Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (32 page)

I radioed the dispatcher to tell her I was on the scene and to see whether I could raise my fellow warden.

“Bard,” I said, “where are you?”

“Bowditch? Is that you? I’m inside my truck.”

“Are you OK?”

“The bullet grazed my fucking head. The blood keeps running into my eyes.”

Head wounds tend to bleed heavily, so it didn’t surprise me that Bard had panicked. I probably would have, too, if I’d been shot.

“Is Chubby still inside?” I asked, aware that if he had a police scanner—and most rural Mainers did, especially the inveterate lawbreakers—that he might be eavesdropping on our conversation.

“He hasn’t come out the door, and there’s no back way out of there.”

I unfastened my shotgun from its holder. “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to come up to your truck.”

“Ten-four,” he replied.

I pushed open my door and hopped out, keeping my body low to the ground, holding the heavy Mossberg with its sling around my wrist to steady my aim. Across the road from the camper, the hill fell steeply amid birches, beeches, and poplars. I figured I could circle around through the trees, using the embankment as cover.

I had to steady myself against tree trunks to keep from sliding on the fallen leaves down the hill. My torso was slick with perspiration beneath my ballistic vest, and I felt both hot and cold at the same time. Once I’d swung around below Bard’s truck, I had to climb the hill again. The forest floor was wet from where the morning frost was melting away, and the leaves came off beneath my boots in layers. The air rising from the ground carried the nutty odor of decaying vegetation.

Eventually, I managed to pull myself out of the ditch beneath the passenger side of Bard’s truck. I knocked at the door. It swung open suddenly from the pull of gravity, and I nearly toppled backward down the hillside to avoid being clipped in the shoulder. Bard thrust his bloody face at me. He was sprawled across both seats, his feet jammed beneath the steering wheel, and he had clamped a raincoat against his wounded skull. He looked like he’d spilled a can of red paint over his head.

“Took you long enough,” he said, trying to blink the blood out of his eyes.

“How are you doing?”

“It stings like a motherfucker. But I’m all right, I guess.”

“So what happened here?”

Bard rubbed at his eyes but succeeded only in rearranging the smeared pattern on his face. “He shot me is what happened. Just opened fire out the window while I was sitting here. The glass exploded and the bullet clipped me in the head. Son of a bitch!”

The concept that LeClair had spontaneously started shooting didn’t strike me as persuasive. There had to be more to the story. At the moment, I needed to focus on defusing the situation or at least stalling until backup arrived. “You said you returned fire?”

“Yeah, I emptied my magazine into the camper. He hasn’t shot at me again, so maybe I got lucky.”

So, if I understood what Bard was telling me, he had pulled his sidearm and fired blindly into the Airstream. Self-defense excuses a lot, but law-enforcement officers aren’t supposed to discharge their weapons without knowing what else their bullets might strike. The attorney general had personally interrogated me when I’d shot a sociopath who’d cracked my head open with a crowbar. I’d barely escaped that interview with my badge.

“Stay here,” I said, pulling away from the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To see if he’s OK.”

He twisted his mouth and blinked several times in quick succession. “What about me?”

I didn’t answer that I expected him to live. I didn’t say anything, in fact, because at that precise moment a shot sounded from the camper, and I dropped, face-first, to the ground.

“He’s shooting again!” Bard said, as if I had somehow missed the news. He reached for his SIG, which he must have reloaded while he was waiting for me. Then he sat up and, with his bloody eyelids stuck together, shot at the camper through what was left of the driver’s window.

“Stop it! Bard, stop it!”

He gave no indication of having heard me. He didn’t stop shooting until the receiver ejected the fifteenth .357 cartridge from the magazine. One of the red-hot cases bounced off my leg, leaving a burn in the fabric.

A blue cloud of gunpowder smoke drifted over my head. “Goddamn it,” I said. “He wasn’t shooting at us.”

Bard continued to stare up at the Airstream. “What?”

“That shot was muffled.”

I rose from my knees and peered over the hood of the truck. Even from a distance, I could see the bullet holes in the metal skin of the Airstream. In his rage and blindness, Bard had mostly managed to miss the camper, but a few of his rounds had found their marks.

Holding the shotgun across my body, ready to bring the barrel up if need be, I darted around the front of the Sierra and ran in a straight line at the front door. If Chubby had been taking aim through one of the cracked windows, he could easily have ended my life with a single shot. But I was certain that the fat man wasn’t pointing a gun at me.

“Bowditch!” I heard Bard shout. “Bowditch! What the fuck?”

I grabbed the metal handle of the door and gave it a twist. An odor spilled out in my face: a miasma of dirty dishes, stale marijuana smoke, and unwashed bed linens. I craned my neck to see inside. The interior was dim except for where the sunlight filtered in through the dusty windows.

I didn’t recognize the Indian boy, although I found myself unsurprised to see him. There had been a reason Chubby didn’t want to let Bard see what was happening inside his trailer. The boy’s small body was propped against a blood-drenched cushion. He was naked except for his tight white underwear. There was a bullet hole in his neck from where one of Bard’s stray rounds had pierced the carotid artery.

Chubby lay on his back across the fixed table that occupied the center of the camper. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and denim coveralls, a strap loose over one shoulder. He was barefoot. His eyes were wide open. The gun he’d shot himself with had fallen from his burned mouth. I wouldn’t have pegged LeClair for a suicide, didn’t think he had it in him, but he must have known the torments that await child molesters in prison. In the end, the fat man had taken the easy way out.

35

The boy’s name was Marky Parker. One of the Passamaquoddy officers who arrived at the scene knew him. He said Marky had gotten into some trouble on the rez for drugs and alcohol, but nothing serious. He was a good kid, the policeman said.

“I didn’t know the boy was in there,” Bard told Sergeant McQuarrie. “Honestly, Mack, I had no idea.”

The paramedics had managed to staunch Bard’s wound with a powdered clotting agent and a linen bandage wrapped tightly around the skull. They’d even managed to clean most of the dried blood off his pug-nosed face with alcohol swabs, although the process had tinted his skin orange in places. The EMTs made him lie flat in the back of the ambulance as a precaution. Bard had already fainted once when he’d attempted to look inside the camper himself.

The injured warden stared up at us with wide, imploring eyes that still had flecks of blood stuck in the lashes. He was such a muscular, energetic man, it was strange to see him in a posture of such helplessness. “There was no way for me to know that Chubby had a kid in there with him,” he said. “You have to believe me.”

McQuarrie wore the expression of a man who has just received a call from his oncologist. His broad shoulders seemed bent, and his chin kept sinking against his barrel chest. He had a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, which made me think of a chipmunk carrying a nut.

Bard gave me a twitchy, uncertain smile. “Bowditch, you can back me up here.”

I stared hard into his gray eyes; they reminded me at that moment of dirty nickels. But I didn’t say a word.

“Let me just tell you what happened from the beginning,” Bard said to McQuarrie.

The sergeant spat brown saliva onto the ground. “Stop talking, Jeremy.”

“But I’ve got nothing to hide.”

A vein began to pulse in my neck. “Listen to the sergeant, Bard.”

In a hoarser-than-usual voice, McQuarrie said, “You’ll have plenty of chances to tell it to the state cops and the AG’s office. They’re going to want a detailed statement on how this happened. I suggest you bring your lawyer to the interviews. In the meantime, my advice is to keep your trap shut.”

From his back on the gurney, Bard gave us a defiant glare. “They’re going to pay me while I’m suspended, though. I’m still going to get paid, right?”

“You’ll get your money,” I said.

Then I walked off to watch the activity around the camper.

Lieutenant Zanadakis had done a U-turn on his way to Machias and arrived shortly after the Passamaquoddy police. The deputy sheriff who had been directing traffic at Briar’s crash scene had sped over, only to be given the same thankless job here. Wardens Bayley and Sullivan stood talking beside their patrol trucks at the periphery of the action. Every few minutes, another cruiser would arrive. The sheriff, I’d heard, was on her way, along with the district attorney and the medical examiner. The attorney general would be sending one of his people, too.

I kept thinking about my last conversation with Chubby, how he’d called me in a panic, hoping I could persuade Bard to stop harassing him. It was hard for me to have much sympathy for a con man and drug dealer who had entertained half-naked kids in the privacy of his camper. LeClair probably deserved his violent end. The boy didn’t, though. The image of his blood-soaked body was seared into my brain in a way that made me think I’d carry it around forever. The fact that Marky was a Passamaquoddy lent this shooting an awkward political dimension, given the tensions that always existed between the tribe and the state of Maine. I had a feeling that powerful forces would demand a sacrificial animal be thrown onto the pyre. Jeremy Bard was about to get his ass roasted.

“And I thought this was going to be a good day,” Mack said in my ear. “First, Bilodeau gets those ballistic results. Then we arrest KKK without anyone firing a single shot. You’d think at my age I’d know better.”

“Maybe this is just one of those cursed investigations,” I said. “No matter what we do, it all turns to shit.”

“Do you believe in curses, kid?”

“I’m starting to.”

Mack let out a sigh that smelled of Skoal wintergreen. “So what do you think really happened here? Give it to me straight.”

“There are black dents in the door of the Airstream,” I said. “You can’t see them because the door is open, but I noticed the scuff marks before when I approached the camper. I bet the dents match the bottom of Bard’s boot. I think he came here trying to provoke Chub into doing something crazy. You heard the way Rivard laid into him this morning. Bard wanted to be the hero. He caught Chubby fondling a half-naked kid and spooked LeClair into opening fire. We’ll probably never know how it unfolded.”

“You don’t expect him to tell the truth?”

“Do you?”

I’d always had a cynical streak in me. It was just one of the emotional scars my father had inflicted on my character during my childhood. But my frequent bouts of pessimism had always been counterbalanced by a naive idealism: a belief that justice could be brought to the affairs of mankind, not in every case, but often enough to be worth the trouble. A sense of righteousness had led me to join the Warden Service. Now it seemed as if every sentence I uttered came barbed with sarcasm. And I didn’t like what I heard.

Once again, the state police would need to get a formal statement from me: the second in less than twenty-four hours. The deaths of Chubby LeClair and Marky Parker had pushed Briar out of my thoughts for a short while, but when I closed my eyes, I found myself returned instantly to the bend in the road where her car had gone airborne. Her broken body was another image I realized I would never exorcise from my haunted head.

*   *   *

The sky was growing dark and the trees had taken on silhouettes that reminded me of deformed men by the time Zanadakis finally gave me permission to leave. I’d already told my story three times: once to the detective, once to an assistant attorney general, and once to Sheriff Rhine. I’d probably need to tell the tale a fourth time when the Warden Service conducted its own internal affairs investigation into Jeremy Bard’s actions on this cold day in October.

On the drive home, I checked my messages and found a text from my former sergeant, Kathy Frost: “I heard the news today. Oh boy.”

I wasn’t sure what news she meant: Briar’s death, Karl Khristian’s arrest, or the shootings in Plantation No. 21. Probably all of the above. I missed Kathy’s wicked sense of humor. Her jokes had brought me back from many dark places in my rookie years, and it was probably no coincidence that my misgivings about the Warden Service had escalated after I’d been transferred from her squad. That was one of the reasons I’d been avoiding her. I didn’t want reminders of a time when I’d worked for supervisors I liked and respected. Better not to think about those days.

There was nothing at all on the phone from my stepfather—no texts, no e-mails, no voice mail. I needed to see my mom. I decided I would try Neil again after I’d microwaved a couple of burritos back at the hacienda.

Whatever plans I was making flew away like so many scared birds when I pulled up to my cabin and my headlights showed Billy Cronk sitting on my porch steps. He was wearing his camouflage hunting jacket, blue jeans, and heavy boots, and his golden hair was loose about his shoulders. He leaned forward, with his shoulders hunched, resting his forearms on his knees in a contemplative pose. On the pine needles at his feet, five pint-size Budweiser cans lay scattered.

I hadn’t left the porch light on, so when I shut off the truck, he disappeared back into the shadows. I reached for the SureFire I wore on my belt and shined it at his tanned face.

“What the hell, Billy?”

He squinted into the light. “I saved one for you.” He raised the last beer in the six-pack as if it were a peace offering.

“Thanks but no thanks. What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize for being a turd the other day.”