Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (3 page)

There were truck tracks in the road, but the conditions were too arid and the ground was too hard to grab any prints. I did come across a cigarette butt lying in a tuft of rabbit’s foot clover. The filter was white, not tan. A Salem, maybe? Or a Marlboro Light? It had rained two nights earlier, but this cigarette didn’t look like it had ever gotten soggy. I returned to my GMC to find an evidence bag.

“Hey, Mike!”

Billy was standing at the edge of the grass. He motioned me toward him emphatically, the way you do with a small child when you come across a frog in a pond. He knelt down to inspect the metal cylinders at his feet.

“Don’t pick those up,” I said. “There might be fingerprints on them.”

He dropped a brass casing onto the ground. “Sorry.”

There were four shells, all from a .22 Magnum rifle.

“That’s a small caliber to take down a moose,” said Billy. “I wouldn’t use my twenty-two on a varmint bigger than a woodchuck.”

That was because Billy Cronk didn’t take reckless potshots at animals, hoping to get lucky. In his mind, it was a cardinal sin for a hunter to use too small a gun on a living creature. You might miss your kill shot and leave an animal mortally wounded. But I knew plenty of cruel and careless men who didn’t worry about the casualties they left behind.

“My dad always used a twenty-two Mag when he was poaching,” I said. “He told me that a twenty-two was powerful but quiet. He said it was deadly in the right hands.”

“Or the wrong ones,” said Billy.

“Or the wrong ones,” I agreed.

In addition to his many other sins, my father had been one of the most notorious poachers in the mountains of western Maine, a man who killed deer, moose, and grouse at will, daring ineffectual game wardens to catch him—which they never did. The idea that his only son had become a warden himself either amused or disgusted him. He kept his emotions in a hermetically sealed box that he refused to open in my presence. But even my poacher father had never committed an act this cold-blooded. To steal the life from another creature as if it had zero value, to kill for fun rather than food or self-defense or revenge—even Jack Bowditch would have been nauseated by this meaningless slaughter.

When I surveyed the distant tree line again, I discovered that the ravens had vanished. They must have flown off while I focused on the moose. I remembered that in Norse mythology, the god Odin had two ravens—Thought and Memory—that he sent out each day to collect information. They were his personal spies. In the evening, the black-bearded birds would return to Asgard, perch on Odin’s shoulders, and whisper the world’s secrets into his ears. What would they tell the father of gods tonight? I stared at the empty tree where the birds had last perched and tried to make sense of an utterly senseless crime.

Four dead moose, all seemingly killed by the same gun in the same night. What had started this killing spree? And what had ended it?

The realization took hold in my mind.

“There are others,” I said.

“What?”

“Whoever did this didn’t just stop at four. They were on a joyride, and they were having too much fun. If we keep looking, we’ll find more bodies. I’m sure of it.”

The image in my head was of redneck punks at a carnival shooting gallery, plinking one target, then the next, until their time was up or they were out of quarters. How many moose could someone shoot in a single night? There was only one way for me to find out.

“I want you to take me everywhere in the area you can remember seeing a moose,” I told Billy.

*   *   *

We found two more corpses before noon: a bull and a cow.

The bull was a monster that had survived many hunting seasons in this pathless forest. For nearly a dozen years, judging from his tremendously humped back and the wear on his lower incisors, he had managed to elude hunters who had hoped to mount his head above a fireplace. And then one night, when all the orange-clad humans had departed the woods for another season, this majestic animal had walked face-first into a .22-caliber bullet. His killers hadn’t even bothered to take home their thousand-dollar trophy; instead, they’d left those magnificent antlers to be gnawed at by porcupines while the moose’s body rotted in the sun.

The cow was just a delicate little thing that most hunters wouldn’t even have troubled with. Billy found it within a mile of Morse’s new mansion, sprawled at the edge of a grove of northern white cedars that the landscape architects had chopped back to make way for a scenic driveway with a view of the lake. I located two .22 long rifle cartridges and a Salem cigarette filter in the roadside needles.

“That’s a different caliber,” Billy said. “The other shells were twenty-two Mags.”

“Yeah, but there was a Salem with the first moose,” I said. “The manner of death is the same, too: an opportunistic shot taken at medium range, probably with the help of a jacklight to blind the animal. This could have been the second man using a different gun.”

Billy glanced up the road in the direction of his employer’s residence. “The Morses should have heard the shot, this close to the house.”

“Maybe they did hear it,” I suggested.

“Ms. Morse didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Did you talk with her this morning?”

“Not yet. But she would have called if she’d heard gunshots.”

“Is she the only one who lives there? Does she have any family?”

He gave me an embarrassed smile. “Yep.”

“What does that shit-eating grin mean?”

“Her daughter Briar’s been living there since she dropped out of college last May.”

“Briar?”

He shrugged as if to suggest the name made no sense to him, either. “Plus, there’s her assistant, Leaf,” said Billy, “and the housekeeper, Vera; the cook, Meagan; and sometimes Mr. Albee spends the night.”

“Who’s he, her boyfriend?”

“No, he’s helping her with this park thing.” A look of alarm widened his blue eyes. “Oh fuck. She’s going to blame me for this.”

“Why? You didn’t shoot the moose.”

“She’ll say it was my fault somehow for not watching things close enough. Oh fuck, Mike, I’m screwed. I just bought Aimee a new washer. I can’t afford to lose my job again!”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Billy,” I said. “We need to get a bunch of wardens out here pronto. Each one of the dead moose needs to have its location mapped. Cody Devoe’s dog can help us find any spent shell casings I missed, plus whatever other evidence we can scare up. Cigarettes, candy wrappers. And there might still be other animals out there. Basically, I need to call in the whole fucking cavalry.”

He lifted his bristling blond eyebrows. “Is there any way you can do it … quietly?”

“Billy, this is the worst wildlife crime I’ve ever heard about—and it’s taken place on Betty Morse’s property. You don’t think we can hide this from her?”

“I guess not.”

I patted one of his shoulders, but it was like trying to reassure a boulder. “Let me call my sergeant, and then you and I will go talk to Ms. Morse together.”

I rummaged around behind the seat of my truck until I found the rolled-up U.S. Geographic Survey map that showed the quadrangle for Sixth Machias Lake. I tried to spread it open on the griddle-hot hood of my truck, but the edges kept curling back on themselves. The map was only four years old, but it was already terribly out of date, since it failed to show any of Elizabeth Morse’s new construction. With a pen, I marked the approximate locations of the six dead animals, but I detected no obvious pattern, except that whoever had murdered them was obviously familiar enough with the old tote roads to travel through a woodland maze without getting lost or discovered.

I laid out the evidence bags with the shell casings and the cigarette butts in a row beside the map. My division supervisor, Lt. Marc Rivard, was one of those bosses who always tells you to bring them solutions, not problems. His latest bit of managerial wisdom, which he’d taken to quoting frequently in our monthly meetings, was, “Who needs a carrot when you’ve got a stick?” Rivard had been my warden sergeant until he was suddenly promoted over the summer, after our previous lieutenant was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My new sergeant, Mack McQuarrie, didn’t seem to care what I did as long as I didn’t rile up the powers in Augusta.

Given Rivard’s love of the limelight and the sensational nature of this case—a mass slaughter of animals on the property of the richest and most despised businesswoman in Maine—the lieutenant was certain to take a renewed interest in me. If I didn’t handle this investigation by the book, I could expect him to break his proverbial stick across my nonproverbial back.

Based on the initial evidence, I would tell the lieutenant that two guns had been used, suggesting two different shooters. They had left their brass behind, meaning they were unconcerned that their rifles would ever be connected to these crimes (perhaps they’d planned on tossing their guns into the lake). Either that or they were just careless. The relative scarcity of spent shell casings implied that the killers were extraordinary marksmen; they’d barely wasted a bullet bringing down the moose. As far as the cigarette butts went, all I could determine was that one of the guys, at least, smoked menthols, which provide more of a rush than other forms of tobacco, if you don’t mind ripping the lining of your lungs to shreds. So he had a reckless disregard for his own well-being in addition to that of God’s creatures.

Christ, I thought, I’m going to need all the help I can get on this case.

I put in a call to Sergeant McQuarrie and reached him at a backwoods butcher shop.

During the fall, moose- and deer-cutting businesses sprang up in the forested corners of the state. Most of the meat cutters were solid citizens, but a few of them viewed Maine’s wildlife laws as unnecessary limits on commerce. It behooved game wardens to drop in on these fly-by-night outfits for impromptu investigations. Mack and I had our doubts about the Butcher Brothers of Baileyville.

“Bowditch!” McQuarrie had abused his throat with liquor and tobacco for four and a half decades, and you could hear it in his voice over the phone. “I had a feeling I’d hear from you today. I was hoping it was just heartburn from Peg’s chili. What’s the rumpus, kid?” Mack spoke like a person who’d learned English by watching Jimmy Cagney movies.

I cut to the chase. “Someone shot up six moose on Elizabeth Morse’s private estate.”

“Christ on a cracker.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That about sums it up.”

“They take any meat?”

“No. It was just someone riding around and killing things for kicks.”

I heard a woman’s voice in the background, asking him a question. The line went dead for a second while Mack clamped a hand over the receiver. He came back, his voice overloud against the new sound of a bone saw starting up at the butcher shop. “So where do you want to meet?”

I gave him the directions to the new gate. He told me he’d be there in half an hour. He added that he was bringing “company.” He didn’t elaborate.

“The L.T.’s gonna fucking love this,” he said, using the division nickname for the lieutenant.

“Are you speaking ironically?”

“You’re the college boy. You figure it out.”

McQuarrie was my third sergeant in three years as a warden. The first, Kathy Frost, was the best by far: one of the only women in the service, funny, smart, and hard as nails. To this day, she remained among my closest friends, and I wished I could somehow reach across administrative divisions and pull her from the midcoast to eastern Maine to help me with this investigation. My second sergeant was Rivard, and all I could say about that experience was that it had been mercifully brief. McQuarrie didn’t strike me as a bad guy, but he was a conventional thinker who tended to follow his young lieutenant’s orders and then gripe about them behind his back. I guess that was what happened when you were pushing sixty-three and the finish line was just down the hill.

Billy Cronk was standing above the cow moose with his fists clenched, staring at the carcass the way a person looks into a campfire: mesmerized.

“Billy?”

“I’m trying to think of the assholes I know who might’ve done this.”

“Any names spring to mind?”

“Yeah, the whole fucking phone book. You know how popular Ms. Morse is around here.” He glanced at me with his lip twisted into a smile. “I ain’t so popular myself now that people know who I’m working for. Aimee’s brother won’t even talk to me. Kyle works over to Skillens’ lumber mill. He says I picked my side and I’m going to have to live with the consequences, like he’d prefer his nephews and niece just went hungry.”

I could sympathize with Billy’s plight, but I understood his brother-in-law’s argument, too. Skillens’ was the largest employer in the region, a historic sawmill built in the nineteenth century, when there were still miles of virgin forest in eastern Maine. The company had once owned the land on which we were standing, until hard times had forced it to sell out to Elizabeth Morse. I’d heard Skillens’ was losing big money since Morse cut off the supply of quality hardwood. The mood at the mill was that of a deathwatch.

Sometimes life pushes you to make hard choices. People pretend they can spend their whole lives standing on the sidelines, as if taking a stand and not taking a stand are different things, when really they are both ways of choosing. One’s just more cowardly than the other. As a game warden, I knew what it was like to be hated for no other reason than my uniform. Billy had made a choice, too, even if he didn’t fully understand the ramifications yet.

“Let’s go talk with your employer,” I said. “It sounds like it might be better if she hears what happened from me.”

“It won’t help,” Billy said.

I had a feeling he might be right.

4

Elizabeth Morse’s mansion was like nothing I’d seen before. The descriptions I’d heard around town didn’t do it justice.

It had been built in the form of a compound, with a four-story residence overlooking the lake and a cluster of smaller guest cottages, boathouses, and work spaces built around the edges. The main building looked like the sort of grand hotel you might expect to find on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Its foundation was of great gray fieldstones carefully chosen so that all the heavy slabs fitted perfectly together without needing cement. The logs, as long as telephone poles, glowed like new copper in the morning sunlight. Two enormous stone chimneys rose from the steeply pitched roofline, and long balconies perched along the higher floors. There were windows everywhere, tall panels of glass to soak up the sunlight. The mansion had been constructed at the tip of a natural point of land, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that nearly every room had a view of Sixth Machias Lake.