Paskagankee (8 page)

Mike could feel Shari looking at him as he stared out the window of the SUV, seeing not the wilderness of Paskagankee, Maine, during an early November storm, but a blue-collar suburb on the outskirts of Boston on a sweltering July evening. “I'm assuming the customer was unsuccessful?” she said finally.

“That's one way to put it. The perp put a bullet in the hero's head and then for good measure did his wife too, just to keep everyone else in line. That's when everything changed. We went from a posture of containment to one of attack. The moment he demonstrated his willingness to kill, especially multiple people at once, we knew we were running out of time and had to take action quickly.”

Mike paused and tried to collect himself. The whole scene came flooding back to him so fully and felt so real. He lived it day after day and night after night; he dreamed about it; it permeated his entire existence: The grit of the dirty pavement under his feet. The jitteriness and exhaustion resulting from adrenaline pounding through his body for hours with no outlet. The feeling of sweat running freely down the inside of his uniform shirt. The knowledge that innocent people had died and more were likely to unless something was done, and soon.

“Mike?”

He jumped, startled. He had been a couple of hundred miles away. He glanced across the SUV at Shari and saw the concern evident on her face. Her eyes were big and blue and beautiful. “Are you okay? You're white as a ghost.”

He chuckled shakily. His mouth was dry and the inside of the police vehicle felt stiflingly hot. “I'm fine. Where were we?”

“You don't have to do this, you know,” she said softly. “I understand if you just want to leave it in the past.”

“That's exactly the problem. I can't leave it in the past. It's with me every day, a living, breathing entity. It's become a part of who I am. Maybe telling the story will help, I don't know. I've never really talked about it with anyone, not even the shrink the department made me see afterward.”

“Okay. So, the father murdered two people in the bank in cold blood.”

“That's right.” Mike's hands shook as he gripped the steering wheel. His palms felt sweaty and slick and his stomach churned. “Anyway, Lieutenant Blackburn, who was in charge of the operation, told us to take the guy down if we were able to get a clear shot. This particular branch office had a big plate-glass window fronting the street, and the suspect had been sighted numerous times over the course of the afternoon and evening walking back and forth in front of it. He became extremely agitated after shooting the two victims and cut off all communication with the negotiator.

“The SWAT guys were preparing to storm the bank, but the lieutenant wanted to wait just a little longer before sending them in. He was afraid once they hit the door that more people would get slaughtered by the guy before SWAT could put him down, even if they used flash-bangs to disorient him. There were so many people inside that damned building that even if the guy fired randomly, he was a lock to hit other people. Blackburn rolled the dice, hoping the guy would take another stroll in front of the big window and one of us could take him out before he killed anyone else. It was a calculated risk.” Mike wiped his sweaty hands on his pants.

“You took the shot, didn't you?”

Mike took a deep, shaky breath and blew it out forcefully. “Oh, yeah.”

“And?”

“Well, the guy had been using employees as human shields all day. Whenever he walked around inside the bank, he pushed an innocent person around in front of him. This time, he did the same thing, but as he turned to retrace his steps, I had a clean shot for a split-second. So I took it.

“The thick plate glass deflected the path of the bullet even though it was almost a straight shot. It struck one of his hands, if you can believe that, and knocked the weapon to the floor. Several hostages jumped him after he fell and subdued him.”

Mike felt Officer Dupont eyeing him closely despite the fact he continued staring straight ahead through the windshield. “So you were a hero. You saved all those people and, in the process, didn't even have to kill the suspect. All-in-all it sounds like a pretty good day to me.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed bleakly. “A pretty good day. There was only one problem. After the bullet struck the perp's hand, it ricocheted at an angle down and to the left, where he had handcuffed his daughter to a desk leg. It struck the little girl in the head and she died instantly.”

The inside of the SUV grew silent. The tension was electric. “But you have to know that wasn't your fault,” Shari protested. “That was nothing more than the worst kind of terrible luck.”

Mike wiped his forehead with his uniform sleeve. He knew it wasn't hot in the car, but it felt like a sauna to him. This was the visceral reaction he felt every time he thought about that awful day in Revere, Massachusetts. “Yes, I know that,” he finally said. “The department conducted a full hearing afterward, just as they do whenever an officer is involved in a shooting. I was completely exonerated.

“Of course, the poor little girl's family didn't see it that way—what was left of her family, that is—and who could blame them? From their perspective the people who were being paid to protect her from harm were the ones that killed her. The grandparents filed suit against the city for millions—a lawsuit which is still pending, by the way.

“After that, the mayor's office informed the chief it would probably be best if I just went away quietly, so I did.”

Shari Dupont sat motionlessly, mouth agape, her face flushed with anger and her eyes flashing. Even from deep inside his personal hell, Mike thought her emotion made her look more beautiful than before, if that was possible. “You should have stayed and fought for your job,” she sputtered. “You did
nothing wrong!
They couldn't just fire you for doing your damned job!”

“You're not getting it,” he said, a faint smile crossing his face as he took in Shari's reaction. “I wasn't fired. They made a suggestion, one with which I agreed wholeheartedly, and I took it. I had been considering getting away for quite a while, trying something new, but my wife loved Revere and didn't want to move. It was where she had grown up, where her family and friends were and still are.”

“I didn't know you were married,” Shari said in surprise.

“Five years,” he answered. “But after the shooting things were never the same. There was so much negative publicity, so much pressure on both of us, none of which was her fault, she just couldn't handle it. She left me four months later. I don't blame her, really,” he said reflectively. “I wasn't the same guy after that shooting.

“Anyway, like I said, I had been wanting to do something different for a long time, I just wasn't able to decide what it might be. I figured there was nothing holding me in Revere anymore, so when I read about the opening for chief here in Paskagankee, I decided to give it a shot. Little did I know the last guy to hold the job would want out so badly, I would be hired almost immediately. Now, here I am.”

Mike breathed deeply. The temperature in the SUV was returning to normal for him, and the nausea he felt every time he thought about that horrible day in July sixteen months ago was beginning to ease.

“That's quite a story,” Shari said quietly. “I remember seeing something about it on the news, even way down at the FBI Academy in Virginia, but I had no idea how horrifying the tragedy was.”

“You want to hear something funny?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the slick road. He still clutched the steering wheel with both hands like a drowning man holding a life preserver.

“Sure.”

“That night was the only time I ever fired my gun on duty. I drew it plenty of times, shot thousands of rounds at the practice range, but that was the one and only time I ever actually fired on someone. And I killed a little girl.”

10

CAROLYN SCHERER POUNDED DOWN the narrow path carved out of the thick woods, barely noticing and not caring that the weather was steadily worsening, making the forest floor slippery and dangerous for running. Carolyn had fallen in love with the sport years ago, when doctors advised her she was grossly overweight, and if she didn't begin exercising and slimming down, she could expect an early and exceedingly unpleasant death.

Carolyn had started out cautiously, walking short distances at first and then increasing the lengths of those walks, discovering in the process that she loved being outdoors. After dropping enough weight to run safely, she began jogging, slowly and over short distances at first. Now she was hooked. Carolyn Scherer was officially a die-hard distance runner. Carolyn Scherer was not about to let a little unpleasant weather interfere with her daily routine.

She had started out twenty minutes ago on her favorite route, which would take her from the back yard of her Mountain Road home, through the thickly forested woods along a little-used hunting trail, and then back to her house along the side of the sparsely populated road. The entire route was over six miles long, and Carolyn ran it practically every day.

By now, she was deep inside the massive forest pressing in on Paskagankee from all sides. The steadily falling sleet and freezing rain coated every surface in rapidly thickening ice. Tree branches drooped dramatically, some blocking the path. Several times already, Carolyn had been forced to jump over or detour around huge limbs.

The disturbing thought crossed Carolyn's mind that should she slip on the ice and fall; she probably would not be found until spring. Cell phones were useless because coverage was virtually nonexistent out here. She shivered, only partly from the bitter cold and freezing rain.

Rounding a corner and concentrating all her attention on navigating the path, Carolyn almost missed seeing the large mass of dark red, partially frozen liquid—it was almost brown, really—flashing past in her peripheral vision under the trees to her right. Several yards beyond the odd-looking splatter, some instinct she couldn't identify made her circle back. Curiosity overrode a vaguely-formed feeling of dread in her gut.

Reaching the spot where she had glimpsed the reddish-brown slush, Carolyn peered into a stand of trees now off her left. She had glimpsed the strange sight for just a half-second and then only out of the corner of her eye, but she could have sworn it looked exactly like a pool of blood. But of course it wasn't a pool of blood, it couldn't be, because how in the world would a pool of blood end up way out here in this isolated area?

Carolyn stopped and looked and almost couldn't find what she was certain she had seen just moments before. The freezing rain was driving hard now, slanting sideways, dripping off the brim of her New England Patriots baseball cap and obscuring her vision.

There! Under an oak tree denuded by the season, a large puddle of what did indeed appear to be partially frozen slushy blood covered the ground, diluted by the elements but still quite possibly blood.

She examined her discovery with equal parts curiosity and revulsion and then leaped back, nearly losing her footing on the slippery ground, choking off a scream as a drop of the liquid fell from above onto the growing puddle, narrowly missing her neck. Horrified and confused, Carolyn forced herself to look up into the trees as her heart pounded out a beat she was certain could be heard way off in Paskagankee.

Alone in the forest, Carolyn Scherer let loose a scream. Impaled on a dead branch high above her was a human head.

A man's head.

Its eyes were open with a look of terror frozen on its face as blood dripped slowly but steadily onto the ground at Carolyn's feet. Strings of tendons or muscles or ligaments, Carolyn didn't know which and didn't care, hung several inches below the grotesquely severed neck, and the blood rolled sluggishly along them before gathering into bulbous balls at the ends and falling thickly to the ground.

And Carolyn screamed.

11

PROFESSOR KENNETH DYE'S HOUSE was located in a modest Orono subdivision of small ranch homes. The neighborhood was within easy commuting distance of the University of Maine, and Sharon guessed the homes had all been slapped together at the same time, maybe a half-century ago, to provide affordable housing for university students and staff. The street was quiet as the Paskagankee Police Department Ford Explorer worked its way up the professor's driveway, easing to a stop behind what Shari assumed to be the professor's car, a Toyota Prius of recent vintage.

Smoke curled out of the chimney on the east side of the house as she double-checked the address she had written on a slip of paper, matching it with the number screwed in tarnished brass to the wood frame next to the front door. “This is it,” she said, looking at her watch, “and only two hours and forty-five minutes after we started. Not bad considering we had to travel almost fifty miles in this God-awful weather.”

She had kept the conversation intentionally light after Mike finished relating the tale of that tragic night sixteen months ago. Shari was no medical professional, but she had become concerned he might suffer a nervous breakdown while he was talking. It was obvious he had been affected deeply by the shooting and even though his head knew the little girl's death was nothing more than a horrible accident, she could see plainly that in his heart he refused to stop blaming himself.