The Precipice (22 page)

After I left Stacey with Charley, I had driven to my rented house in southern Maine, where the Portland suburbs faded into the woods and cornfields around Sebago Lake, arriving just before dawn. DeFord disbanded the search team later that morning, after the corpses had been removed from the base of the cliff and taken in a repurposed ambulance to the office of the state medical examiner in Augusta. The investigation into the cause of death continued, but I wasn’t to be part of it. I heard that Pinkham wasn’t ready to accept the prevailing wisdom that the women had been killed by wild animals, not until the forensic pathologist signed off on the theory. In the meantime, the warden investigator would continue to explore the human element.

Others were less circumspect. As Stacey had predicted, the national media seized on the salacious story of the beautiful young girls eaten by wolves. That Samantha and Missy were so-called Bible students only added to the tale’s juiciness. I did my best to stay away from television sets and tabloids, but I couldn’t escape the rumor mill that was the Maine Warden Service. I learned from Tommy Volk that the Reverend Mott had gone on the morning news shows as a spokesman for the families. There was no doubt in the preacher’s mind that Samantha and Missy had been chased to their deaths by coyotes, and he was open in his condemnation of the state of Maine, as if somehow the searchers were at fault for not knowing the women had gone missing over a week earlier. There was talk of a lawsuit—for what and against whom, I had no idea.

Just as the story was about to be shoved aside by a new wave of fighting in the Middle East, a student at Pentecost University appeared in front of the cameras to tell the world that Samantha and Missy had secretly been lovers. Now there was sex to go along with the violence and religion. The university refused to comment on the rumors, and the Reverend Mott disappeared abruptly from the airwaves.

To quiet the panic and minimize the bad publicity threatening Maine’s tourism industry, the governor issued an executive order, placing a bounty of one hundred dollars on every coyote killed around Moosehead Lake. Driven by money, revenge, and bloodlust, dozens of hunters and trappers took to the woods. Biologists were dispatched to tagging stations to receive the dead animals and take blood and hair samples to compare against the evidence found in the forest where Samantha’s and Missy’s bones were discovered. Stacey was pulled away from the study she had been doing on white-tailed deer and stationed back in Monson.

At the end of her first day collecting pelts, she called me from Ross’s Rooming House, where she was staying.

“A German shepherd, Mike.” Her voice sounded dry, as if she had yelled herself hoarse.

“What?”

“Some asshole shot a goddamned German shepherd today. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him it was somebody’s pet, even after I showed him the nails had just been clipped. He just wanted his hundred bucks.”

“Oh God, Stacey.”

“Troy Dow and his relatives brought in thirty-three animals. Thirty-three! Some had been snared, others shot. One had an arrow broken off in it. For all I know, they imported half of them from other places around the state. It’s like a fucking gold rush here.”

“People are scared.”

“Scared and greedy,” she said. “I met a bunch of the Dows today. Trevor, Terrence, Todd, Tara—there seems to be a pattern. I guess the family matriarch is named Tempest. People think she’s a witch because she never comes down off her hilltop. She just sits up there cursing people.”

“Have you met Toby yet?”

“The developmentally disabled boy who hangs out at the general store? I asked Pearlene—she’s the woman who owns the place—why she allows him to beg money from her customers, and she says everyone is terrified of the Dows, herself included. The whole inbred clan lives together in a compound in the woods. Supposedly, the settlement is booby-trapped with all sorts of trip wires and explosives. In addition to the usual poaching and drug dealing, they’ve got a racket going as caretakers for the cottage owners around Hebron Lake. If you don’t hire them to watch your place for the winter, they’ll burglarize it or just burn it down. It’s like the hillbilly mafia up here.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got my pink canister of pepper spray.” She paused when I didn’t respond. “That was a joke. But if my body shows up, gang-raped and shot in the head, you’ll know who to talk to first.”

I pinched my brow between my thumb and forefinger. “That’s not funny, Stacey.”

“None of this is funny. It’s sickening is what it is. Today was one of the worst days in my life. Pickups were coming in stacked with dead animals, one after the other. I’ve never seen slaughter like this, and people were just gleeful about it. Guys were teasing each other because they’d shot more coyotes than their buddies. Others were pissed off at me that I wouldn’t pay them cash and told them they’d have to send in a voucher to be paid. Not one of them mentioned Samantha or Missy, either. Those women were just an excuse for these assholes to commit mass murder—or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if I can do this, Mike. I’m just praying that the medical examiner will come out with a statement tomorrow saying that the coyotes didn’t kill them, so that the bounty gets called off.”

I hesitated before I spoke. I respected Stacey immensely but was obliged in my job to consider all possibilities. “We don’t know what the forensics report will say.”

“What do you mean?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

“What if the results are inconclusive? There’s also the chance that—”

“What?”

“It happened before up in Canada. Remember Taylor Mitchell?”

Stacey seemed to go away for a long time. I wondered if the call had been dropped.

“Not you, too,” she said at last.

That was when she hung up on me.

*   *   *

The next morning, I met Kathy Frost for eggs and coffee at a breakfast place in Lewiston. She was on her way to have some tests done at Central Maine Medical Center. I didn’t ask what kind of tests, but I assumed they had something to do with her having been shot. Some of the steel pellets were still lodged inside her torso and would be as long as she lived.

My former sergeant came through the door of Simones Hot Dog Restaurant. She looked better than the last time I’d seen her—but not much.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Like a road-killed raccoon. Is it that obvious?”

The waitress came over with a coffeepot to fill our cups. She blinked her heavy eyelashes at me and said how much she liked my uniform, causing me to redden in spite of myself. I ordered a chili and cheese omelette. Kathy opted for oatmeal.

“Your gastrointestinal system must hate you,” she said.

“I have an iron stomach.”

“Wait until you hit forty.”

Two old geezers at the next booth were arguing with each other in singsong French. One of them—it sounded like he owned apartment buildings—had a gripe against
les Somalis.

Lewiston was a former mill town. At the turn of the twentieth century, the textile factories along the Androscoggin River had employed tens of thousands of Canadian
é
migr
é
s, my great-grandparents among them. In those days, fancy restaurants had signs in their doors saying
NO FRENCH ALLOWED
, and children at the Catholic schools were slapped by nuns for not speaking English. In time, the mills began to close as the manufacturing jobs went to Asia. Lewiston’s population plummeted, until a new wave of immigrants arrived from Somalia. Now it was commonplace to see dark-skinned women in head scarves carrying bags of groceries along Lisbon Street. Inevitably, there were culture clashes. The Lewiston mayor appeared on national TV telling the Somalis to stop coming and draining the city’s welfare services. A man tossed a pig’s head into a downtown mosque.

The names change, I thought, but hate reigns eternal.

“Stacey is mad at me,” I said.

“What did you do now?”

I sat back in the mustard-yellow booth. “Why do you assume I’m to blame?”

By way of an answer, Kathy raised an eyebrow over the rim of her coffee mug.

I lowered my voice so that the Franco men wouldn’t overhear. “She’s convinced that the medical examiner is going to find that Samantha and Missy were murdered,” I said. “She thinks the governor’s bounty program is a waste of time and money. She says he’s just whipping up fear for political purposes.”

“That sounds right to me.”

“You don’t think it’s possible they were killed by coyotes?”

“Possible, but unlikely.”

The waitress arrived with our plates. I waited until she had finished refilling our mugs to return to the conversation.

“In that case, who do you think killed them?” I said.

Kathy doused her hot cereal with milk. “They could have just fallen.”

“Both of them?”

She sighed, glanced around at the nearby booths and tables, then leaned over her bowl.

“If I tell you something, I need you to keep it a secret. Remember that FBI agent who was at the command post the night you came back from Chairback Gap, the man who never blinked?”

“Genoways?”

“You didn’t wonder why he was there?”

I lowered my fork. “Don’t tell me the rumors about the serial killer are true.”

“Over the past five summers, there have been a series of strange deaths and disappearances on the AT. It started when a young guy in Virginia was found dead in a creek, as if he’d gotten carried away by a flash flood. The only problem was, he had no water in his lungs. The next year, a couple of day hikers in Pennsylvania came across a woman hanging by a bungee cord from a tree. It looked like a suicide, but her family said she had no reason to kill herself. There were similar unexplained incidents in the Adirondacks and Vermont. And then there was the Iraq vet who disappeared in New Hampshire last summer.”

I hadn’t heard of the other occurrences, but I knew about the missing Marine. He had lost one of his legs in an IED attack in Fallujah and was hiking the Appalachian Trail on his prosthetic limb to raise awareness about the plight of wounded warriors. The man had vanished without a trace in the Presidential Range during a stormy week when New England was being battered by the remnants of a tropical hurricane. The working theory was that he’d wandered off the trail and fallen into a gorge.

“The FBI thinks all these incidents are related?” I asked.

“They aren’t sure. Except for the fact that they’re all unexplained, there isn’t anything to tie them together.”

“Other than the northward pattern.”

“Right. After Vermont and New Hampshire, Maine would be next. With the hiking season almost over, it was looking like the connection had fallen apart. Then Samantha and Missy disappeared.”

I tried a forkful of omelette but the chili had gone cold. “How come this is the first I’m hearing of this?”

“Because the Bureau doesn’t want to start a panic. Hundreds of thousands of people hike the AT every year—either the whole trail or just parts of it. What would happen if word got out that a serial killer was loose out there, especially when there’s no concrete proof it’s even true?”

“The FBI might not have wanted a panic, but that’s what they’ve got. The problem is that people are freaking out over man-eating coyotes.”

In college I had taken a couple of courses in psychology, na
ï
vely thinking it might help in my future career in law enforcement, and one of my instructors had given us tests where we were supposed to look for hidden images in television static. Most everyone in the class found something, but it turned out the experiment was rigged. There were no hidden numbers or words. It was all an illusion. The professor wanted to show us how the human brain searches for patterns where none exist. He said it was an evolutionary tool we’d developed to deal with uncertainty and helplessness—a way to find meaning in chaos.

“That explains Genoways’s interest in Chad McDonough,” I said, pushing aside my half-eaten omelette. “The kid told me he was a section hiker. What do you know about his whereabouts over the past five summers?”

“Genoways didn’t share that information with me.”

“What motive would someone have to murder strangers and make it look like accidents and suicides?” I asked.

Kathy shrugged. “Kicks? A sense of power? Knowing he was outwitting the hapless FBI? And who says the victims were strangers? The killer might’ve known one or more of them. He could have murdered the others as a means of misdirection. Didn’t you ever read Agatha Christie when you were a kid?”

“I was more of an Arthur Conan Doyle fan.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Kathy winced as she settled back against the hard plastic booth.

A depressing thought came to me. “If this is part of a pattern—if the same guy killed Samantha and Missy and the others—then we shouldn’t expect the medical examiner’s report to settle anything. All the other deaths have been inconclusive.”

“It might absolve Stacey’s coyotes at least. My guess is it will.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the Franco guys who’d been arguing in the booth behind me had left.

“I should apologize to her for not trusting her instincts,” I said.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do, Grasshopper.”

“That would be a first.”

Kathy gave me a wink and returned to her oatmeal. The waitress came by with the bill.

*   *   *

Before I drove back to my district, I sent Stacey an e-mail, asking if she wanted me to drive up to Monson after work. I could help out at the tagging station. Better to offer my apology in person, I thought.

Kathy’s news had rattled me. When Dani Tate had brought up the rumors of a serial killer stalking the Appalachian Trail, I had laughed them off as delusional. Human predators were an obsession of Hollywood, but there hadn’t been a mass murderer apprehended in Maine for as long as I could remember.

But what if Genoways was chasing a real person, and what if that person was someone I had met?

In my mind, I saw Chad McDonough’s half-baked smile again. Where had McDonut gone? There had been no sightings of the pudgy section hiker after Troy Dow had dropped him in downtown Greenville. The last I’d heard, his car was still parked at the Abol Bridge Campground with a boot on the wheel.