Winter at the Door (21 page)

The walls, floor, and fixtures in there were all splattered with blood and brain matter, so she guessed already what she was about to confront: a small tiled room, a tub or shower enclosure, and a shotgun, fired by pushing the trigger with a yardstick or some similar tool, or by pulling on it with a string looped back around the gunstock.

Only a shotgun made that kind of a mess. Steeling herself against the thick, nauseating smell in the room, Lizzie stepped in and stood by the sink to take in the details:

Shaving things on a shelf. A wastebasket containing a few used tissues. Tooth glass and toothbrush. And in the tub a man’s body, fully dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a pair of sneakers, but no longer possessing anything that could even remotely be said to resemble a head.

He’d chosen the string-around-the-gunstock method. “Okay,” she said. “Anything special I should notice?”

Chevrier shook his head. “That’s his shotgun. I’ve been out hunting with him many a time. But this,” he said, “isn’t how he would do it.”

Dylan looked in. “Cody, you want me to drive Hannah Dodson home? She walked over from her place, but it seems kind of harsh to let her just …”

“Yeah, Dylan, thanks. Make sure someone’s there with her, all right? And we’ll wait here for you,” said Chevrier.

“I wanted you to see it,” he told Lizzie when Dylan had gone. “So when you hear later about how it’s open and shut—”

Something struck her; she glanced back into the bathroom. “How sick was he?”

The collection of pill bottles on the windowsill consisted of at least a dozen small orange plastic containers with white printed pharmacy labels.

“As bad off as Carl Bogart, maybe worse,” said Chevrier. “Hey, guys get old,” he added sadly. “Anyway, he had pancreatic cancer, couple of months left. Another reason they’ll say it was suicide, besides the method.”

And besides the fact that it was hard to fake a thing like this, she thought, because despite the chaotic first impression it made, blood spatter came in recognizable patterns. You could drug a man, lay him down, shoot him, then pose him as if he’d done it himself, taking care to get all the details just right: the angle, the point-blank distance, the powder tattooing, even.

You’d still have a telltale hole in the back-splatter, though, caused by your body being smack-dab in the bloody middle of it when the gun went off.

“You think somebody talked him into it? Or threatened him?”

That way, the evidence would look right. And a guy dying of cancer might not be hard to persuade.

On the other hand, though, what could you threaten him with that was worse than his own near-certain imminent fate?

She followed Chevrier back out onto the porch. “Why are you so sure he
didn’t
kill himself in there?”

Chevrier turned to her. “Weren’t you listening? Terminal cancer, already it was painful, and he was expecting worse. A lot worse.”

The lightbulb went on: those pills. “He had another method planned? Something not so …”

In her experience suicides were of two kinds: the ones who didn’t want to hurt someone on their way out and the ones who did. A self-administered dose of shotgun shell argued strongly for the latter variety.

Just ask that poor woman who found him …

“Bingo,” Chevrier replied sarcastically. “All those bottles in there on the windowsill? They’re full. Pain pills, sleeping medications, he’d been saving them up. Got a supply of anti-nausea medicine, too, the kind that really works, so he wouldn’t puke ’em all back up after he …”

He stopped, sudden tears coming into his voice. “He was a good guy, Wilson Sirois was. Game warden all his life, loved being out there, knew the woods way up along the Canadian border like his backyard.”

Chevrier kicked at a clod of dirt left by one of the cops that had been in and out of Sirois’s house. “He was gonna go out there when the time came, had his spot all picked, a nice little glade by a stream we used to fish. And I …”

Lizzie waited, looking out across the valley from the long front porch. Far to the west, the northern Appalachian mountains shone white with snow at their tops, the endless forests below a greenish-black charcoal scribble.

“You know all this because you were going to go with him,” she finished for Chevrier. “To help him, and stay with him?”

He nodded, starting down the porch steps. “Yeah. That was the plan. He said he would let me know.”

Dylan pulled the Blazer back up into the yard and sat behind the wheel waiting. “But I guess that won’t be happening now. He did it without me. Yeah, sure he did,” he snarled sarcastically.

Chevrier spat on the half-frozen ground, looked around in bleak misery. “Freakin’ epidemic of it around here, wouldn’t you say?”

They climbed into the Blazer. “What if the weather got too bad, though?” The weather forecaster on the radio this morning had been hinting at snow, and there’d be more of it soon.

And it didn’t sound as if Sirois was going to last until a spring thaw. “Or he was too sick to do it.”

Or
, she didn’t add,
if it all just went south too fast for Wilson Sirois to swallow his pills
.

“Or if something else went wrong.” Sirois could’ve ended up in an ambulance instead of by his stream in any number of ways. “And anyway, as a method, pills are iffy.”

No need to go into detail. But she’d seen pill overdoses back when she was on patrol, many of them deliberate.

She had not, however, seen very many successful ones. The human gut tended to rebel before enough of the substance had been absorbed, or at least that was how it had been explained to her by a Boston emergency-room resident, one long-ago midnight just before Christmas. Even anti-nausea meds might not help.

Chevrier understood. “Sirois knew everybody and they knew him. There wasn’t an ambulance tech or ER doc in the County who’d have resuscitated him.”

He took a breath. Dylan drove carefully and well, keeping thoughtfully quiet. Not until they got to the highway and turned toward Bearkill did he speak up.

“The woman who found him says he was a retired game warden,” he said. “Does that mean he’d have been able to help find someone in the woods? Or a campsite way off the beaten track? Sick as he was, could he have gone along, or maybe at least helped out with suggestions from home?”

Nice one
, she thought about the connection he’d just made.
Some hidden place that a lifetime in the woods might’ve made the game warden aware of … a place where someone might be hiding a child?

Coming toward them, a boxy red and white emergency vehicle flashed its lights at the sight of the Blazer. No lights or siren running, though, and they weren’t racing anywhere, either.

They’d been told what awaited, no doubt, and who the hell would be in a rush to confront that?

“Yeah,” said Chevrier when the ambulance had passed, another county car with a deputy at the wheel right behind it.

“Sirois could’ve done that. Out in those woods, there, he was the man. Everyone around here knows it, too.”

His voice grew reminiscent as he recalled his dead friend; his second loss in a month, she realized.

“Yeah, you needed somebody located up there, he was the one you wanted out hunting for them. People said Wilson Sirois could find an eyelash in the Allagash, and it was true.”

At first, Margaret Brantwell thought she must simply have made some kind of mistake. Things had been noisy around the house all morning, what with the hired guys outside trying to get the last bales of hay under cover before the snow got here and the dogs barking in their pen, trying to get at the hired guys.

Also, the baby had been crying, fussy and not wanting to go down for his morning nap. But finally he’d quieted; she’d left him in his crib in the sunroom, a peace lily shading him and the small mechanical fountain she’d had put in when the room was added onto the house trickling pleasantly.

And then …
 She remembered very well thinking how lovely it all looked, and how glad she was to have time with her grandson even if he could be a little fussy now and then.

For a while she had thought she might never make peace with Missy again. Missy’s father was a proud man, and he’d taken his daughter’s pregnancy—and her refusal to name the baby’s dad—very hard. Margaret had been sorely torn, caught between her husband’s anger and her daughter’s obdurate stubbornness.

But little Jeffrey had won his grandfather over at last, as Margaret had been pleased to recall when she’d finally put the child down for his nap … or had she?

She looked around, not frightened yet but only perturbed at herself.
Silly. That must’ve been some other day
.

Which unfortunately was not out of the question. She knew she’d been forgetting things—losing thoughts, she called it to herself when she dared think of the mental blurry spots she had been having lately—and she must have misremembered this.

Of course she had. The baby would be up in the guest room that
she had fitted out for him with such pleasure, once Missy started letting him stay for the whole day while she worked.

Returning to the kitchen she took such pride in, all tile, granite, and stainless steel with new white cabinets and a center island, Margaret paused to grab a pile of clean cloth diapers still warm from the dryer and press her face into the sweetness left by boiling hot water and Ivory Snow soap flakes.

Then she went on upstairs, wondering distantly what it was that she’d been so worried about only moments ago. Humming, she placed the diapers in the hall cupboard now given over to baby things, the terrycloth onesies and tiny socks and the sweater she had knitted for him.
I should find that yarn and knit mittens …

Next she went into what had been the guest room. The crib, a white-painted maple one bought brand-new in a Bangor department store, came recommended for safety by
Consumer Reports
and held a properly firm baby mattress with a blue sheet and a blue fleece blanket; stuffed toys, plush bedding, and anything else a small child could smother in were forbidden, naturally.

Even the baby quilt she’d stitched for little Jeffrey was not allowed in there, so she’d draped it over the raised railing where its bonnet pattern showed prettily, appliquéd in gingham. Oh, how she loved being a grandmother, she thought, crossing to the baby’s crib and peering in.

And finding it empty.

“So, let me get this straight,” said Chevrier. “You think both hunters got killed, and Nussbaum, too, because one of the hunters was in the woods out there and saw someone? A little girl?”

They sat at a booth in Grammy’s Restaurant, their lunches barely touched. “Yeah. Sounds unlikely, huh? But that’s it,” said Dylan.

“And my guys, Sirois and Bogart and the other three, you think their deaths might be also hooked into it all somehow?”

Another nod, this one a good deal less certain, from Dylan. He’d ordered a seafood plate but looked as if chicken soup with saltines might suit him better.

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. He picked up a french fry, ate half of it, and put the rest down, swallowing more Coke instead.

“If Sirois really could’ve helped find that campsite, that’s a possible connection. For the rest of them, though …”

He sighed, leaning back uncomfortably as Lizzie got up from the booth. As she crossed to where the waitress was filling a tray full of water glasses, she heard Dylan add tactfully, “Let’s just see where it goes.”

She slid back into the booth in time to catch the tail end of Chevrier’s reply. “… so what do you suggest? ’Cause I can tell you right now, a search party that doesn’t know where to search out there might as well just—”

“No.” She picked up her sandwich, looked at both men over it. “Not a search. A tip line.”

She bit in and chewed industriously. If the sight of a guy in a pool of blood had been enough to ruin her appetite for very long, she’d have been dead of starvation by now.

“For the hunters, trappers. Loggers, too, maybe, as well as the game wardens. People who spend time out in the woods might see something.”

Watching her devour her meal, Chevrier slowly picked up one of the fried shrimp he’d ordered and put it into his mouth. It went down, and he took another, but not eagerly.

“Huh. Not a bad idea. You started on it yet?” he asked, and when she answered in the affirmative, he looked grimly impressed.

“Good. Way to take the initiative,” he said as the waitress arrived with the milk shake Lizzie had ordered for Dylan.

Then, seeing how rocky the detective looked with the sweat glistening in his hairline and his eyes pain-pinched, Chevrier paused in scarfing up his shrimp.

“Get a little of that down if you can,” he advised, “and take a pill, for God’s sake. You look like a damned ghost.”

He turned back to Lizzie. “But we don’t have to say why we want to find this place, right? Just tell guys, when they’re out in the woods, keep their eyes open. We just want them to call if they see anything and—”

“Right. All that’s under control,” said Lizzie, pleased that the move she’d made was meeting with the boss’s approval. She was about to say more when the diner’s front door swung open, letting in two patrons:

The veterinarian Trey Washburn was having lunch today with a pretty brunette wearing a short, silver-colored down jacket, slim jeans, and a pair of red cowboy boots. It was the veterinary technician she’d met a few nights earlier, Lizzie realized, but she hadn’t noticed then how attractive the girl was.

Looking over the room, Trey spotted her and waved, his face looking a lot friendlier than it had a couple of hours earlier.

Or maybe just smug. But then another new arrival hurried in: Missy Brantwell. Scanning the room swiftly, she rushed over, nearly colliding with a waitress in her hurry.

“Oh, thank God you’re here,” she babbled to Chevrier. “I saw the Blazer outside and I—”

Wiping his lips, Chevrier got to his feet as the room went silent, Missy’s frantic voice suddenly the only sound in it.

“Cody, the baby’s missing. Jeffrey was with my mom, but now he’s gone. We looked everywhere and he’s just not there.”