Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (12 page)

“Just give me the lowdown, Saint Michael.”

My sergeant listened without interruption while I recounted the events of the tedious afternoon and the explosive evening. Every once in a while, I heard him spit tobacco juice into a metal cup. I ended my narration with a third apology for not reporting in to him faster, although I knew plenty of wardens who spoke to their sergeants once a week at best. They weren’t investigating the worst wildlife crime in Maine history, however.

“Khristian was already on the L.T.’s list of suspects,” McQuarrie said.

“I have my doubts about him as the perp here.”

He spat again into his cup. “Of course you do.”

“There were at least two shooters. And Karl Khristian seems like a lone-wolf type to me.”

“Don’t fall in love with your theories. Besides, it’s Bilodeau’s job to crack this case, not yours. All we need from you is to gather evidence—and report in. Understood?”

I took a sip of my half-curdled milk. “So what else did you guys find today? Were there other kill sites?”

McQuarrie laughed until he started coughing. “Frost was right. You really are a Nosey Parker. You’ll hear about it at the briefing tomorrow morning. I suggest you arrive early—and bring doughnuts.”

It would take more than a box of crullers to win my way into the lieutenant’s good graces.

Rivard had always resented my ambition. “If you want to play detective,” he’d once told me, “you should join the state police.” But what was this case if not a criminal investigation? By all rights, it should have been mine to solve, not Bilodeau’s. As the district warden who’d found the bodies, I should at least have been partnered with the investigator. The fact that I was determined to apprehend the shooters—that I was driven by a sense of duty—shouldn’t have been scorned by my lieutenant or laughed off by my sergeant. I might have meddled in cases outside my jurisdiction in the past, but that wasn’t the situation here, not by a long shot. Rivard could take the investigation out of my hands, but he couldn’t stop me from giving a damn.

I realized that I’d forgotten to tell Mack about the call from Elizabeth Morse. Until I spoke with her and learned what she wanted, it was probably just as well. I could imagine Rivard hitting the roof when he heard that the queen had reached out to me.

I tried the number she’d given me and got one of those automated female voices that instruct you to leave a message at the tone.

“Ms. Morse,” I said. “This is Warden Bowditch returning your call. I’m in for the night if you’d like to try me again, or you can reach me anytime on my cell phone.” I recited the ten-digit number. “I’m sure Lieutenant Rivard can answer any questions you might have about the investigation into the shooting. But I would like to talk with you about another matter, concerning Billy Cronk, when you have a chance. I look forward to speaking with you.”

That night, I lay awake, waiting for the phone to ring and wondering how to explain Billy’s reckless confrontation with Karl Khristian, or the irrational fear of losing his job that had motivated him to take such reckless actions. I needn’t have worried, because Betty Morse never called me back.

13

The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife kept a field office on Route 1A outside Machias. It was little more than a farmhouse with an attached garage and barn. All of the structures were painted green, like just about everything else the department owned, and this morning the buildings were surrounded by a fleet of pickups, many of them green. Rivard had commandeered the place to serve as the headquarters of his moose-massacre investigation.

At McQuarrie’s suggestion, I had stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts in East Machias and purchased three dozen doughnuts at my own expense. I entered the already-packed house, expecting to be greeted as a hero. Instead, I found my colleagues chewing on Dunkin’ Munchkins and pouring cups of coffee from a Box O’ Joe. It seemed that Warden Bard had been a step ahead of me this morning.

In normal times, the field office was used by fisheries biologists who were trying, in vain, to bring Atlantic salmon back to the Down East rivers from which they had mysteriously vanished over the course of my lifetime. There were a hundred explanations why the salmon had gone away—global warming, acid rain, overfishing. All anyone could say for sure was that the effort to restore them had been fruitless. I couldn’t imagine spending my life devoted to a lost cause, but the department biologists and biotechs must not have thought in those bleak terms. I saw two of the “fish heads” laughing and eagerly eating doughnuts in the back of the room.

As I set the surplus pastries on a table, someone clapped me on the shoulder. “Hello there!” came a familiar voice.

I turned, to find myself looking down at an old man with a lantern jaw and bright green eyes.

“Charley!” I said, shaking his strong hand.

“I looked across the room just now and said, ‘Who’s that stranger over there with the chocolate éclairs?’”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to stop by, but one thing keeps leading to another. The moose hunt this year ran me ragged.”

“A warden’s work is never done.”

“I thought that saying referred to women.”

“Them, too.” He clapped me on the shoulder again, hard enough to leave a red mark.

Charley Stevens kept himself in great shape for a man of his advanced years. He had a farmer’s build: flat stomach, muscled forearms, and an unbreakable back. Women I knew, even young women, considered him unconventionally handsome. He had eyes the color of sea ice, and his big face was creased with laugh lines around the eyes and mouth. Every two weeks, his wife, Ora, barbered his stiff white hair with big scissors out in the yard. She was in a wheelchair, so Charley would sit on the ground, his legs folded like a yogi’s. This morning, he was wearing a crisp white T-shirt tucked into green Dickies.

“I know Ora would love to cook you dinner some evening,” he said. “The mushrooms haven’t been great this fall, but we have lots dried, and I’ve shot a fair number of black ducks. The door’s always open, as they say, and Nimrod and I are at your disposal should you ever want to send a few woodcock to their eternal rest.”

Listening to him, I couldn’t remember why I had been dodging his invitations. “I’d like that.”

“Then it’s a date.”

“Once these killings are solved,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Stacey told me Rivard was planning a powwow, so I decided to invite myself over and see if I could make myself useful.”

I didn’t see his daughter in the crowd. “Is she here?”

“She’s got the day off. Matt’s taking her out on Passamaquoddy Bay on his dad’s picnic boat.”

“Oh.”

Someone whistled. It was McQuarrie, calling the room to order. “All right, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover this morning, so let’s stop with the yapping.”

Rivard stepped forward. Despite the long day and night in the woods, he had seemingly found time to get his hair cut and his mustache trimmed. He looked like a man who expected to be interviewed on television. “Good morning,” he said. “I have some news before we begin. This morning, Ms. Morse informed me that she is offering a reward of ten thousand dollars for information that leads to the arrest and successful prosecution of anyone involved in the shootings.”

A warden behind me—it might have been Bayley—whistled when the lieutenant announced the dollar figure and said, “If I catch the bastards, do I get to keep the reward?”

“Settle down!” said McQuarrie, quieting the laughs.

“The purpose of this meeting is to plot strategy,” said Rivard. “So far, we have managed to collect very little in the way of hard evidence from the kill sites. Mack, can you run down the list of what we’ve found?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was almost nothing new in the inventory beyond the items I had personally discovered: ten shell casings from a .22 Magnum, three from a .22 long rifle; four .22 bullets and one fragment recovered from the bodies; three cigarette butts (Salems); two candy wrappers (Starburst and Tastetations); one empty sixteen-ounce can of Budweiser located outside the Morse property; one empty bottle of Miller Genuine Draft, found in the same vicinity. That was it.

“Last night, we transported all these items to the Maine State Crime Lab in Augusta,” said McQuarrie. “The techs are dusting what they can for prints. We should get those results soon. It’s going to take longer to see what DNA evidence we can pull off those cigarettes.”

So they hadn’t found additional kill sites. Had they even looked? I fought down the desire to raise my hand and ask.

“We also collected insect samples,” said Warden Investigator Bilodeau in a near whisper. He had a toothpick tucked in the corner of his mouth again.

“That’s right,” said McQuarrie. “We collected some bugs to help us determine the time of death for each animal. There’s a professor over at UNH who’s a specialist in that stuff, and he agreed to take a look.”

The whip-thin investigator continued, so softly that we all leaned toward him to hear. “The evidence so far points to all the moose being killed the night before last—based on rate of decomposition and residual core body temperatures.”

“What this means,” said Rivard, “is that we haven’t caught any breaks so far. We might get lucky with the prints or the DNA, but we can’t bank on it. The crime lab ballistics guys should be able to narrow down the firearms we’re looking for.” He took a sip of coffee to smooth his throat. “Continue, Sergeant.”

“Last night,” said Mack, “I put Sullivan and Bard on a detail on the road outside Morse’s Sixth Machias gate, figuring the shooters might come back for sloppy seconds. Bard, you want to tell everyone what you found?”

My muscle-bound rival took the opportunity to puff out his already-thick chest. “We stopped three vehicles on the public road,” he said, reading from a Rite in the Rain notebook. “A 2001 Subaru Outback registered to a Peter Wyman of Baileyville, who was the driver. He consented to a search of the car, but there was no evidence he had been engaged in hunting activities. The second vehicle was a 2005 Ford Ranger registered to Alice Dade of Grand Lake Stream. It contained two juveniles, a boy and girl. The boy produced a driver’s license identifying him as Scott Dade. He said he was the owner’s son, which we confirmed. The girl had no identification in her purse.”

“She had a packet of rubbers, though,” said Warden Sullivan with a leering grin.

Half the room laughed; the rest of us fidgeted and looked at the walls. Beside me, Charley voiced his displeasure with a grunt.

“There was no evidence of hunting activities,” continued Bard when the laughter had died down. “The third vehicle was a 2008 Toyota Tacoma driven by Chubby LeClair.”

I heard murmurs from those around me.

Chubby LeClair was a fleshy fellow who lived in an Airstream camper in the woods. For years, he had passed himself off as a Passamaquoddy, claiming he was one-quarter Indian on his dead father’s side, until the tribal elders managed to pick enough holes in his story to determine that he was just another white opportunist who liked to wear his hair long and collect checks from the Feds. The tribal manager had him evicted from his rent-free brick house overlooking Big Lake and drove him off the reservation and into the wilds of Plantation No. 21. Despite the counterweighing genetic evidence (Chub had reddish hair and gray eyes), he continued to proclaim his Passamaquoddy heritage. He remained popular with the teenagers in the area, who knew him as a dealer in choice weed. It was said he traded blow jobs—from girls
and
boys—for blunts.

The Warden Service knew him as an incorrigible poacher who would be caught jacking a deer one season, lose his hunting license for a while, and then be caught again the moment he got his license back. Chubby seemed constitutionally incapable of obeying a law or taking a hint. I had busted him in August when I saw him drive down the road with a doe’s foot sticking out of his passenger window. He had responded to the summons I’d written with big smiles and “No hard feelings,” and the next thing I knew, he had decided I was now his friend. It wasn’t unusual for him to call me to ask where the bass were biting.

“I don’t suppose Chub had a twenty-two on him?” someone asked.

“Just a twenty-gauge Remington,” said Bard, “and enough grouse feathers inside the cab of his truck to stuff a pillow. I confiscated the firearm and wrote him up for hunting without a license. The fat fuck was smiling the whole time, like I was giving him an ice-cream cone.”

“That’s just Chub,” said a warden across the room.

“We would have dragged his fat ass to jail,” continued Bard, “but we didn’t want to leave our position beside the road.”

“Let’s get back on track here,” said Rivard. “One of my goals for this meeting is to develop a list of potential suspects that Bilodeau can pursue while we continue our search of the Morse property. LeClair is one name.” He lifted his chin in my direction. “Karl Khristian and Billy Cronk are two more. Warden Bowditch, I understand that you had an interesting evening at Mr. Khristian’s house. We’d all like to hear your account of the events.”

I felt like a daydreaming kid who had just been called upon in class. “Sure, Lieutenant.” I set down my coffee cup on a bookcase. “I was the first officer on the scene of that ten-thirty-two.”

Rivard couldn’t resist the dig. “You seem to be the first officer at the scene a lot these days.”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

It wasn’t meant to be a joke, but I heard chuckles.

With all ears in the room turned in my direction, I told the story of collecting evidence at the gravel pits when I heard the call come over the police radio. I described in detail what had happened when I arrived at the armed compound: KKK shooting into the dirt at Billy’s feet, the words I’d used to persuade the sovereign citizen to emerge from inside his castle walls, how my friend had quickly disarmed the little man, and the arrival of the sheriff and other officers on the scene.

“As far as I know, they’re both still in jail,” I said. “But I don’t see the point in adding Billy Cronk’s name to the list of suspects.”