Bad Little Falls (30 page)

“Where did he keep it?”

“In the basement.”

My heart sank. “Is it loaded? Does Lucas know how to fire it?”

“Prester took him out back to shoot cans one day when I was at work.”

I pictured Lucas fleeing into the snowy woods. Was he afraid of Corbett, and that’s why he fled? There was also the father to consider. I couldn’t even begin to guess how Mitch Munro might fit into this particular puzzle, if he even did. Maybe the boy had decided to cross the Heath to reach his father’s house.

“Does Lucas have some favorite place to hide—like a tree house or a cellar hole? Maybe a cave?”

“Prester used to have an old fort my dad built him in the woods. I think Lucas goes there sometimes.”

“Can you tell me where it is?”

“I’ve never been there. He draws maps of the woods in his notebooks. There’s a stack of them under his bed.”

“What about friends?”

“My son doesn’t have a friend in the world.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard a sadder statement in my life, but she said it with such frankness, I knew it was the truth.

“You need to find him, Mike,” she said. “Please!”

“That’s my job,” I said. “Finding lost kids is what I do.”

It sounded like a boast, but I hadn’t meant it that way. I wanted her to understand that on this one thing at least she could trust me. I was a Maine game warden, and I wouldn’t rest until I found her child.

She pressed her hands flat against the Plexiglas. “I can’t afford to lose him, too, Mike.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been so horrible. You don’t deserve this shit. You’re a sweet guy. You should find yourself a sweet girl.”

Down the hall, another iron door slammed. “I don’t want a sweet girl. I want you.”

She wasn’t sober, not by any means, but when she spoke again, her voice was clear and even. “No, you don’t. You want some fantasy version of me. You want the employee of the fucking month.” She gestured at her prison jumpsuit. “
This
is the real me. It always has been and always will be.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“That’s what makes you so sweet. Good-bye, Mike. Please let me know when you find Lucas.”

I nodded, unable to muster a full sentence. I knocked on the door, and one of the guards let me out. Then I went to retrieve my service weapon from the lockbox. When I stepped outside, there was a dusting of snow on my patrol truck.

33

I needed to tell the state police about Mitch Munro so that they could bring the snowmobiler in for questioning, at the very least. The medical examiner had found evidence of a cracked sternum. The injury had been inflicted hours before Cates died. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Munro as the attacker. The problem was Jamie. It was doubtful she would repeat the story she’d told me to a courtroom—not unless she was allowed to retain custody of her sister and son.

As I drove through the falling darkness, I wondered whether I could help broker a deal between Jamie and the prosecutors. If she could deliver Munro, would that be enough to waive the drunk-driving and possession charges? Might she be permitted by the DHHS to keep Lucas?

Of course I would have to find the boy first. I needed to focus on the challenge at hand before I worried about convincing detectives and prosecutors to make deals they would have zero interest in making.

*   *   *

When I arrived at the Sewall house, I found a Volvo V70 station wagon parked in the shoveled section of the dooryard. Beside it was the familiar Ford Interceptor I’d first seen outside the Sprague house so many nights ago: Chief Deputy Corbett’s cruiser.

A woman leapt out of the Volvo as if it had burst into flames. “What took you so long?” she said.

The social worker, Magda Mueller, had a wide, flat face and tightly curled red hair that reminded me of the coats of certain exotic breeds of water dogs. Her charcoal-colored coat hung to her knees, and I saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans and no-nonsense snow boots.

“I stopped by the jail to get some information from the mother.”

“Like what?”

“Whether the boy has access to a loaded firearm.” I spotted Tammi Sewall sitting meekly in the Volvo’s passenger seat, listening to Inca music on the stereo. She gave me a broad smile and a friendly wave, as if she had no idea how dire her family’s situation was. “Where’s Chief Deputy Corbett?” I asked.

“He said he was going to scope things out.”

“He’s inside the building?”

“As far as I know. He might have gone out the basement door if he decided to pursue the boy into the woods.”

The last thing I needed was Corbett blundering around, disturbing Lucas’s footprints. The snow was drifting down at a steady clip. I was going to have a devil of a time tracking the boy as dusk fell.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I arrived to check on the aunt and the boy. The aunt let us into the house, but when the boy found out I worked for DHHS, he became agitated. He ran down into the basement while I was trying to deal with the disabled woman.”

“You didn’t follow him?”

She crossed her arms. “I have a policy of not chasing troubled kids into dark holes.”

I couldn’t question her wisdom there. “So you evacuated Tammi from the building and called the sheriff?”

“The next thing I knew, Corbett showed up. He told me to wait outside here while he checked the premises. A little later, he came out and said there were tracks heading off through the backyard into the woods. I called the sheriff, and she told me a game warden was on the way. That was, like, an hour ago.”

I lowered my voice. “What are you going to do with Tammi?”

“There’s a foster-care home in Lubec where she can stay for a few days.”

“And the boy?”

“Corbett says the father is a convicted felon, which isn’t ideal. I know a family in Calais that will take him temporarily.”

“You mean you’re going to split up Tammi and Lucas?”

“Just for the time being. The department will need to do an assessment. Maybe there’s some extended family we can place them with. That’s usually preferable to a foster situation or a group home.”

“What happens when the mother gets out of jail?”

“Shouldn’t you be more worried about finding the kid? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

I took her point.

The front door of the house was ajar. A wedge of light streamed through the crack. I kicked snow off my boots and pushed the door open. “Corbett? It’s Bowditch.” My words seemed to bounce off the entryway’s walls.

There was no reply.

The light in the foyer was burning, but the other rooms were dark. The home had seemed so warm and welcoming the first time I’d visited. Now a chill was blowing through some open door or window, and the faint odor of Jamie’s cigarettes hung in the air.

It troubled me how the chief deputy kept appearing around the Sewalls. I didn’t want to feel suspicious and unsafe, but my hand kept drifting down to my sidearm.

The floor creaked beneath my feet. “Corbett?”

The answer came from above my head. “Up here.”

There was a single narrow staircase leading up to the second floor. The house was old and, like many nineteenth-century New England farmhouses, seemed to have been built for a race of ascetic pygmies. I had to duck my head to keep from knocking my brow against an oak beam.

There were three small bedrooms and a single bath on the second floor. The first room was Jamie’s. It had a queen-size mattress beneath a quilt that looked like a family heirloom. The walls had been freshly painted—a soothing lavender—and there was a vase of grocery-store flowers on the bureau, but there were telltale signs of disarrangement if you looked closely. The carnations were beginning to wilt, and the bed was unmade. I hung in the doorway for a moment, breathing in the familiar smell of her perfume and feeling a pang at the thought that I would never share this bed with her.

I found Corbett in the next room, sitting on Prester’s Sewall’s narrow bed. In his hands he was holding a quart-size Ziploc bag filled with dried herbs. His high, scarlet forehead was furrowed, but the turn of his lips suggested amusement.

“What have you got there?” I asked.

“It ain’t oregano,” said Corbett.

Unlike Jamie’s, this room was a mess. It seemed more like the sanctuary of a hormone-crazed teenager than that of a man in his mid-twenties. Posters showing women in bikinis, cupping their heavy naked breasts in their hands, beckoned from the walls. Empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best, a plate with congealed grease in the shape of a pizza slice, a pile of dirty jeans and undershirts on a chair—these were the dead man’s personal effects, all that he had left behind.

“So you just found that lying in the open?” I asked, half wondering if he’d planted the pot for reasons I couldn’t guess at the moment.

“Exigent circumstances,” he said. “I was looking for the boy.”

“In Prester’s bureau?”

“Kid could have been hiding anywhere.”

“Jesus, Corbett. The guy’s already dead. What do you plan on doing, busting his corpse for intent to distribute?”

“No, but I’m sure the sheriff is going to have some pointed questions for the sister.”

“This is her brother’s room!”

“But it’s her house.”

I couldn’t bring myself to argue with him. The entire situation was more than I could wrap my head around. “I take it you didn’t find Lucas.”

Corbett tilted his razor-burned chin toward the window. “His footprints lead off into the trees. Unless the snow picks up, you shouldn’t have any trouble following them.”

I exhaled loudly, trying to dispel the depression from my soul. “I need to look in his room first.”

“Why? What for?”

I didn’t answer. Lucas’s room was at the end of the hall. It was nearly as dirty as his uncle’s, although not quite, thanks to the ministrations of his mother, no doubt. The poster on his wall showed Bruce Lee flexing every muscle in his fat-free body. Books were scattered everywhere: detective novels and comics, science fiction and strange histories of Stonehenge and the Loch Ness monster.

I lifted the bedspread from the floor and discovered the stash of notebooks his mother had mentioned. There were at least a dozen of various colors and styles: Some were big and spiral-bound; others reminded me of old college exam booklets. I recognized the most recent notebook immediately, with its lemon cover and violent illustrations.

Corbett stood in the doorway. “What are you looking for?”

I didn’t feel like explaining myself. Jamie had mentioned that her son wrote constantly in his notebooks and that if he had a secret hideout, I might find evidence inside. Standing over his bed, I read the kid’s most recent entry. It was dated that morning:

Mom never came home for the second night in a row!

It’s all my fault.

I can’t believe Uncle Prester is DEAD.

What if they never find his body?

What if Ma never comes home AT ALL?

What if the social lady takes Tammi to some mental home and Dad decides he don’t want me to come live with hiim?

I will be all ALONE!

I hadn’t realized that the notebook contained Lucas’s diary. When I had looked at it before, I’d focused only on the disturbing drawings and assumed the rest were imaginary stories or schoolwork. Now I understood that the odd little boy had been keeping a journal, and I wondered if some of the answers I was seeking—about Jamie and Mitch, Randall and Prester—might be found inside. I’d had this notebook in my possession for days without realizing what it was.

“What is that?” Corbett asked, showing more interest than usual.

“The kid’s diary,” I said. “I am hoping it will lead me to him.”

I leafed through the pages and happened on a map that showed what looked like the forest behind the house. It was stylishly rendered—Lucas had a talent for drawing—and showed a few of landmarks linked by a single dotted line that must have been a trail. The path crossed a stream labeled “Injun Brook” and detoured around a tangle of fallen trees besides which he’d scrawled “Widowmakers.” It ended at a cartoonish-looking building he called “Fort Knox.”

I wasn’t certain if the map was purely fanciful or whether it would be of help locating the boy, but I decided to take the notebook with me in case I wanted to refer to it again during the search. I spent a moment inspecting the strange images inked on the cover—the demonic owl, the feathered woman—and shook my head sadly. Lucas, I decided, was a deeply troubled kid, and why shouldn’t he be, an intelligent and imaginative child growing up in a rancid drug den?

“What kind of diary does a twelve-year-old keep? Is it like a record of how many times he jerks off in a day?” Corbett’s tone was light, but I could sense that he wanted to have a look for himself.