The Precipice

by Paul Doiron

  “Are you all right? What did he do to you?” I put my hand out to examine her head wound.

  “He hit me in the fucking head.” She pinched her buttonless shirt together, as if overcome with modesty. “And I twisted my ankle when I jumped off that fucking cliff.”

  “You jumped?”

  She swung around to face the quarry. “My gun! We need to find it.”

  But Benton had stopped moving. He lay on his back in the rippling water. The leaves near his head were shining and crimson.

  “Bowditch!”

  Men stood along the top of the berm above us, DeFord among them. The lieutenant sprang down the rocky wall, keeping the sides of his boots against the incline the way a snowshoer might descend a steep hill. He dropped into the pool beside us.

  “Are you two OK?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No!” Stacey shouted.

  The lieutenant began wading across the pond toward Benton’s inert body, using his arms in a swimming motion to assist in moving himself forward.

  Stacey pushed her wet, bloody hair out of her eyes. “What are you doing here, Mike? How did you find me?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  Before I could say more, DeFord shouted out, “This man is still alive! I need an EMT down here!”

  I couldn’t believe he was still breathing. Benton must have had a stronger constitution than Rasputin. When I turned to Stacey, I found that her face was contorted with anger. I had assured her that the man who had brutalized her and murdered Nissen would die. But somehow he clung to life. Her lips were pressed so tightly together now, they were almost invisible. There was nothing there for me to kiss.

  Meanwhile, Charley’s floatplane circled high overhead, wheeling around and around like a watchful eagle.

  38

  Stacey kept telling us she was fine even while blood continued to seep down her jawbone. I’d given her a compression bandage from my first-aid kit to stanch the wound, but it didn’t seem to be working.

  “You need stitches,” I said.

  “I’m not going anywhere until they finish searching the house.”

  “You’re bleeding right through that bandage.”

  “Give me a clotting sponge, and I’ll drive myself to the hospital when they’re done searching.”

  “You’re not driving yourself anywhere,” Lieutenant DeFord said.

  Stacey sat in the passenger seat of the lieutenant’s truck with the door open, her legs facing out, so she could keep her weight off her twisted ankle. She wore my camouflage raincoat to cover her ripped shirt. And from the way she was shaking, you might have thought she’d just guzzled a pot of coffee.

  Fifteen minutes earlier, the EMTs had rushed off in their ambulance with Benton’s unconscious body. A Life Flight chopper would transport the wounded man to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. His skin had been as gray as a zombie’s when he went by on the stretcher. It seemed that Stacey had punctured his jugular vein, not an artery.

  Now DeFord and I were listening to her story.

  “It all started at the store,” she said. “I was so pissed off about my stupid job, I couldn’t think straight. I told Waterman I wasn’t going to tag another coyote—I was through with his witch-hunt. He said my refusal was grounds for firing, and I dared him to do it. Then I drove over to Ross’s to get my stuff.”

  “You were going to check out, but then you had a conversation with Steffi Ross.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “How did you know that?”

  “I followed you there.”

  She kept focusing on DeFord, as if she was pissed at me for some reason and couldn’t bear to look me in the eyes. “I wanted to hear what Steffi remembered about Samantha and Missy.”

  I tried to regain her attention. “She told you Nissen was in the dining room with them that night, and she mentioned that they’d asked about local churches—which led you to go to the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle.”

  Now her mouth dropped open. “What the fuck, Bowditch?”

  “Brother John told me you went to see him.”

  Stacey raised her voice to Lieutenant DeFord. “If he knows all this already, why do you need me to explain it to you?”

  I didn’t understand where her anger was coming from. After what had happened, I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms, but if anything, she seemed to be pulling farther away.

  “Because I don’t know what made you decide to drive out to Blanchard,” I said.

  “I drove out there because Nissen was a member of Brother John’s church,” she said. “He was the one who told the pastor that Samantha and Missy were gay. Nissen had some problems with women. I think lesbians probably scared the shit out of the guy.”

  “No one knew where you were, Stacey.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You should have called Pinkham or myself with your concerns,” the lieutenant said, not unkindly.

  “After the way I pissed everyone off up in Greenville? Would you have believed me if I’d called with a bunch of suspicions and nothing to back them up?”

  DeFord scratched the back of his neck.

  “That’s what I thought,” Stacey said.

  “I would have believed you,” I said.

  She stared at me, but I couldn’t tell what was going on inside her head. She was in distress; I could tell that much.

  “So you drove out to Breakneck Ridge,” DeFord said. “What did you find when you got there?”

  “Nissen wasn’t home. There was no sign of him. I decided to wait in my truck until he turned up, but I ended up falling asleep. The next thing I knew, it was almost dawn, and he was tapping on my window. He nearly scared the shit out of me.”

  “Did he say where he’d been?” I asked.

  “He said he’d had a booth at the Eastern States Exposition in Massachusetts. He’d been there the past few days, he said, selling his honey and candles in the State of Maine Building. His van was full of boxes and stuff. I helped him unload it, and he asked if I wanted to go inside.”

  “You went with him into his house?” I said. “Just the two of you?”

  “Yeah, why? I had my Ruger in my pocket.”

  “You didn’t have any concerns for your safety?” DeFord asked. “You just told us that you suspected Nissen of being a murderer.”

  She removed the bandage from her head, releasing a new trickle of blood. She stuck it back in place. “Of course I was concerned! But I wasn’t going to let fear keep me from asking questions.”

  Stacey was as much of a bulldog as her old man in that respect.

  “How did you get him to open up?” the lieutenant asked. “Bob wasn’t very chatty.”

  “Not with men, maybe. I batted my eyelashes at him. It wasn’t exactly a secret that the dude was hard up for female companionship. Why do you think he had meals at Ross’s all the time? He went there for the pretty young thru-hikers.”

  “Why didn’t you call me first and tell me what you were doing?” I asked.

  She ignored my question and flicked her eyes at DeFord. “Once we were inside, I told him everything I’d learned. He seemed angry at first, said it was none of my business.”

  “How did he explain his actions?” DeFord asked.

  “He said he hadn’t told anyone that he’d met Samantha and Missy because it didn’t matter. He knew he’d had nothing to do with their disappearance, he said. Why bring it up?”

  “Because it was relevant,” I said.

  Stacey’s hand trembled as she moved the bandage and shifted uncomfortably on the seat. “I felt sorry for him living alone out there with just a bunch of bees for company. He showed me this plaque someone had given him for his speed-hiking record. He was like a little kid, he was so proud of it. And he said he was writing a book called Death on the Appalachian Trail, about all the ways people have died on the AT since the 1930s. I got a little nervous again when he told me the tit
le.”

  There was a shout inside the house, and a state police evidence technician hurried though the front door. I could see that DeFord was itching to follow, but he restrained himself.

  “How does this connect with Benton?” he asked.

  “I asked Nissen to tell me about the murders on the AT,” Stacey said. “I wondered if there might be a connection to what happened to Samantha and Missy and the others who died. He was pretty insistent that coyotes had killed them. I think he thought it would be better for his book if they had. But I kept pressing him. He said there had been a serial killer down in Virginia named Randall Lee Smith, who shot two hikers in 1981 and later tried to kill two fishermen. And then he told me about two gay women who were murdered in 1988 in Pennsylvania by a guy named Stephen Roy Carr. Over the past few years, he said, there had been a series of strange deaths and disappearances in the Northeast, but nothing yet in Maine.”

  I tried to catch Stacey’s attention, to no avail. “Who figured it out? You or Nissen?”

  “Both of us,” she said. “Nissen had started a file on Samantha and Missy. We went through it together, page by page, until we came to that MISSING poster. I must have seen that picture a thousand times, but I’d never thought about the T-shirt Missy was wearing. For some reason, it finally jumped out at me.”

  Of course, I thought. Toby Dow had been wearing the same Monson souvenir shirt every time I’d seen him.

  “You asked Nissen where she might have bought it,” I said.

  “He said there was only one place in town that sold them.”

  “The general store.”

  “That’s right. And I said it was odd that no one had reported that Samantha and Missy had stopped there. It seems like the kind of thing someone would have remembered under the circumstances.”

  “What happened then?” the lieutenant asked impatiently.

  Like her father, Stacey enjoyed telling stories and was never in any hurry to wrap them up if she had an attentive audience.

  “Nissen jumped up with this big shit-eating grin and said we needed to go somewhere,” she said. “He wanted me to ride with him in the van, but I said that I’d follow in my truck because I still had my doubts about him.”

  “He didn’t tell you where you were going?” I asked.

  “I thought it was the store. But then he kept driving past the slate quarries, until we got to this place. I think he’d realized Benton was a killer, and he wanted to be the one to get credit for catching him.”

  Caleb Maxwell had told me that Nissen had always cared about being the first to find a missing person when they were members of Moosehead Search and Rescue. That same competitive, self-aggrandizing nature seemed to have been on display this morning.

  “When we got here,” Stacey continued, “Nissen came out of his van with an axe. Maybe he didn’t own a gun because he was a felon.”

  DeFord and I laughed at the same time.

  “That doesn’t stop most of them,” he said.

  Stacey frowned. “Well, I’m glad you think it’s funny. I had no idea whose house this was until I saw that shuttle bus over there; then I realized it was Lurch’s place.”

  The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Lurch?”

  “Like in the Addams Family. It’s what I called Benton.” She paused as another police cruiser pulled up, this one belonging to the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department. “I got out my Ruger, and Nissen and I went to the front door. What we didn’t realize was that Lurch had been packing up his bus. He must have heard us coming, because he hid behind the seats. When there wasn’t any answer at the door, I went to take a look inside the bus. He jumped out and hit me on the head with a piece of wood.”

  “Who gave him the black eye?” I asked.

  “It was me. I didn’t go down the first time. I managed to get a punch off, and I think I hurt him. But he grabbed my shirt and ripped off the buttons. So he clubbed me again.”

  Her voice wavered. “When I came to, I was lying next to Bob inside the shuttle. I’m not sure where Lurch was planning to take us. He must’ve been hoping to cover his tracks again. I guess it doesn’t matter now. He was in the house a long time, and we were alone in the van. We were tied up with paracord, but Lurch didn’t know how to tie knots. He must have flunked that part of the psycho test. It took forever, but Bob finally managed to get free. He was untying my hands when Lurch came back. Christ, it was horrible.”

  She closed her eyes and shivered. “After that, he made us walk to the quarry,” she said. “Bob could barely move. Lurch had shot off his toes. That asshole shoved the poor guy over that concrete barrier because he couldn’t climb. I thought about taking off, but I knew he would shoot me in the back while I was running—and I didn’t want to leave Bob. When we got to the pit, Lurch told us to stand on the edge. He shot Bob first.”

  “And that’s when you jumped?” I asked.

  “What else could I do?” she said. “Benton thought it was hilarious. He started howling and throwing rocks at me. I knew there was no way out. I was sure I was going to die.”

  A state trooper emerged from the house. “Lieutenant!”

  “Excuse me,” DeFord said.

  Stacey hopped to the ground and winced when she landed on her bad foot.

  “I’m sorry, Stacey,” the lieutenant said, “but you can’t go in there. It’s a crime scene.”

  “Just let us know what you find,” I said.

  “I will.”

  When we were alone, I said, “Stacey, why did you disappear on me like that?”

  “Because you didn’t believe in me. I told you someone murdered Samantha and Missy, and I needed your support. I started wondering how much I could trust you if you wouldn’t trust me.”

  I resisted the overpowering urge to touch her face. “I was sure something horrible had happened to you.”

  “Well, it kind of did,” she said with a bitter laugh. “And now, with my luck, that monster is probably going to pull through. I wish you’d just shot him when you had the chance.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that.”

  I reached into the pocket of the coat I had given her to wear and removed the broken sunglasses I’d found on Nissen’s lawn. “These belong to you.”

  She looked at them without recognition for a few seconds before stuffing them back in my jacket pocket. She leaned against the side of the truck and began flexing her ankle, testing the limit of her pain.

  “You don’t want to know how I found you?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  I almost felt embarrassed telling her now. “The broken cell phone Toby Dow was playing with at the general store—it was Missy’s. Benton must have thrown it into the Dumpster.”

  “Well, that was stupid of him.”

  “No, it was daring,” I said. “Those other deaths and disappearances on the AT in the past few years—they had one thing in common. They were all staged to look like something other than homicides. Benton was toying with the FBI, daring them to figure out what he was doing. He probably placed that phone in the trash in hopes it would be found, because the game wasn’t thrilling enough for him.”

  “Congratulations on figuring it out,” she said. “It’s too bad for Nissen you didn’t do it sooner.”

  I must have looked like I’d been punched in the gut.

  Tears appeared in her eyes, and she shuddered. “I’m sorry. That was a horrible thing to say. I’m just a wreck right now. I shouldn’t be near anyone when I’m like this.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Just let me be alone. I need to be alone.”

  I watched her limp away, wondering about the last word she had used. Alone for how long? I had spent my entire life trying to escape from my own solitary confinement. The thought of returning to that lonely prison terrified me.

  But it would be better to lose her this way, I thought, than to have lost her in that flooded pit. I could still hear Benton A
very’s howls in my head and probably would forever. What had driven him to commit such atrocities? Even if he survived, would he be able to tell us, and would we even understand?

  I threw my head back and gazed up at the perfect sky. From horizon to horizon, the color was a deep, heavenly blue. Not a single cloud to be seen. On such an unblemished morning, it seemed hard to imagine that such evil could exist upon the earth, not unless you believed, like Brother John, that humanity had fallen from God’s grace; that our mortality was the price we paid for our sinfulness, and the two were coiled up together, impossible to ever unravel.

  39

  The state police found a leather satchel under Benton’s bed. Inside was an odd assortment of mementos: a bottle opener shaped like a trout, a woman’s turquoise bracelet, a trail map to Bear Mountain State Park in New York State, a shot glass from Bennington College, a Purple Heart medal, and a Samsung Galaxy smartphone with a serial number behind the battery registered to Samantha Boggs. The evidence techs also discovered a police scanner in the kitchen with a pad of paper. Benton had scribbled Chad McDonough’s phone number on a note.

  DeFord took Stacey to Dover-Foxcroft to get stitches once the evidence technicians and the death-scene examiner were done with their work. It seemed pointless for me to ask to drive her. If nothing else, she needed time to cool down. DeFord later told me that, after they were done at the hospital, her father picked her up in his floatplane on Sebec Lake and flew her back home to Grand Lake Stream. Charley called me that night to talk about what had happened to Stacey. We spoke for an hour, and then I asked him how much time I should give her. He said she would get in touch with me when she was ready.

  But she didn’t.

  The FBI held a press conference, asking for help identifying the man called Benton Avery, since his fingerprints were nowhere in their databases. When they showed his photograph, people from up and down the eastern seaboard called to report having seen someone who looked like him along the Appalachian Trail. He had flipped burgers for a time in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where he was known as Randall Smith. In Bartlett, New Hampshire, where he’d worked as a carny at an amusement park, people called him Stephen Carr. Benton Avery—or whoever he really was—had a wicked sense of humor. He’d stolen his aliases from two other AT serial killers.