by Paul Doiron
My mother hadn’t taught me French, but I had spent enough time with my late grandparents that I could follow the thrust of what he was saying.
“What motel?” I asked.
“The Valley View.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Is it Angie Bouchard?”
Chasse Lamontaine didn’t ask how I knew the name, but his eyes widened from their usual squint. He nodded in the affirmative.
“A person driving by the motel this morning found her car parked behind the building, out of sight of the road. He recognized it as Angie’s. She was inside, dead. Somebody strangled her.”
30
Stan Kellam erupted at me this time. “You know Emmeline Bouchard’s daughter? And you didn’t say anything?”
“I stopped at her house in Presque Isle before I came here.”
Chasse seemed focused and alert. No longer laid-back, he was taking in every word.
“Enough bullshit,” said Kellam loudly enough that the dog barked at the far end of the house. “What are you really doing here? It has to do with Stevens, doesn’t it? He sent you to spy on me.”
“Charley has nothing to do with me being here.”
“That’s a lie.”
I bobbed and weaved. “He didn’t send me.”
“I earned my master’s in the interpretation of body language to detect lying. You’re indicating deception all over the place, Bowditch.”
“Then you know how poor even experts are at catching lies.” I turned to the sink to rinse my coffee mug. “Thank you for the hospitality and the help, but I need to get up to St. Ignace.”
“Not before you answer my questions.”
“The state police will want to hear what I have to say.”
“So use the goddamn phone.”
At that moment, the Cane Corso came bounding into the kitchen. The charcoal dog moved into an attack position between his master and me. There was no question in his mind about the enemy in the room. Chasse seemed unruffled by the beast’s sudden appearance.
“I need to meet with the detective in charge,” I said with as much calmness as I could manage. “I would hope you can understand that.”
The lieutenant’s chair toppled as he pushed himself to his feet. The dog showed me his teeth when he growled—always the last thing you want to see.
“Where is Stevens?” Kellam demanded. “What is he up to?”
A single word from his master might have sent the amber-eyed mastiff leaping at my throat.
“I honestly don’t know.”
“But he sent you here?”
“Not directly.”
“What does Charley Stevens have to do with Angie being murdered?” said Chasse. I’d been so distracted by the dog, I’d momentarily forgotten the warden was still in the room.
“Charley thinks I lied about what happened fifteen years ago,” said Kellam. “He thinks there might have been some sort of cover-up. So he sent Dr. Watson here to wheedle information out of me. Isn’t that right, Mike?”
“Stan?”
Vaneese stood in the hall between the kitchen and the rest of the house. She was dressed in a linen blouse and denim cutoffs that made her legs look a mile long. I didn’t know how long she’d been lurking within earshot, but my gut told she’d heard everything.
“Go upstairs, Vee,” said Kellam.
“I told you he would get out if you didn’t lock his door.”
For an instant, I didn’t realize she meant the dog.
“Go upstairs.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?”
“Mike is going to explain what game he’s been playing with us.”
“Or what, you’re going to sic Ferox on him? Mon dieu.” She dropped her voice. “Ferox, hier!”
The Cane Corso cast a glance back at Kellam, then clicked across the pine floor to Vaneese’s side.
“Platz,” she said.
The dog settled down beside her bare feet. He still looked like he wanted a chance to chew on my esophagus, but I was finally able to draw a breath.
“I owe you an explanation, Stan,” I said. “And you’ll get one. I promise. But right now, I have to go.”
“What do you think happened, Bowditch?” Chasse asked, but there was no menace in his tone. He seemed merely curious.
Before I could answer, Kellam said, “He knows Pellerin and I didn’t see eye to eye over how to handle the Michauds and wanted to go over my head. He thinks I might have ratted Scott out to Pierre.”
The most startling aspect of this confession was that I’d had no such suspicions.
“You think the lieutenant was the one who blew Pellerin’s cover?” Chasse asked, then added a disbelieving smile.
“No.”
But Kellam hadn’t heard me. He glowed with such heat now he looked like he might suffer a heart attack. “The thought that I sold out one of my wardens to the Michauds is obscene.”
“Stan, you need to take it down a notch,” I said.
“Don’t tell me how to behave in my own house!”
Ferox snapped again. Vaneese hissed at the animal: “Beruhigen.”
“So what else do you suspect me of doing?” said Kellam. “You think I drove up to St. Ignace last night, killed Emmeline’s daughter for no reason, and booked it back before dawn?”
“Nobody had a reason to kill her!” said Chasse Lamontaine with surprising passion. “She went to high school with my boys. Angie was an innocent girl.”
Could the man possibly be that naive?
“The state police need to hear what I have to say, Stan.”
“I should get back to the Valley, too,” said Chasse.
“So get the hell out of here then, the both of you,” said Kellam. “You have five minutes, Bowditch, or I swear to Christ, I’m putting the dog on you.”
* * *
Kellam disappeared as I went upstairs to pack my things. I wished I could have taken those two boxes of files with me, but I was already pushing my luck. And the clock was running.
Vaneese, having locked Ferox in what I hoped was a secure room, hung in the doorway. Perhaps her fiancé had told her to watch me in case I tried to steal any documents. The hardness in her eyes made me believe she, too, felt I had betrayed their trust.
“I’m sorry to leave so abruptly—”
“It gives you an excuse to leave without having to explain, no?”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Stan is not a criminal.”
I tried zipping my duffel, but the teeth caught on a shirt I’d stuffed inside. “Would you call him a good man, though?”
She straightened her neck as if I’d touched a nerve. “Better than you, I think.”
“That’s a low bar. Tell him I wasn’t lying when I said I would explain everything later.”
She folded her arms below her breasts. “And we should believe you why?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t—but it’s the truth.”
Then she escorted me through the house and outside into the humid morning. I crossed a spongy patch of stair-step moss that gave beneath my boots. Heard the burr of browsing bees. Breathed in the good smell of the lake.
Chasse had already left.
As I loaded my Scout, I looked back at the lodge and saw Kellam standing rigid behind the plate glass window. He had a Corona in his hand, and the Cane Corso was beside him.
I drove up the hill until the lake disappeared behind the maples and the spruces and the firs. No doubt Kellam would be on the phone with his old buddies in law enforcement, asking to be updated on the homicide in St. Ignace. He would spend the next hours swilling Coronas and wondering what treason Charley and I suspected he committed that had caused Scott Pellerin’s death.
When I reached the gate, I found Edouard—now somehow fully dressed—standing at attention beside the steel post like a guardsman. Deerflies buzzed about his sweating skull.
I rolled down my window. “Nice meeting you, Edouard.”
His mouth became a hard line
. It was as if he’d overheard the argument in the kitchen and had chosen to side with his savior, Kellam. When he swung the massive gate shut behind me, the clang of metal on metal echoed inside my skull.
Chasse Lamontaine had a five-minute head start on me. I checked my cell, but now that I was out of sight of Kellam’s tower, I had no service.
I was praying that whichever state police detective had caught the Bouchard case was someone I knew personally. After my promotion, I’d done meet and greets with detectives around the state: anyone I might consult on future cases. But shaking hands with someone isn’t the same as working side by side to solve a crime. As it was, I was going to have a hard-enough time explaining the circumstances that had led me to knock on Angie Bouchard’s door.
Why had she run back to her mother’s motel?
Who had she gone there to meet?
What had she told him?
Strangulation is one of the most intimate methods of murder. The perpetrator, except in cases where the victim is a child, is almost always male. Females constitute the overwhelming majority of victims. There is frequently a sexual component. Many rapists strangle their victims so as not to leave behind a witness.
Evidence or no, I was willing to go out on a limb and surmise that Angie hadn’t crossed paths with a stranger who also happened to be a sexual predator. She had known the man who’d killed her. Maybe she had even sought him out. She’d trusted her killer enough to let him get close.
In my memory, I saw Roland Michaud’s ursine eyes.
Did he kill her for selling the badge and jeopardizing the secrets he’d been keeping for the past fifteen years?
Lost in thought, I’d failed to notice that I was no longer following Chasse Lamontaine’s tire prints. He must have taken a detour. As a native of the county and a patrol warden, he would have known all the backwoods shortcuts.
I couldn’t afford to attempt a similar maneuver. The dotted squiggles on the map, leading to the St. John Valley, might be navigable roads in reality. They might also be abandoned skidder trails, overgrown with alders and popples, blocked by deadfalls, and impassable to all but the skinniest of deer. I stuck to the same route I had taken into the woods.
This time, there was an attendant at the Fish River Checkpoint. He was a burly man with a bulbous nose and a gauzy white strip tucked into the back of his Red Sox cap. It hung down his neck like the sun protectors on the hats worn by the French Foreign Legion.
He came around to my window with a clipboard.
A chemical odor emanated from him, like an industrial perfume. “Says here you were supposed to be out yesterday,” he told me in a booming voice. “You got lost, I expect.”
“Lost? No. I got turned around pretty good, though.”
“Ha! I ain’t gonna charge you for the extra night. Let me open this sucker up for you.”
“Do you mind my asking a question?”
“You’re wondering about these?” He flicked the gauze dangling from his baseball cap. “Dryer sheets! The bugs hate them. I got them stuffed all in my clothes. Tonight, I won’t have a single bite. Try them sometime. You’ll thank me for the tip.”
A moment later, I was headed back toward civilization. Blackflies that had flown in through the window assaulted me behind my ears like tiny heat-seeking missiles. I wondered if there was a Laundromat in Portage where I could purchase some dryer sheets.
Outside the village, my cell phone exploded with computer-generated musical notes. It was a symphony of buzzing voice mails, dinging texts, and trilling messages. Three of the most recent had come from Stacey.
“My mom told me about my dad,” she said in her voice mail. “And now she can’t reach you either. I’m coming up there as soon as I can get a flight. Don’t try to argue me out of this, Mike. You know you can’t stop me.”
31
My first call wasn’t to Stacey; it was to Dani. She hadn’t left me so much as a text message while I’d been in the woods. My hope was that she had slept the whole time. She surprised me by answering.
“Ugh,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Almost nine o’clock.”
“Ugh.”
“I wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“Like shit,” she said in the same loopy voice she had used the last time. “Hopefully, I’ll feel better this afternoon. I want to put in a half day.”
“You’re not planning on going to work?”
“Mike,” was all she said.
“Do you want to switch over to FaceTime?”
“So you can tell me how sick I look?” She actually managed a laugh. “No, thanks.”
Instead of harping on her, I said, “A lot’s happened since yesterday. The woman who sold that badge to John Smith was murdered last night. Her name was Angie Bouchard. I’d met with her only hours earlier. And I still have no idea where Charley is.”
She paused a long time before she spoke again. “How old was she?”
“Twenty-four, twenty-five.”
“Shit.”
I brought her up to speed as I turned onto the northbound lane of Route 11, headed for Fort Kent and the Canadian border. I deliberately avoided any mention of the message I’d gotten from Stacey, alerting me of her imminent return to Maine. Given Dani’s current state, it seemed a sticky subject. Once again, she listened with uncharacteristic silence.
Past Winterville, I swerved, unsuccessfully, to avoid a pool of still-tacky blood. An eighteen-wheeler must have hit a moose in the night. Afterward, my tires sounded different from the gore stuck to them.
“Dani?”
“Hmmm?”
“I was wondering if you were still there. So I’m headed to St. Ignace now and need to call the state police. I don’t know who’s caught the case yet, but I need to tell him what I know.”
“Maybe it was Shithead.”
“Who?”
“Shithead. Shit for Brains. Maybe he killed her.”
“John Smith is in jail, Dani. I arrested him for attempted murder. Remember?”
“Yeah, right.” She paused again, and I heard her take several breaths. “I’m going to get up and take some ibuprofen. Send me a text if something happens.”
“When was the last time you took your temperature?”
Her reaction caught me off guard. “Will you lay off me?”
“I’m worried is all. You said you were bitten by a tick?”
“It’s just the flu.”
“I’d feel better if someone looked in on you.”
What she did next almost made me veer into oncoming traffic.
She hung up.
I pulled into the overgrown lot of an auto repair shop that had closed about a hundred years ago and made another call. The Scout shuddered every time a big truck whipped past. The phone rang and rang.
Please don’t go to voice mail.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon,” said Kathy Frost. “I thought you’d still be ‘fishing.’ Did the bugs drive you out of the woods?”
“Kathy, I need you to do something for me. It’s important.”
* * *
Route 11 between Portage and Fort Kent is one of Maine’s officially designated scenic byways, but I couldn’t have described the views that day to save my life. There were lakes with cottages. Green hills maybe. Rolling fields.
My head felt as if it had been shaken like a snow globe.
Kathy volunteered to drive out to Dani’s house to check on her. After some debate, we agreed against summoning an ambulance, knowing what a proud person my girlfriend was. They lived two hours apart, so I wouldn’t hear from Kathy soon.
“Maybe you want to cut your fishing trip short,” she offered.
“I’m not fishing.”
“I know that, Mike. Whatever you’re up to, I hope you can justify it.”
“Dani understands.”
“She also sounds out of her head.”
Next, I called Ora.
“I had to tell her the tru
th,” she said, meaning Stacey. “She knew something was wrong. She senses things like I do.”
“What did she sense?”
“That her father was in danger.”
“We don’t know that, Ora.”
She treated my response as not requiring a rebuttal. “This woman they found dead this morning in St. Ignace—she was involved in this matter Charley’s investigating?”
For a moment, I’d thought Ora’s vague premonitions had graduated to witch-level clairvoyance.
“How did you know about it?”
The truth was less sensational. “The story’s been all over public radio this morning.”
Of course it would be.
“The truth is, I don’t know if Angie Bouchard’s death is connected to this thing with the badge or not. I suspect it is.”
I told her about my brief encounter with the murdered woman and her boyfriend. Then I provided an account of my hours in the company of the inscrutable Stan Kellam.
“I never liked him,” Ora said with uncharacteristic tartness. “Charley used to say that Stanley’s virtues outweighed his vices, but only by a pennyweight. That arrogant man knows something about Scott’s death that he’s not admitting. And no, it’s not one of my ‘intuitions’ that makes me say that. It comes from having known Stanley Kellam for three decades.”
“About Stacey,” I said.
“She’s arriving in Bangor tonight. She’s going to rent a car and drive here. Tomorrow, she’s planning on taking Charley’s plane and flying up to the Valley.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Stacey’s not the way she used to be, Mike.”
“Her rash decision to come up here suggests otherwise.”
“Her father is in trouble. I don’t have to ask what you would do in that situation, because you already know.”
She was referring to my rash, juvenile behavior when my father had been accused of murder and fled into the forest. It seemed an age ago now. And of course, I had no answer for her. How do you rebut the cold, hard truth?
Nor could I forget how Stacey had handled the situation in the Big Cypress National Preserve when Buster Lee was bitten by that snake. It wasn’t the competence she’d shown, treating the man’s gory wound. Stacey had always been proficient at more skills than I could count. It was the steady calmness with which she’d handled her terrified patient.
