by Paul Doiron
“Did you get a look at the shooter?” he asked.
“No,” I said, trying to gather my wits. “I think he was hiding in the blueberry bushes between the house and the trees. He would have had to come down from the top of the ridge to get a clear shot at the front of the house. He was probably hoping to get closer, but Kathy let Pluto out.” In my mind’s eye, I saw the hound lying dead in the grass and felt a surge of acid coming back up my throat. “Pluto must have been barking, and when Kathy came outside to check on him, the shooter fired from the bushes and caught her broadside.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t pursue her into the house.”
“He must have seen my headlights approaching,” I said. “From the hillside, you can see down to the bottom of the valley. He didn’t want any witnesses.”
“You saved her life, Bowditch.”
“For now.”
I heard car doors slamming and men’s voices shouting and, over it all, the unmistakable chittering of a distant helicopter. The noise got louder and louder, until I could make out the distinctive sounds of the two rotors over the airplanelike roar of its engine. The LifeFlight chopper was landing in the leafy blueberry barrens below the farmhouse. Without a word, the major stepped out of view around the ambulance door.
The bandage made a sticky sound as I peeled it away from my blood-matted head. There were red polka dots all over the batting, and a few hairs I’d torn loose. With my fingertips, I felt my injured cheek and removed a tiny shard of glass that had been driven into the flesh. Exposed to the open air, the wounds began to smart and bleed again.
Kathy’s blood had been dark red, not bright red. It had pumped from the wounds when she breathed, rather than spurted through my fingers. She was bleeding internally, but there was a chance that the shotgun pellets had missed the major organs and arteries and had severed veins instead.
I pushed myself to a standing position and grabbed the edge of the compartment over my head. My head went woozy, and I thought I might faint, but after wobbling like a toddler for the better part of a minute, I felt my head clear and strength returning to my legs. I threw the blanket off my shoulders and stepped carefully down onto the packed gravel of the driveway. A misty rain was starting to fall again.
The helicopter had landed on a flat patch of land to my right. The chopper was white and green, with gold swooshes along the side. The crew wore matching green jumpsuits. With all the rain and fog, it was a miracle LifeFlight had been given clearance to take off. Leaning against the side of the ambulance, I watched as a mob of paramedics, cops, and wardens carried the litter out of the house and across the field to the waiting helicopter.
Few cops will ever admit that they consider the life of a fellow officer to be more valuable than anyone else’s. But when you watch a spectacle like the one I was witnessing—officers elbowing one another aside to be litter bearers—it becomes hard not to draw that conclusion. And why not? If you put your life on the line for strangers each day, wouldn’t you hope that someone would honor your sacrifice?
After they’d secured the stretcher inside, the men backed away and the chopper lifted off with surprising suddenness. Its rear end tilted up first and then the whole enormous contraption came off the ground. The whirling blades sent loose leaves flying. A few of the guys standing closer to the landing site actually threw their bodies flat on the ground.
I watched the loud, blinking machine shoot south across the sky until it was smaller than a meteor.
Malcomb was kneeling beside the sprawled corpse of Pluto.
I walked unsteadily toward him. “Major?”
He had approached the dead dog as close as he deemed wise, given that this was an active crime scene. The animal that had been his colleague on so many missing-person investigations was gone. Now there was just a dog-shaped piece of evidence that was not to be touched.
He looked up at me from the ground, his face hard again.
“I need to get down to Maine Med,” he said. “Lieutenant Soctomah wants you to walk him around the scene while your memory is fresh. Maybe someone can drive you to the hospital after the detective is done with you. You’ll want to get those cuts looked at. I expect you’ll survive a few more hours.”
“Yes, sir,” I said to the man who was no longer my commanding officer. “I’ll survive.”
15
The state police detective who had taken charge of the investigation was a lieutenant named Wayne Soctomah, whom I’d first met when my father was a fugitive in the North Woods. My dad had been accused of having ambushed and killed two men with a high-powered rifle. There were certain similarities to the present case.
Soctomah was a member of the Passamaquoddy Nation, having grown up near my current home outside Grand Lake Stream, in the Indian village on Peter Dana Point. He had become a Maine state trooper during a time when Native Americans were not automatically welcomed into the state police’s ranks. Later, he took night classes to get a master’s in criminal justice from Boston University and had risen quickly through the ranks to a senior position as a detective in the Major Crimes Unit. He was a muscular man with a thick silver crew cut and closely set eyes that reminded me of those of a bird of prey.
I must have looked to Soctomah like one of the intoxicated rednecks Maine game wardens routinely arrest: bearded, shirtless, with blood of indefinite origin smeared all over my torso.
“We need to get a bandage on your head” were the first words he spoke to me.
“I wouldn’t mind a jacket, either.”
“I’ve got one in the cruiser.” He had a faint accent I’d heard on the Passamaquoddy rez. I wondered if he’d worked his whole life to rid himself of that singsong cadence.
The navy blue polyester jacket he gave me had POLICE stenciled on the back. The fabric felt slippery on my bare skin, and my wrists poked out of the too-short arms. I felt like an impostor wearing it.
Soctomah had called over one of the EMTs to tape a fresh bandage to my bleeding skull. It was the size of a sponge you might use to wash a car.
“Better?” he asked.
I still felt like my knees might buckle. “Yeah.”
“Good, because I need to know what happened here. Give me as much detail as you can.”
Despite the ringing in my skull, I did my best to recount the entire sequence of events. Soctomah took notes the whole time. I told him about my earlier visit to the house, the argument I’d had with Kathy, and then her call to apologize. I told him how Pluto had begun barking and how we’d ended our conversation abruptly. I demonstrated where I’d stopped the Bronco when I’d first seen the dead dog, then pointed out the route I’d taken to seek cover behind the stone wall, showing him exactly where I’d pressed my body into the weeds. After that, we walked toward the house—avoiding the evidence techs at work—and I showed him how I’d entered the hall.
“It seems like you might have surprised the shooter before he could finish the job.” Soctomah glanced at my pockmarked Bronco. “How long do you think you kept him occupied?”
“Long enough for the ambulance to get here.”
“It’s lucky the station is just down the hill in Union,” he said.
I felt the mist beginning to shift to something with a heavier, downward trajectory. I wondered if the helicopter could beat the rain to Portland.
“Will they call you if Kathy dies en route to the hospital?” I asked him.
He laid a hand on my shoulder in a friendly way. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
“It’s not ‘power,’” he said. “It’s ‘courage.’ Why don’t we focus on what we can change here? I’ve got evidence techs searching the blueberry fields for spent shells. The major has loaned me a K-9 team to backtrack up the hill to those trees. Is that where you saw the headlights when you were leaving?”
“There’s a park
ing lot on the far side of those pines. It’s the entrance to an old apple orchard. Kids sometimes park there to smoke pot and fool around.”
“Does it seem like the vehicle was parked there?”
“I think so.” I tried to retrieve the memory, but it was eluding me. “The headlights seemed high off the ground, so I would say it was a pickup or a Jeep, maybe even with a raised suspension. Like a truck someone had altered to go mudding.”
He jotted something in his notebook. “She didn’t say anything else before she hung up on you—something specific?”
My head and face still felt like fire ants were crawling around under the cotton batting, but my leg muscles had regained some of their sturdiness. I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t have circulatory shock.
“She was getting death threats. I’m sure you’ll find them on her computer. Hopefully, the guy who did this e-mailed her first, because then you’ll have an electronic trail to follow. But I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Why?”
“This all feels too deliberate and careful. Whoever shot Kathy had been scouting her house awhile. He’s going to be hard to catch.”
The detective wasn’t about to divulge any of his suspicions, least of all to me. “I’m going to need to borrow your Walther. I’ll give it back to you after we do a ballistics test.”
I reached around to the back of my jeans, where I’d tucked the pistol. Then I cleared a round out of the action and ejected the magazine. I handed him the gun in pieces.
A state trooper wearing a long, dark raincoat and hat with the plastic wrap they use to cover their brimmed headgear strode up toward us. He was holding a Baggie with a single crimped shotgun shell in it. The plastic was burnt-orange and as long as my finger: HEVI-Shot Magnum Blend.
“What kind of sniper uses a turkey gun?” I asked.
“I have a red-dot scope on my boy’s Ithaca at home,” the trooper said. “He doesn’t miss a bird with it.”
“If our guy is a turkey hunter, he’d be on the list of people who tagged one,” I said.
The detective nodded. “That’s a pretty long list.”
The drizzle was falling more heavily now, hard enough that I could see individual drops bounce off the trooper’s hat.
“Has anyone called Danielle Tate and told her what happened to Kathy?” I asked.
“Major Malcomb did, I believe.”
“Because whoever shot Kathy might be going for a twofer tonight.”
Soctomah’s head snapped around toward the trooper, and without either of them saying a word, the tall policeman waded through the weeds toward his cruiser. He would be paying Warden Tate a visit.
“I can’t think of anything I haven’t told you,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go see Kathy now.”
“We can take him!”
It was the female EMT. I hadn’t realized she’d been eavesdropping on our conversation. She’d changed out of her own blood-soaked clothes and was sipping what looked like hot coffee from the lid of a thermos. The ambulance could have left after the LifeFlight helicopter had taken off, but the paramedics had spent nearly half an hour fighting to keep Kathy alive. They probably even knew her, given that their lines of work often intersected. After a night like this one had been, it’s not so easy to pack up your gear and go home.
I walked halfway toward the waiting ambulance; then I remembered I was still wearing Soctomah’s jacket. I pulled my arms loose and was preparing to hurl it back to him, but the detective held up his hand.
“Hang on to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to freeze to death.”
I put the jacket back on over my naked shoulders and snapped the buttons to keep some of the damp out.
Portland was more than an hour south of Appleton. It was a long detour for the paramedics to make for the sole purpose of giving me a taxi ride.
“You’re not going to charge me for this?” I asked, climbing again into the back of the ambulance and sitting down on the familiar gray vinyl seat.
“That depends,” said the EMT with a smile and a wink. “Do you have insurance?”
16
We arrived at Maine Medical Center close to midnight. I’d asked the EMTs to let me know if they got word of Kathy’s condition, but nothing had come over the airwaves. They’d given me a T-shirt to wear under Soctomah’s borrowed police jacket.
The ambulance had clearance to use one of the hospital’s emergency bays. The wounds on my scalp had stopped bleeding, which was a promising sign, but the EMTs said I still might need stitches. The woman whispered something to an attendant at the door and then waved me forward.
“Marcus is going to take you to triage,” she said.
“Thanks for the lift.”
“We’ll be praying for her.”
My own prayers didn’t have the best track record. They certainly hadn’t helped my mother. The last time I’d visited this hospital was the night of her death.
Marcus, the admitting nurse, or whatever he was, escorted me to a room the size of a phone booth and took my blood pressure, measured my pulse rate, shined a light in my pupils, and peeked under my bandages. He must have determined that my death was not imminent, because the next thing I knew, I was being escorted back to the waiting room of the ER.
I checked in with the receptionist, who had me fill out a form and take a seat. She didn’t need to give me instructions. For an otherwise-healthy young man, I’d spent a fair amount of my life in hospitals.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me the condition of a friend of mine who was brought in by LifeFlight?” I asked the clerk, already knowing the answer.
“Are you a relative?”
“No.”
She had a sad, understanding smile. “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to release private information.”
The wardens, my former colleagues, began to appear before my name was called. The local guys arrived first, the ones from Division A, which patrols the southernmost part of the state. Kathy was a Division B sergeant from central Maine. But the Warden Service is a small, tight-knit corps—a hundred field officers, more or less—and everyone knows everyone.
I recognized each anguished face. There was Sergeant Ouelette and Tommy Volk; David DiPietro and John Taylor; Patrick Flynn, who had been in my class at the Academy. They passed through admitting on their way to the waiting room outside the surgery unit. Not one of them glanced in my direction; not one of them recognized me under my bandaged, bearded face.
Eventually, my name was called.
I followed another guy in nurse’s scrubs through the door into the examination room. I must have waited forty-five minutes for the doctor to appear. He was a lean man with a salt-and-pepper beard and the smallest hands I’d ever seen on an adult. He glanced at the chart the nurse had left and then began asking me questions about my medical history. I rattled off my life’s injuries: seven broken bones, some from childhood, others from a more recent ATV crash; eighteen stitches in three places incurred over twenty-seven years; two concussions, including one caused by a crowbar to the back of the skull; residual frostbite damage to my fingers, toes, and both ears; a nonpenetrating gunshot wound to the chest; and now these lacerations from a windshield that had exploded in my face.
He waited to make sure I had finished with my list. “You’ve lived a dangerous life.”
I couldn’t disagree.
The doctor used his tiny hands to pick shards of glass out of my face and skull with tweezers, remarking twice how lucky I’d been that they’d missed my eye, as it to make a broader point about my general indebtedness to good fortune in light of the many abuses my body had suffered. He placed three stitches above my ear, bringing my life’s total of sutures to twenty-one. And then he bandaged me up again. He worked with such speed and precision that I almost missed my chance to ask him the only question that was on my mind.
“Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“A game warden named Kathy Frost was brought in h
ere by helicopter. She was shot by the same person who shot me. Please tell me: Is she alive?”
“You’re not a member of her family?”
“No, but she’s my friend.”
“I’m really not supposed to say, you know.” He stuck his hands into his pockets and looked at the floor. “But what I heard wasn’t good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
* * *
Now that I was stitched up, I was free to leave, but I had no intention of going anywhere until I heard how Kathy was doing.
I returned to the ER waiting room and took a seat. Once again I had a clear view of the doors leading to the parking garage. A woman entered the building, dressed in brown cords and an orange turtleneck sweater. I recognized her immediately. She had gray hair cut in a short and spiky style, and she was wearing blue-framed eyeglasses. The Reverend Deborah Davies never looked much like a warden chaplain even when she was wearing a clerical collar under her uniform.
She gave a brief glance at the waiting room, started forward, then stopped, looking me straight in the eyes.
“Mike?”
I rose stiffly from the chair. We met at the edge of the carpet.
“It is you,” she said.
“Hello, Reverend.”
She reached out her arms and gripped my shoulders. “How is Kathy? Have you heard anything?”
“Only that she’s in surgery. She lost a lot of blood.”
She brought her fingers up to touch my bandages. “How are you?”
“A few stitches.”
She surveyed the room. “Where is everyone?”
“Waiting down the hall, I think, in the room outside surgery.”
“Why are you out here by yourself?”
“I’m not a warden anymore.”
“Poppycock.”
I had forgotten what a natural goofball Deb Davies was.
“Come with me,” she said.
