by Paul Doiron
“Not Dunbar?”
“No,” she said. “Corbett.”
If anything, that choice seemed worse to me, given my misgivings about the chief deputy.
“So what happened next?”
“By the time Corbett got there, he found the bulkhead door open. He said there were new tracks leading from the basement off into the trees. He wanted to pursue, but I told him to stay put until I called you.”
“You want me to go over there?”
“I have more confidence in your finding him. My guys aren’t trained to look for a kid in the woods. Besides, you already have a relationship with the boy. Just remember, he may be armed.”
“I need to ask Rivard.”
“With the snow coming, he’s about ready to suspend the search. He thinks you would be better off looking for the boy.”
I felt like a prehistoric animal that had fallen into a tar pit. No matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t extricate myself from the mess the Sewalls had created. “I need to stop by the jail first,” I said.
The suspicion in Rhine’s voice came through the receiver. “Why?”
“To talk with Jamie. Something tells me that she might know where Lucas went.”
The opportunity to see her again was no small incentive, either.
32
From the outside, you might have mistaken the Washington County jail for a new building, but inside, the ceilings hung low and the air had the stuffy chill of a mausoleum. The brick walls were the color of curdled cream and showed signs of having been painted innumerable times for the sole purpose of keeping inmates busy. Men had died in this building, and it didn’t take much of an imagination to sense their presence in the flickering lights and the sudden drafts that moved through the halls.
The grizzled captain who ran the jail met me at the door, along with a couple of slack-jawed guards who seemed to have nothing better to do. The sheriff had a meeting with the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, the captain said in a tone that suggested the discussion would be an unpleasant event for everyone involved.
Jails tend to be loud, clanging places filled with shouts, echoes, and the slamming of metal doors. The guards made me secure my service weapon in a wall-mounted lockbox before they led me into the visitation room. The room smelled of disinfectant sprayed over every possible surface. A Plexiglas barrier running down the center of a table divided the inmates’ side from the visitors’. There was an intercom-type contraption in the glass to speak through.
“No sign of Prester?” the captain said.
“Not yet.”
“First the brother, now the sister.” He gave me that familiar world-weary expression that all law-enforcement officers eventually adopt. “Quite the family, them Sewalls.”
“Quite the family,” I agreed.
A lock clicked loudly, and the door opened on the visitors’ side of the barrier. A stout blond woman in a khaki uniform led Jamie into the room. She was wearing a jumpsuit the color of a moldering tangerine. The guard guided her, not ungently, into a chair facing me through the glass.
Jamie’s eyes were threaded with veins, her skin looked bleached, and her hair was a rat’s nest.
I recalled the seductive woman who had shown up at my motel door, the one with the soft curves who had curled against me in bed and confessed her desire to escape her depressing life for some tropical paradise. She was nearly unrecognizable as the suffering person seated across from me, and I was left to wonder what, if anything, had been real between us.
“Fancy meeting you here.” Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with sand.
“You look like you’ve had a hard night.”
“Gee. Do you think?”
“If you’d needed a ride, you should have called me rather than driving drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“The trooper who arrested you says you were.”
“I was buzzed.”
Her hands were trembling-either from nervousness or withdrawal from substances unknown. I realized I could smell the alcohol on her breath through the holes in the glass.
“What about the Adderall the trooper found in your purse?” I asked. “Did that get in there by accident?”
“Those were Tammi’s. She has a prescription. I picked them up for her at Rite Aid.” She lifted her cleft chin and showed her teeth to the assembled deputies. “Can we have some privacy here?”
I nodded to give my consent, and the men filed out.
I motioned to the wall-mounted camera above my head. “They can still see us, you know.”
“Just as long as I don’t have to look into their stupid faces.” She pushed a strand of greasy hair back over her ear. “You don’t have to be such an asshole, you know? I didn’t do anything to hurt you. You shouldn’t treat me like I did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice quavered. “Have you found Prester yet?”
“We’re still looking.”
“Let me know when you do, please.”
I felt sorry for her in her intoxication and her grief and that pathetic jumpsuit, but I was still angry. “If you didn’t want to talk with me, couldn’t you have just gone to a meeting or called your sponsor last night?”
“Why? So she could talk me out of it? I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to get high. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin. “Jamie, you’re in serious trouble.”
She began to blink back tears. “Don’t you think I know that!”
“If you’re found guilty and sent to prison, the state is going to remove Tammi and Lucas from your house.”
“They can’t do that!” Her voice broke as she spoke the words.
“They can, and they will.” I needed to tell her that Lucas had run away, needed to find out where the boy might have gone, but one unanswered question kept pushing its way to the front of my brain. “If I’m going to help you,” I said, “I need to know the truth about something.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“I went to Wyman Hill last night, over in Township Nineteen. Do you remember how I told you I saw a snowmobile out on the Heath the night Randall was murdered? I know whose sled it was now.”
She brought her hands together in a praying motion but remained silent.
I leaned forward. “Mitch was the one Prester and Randall were meeting on the afternoon of the blizzard, wasn’t it? He was buying drugs from them.”
She looked up suddenly. “That’s not what happened.”
“So tell me the truth.”
“I can’t.”
“Do you want Prester to be remembered as a murderer? Is that what you want for your brother?”
“Mitch is Lucas’s father.”
“That won’t stop me from taking him down.”
“Mitch didn’t kill Randall. I swear to God he didn’t.” Tears streamed down her face. “This is all my fault. Everything that happened is all my fault.”
She had said these same words before, and I had assumed she meant it in the sense of bad karma plaguing her for past misdeeds. “What happened?”
She wasn’t so stoned that she didn’t give a glance at the wall-mounted camera. “Randall beat up Lucas. He knocked him to the ground and bruised the whole side of his face. I thought he might have broken his arm, too. I asked Prester to do something about it-be a man for once-but he wouldn’t because he was too afraid of Randall. So I said, ‘Couldn’t you just lure him somewhere where Mitch could kick the shit out of him?’ He knows karate, and if he took Randall by surprise… I just wanted Mitch to beat Randall up.”
The medical examiner said that Cates had suffered a cracked sternum in the hours before his death. The injury had rendered him immobile, which was why Prester had been the one to seek help after their car got stuck. But what if Munro had lied to Jamie? What if he had returned to the stranded Grand Am later to finish the job?
“Do you know where Mitch is now?” I asked her.
“He wasn’t at his house?”
“No.” A door slammed shut down the hall, and I remembered why the sheriff had called me in the first place. “Is it possible he could be with Lucas?”
“Lucas is at home with Tammi.”
“No, he isn’t. Lucas ran away, Jamie.”
“What are you saying?”
“The sheriff sent someone from DHHS to look in on Tammi and Lucas,” I said. “When the social worker showed up, Lucas locked himself in the basement.”
“He’s afraid of the basement. There’s something down there that scares him. He won’t tell me what it is.” She raised her fingers to her lips as if to chew on her nails but then stopped herself. “But you said he ran away. I don’t understand.”
“The sheriff decided to send one of her deputies over there, too, because she was concerned for everyone’s safety. The deputy found tracks leading from the bulkhead into the forest behind your house.”
“Deputy? Which deputy?”
“Chief Deputy Corbett”
“He’s the one Randall used to talk about!”
“Talk about how?”
“I don’t know-he just mentioned his name sometimes. Then he and Prester would laugh. Oh my God. Was he the guy who frisked me at the hospital? The blond guy with a red face?”
I didn’t answer, but suddenly the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency’s accusation that Rhine had a dirty cop in her department seemed less and less far-fetched. And to what lengths would a man like Corbett go to avoid exposure? Might he have killed Randall Cates and driven Prester Sewall to his death? Might he even harm Lucas if he suspected the boy knew the truth?
Jamie sat bolt upright in her chair. “You need to go over there, Mike! You need to make sure Lucas is safe!”
“I need to ask you some questions first.”
“What kinds of questions?”
“First, would Lucas have access to a firearm? He told me he did.”
“Prester had a twenty-two he used to shoot squirrels and woodchucks. It was my dad’s.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“In the basement.”
My heart sank. “Is it loaded? Does Lucas know how to fire it?”
“Prester took him out back to shoot cans one day when I was at work.”
I pictured Lucas fleeing into the snowy woods. Was he afraid of Corbett, and that’s why he fled? There was also the father to consider. I couldn’t even begin to guess how Mitch Munro might fit into this particular puzzle, if he even did. Maybe the boy had decided to cross the Heath to reach his father’s house.
“Does Lucas have some favorite place to hide-like a tree house or a cellar hole? Maybe a cave?”
“Prester used to have an old fort my dad built him in the woods. I think Lucas goes there sometimes.”
“Can you tell me where it is?”
“I’ve never been there. He draws maps of the woods in his notebooks. There’s a stack of them under his bed.”
“What about friends?”
“My son doesn’t have a friend in the world.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard a sadder statement in my life, but she said it with such frankness, I knew it was the truth.
“You need to find him, Mike,” she said. “Please!”
“That’s my job,” I said. “Finding lost kids is what I do.”
It sounded like a boast, but I hadn’t meant it that way. I wanted her to understand that on this one thing at least she could trust me. I was a Maine game warden, and I wouldn’t rest until I found her child.
She pressed her hands flat against the Plexiglas. “I can’t afford to lose him, too, Mike.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been so horrible. You don’t deserve this shit. You’re a sweet guy. You should find yourself a sweet girl.”
Down the hall, another iron door slammed. “I don’t want a sweet girl. I want you.”
She wasn’t sober, not by any means, but when she spoke again, her voice was clear and even. “No, you don’t. You want some fantasy version of me. You want the employee of the fucking month.” She gestured at her prison jumpsuit. “ This is the real me. It always has been and always will be.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That’s what makes you so sweet. Good-bye, Mike. Please let me know when you find Lucas.”
I nodded, unable to muster a full sentence. I knocked on the door, and one of the guards let me out. Then I went to retrieve my service weapon from the lockbox. When I stepped outside, there was a dusting of snow on my patrol truck.
33
I needed to tell the state police about Mitch Munro so that they could bring the snowmobiler in for questioning, at the very least. The medical examiner had found evidence of a cracked sternum. The injury had been inflicted hours before Cates died. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Munro as the attacker. The problem was Jamie. It was doubtful she would repeat the story she’d told me to a courtroom-not unless she was allowed to retain custody of her sister and son.
As I drove through the falling darkness, I wondered whether I could help broker a deal between Jamie and the prosecutors. If she could deliver Munro, would that be enough to waive the drunk-driving and possession charges? Might she be permitted by the DHHS to keep Lucas?
Of course I would have to find the boy first. I needed to focus on the challenge at hand before I worried about convincing detectives and prosecutors to make deals they would have zero interest in making.
When I arrived at the Sewall house, I found a Volvo V70 station wagon parked in the shoveled section of the dooryard. Beside it was the familiar Ford Interceptor I’d first seen outside the Sprague house so many nights ago: Chief Deputy Corbett’s cruiser.
A woman leapt out of the Volvo as if it had burst into flames. “What took you so long?” she said.
The social worker, Magda Mueller, had a wide, flat face and tightly curled red hair that reminded me of the coats of certain exotic breeds of water dogs. Her charcoal-colored coat hung to her knees, and I saw that she was wearing faded blue jeans and no-nonsense snow boots.
“I stopped by the jail to get some information from the mother.”
“Like what?”
“Whether the boy has access to a loaded firearm.” I spotted Tammi Sewall sitting meekly in the Volvo’s passenger seat, listening to Inca music on the stereo. She gave me a broad smile and a friendly wave, as if she had no idea how dire her family’s situation was. “Where’s Chief Deputy Corbett?” I asked.
“He said he was going to scope things out.”
“He’s inside the building?”
“As far as I know. He might have gone out the basement door if he decided to pursue the boy into the woods.”
The last thing I needed was Corbett blundering around, disturbing Lucas’s footprints. The snow was drifting down at a steady clip. I was going to have a devil of a time tracking the boy as dusk fell.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I arrived to check on the aunt and the boy. The aunt let us into the house, but when the boy found out I worked for DHHS, he became agitated. He ran down into the basement while I was trying to deal with the disabled woman.”
“You didn’t follow him?”
She crossed her arms. “I have a policy of not chasing troubled kids into dark holes.”
I couldn’t question her wisdom there. “So you evacuated Tammi from the building and called the sheriff?”
“The next thing I knew, Corbett showed up. He told me to wait outside here while he checked the premises. A little later, he came out and said there were tracks heading off through the backyard into the woods. I called the sheriff, and she told me a game warden was on the way. That was, like, an hour ago.”
I lowered my voice. “What are you going to do with Tammi?”
“There’s a foster-care home in Lubec where she can stay for a few days.”
“And the boy?”
“Corbett says the father is a convict
ed felon, which isn’t ideal. I know a family in Calais that will take him temporarily.”
“You mean you’re going to split up Tammi and Lucas?”
“Just for the time being. The department will need to do an assessment. Maybe there’s some extended family we can place them with. That’s usually preferable to a foster situation or a group home.”
“What happens when the mother gets out of jail?”
“Shouldn’t you be more worried about finding the kid? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”
I took her point.
The front door of the house was ajar. A wedge of light streamed through the crack. I kicked snow off my boots and pushed the door open. “Corbett? It’s Bowditch.” My words seemed to bounce off the entryway’s walls.
There was no reply.
The light in the foyer was burning, but the other rooms were dark. The home had seemed so warm and welcoming the first time I’d visited. Now a chill was blowing through some open door or window, and the faint odor of Jamie’s cigarettes hung in the air.
It troubled me how the chief deputy kept appearing around the Sewalls. I didn’t want to feel suspicious and unsafe, but my hand kept drifting down to my sidearm.
The floor creaked beneath my feet. “Corbett?”
The answer came from above my head. “Up here.”
There was a single narrow staircase leading up to the second floor. The house was old and, like many nineteenth-century New England farmhouses, seemed to have been built for a race of ascetic pygmies. I had to duck my head to keep from knocking my brow against an oak beam.
There were three small bedrooms and a single bath on the second floor. The first room was Jamie’s. It had a queen-size mattress beneath a quilt that looked like a family heirloom. The walls had been freshly painted-a soothing lavender-and there was a vase of grocery-store flowers on the bureau, but there were telltale signs of disarrangement if you looked closely. The carnations were beginning to wilt, and the bed was unmade. I hung in the doorway for a moment, breathing in the familiar smell of her perfume and feeling a pang at the thought that I would never share this bed with her.
