by Paul Doiron
“No, I just arrived.”
“Imagine the worst death scene you’ve ever worked and then multiply it by ten. Most of them were killed in their bunks or trying to get out of them.”
“What about Foss?”
“The shooter gave him special attention.” The EMT’s tired eyes grew wide as he spotted Shadow beside me. “Holy hell! What in the world is that beast with you? Is that a wolf dog?”
“I had to confiscate him from some drug addicts,” I said. “He’s a sweetheart, though.”
“I’ll take your word for it!”
I was eager to return to the subject at hand. “So the state police think it was just one guy?”
“One guy with an AR-15 and a whole bunch of clips.”
That wasn’t much help. Black guns, as some people called them, were as common up here now as M1 rifles used to be in the Maine woods after World War II. Their omnipresence was why the service had equipped us with Windham Weaponry MPCs; we had been in serious danger of being outgunned at every firefight.
“He was a regular Audie Murphy, too,” the EMT said. “That’s what I’m hearing. The CSI guys are still mapping the scene up there. Maybe they’ll find it was two shooters. They’re leaving all the bodies where they fell until they can finish photographing everything. They said they’d call us again when they’re ready for us to cart them away. They’re going to need a caravan of ambulances for that job, let me tell you.” He scratched his woolly beard. “I didn’t think I could ever feel sorry for those men, after the things they did. I used to say that prison was too good for them, but now—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He just rolled up his window and drove away.
Adam had been a good shot. I’d seen the evidence in the deer mounts on his bedroom walls. But he had taken a Glock handgun from his mother’s apartment, not a semiautomatic rifle. Unless he had used the money he’d taken off Josh Davidson to buy a carbine.
Dyer had mentioned owning a black gun, too. A Smith & Wesson. I forgot which model.
But, really, the list of potential suspects was close to endless. All it would have taken was for one crackpot to have read Johnny Partridge’s inflammatory column about the pampered pedophiles of Kennebago. The worst-case scenario was some unaffiliated vigilante—just a random kook with a gun—who had traveled in to do the job and had now disappeared back wherever the hell he’d come from.
As I neared Foss’s gate, I came up on a cluster of wardens gathered around an unmarked patrol truck. They were all wearing headlamps and looking at a topographical map spread across the hood. Sooner or later, I would have to show Shadow to them, and I would need to explain what he was doing in my pickup, but I had sped all the way up here to find out what had happened. Show-and-tell could wait a few minutes.
I left the wolf in the truck and buttoned up my coat to join the others.
“Hey!” I said.
Pulsifer glanced up. With his headlamp, he looked like a coal miner. “What did I tell you guys? Bowditch can’t help himself.”
“You make me sound like a compulsive gambler.”
“Your words, not mine.”
“Good to see you, Mike,” said Bill Gordon. He was Pulsifer’s sergeant, despite being nearly a decade younger. Gordon was new to the division—he had worked up in Aroostook County for years—and had never met my father. Many of the other area wardens shared Pulsifer’s hatred for the late Jack Bowditch and still treated me as the son of a cop killer. Jeff White, the other warden present, fell into that category.
“You want to bring me up to speed?” I said.
“CID is controlling the death scene,” said Gordon. “They want as few people as possible disturbing it, which is why we’re down here. Word is it was a regular bloodbath.”
“More like a turkey shoot,” said White.
“And none alive to tell the tale,” added Pulsifer, as if quoting some famous novel I didn’t recognize.
“So most of them were shot in their bunks?” I asked.
“All of them except Wallace Bickford,” said Pulsifer. “He must have been out taking a leak, because when Clegg found his body, the old dude’s wang was hanging out of his union suit.”
Poor Wally, I thought. A pathetic ending to a pathetic life.
“What about Foss?” I asked.
“Clegg found him outside his trailer,” said Pulsifer. “Don must have heard the shots and screams, because he came out with a big old Ruger 500. Got a couple of pops off, too, before the shooter made Swiss cheese out of his face.”
“Any sign that the shooter was wounded in the exchange?” I asked.
“No,” said Gordon. “This guy knew what he was doing. He made sure to walk on the road and keep to the heavily traveled paths. It’s going to be wicked tough picking out his boot prints from all the others.”
“What about tire tracks?”
Pulsifer removed his glove and used his index finger to trace a wavy line on the snow-dotted map. “My guess is he took a snowmobile up here. There’s a spur trail a quarter mile away that goes across a bridge over the Dead River and up past Kennebago Settlement. It connects with Route Eighty-nine of the ITS on one end and the Black Fly Loop on the other. I can ride from my house here and cross only two paved roads.”
“Which means he could have gone anywhere,” said Gordon. “And he has a full day’s start on us, too.”
“What did he use for rounds, .223’s?” I asked.
“No, .300 Blackouts,” said Jeff White.
Now that was interesting. I hadn’t come across many hunters who used that particular cartridge. “Aren’t .300 Blackouts supposed to be a good fit for a gun with a suppressor?”
“Quieter than a vulture’s sneeze,” said Pulsifer.
“His choice of cartridges is distinctive,” I said. “Maybe the detectives can use that.”
Jeff White turned his head toward me, blinding me with his headlamp. He was a veteran officer who worked out of Kingfield and was one of the wardens my father had bested time and time again. “Maybe you should go up there and help them out.”
I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard the insult. “Has anyone spoken with Logan Dyer yet?”
“Can’t find him,” said Gordon.
“I heard his dogs baying inside his house.” I turned toward Pulsifer. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you? That he would leave them alone?”
Pulsifer adjusted the strap of his headlight. “Yeah, I’m sure we’re going to get word that he’s a person of interest. Adam Langstrom, too.”
“Langstrom?” asked Jeff White. “Isn’t he dead?”
“Someone with his blood type bled a lot in his truck,” I said.
“I heard he and Foss had a fight,” said Pulsifer. “Maybe he came back looking to even the score.”
“By massacring everyone?” The disbelief in my voice seemed strident in my own ears.
And where had Pulsifer heard that Adam had tussled with Foss? Gary hadn’t been in the room for my conversation with Wallace Bickford. And I had never mentioned the black eye to him.
“For all we know,” I said, “what happened to Langstrom could have been a dry run for what happened here last night.”
“You mean someone’s on a rampage, executing sex offenders?” said Pulsifer. He sounded more excited than horrified.
“Just once I wish things would happen like they do on TV,” said Jeff White. “You know, the killer leaves a partial thumbprint on the dead man’s eyeball.”
“Except Foss doesn’t have eyeballs anymore,” said Pulsifer.
“There is that,” said Gordon.
32
What was so surreal was that it had become a beautiful night: the snow drifting through the beams of the headlamps, the frosted boughs of the evergreens, the pools of violet shadows at the edge of the light. The dreamlike scene reminded me of a Japanese woodblock print I had seen at the Colby Museum when I was a student there. Those college days seemed so long ago now. I had traveled so far since then.
I had to remind myself of the horrible event that had brought us all here. Up the hill, out of sight, evidence technicians were snapping photographs. A K-9 and its handler were running tracks between the buildings, searching for something, anything. Some unlucky cops had been given the task of bagging the dead bodies. The senior officers were on their phones with state police headquarters and the FBI, planning next steps. Because of the darkness and the absence of leads, the manhunt hadn’t yet begun.
But down at the gate, the woods seemed eerily serene. There was not a hint of wind. Fat flakes of snow floated nearly straight down. We were all waiting for orders, and there was nothing to do until the instructions came down from on high.
Not everyone was as spellbound as I was.
Jeff White stamped his booted feet to drive blood into them. “This waiting around is bullshit. What if this maniac is on a killing spree? He could be headed to Sugarloaf or Widowmaker next.”
“This wasn’t random,” said Gordon. “Our guy has a hatred of sex offenders.”
“Who doesn’t?” said White. “You might as well add half the people in the county to the suspect list, including me.”
“Are you confessing, Jeff?” asked Pulsifer, giving White one of his grins.
“I won’t be crying in my pillow tonight,” White said. “I’ll admit that much.”
Jeff White reminded me of Tommy Volk and some of the other wardens I knew who believed in a code of rough justice they’d picked up from watching Westerns. I had been a history major, and I had read once that the Old West depicted on-screen bore no resemblance to the reality of that era, when men voluntarily surrendered their six-shooters before going into saloons and when bank heists were rare enough to count on two hands. Men like White and Volk preferred the myths, since they validated their own violent preconceptions.
“They didn’t deserve to be gunned down in their sleep, Jeff,” I said.
“Fuck you, Bowditch,” he said by way of a counterargument.
To clear my head, I decided to check on Shadow.
The wolf whined when he caught my scent in the air. I shined my flashlight inside the truck and saw a pool of urine on my passenger seat. I knew I should have let him out sooner.
“Is that him? Is that your wolf dog?” Pulsifer appeared at my shoulder as if from a puff of smoke.
“He’s not mine.”
“Then why are you driving around with him?”
“Because I am trying to find him a home,” I said. “I was in New Hampshire visiting a refuge for wolf hybrids. The people there would have taken him, and they seemed nice enough. I just didn’t like the vibe of the place.”
“You’re too softhearted for this job,” said Pulsifer.
“I’m getting kind of sick of hearing that.”
“I hate to tell you, but Jeff is right,” he said. “Lots of people are going to cheer when they hear a bunch of sexual predators got put down. Whoever did this will end up being a folk hero.”
What if it really had been Adam? Might he have seen executing the other sex offenders as some sort of act of redemption? Hadn’t he told his mother that Pariahville deserved to be burned to the ground?
Pulsifer seemed intrigued by Shadow. “What do you think would happen if you let him out?”
“I’m afraid he’d run off.”
“Or eat some little girl in a red cape,” he said.
“Doesn’t the wolf eat the grandmother?”
We heard a sharp whistle. I turned and saw Sergeant Gordon waving us back up the hill. I would have to mop up the piss later.
“Listen to this,” Gordon said. “Someone shot up a house over in Eustis this afternoon. An old guy was inside watching television. Suddenly, glass started exploding everywhere and he hit the deck. Bullets were tearing up the walls, but he managed to crawl into the bathroom and hide inside the tub. The only thing that saved him was that his son and a bunch of his drinking buddies came riding up on their snowmobiles. By the time they could get the old guy to explain what had happened, the shooter was gone.”
“Who is the guy?” Pulsifer asked. “What’s his name?”
“Ducharme.”
White and Pulsifer grunted simultaneously.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s listed on the public registry.”
“Ducharme fondled his seven-year-old niece,” said Pulsifer. “He inserted various objects into her, if I remember correctly. When he got out of prison a few years back, Joe at the Bigelow General Store got a bunch of business owners together, and they banned him from entering their establishments. The only reason Ducharme probably didn’t end up here with Foss is that his born-again son took him in.”
“It looks like our vigilante is just getting started,” Pulsifer said.
“He probably figured what the hell,” said White. “‘I already mowed down ten of them. Why stop now?’”
“So here’s what’s happening,” said Gordon. “We’re all getting our own personal predator to protect.”
“You are shitting me,” said Jeff White.
The sergeant rubbed his bare hands together and blew on them. “If this guy is going from house to house, using the registry to pick his targets, then we have a general idea where he might be headed next.”
“There are dozens of names on that list, just in this area,” I said.
“Shouldn’t we be out on our sleds?” asked White. “If this guy is riding a snowmobile, then we should be out looking for him on the trails, not parked in front of some pedophile’s driveway.”
“Major Carter says it’s all hands on deck tonight, until he can get more of his own men up here. But I expect tomorrow you’re going to get your wish. They’ll have planes in the air first thing in the morning and we’ll be setting up checkpoints all over Franklin and Somerset counties.”
“Crazy night,” said Pulsifer. “The safest people in these mountains are going to be convicted sex offenders.”
Gordon got on the phone again to confer with the state police. Then he huddled with Pulsifer and White to give them their assignments. Pulsifer was given a pedophile nearby in Coplin Plantation. White got a statutory rapist in Rangeley. Neither warden seemed delighted with his chosen blind date.
“What about me?” I asked the sergeant.
“You haven’t even been cleared for duty, Bowditch. Isn’t that what I heard?”
“Yeah, but I can help.”
He removed a key fob from his pocket. “Actually, Jim Clegg said he wanted to talk to you. He should be down in a few minutes.”
“Did he say what it’s about?”
“Not to me,” he said.
I returned to my truck and used a towel to wipe up the urine. I tried letting Shadow out to see if he needed to shit, and sure enough, he did. It was the biggest pile I had ever seen come out of a canine.
How to get him back inside the truck now? I found a box of protein bars I kept in the glove compartment, ate one, and fed the rest to Shadow, who chomped them to pieces, Cookie Monster–style. In my Internet research, I had read something about wild wolves eating twenty pounds of meat a day.
I had no clue how to care for this animal. Maybe I should find a motel room for the night, then swing back to Fenris Unchained in the morning. Hopefully, Dale Probert would forgive my change of heart.
Every time headlights appeared, cutting a hazy arc through the darkness, I figured it must be Clegg, but I was always disappointed. I watched the first ambulance return to begin transporting the bodies to the medical examiner’s office in Augusta. It was followed by a second and a third.
Another vehicle approached from the direction of Route 16, a Ford Explorer Interceptor. I recognized it at once by its midnight blue paint job. I scrambled out of my pickup and stepped into the road.
Russo rolled down his window. I got a whiff of the peppermint gum he had been chewing. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.
“I could say the same thing.”
“Thought I’d come over after
my shift was done and see how I could help.” Russo’s bland face reminded me of someone who’d been injected with Botox, so that every muscle was paralyzed.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Logan Dyer today,” I said.
“No, I haven’t. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. Logan’s been calling in sick a lot. He’s been convinced he has a brain tumor.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“This morning, he didn’t even bother to call.”
“Really?”
“I’m worried about him. There was no answer at his door just now when I knocked.”
“Did Dyer’s dogs start baying when you knocked at his door?”
Russo turned his head away from me to face the hill. “You know, they did, and I thought it was strange. Logan never goes anywhere without his Plotts.”
His face began to glow, and I realized it was from the lights of another vehicle coming down the hill, its beams shining inside his SUV. I turned to see who it was, and it was Clegg. Instead of moving his Explorer aside, Russo unbuckled his lap belt and stepped down into the snow beside me.
Detective Clegg kept his engine running as he emerged from his cruiser. He walked toward us with his hands deep in the pockets of his brown uniform parka. His nose and cheeks were rosy from a long day spent outdoors. His chalk white hair was standing up, as if he’d just removed a hat.
“Lieutenant,” said Russo, greeting Clegg by his official rank.
“Russo. Who’s that with you?”
“Mike Bowditch,” I said.
“Just the man I was looking for.”
“Why is that?” asked Russo, as if it was any of his business.
“I spoke with Amber Langstrom yesterday and she mentioned that you came to her apartment.”
“I apologize. I’d been meaning to talk with you about it.”
Clegg shrugged. “Doesn’t matter now. But she told me you found a box of her son’s guns there.”
“That’s right,” I said. “He took a Glock with him. His mom sensed he was afraid of someone in particular and wanted it for self-defense. Did you find any nine-millimeter shells up there?”
“Not yet.” He removed his bare hands from his pockets and rubbed them together for warmth. “Is it possible Langstrom also had an AR-15 rifle?”
