Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  “I told him that he was fired,” he said. “What else would I be telling him?”

  And then he stepped past me and returned to his vehicle. His headlights came on. I watched him do a perfect three-point turn and then drive away.

  When I looked in on Dyer myself, he gave me a smile that showed off his discolored teeth.

  “What did Russo say to you just now?” I asked. “Tell me what he said.”

  “He said I’m going to be famous.” I found myself wanting to slap him again across his smug, triumphant face. Whatever else Logan Dyer was, he was no patsy. He had killed twelve men that I knew of, starting with Adam, and nearly including Mink and me. But I still couldn’t believe he had written that so-called manifesto, couldn’t believe he had planned and executed his vigilante campaign alone. I had to sit down on a snowbank to cool off.

  Pulsifer was the last warden to arrive, and he pretended to give me holy hell for my ruined truck. “I am no insurance adjuster, but I would file this one under ‘totaled.’ Don’t be surprised if your rates go through the roof, Bowditch.”

  Gary helped me transfer my gear from my truck to his—the stuff that hadn’t been shot full of holes, that is.

  “What about these?” he said when we were almost done. He held out my father’s dog tags. In the artificial light of the emergency vehicles I read the stamped words again, as if for the first time:

  BOWDITCH

  JOHN, M.

  004-00-8120

  O NEG

  NO PREF.

  I sucked in my breath.

  “What?” asked Pulsifer, narrowing his eyes and sticking out his chin in that foxlike way of his.

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Blood doesn’t lie’?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  I put the dog tags around my neck and tucked them under my T-shirt. I didn’t pause to think about what I was doing or why. The metal felt cold against my chest.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you someday.”

  * * *

  I stayed with Lauren and Gary Pulsifer again that night. I’d asked Clegg to call me if he got any information out of Dyer, thinking I’d hear from him in the morning. But the detective called even before we’d finished the hot chocolates Lauren had made to warm us both up.

  I took the phone into the Pulsifer’s guest room, which was as drafty as ever.

  “He confessed to everything,” Clegg said. “As soon as I started back to Farmington, he started talking. He said, ‘Yeah, I killed them all. Langstrom, too. I’m guilty, and that’s all I’m going to say. If you want to know why I did it, read my letter.’”

  “His letter?” I said.

  “That word struck me as odd, too. I said, ‘Are you referring to your manifesto?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, my manifesto. That letter I wrote. All my reasons for doing it are in there. Read it and you’ll understand why. I’m guilty, and that’s all I’m going to say.’”

  “So what were the reasons he supposedly gave in his ‘letter’?”

  Clegg answered as if he might have had the document in front of him. “It starts with him having a revelation that he has only a short time to live, and that he decided the best way for him to spend his final days was in dramatic action, taking extreme measures to protect the children of Maine, since the criminal justice system has failed so mightily. He claims this country was founded on vigilantism and the only way ‘to take it back’ is by adopting the methods of our Founding Fathers. It’s quite a lengthy document.”

  “That sounds a lot more like Johnny Partridge than it does Logan Dyer. Don’t you think?”

  “Speaking for myself, I would say yes. Speaking for the state of Maine, I am not sure it matters.”

  “How can it not matter?”

  “Because you caught him in the act of trying to kill Nathan Minkowski and yourself. Because every bit of physical evidence we have found so far connects him to the massacre of those men. Because he had means, motive, and opportunity. And because his ‘letter’ tells us exactly why he chose to leave Langstrom’s truck near the SERE school.”

  “What reason did he give?

  “So that its discovery would gain international attention for his crusade. The navy base is already the preoccupation of conspiracy theorists. He sees himself as the inspirational leader of a vigilante insurrection that will sweep the nation.”

  “There’s more to this, Clegg. There has to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if Dyer was put up to this? What if he was goaded along by someone else? He’s already unstable, and he thinks he’s dying of a brain tumor, and so he’s going to be easy to manipulate. Someone tells him he’ll be a world-famous hero if he wipes out all those sex offenders.”

  “Who do you think is manipulating him?”

  “Russo.”

  Clegg’s tone turned sour. “What reason would Russo have had to mastermind something like this?”

  “He wouldn’t, which is why he would make such a good middleman. People think those Night Watchmen are just a bunch of tough-talking old drunks. I did, too. But they hated what Foss was doing—bringing ‘human garbage’ to their mountain resort—and his business was in direct competition with Cabot Lumber. When I met Russo at the Sluiceway, he didn’t act like the head of security at Widowmaker. He acted like he worked for Cabot.”

  “Mike—”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but at every stage of this thing, there’s been one of those Night Watchmen involved. First it was Torgerson showing up outside the SERE school. Then it was Partridge publishing an incendiary column the day before the massacre. I don’t know how Adam Langstrom fits into it all. Maybe Russo told Dyer to kill him as a dry run, to see if he could go through with killing the others. But I think Foss was the real target all along.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I think you should get some sleep, Mike,” Clegg said at last in a patient, fatherly voice. “Those aren’t accusations you should be making in public without any proof. You’re starting to sound like those conspiracy theorists we were just talking about.”

  “If I was one of the Night Watchmen, that’s exactly what I’d hope you’d say.”

  “Or it could be that it’s all coincidence, and Dyer is a better letter writer than you think he is.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Well, we’ll know more in the morning.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Dyer’s manifesto also spells out exactly how he disposed of Langstrom’s body. He says he lashed it to a tire wheel and then pushed it off a bridge over the Dead River. In the morning, the state police are sending a dive team to check out the water under that bridge. You’re welcome to watch them if you’d like.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

  I had barely hung up the phone when the door opened and Flotsam and Jetsam rushed into the guest room and began sniffing around my legs. As I scratched their heads, I found myself thinking of Shadow again. Would he be able to survive alone in the wild, after having spent so much time with humans? Yes, he would, I thought. There was something about that animal that made me regret all the times I had scoffed at New Agers for worshiping wolves as magical creatures possessed of special powers. Shadow might not be a deity, but that big brute was a survivor.

  The phone buzzed again. This time it was Stacey. I stretched out atop the still-made bed. The dogs jumped up to join me.

  “I got your message,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I am now.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “I promise to tell you the whole story,” I said, “but first I need to hear how you’re doing.”

  “Shitty. You were right. I shouldn’t have gone out there. I saw things—I wish I could unsee them.”

  “You need to come home.”

  “I’m worried it won’t help.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You promised to tell me the whole story of what happene
d to you. Begin at the beginning.”

  And that was what I did.

  * * *

  The next morning, I awoke early to go watch the state police divers begin their search for Adam’s corpse. Pulsifer was waiting in the kitchen with two cups of coffee. “You’re not going to get far without a vehicle.”

  “I figured I’d steal one of yours.”

  “Another charge for the disciplinary committee.”

  As I had expected, the temperature had plummeted after the snow moved out, and it took us so long to scrape the frost from the windows of Gary’s patrol truck that I needed to pry my fingers loose from the scraper. I never knew the living could also suffer from rigor mortis.

  “Do you know what the state does with unclaimed bodies?” I asked Pulsifer.

  “I’ve always assumed the ashes end up in the back room of some funeral home. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just something that’s been on my mind.”

  We drove in silence back toward Kennebago Settlement, both of us agreeing without saying so that it was too cold for further conversation.

  A deputy had blocked the road to the bridge with his car to prevent nosy people from approaching the scene. It was my friend from the other night, the one who had pointed me in the direction of the wounded dog.

  “I heard it was hit by a car,” he told me.

  I had hoped the injured animal might still survive. I certainly didn’t blame it for the actions of its vile owner.

  Pulsifer and I walked to the bridge.

  On too many occasions I had watched the Warden Service dive team retrieve bodies from the water: swimmers who underestimated the currents in a river, snowmobilers who overestimated the thickness of lake ice. Most of the corpses I had seen brought up from the depths had belonged to young people. Younger than thirty. Younger than me. The young and the reckless.

  Adam had been only twenty-one.

  The river wasn’t particularly deep, and the dark water, when the divers opened a hole, didn’t seem to be moving particularly fast, but I knew that diving is always dangerous, especially under ice.

  Mist rose from the moving water—it was so much warmer than the air. It almost seemed as if we were staring into hot springs.

  I had expected a long wait, but the divers found Adam on their first descent. He was exactly where Logan Dyer’s manifesto had said he would be. Everything Dyer had told the detectives turned out to be true.

  And for reasons I couldn’t explain, it made me all the more certain that he hadn’t acted alone. But what could I do about it? I hadn’t even been able to convince Clegg. I would have to be content in knowing that the man who had pulled the trigger twelve times would spend the rest of his life—however long it was—behind bars. Not all of the wicked are punished in this life; many bad men die peacefully in their sleep. The injustices of this world are why we so desperately dream of a better one yet to come.

  The divers laid the corpse on a black tarp that they could zip up to form a bag. Then they began changing hurriedly out of their wet suits. The hole they had made in the ice was already refreezing.

  The lifeless thing that they brought up resembled none of the pictures of Adam I had seen. Not the cocksure kid in the photo Amber had left me; not the angry defendant scowling at the camera at his trial; not the damaged ex-con from the sex offender registry. His skin was white, with some blue-and-purple mottling. His hair looked like black kelp except where the bullet had torn away part of his skull. If I hadn’t been told who this sodden, crooked-limbed creature was, I never would have recognized him.

  “I believe my testicles have fully retracted,” said Puslifer through chattering teeth. “How about we get going?”

  I was about to reply, when I heard shouting start up in the road behind us. The deputy was trying to block a woman from getting past him and rushing to the bridge. I recognized the lipstick red Jeep parked beyond the police cruiser.

  Had her friend in the Rangeley police department told her where to go? The woman had a special gift for getting secrets out of men. Without a word to Pulsifer, I started back along the ice-hard road. My bruised knee was as stiff as if it were encased in a metal brace.

  “Let me through!” Amber screamed. “He’s my son! He’s my son!”

  “You can’t, Amber,” said the deputy.

  He was strong, but she drove her boot, hard, into the top of his foot. The man went down, cursing, as if hit by a maul.

  I moved to intercept Amber as she surged forward.

  She tried to dodge me, but I had played cornerback in high school and knew how to guess which way a running person will turn by watching their hips. I got my arms around her before she could take another step. She tried the same stomp move on me, but I was ready for it.

  “Stop, Amber,” I said in her ear. Her hair smelled of marijuana.

  “I want to see him.”

  “You will.”

  From a distance, it must have looked like we were dancing.

  “I know you lied to me,” I said. “I know Adam isn’t my brother.”

  She ceased to struggle. She turned her anguished face to mine. She hadn’t removed her makeup in a long time, and it was streaked and smeared from her tears. “What?”

  “Adam couldn’t have been my dad’s son.”

  “But he is.”

  I could feel the cold metal of my father’s dog tags against my chest. “My dad had O-negative blood. That’s the same blood type I have. But Adam’s records say he was AB-positive.”

  “But I’m AB-positive.”

  “A man with an O-negative blood type can’t have a child who is AB. It doesn’t matter what the mother’s blood type is.”

  She stared up at me with eyes redder than any I had ever seen. “It’s not true. Adam was Jack’s boy. He was.”

  “I don’t know how long you’ve known the truth,” I said. “But you knew you were lying the night you came to me for help. You were desperate and out of options, so you tried the same lie on me that you used on my dad a long time ago. Did he ever believe you?”

  Her body grew heavy in my arms. “No. He knew Adam wasn’t his.”

  “Then how did you get his dog tags?”

  “He left them in my house. They fell between the wall and the bed. We heard A.J. drive up and—”

  “Whose son is Adam?” I asked.

  She shook her head so that her dirty hair hid her face.

  “No one’s,” she said. “Not anymore.” And she began to sob.

  37

  Two weeks later, on my twenty-ninth birthday, Stacey and I fastened our skis on top of my Scout and we started off into the mountains.

  It had been a bad time. Stacey was suffering, afflicted with grief, guilt, and anger, and there was nothing I could do but be present for her. I insisted that she stay with me until the services were over, since I lived so much closer to Augusta. Together, we attended the state-sponsored memorial for her dead colleagues, as well as two of the three private funerals. The body of the young intern who had been killed in the crash, Marti Menendez, had been flown back home to California for burial there.

  Stacey didn’t leave the house much otherwise, except to split wood. We had more than we would need for the winter, but I left her to her labors. She would open the garage door to let in the cold air and then she would go to work with an ax and a wedge, breaking logs down into smaller and smaller pieces. If she doesn’t work through her anguish soon, I thought, I will have nothing to burn but toothpicks.

  On the day before my birthday I left her alone to run an errand in Augusta. It took me most of the day, but when I arrived home, I found that she had cleaned the house from top to bottom. She had wrapped her thick brown hair in a kerchief, almost in imitation of a 1950s housewife.

  “Consider it your birthday present,” she said. “I forgot to get you one. I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied.”

  “I understand, and I have something to take your mind off things. We’re going skiing for the weekend.”


  “Mike, I don’t know if I’m up to it.”

  “You split two cords of wood yourself. I’d say you don’t have to worry about your physical fitness.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Do it for me.”

  She agreed, but she couldn’t manage to show excitement at the idea of going away together. The thought of having fun seemed an offense to her dead friends. I had known the feeling, and I could tell what was going on behind those sad green eyes of hers.

  We hadn’t made love since the accident. She hadn’t been ready. In bed, we lay on our sides, me behind her, hugging her tightly, as I had done every night since she had returned home, sometimes whispering reassurances when she cried, sometimes remaining totally silent until she had fallen asleep.

  That night, however, she put my hand on her breast. I appreciated the gesture but felt she was doing it out of guilt, because it was my birthday the next day.

  “We don’t have to,” I said.

  “Just keep it there.” She leaned her head forward and pulled her hair up and away from her neck.

  I understood the invitation and began kissing her behind her ears.

  She let out a soft moan, and I felt her nipple grow hard in my hand. I began to massage her breast while I nuzzled her neck. She rolled over on her back, and I held myself propped on my arms above her. She traced with her finger the bright new scar on my forearm.

  “We don’t have to,” I said again.

  “I’m tired of feeling nothing.”

  I moved her hand down my body. “Is this something?”

  It was the first time she’d laughed in weeks. “It’s something, all right.”

  * * *

  The next day, we arrived at Widowmaker just before noon. Another front was moving in after the prolonged cold snap. Dark clouds were bunched up in the west, and the wind was blowing a mare’s tail of snow off the summit.

  “I still don’t understand why you wanted to come here, of all places,” Stacey said. “Why not Sugarloaf?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “You always do,” she said with a smile.

  We took the shuttle from the day-use lot to the base lodge, since it was too early to get into our hotel room. I saw Russo’s midnight-blue SUV parked outside the resort’s security office. Not all the wicked are punished. If I was fortunate, I would enjoy my weekend without having another encounter with that soulless man. Stacey was waiting for me when I came out of the locker room. Her green eyes were bright and clear, and she looked sexy as hell in her tight outfit. Holding our skis over our shoulders, we tromped toward the nearest lift. There was a line to get on, and we found ourselves behind two teenage boys with snowboards.