. I thought he might have broken his arm, too. I asked Prester to do something about it—be a man for once—but he wouldn’t because he was too afraid of Randall. So I said, ‘Couldn’t you just lure him somewhere where Mitch could kick the shit out of him?’ He knows karate, and if he took Randall by surprise … I just wanted Mitch to beat Randall up.”

The medical examiner said that Cates had suffered a cracked sternum in the hours before his death. The injury had rendered him immobile, which was why Prester had been the one to seek help after their car got stuck. But what if Munro had lied to Jamie? What if he had returned to the stranded Grand Am later to finish the job?

“Do you know where Mitch is now?” I asked her.

“He wasn’t at his house?”

“No.” A door slammed shut down the hall, and I remembered why the sheriff had called me in the first place. “Is it possible he could be with Lucas?”

“Lucas is at home with Tammi.”

“No, he isn’t. Lucas ran away, Jamie.”

“What are you saying?”

“The sheriff sent someone from DHHS to look in on Tammi and Lucas,” I said. “When the social worker showed up, Lucas locked himself in the basement.”

“He’s afraid of the basement. There’s something down there that scares him. He won’t tell me what it is.” She raised her fingers to her lips as if to chew on her nails but then stopped herself. “But you said he ran away. I don’t understand.”

“The sheriff decided to send one of her deputies over there, too, because she was concerned for everyone’s safety. The deputy found tracks leading from the bulkhead into the forest behind your house.”

“Deputy? Which deputy?”

“Chief Deputy Corbett”

“He’s the one Randall used to talk about!”

“Talk about how?”

“I don’t know—he just mentioned his name sometimes. Then he and Prester would laugh. Oh my God. Was he the guy who frisked me at the hospital? The blond guy with a red face?”

I didn’t answer, but suddenly the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency’s accusation that Rhine had a dirty cop in her department seemed less and less far-fetched. And to what lengths would a man like Corbett go to avoid exposure? Might he have killed Randall Cates and driven Prester Sewall to his death? Might he even harm Lucas if he suspected the boy knew the truth?

Jamie sat bolt upright in her chair. “You need to go over there, Mike! You need to make sure Lucas is safe!”

“I need to ask you some questions first.”

“What kinds of questions?”

“First, would Lucas have access to a firearm? He told me he did.”

“Prester had a twenty-two he used to shoot squirrels and woodchucks. It was my dad’s.”