One Last Lie

by Paul Doiron

  If I was no longer the human powder keg I had been at age twenty-four, then how could I say that Stacey Stevens was incapable of personal growth?

  “I remembered something else,” Ora said. “Scott Pellerin was from Millinocket.”

  “What?”

  “He grew up in Port Clyde, before his mother passed, but he was born at the old Millinocket Community Hospital. His mom had family up in the Katahdin region. I don’t know if it means anything to you or not.”

  “More than you can possibly know. Do you happen to have a number for Scott Pellerin’s sister in Providence?”

  “Yes, I believe so. I’m not sure if it’s still current.”

  “Can you call her and ask what their mother’s maiden name was? The question will be easier coming from you than a stranger.”

  Ora, as sharp as her husband, deduced what I was after. “It’s the badge!”

  “I think so, yes.”

  For the first time, I thought I understood what the name Duke Dupree meant to Charley and why finding his badge on Smith’s table had set him off on his heretofore inexplicable quest.

  32

  Every morning, as I prepared myself for the day ahead, I would take from my bedside a set of dog tags.

  At home I kept them within easy reach, strung from a deer antler I’d found in the leaf litter near a cabin on Rum Pond. When I’d first started wearing the tags, I had felt intense emotions every time I put them on—often anger, sometimes sadness, occasionally an affectionate nostalgia for an alternate life I’d never lived. The dog tags only weighed four grams, but on bad days, they felt as heavy as an anchor chain. Now I wore them out of habit more than anything else. Just a week earlier, leaving for Florida, I had set off the metal detector at the Portland airport because I’d forgotten I was wearing them, let alone why.

  Now I pulled the tags from beneath my T-shirt and, keeping one hand on the wheel, raised the two medallions to a place before my eyes where I could read the name stamped in the stainless steel.

  BOWDITCH, JOHN M.

  My father had been a man whose conscience had atrophied over the course of his life to the point where you doubted he’d ever possessed one. He had been a hard-drinker and a womanizer, a poacher and a scofflaw, and in the end, he’d become a cold-blooded killer.

  Jack Bowditch had also been my father. Blood of my blood. We looked so much alike you might even say I had been made in his image. The analogy might have been blasphemous, but I wore the dog tags he had brought back from two tours in Vietnam the way that certain religious people wear medallions devoted to their name saints: less in the hope of receiving divine intercessions than out of a sense of spiritual identity. I would never, could never, escape my patrimony.

  Similarly, the tarnished badge of Duke Dupree had been an icon to his grandson.

  Scott Pellerin.

  His sister confirmed to Ora that Dupree was the maiden name of their mother. She verified that his grandfather’s badge had been her little brother’s most prized possession.

  When Ora had told me that Pellerin was “me,” I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of our similarities. I understood that Charley had looked upon him as a troubled young man in need of a surrogate father. What I hadn’t realized was that my precursor had been compelled to join the Warden Service for reasons not unlike those that had driven me to the same decision.

  I had become a game warden to win my estranged father’s respect. I had imagined he would be impressed when I announced my career choice. Instead he had mocked me for a fool.

  Scott Pellerin had signed up for similarly misguided reasons. He had wanted to redeem the stained legacy of his maternal grandfather. And so he had carried Duke Dupree’s battered badge with him, stashed away in secret, as a personal talisman.

  It wouldn’t be the first relic that got a man killed.

  * * *

  Fort Kent is the literal end of the road. It is mile zero of Route 1. There is even a marker to commemorate the designation. You have to search hard for the plaque, tucked away in a motel parking lot. I have read there is a similar monument, 2,369 miles south, in Key West, Florida, making the same claim to be the start of Route 1.

  Two mile zeros. Like most things in life, where you are standing is all a matter of perspective.

  As I descended the hill above town, I saw the St. John River, broad and blue, and the verdant hills of Canada beyond. In every significant way, the north shore of the river was indistinguishable from the south, and yet in 1842, an American and a British statesman had decided to draw an invisible line down the middle of the channel, severing a close-knit French-speaking community that had occupied the Valley for half a century beforehand.

  Even now, as I turned onto Main Street, I couldn’t help but watch the ring-billed gulls flying carelessly back and forth across the St. John, and I thought about how every border on earth is a man-made fiction. The birds are never fooled.

  I made a call to the state police barracks in Houlton and spoke with a trooper working a desk.

  “Who caught the Angie Bouchard case?”

  “Lieutenant Zanadakis.”

  “Great.”

  The dapper detective was also looking into my run-in with John Smith. I had prayed that the investigator in charge would be someone I knew. Not someone who knew me too well.

  “Is there anything I can help you with?” asked the trooper in Houlton.

  “I have some information about the dead woman Lieutenant Zanadakis needs to hear. Where can I find him?”

  “In St. Ignace, at the Valley View Motel. That’s the crime scene. He’ll be there until the medical examiner arrives and the evidence techs finish up.”

  I cruised down a tidy main street that ran parallel to the river: a downtown of brick shop fronts and well-kept clapboard buildings. Instead of following the traffic headed to the customs station at the foot of the bridge to Canada, I left Route 1 and turned onto a road that clung to the south bank of the river.

  Most people conceive of northernmost Maine as a howling wilderness, but even I, who had visited the Valley before, found myself taken aback by the handsome prosperity of Fort Kent.

  The views were spectacular. The St. John had its headwaters across the border at Lac Frontière in Québec and drained thousands of square miles on its journey to the tidal tumult of the Bay of Fundy. Here, on the border between Maine and New Brunswick, it was a broad, sandy stream with brushy islands in the middle that inevitably would be submerged the following spring when ice floes jammed the river and the streets of lower Fort Kent began to flood.

  I passed through two villages named for Catholic saints—John and Francis—before I reached a crossroads. It was T-shaped intersection where a logging road angled away from Route 161 and plunged south into the vast commercial timberland that extended to Moccasin Pond and another five hundred miles beyond that. My atlas gave the name of this hamlet as St. Ignatius, but to the French speakers of the Valley, it had always been St. Ignace.

  Now it was mostly just ruins. Along the riverside, a row of charred foundations were all that remained of the houses and business that had burned the night the Maine State Police and the Maine Warden Service had come looking for Scott Pellerin. Sumacs, poplars, and assorted small bushes had grown up from the rubble, but all that fresh green life couldn’t hide the violence that had happened fifteen years before. The fact that the fire that had claimed half the village had been the fault of Pierre Michaud, covering his tracks, wasn’t visible in the devastation.

  I came to a stop. The first drops of yet another rain shower fell upon my windshield. The hot engine hissed.

  Across the road from the ruins stood a general store, closed and for sale; a Grange hall that didn’t appear to have hosted a meeting in decades; and a clapboard house with a sunken roof that looked to be one good blizzard away from collapsing. Two trucks, three ATVs, and a dooryard walled with stacked firewood told me the dwelling was occupied.

  I dug out the snapshot of Pierre Mich
aud and held it at arm’s length with the overgrown ruins of his former home in the background.

  Who was this man? What had he been thinking when he rigged his house with gasoline-drenched blankets, propane tanks, and canisters of acetylene? How did he imagine he could escape with a hundred police officers on both sides of the border searching for him by land, water, and air?

  He must have known that Beau Lac, twenty miles north, along a tributary river, was a soft spot in the invisible fence. The wardens found a dirt bike he had ridden there and dumped into the water. Locals said Pierre had kept a canoe chained to a tree on the lake. He had family on the other side; a Canadian relative might have been waiting to pick him up.

  But he never made it across.

  My imagination easily conjured the scene. A full moon appearing and disappearing behind ragged clouds, a man paddling for his life across water black as spilled ink. And then, out of nowhere, a floatplane. The pilot spots the fugitive. The plane descends. It skates on its pontoons across the surface until it is within thirty yards of the canoe. Gunshots follow. The fugitive leaps into the forty-degree lake, believing he can outswim death. He miscalculates.

  My friend had kept the picture of this evil, bear-faced man in the same box as his war medals. Charley disdained trophies. I thought I understood the meaning of the snapshot now. It was a reminder of a failure he wouldn’t allow himself to forget. And the Hindu inscription on the back? A spell to ward off the furies who assailed his conscience by night.

  As I put away Pierre’s picture, I saw through the rain the shape of a person in a lighted window in the house across the road. Then the curtain fell. I could have knocked and asked to know what happened here fifteen years earlier, but I already knew the answer I’d receive.

  Silence.

  I engaged my wipers to clear the glass. I pushed the transmission into first gear and began creeping forward again.

  Less than a mile down the road, I came to the Valley View Motel. The sign rising from the side of the road was a charming patois:

  BIENVENUE!

  VALLEY VIEW MOTEL

  CHAMBRES RENOVE

  WELCOM SLEDDERS

  Snowmobile season had ended three months earlier, but from the boarded windows of the cabins, it was obvious the motel had been closed a lot longer than that.

  This morning, the parking lot overflowed with visitors. The state police, the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office, even the Fort Kent Police Department had sent representatives, as had the U.S. Border Patrol. The proximity to Canada—just a rifle shot across the river—must have engaged the interest of the feds.

  I parked along the roadside, grabbed my raincoat and warden cap, and made my way up the string of vehicles. I passed Chasse Lamontaine’s warden truck. It was even muddier than before. The bastard had taken a shortcut and beaten me here.

  A deputy, charged with shooing away nosy neighbors and blocking reporters when they arrived, tried to stop me until I showed him my badge.

  A crowd of officers milled outside the tape barrier. Standing off to one side was Chasse Lamontaine. He had his back to me, but his height and wingspan made him impossible to misidentify. The warden was on his phone, speaking to someone in French. It sounded like an argument. I slipped past before he recognized me.

  I found Nico Zanadakis in conversation with a man in blue coveralls: one of his evidence technicians. This morning, the dapper detective was wearing a black trench coat. Beneath it was a charcoal blazer with a gray shirt, a black satin tie, and a silver pocket square. Also nitrile gloves to keep from contaminating evidence. He smelled of eau de cologne and DEET.

  “Bowditch?” His tone was not welcoming.

  “I have information about Angie Bouchard you need to hear.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “It would be best if we speak in private.”

  He dismissed the technician and extended an arm toward the motel dumpster. Someone had deposited the carcass of a road-killed deer inside it, and the air was alive with the buzzing of flies and the stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh. We retreated to a safe distance.

  * * *

  Zanadakis was neither the best nor the worst detective in the state police. He could connect puzzle pieces when he had a pattern to work from.

  “This has something to do with what happened at Hook Lake. Your confrontation with Smith.”

  For the first time, I had an unimpeded view of the back lot. Angie’s Volkswagen, dirty with pollen paste, was parked in the far corner. Evidence techs had opened the doors to shoot videos and photographs.

  “I met with Bouchard yesterday at the house she was renting in Presque Isle.”

  Zanadakis raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  “Her boyfriend was there. Roland Michaud, son of Pierre Michaud. I’m sure that name rings a bell. You need to start with Roland.”

  “No, I need to start with you. What the fuck have you been doing up here? First you visit an amateur fence who tries to kill you. Then you drop in on a girl who turns up dead.”

  “I wasn’t entirely forthcoming when you and I spoke at Hook Lake.”

  “You lied, you mean.”

  “By omission.”

  “I’m not your fucking priest, man. I don’t care about categories of sin. I care about being misled by an officer who swore an oath to uphold the law. Did you think I wouldn’t find out it was Charley Stevens who beat the piss out of Smith? How is the old man mixed up in this?”

  “Smith had a warden badge for sale along with his other stolen stuff at the Machias Dike.”

  He raised the collar of his trench coat against the piss-warm rain. “And Stevens took offense?”

  “The badge belonged to a warden named Duke Dupree.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “He died a long time ago. His grandson was Scott Pellerin.”

  His response was terse but to the point. “Fuck me. This is all connected to that clusterfuck in St. Ignace?”

  “The reason I didn’t tell you at Hook Lake was because I didn’t know who Dupree was or that the badge had anything to do with Pellerin’s disappearance. For all I knew, Charley had just gone off on Smith because he was a scumbag.”

  The pomade in his wavy hair caused the water to bead up. “So where did Smith say he came by the thing?”

  “He bought it from Angie Bouchard at a yard sale. Scott Pellerin stayed at this motel when he was undercover. Angie’s mother, Emmeline, owned and ran the place then. My guess is that Pellerin had his grandfather’s badge with him—maybe as a good-luck charm—and Emmeline discovered it. She was divorced and dating Pierre Michaud at the time. No one knows how Pellerin’s cover was blown, but my current thinking is the badge might’ve played a part.”

  “Was any of this confirmed by Angie Bouchard?”

  “No, but the fact that she had it in her possession suggests a connection.”

  “How did she react when you confronted her with this theory of yours?”

  “I didn’t confront her with anything. I just asked where she’d gotten the badge. She lied and said it belonged to her roommate, but I am pretty sure she found it among her late mother’s belongings and didn’t know what it was.”

  “Did she say anything about coming back up here?”

  “No.”

  “So you might have spooked her?”

  The possibility had occurred to me. “Yes.”

  Zanadakis didn’t have to state the obvious: that if I had never shown up on her doorstep, she might still be alive.

  “Do you have the badge?”

  Rain pattered off the brim of my cap. “No.”

  He seemed taken aback by this. “Where is it?”

  “Charley has it.”

  “And where’s Charley?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question.” Before he could press me on the point, I decided the time had come to shift the discussion. “You need to bring in the state police detectives who worked the Pellerin case. I think Angie’s death is co
nnected to what happened to Scott. I think you’re looking for the same killer or killers. At the very least, the Pellerin case needs to be reassigned to the Unsolved Homicide Unit.”

  Zanadakis raised a gloved finger under my nose. “Bowditch, you might think I don’t recall the circumstances of how we met, but I do. Those drug dealers whose car got stuck in the woods during a snowstorm? You had a theory then, I remember. It was wrong, wasn’t it?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Right now, I need to focus on the physical evidence. Conspiracy theories can wait.”

  “It’s not a conspiracy theory,” I said. “Not in the paranoid sense, I mean. There are actual conspiracies.”

  “Do you practice being such a—?”

  “Bring in Roland Michaud, at least,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I saw Angie and him together at her house. He was half-dressed. Strangulation is an intimate way to kill someone. And he has connections to Pellerin’s disappearance.”

  The detective took a moment to chew on this. “Maybe she cheated on him. Or he cheated on her. Things got violent. It makes more sense than her being murdered over some old badge.”

  “I’d like to see her,” I said.

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “I saw her alive less than twenty-four hours ago. I don’t know how many witnesses you have who can speak to that period of time. I might notice some detail that helps your investigation. What does it hurt to let me look?”

  Arrogant he might be, but Nico Zanadakis was no fool. As long as he got credit for clearing the case, he would exploit anyone and anything that might serve his purpose.

  He brushed water off his greased hair. “All right, but you’d better not vomit on my crime scene.”

  We started in the direction of the Volkswagen, but the detective came to a quick stop and spun around. Chasse Lamontaine was following us. How long had he been standing within earshot?