by Paul Doiron
“No, but it is.” Her dreamy gaze was still focused on mine. “You didn’t see him after he came back from from the war, did you, Michael?”
“I hadn’t heard that he was home. If I had, I would have visited. I’m very sorry that I never got to see him again.”
“Don’t be! It’s better that you didn’t come here. People keep saying that he died in the barn, but he didn’t. Jimmy died over there in Afghanistan.”
“Lyla, that’s enough,” James Gammon said.
“Well, he did,” she said. “I don’t know who the person was who came back, but it wasn’t Jimmy.”
Her husband abruptly rose to his feet, pulling his wife up along with him by the strength of his grip.
“You need to go now,” he said to me. “I knew this was a fucking mistake.”
“You have my sympathies.” It was all I could think to say.
I thought they might escort me out, but they remained frozen where they were, like two actors onstage before the curtain falls.
I closed the door quietly and descended the porch steps without giving a glance behind me. When I climbed inside the Cutlass, I received another blast of stale booze and cigars. The starter gave me problems again. I had a panicky thought that I might be forced to wait inside the house until roadside assistance could tow away Kurt Eklund’s hunk of junk.
To my relief, the engine finally decided it was ready to start. I threw my right arm over the passenger seat and began backing out. Then a blur of motion registered in my peripheral vision. Lyla Gammon had thrown open the front door and was walking, almost jogging, toward my car. She had something in one of her hands—a small piece of paper.
Her husband was trailing fast behind her, but not fast enough. I put my foot on the brake and tried rolling down the window, having forgotten that the electric motor was busted. Lyla flattened a photograph against the glass so that I could see it. She held it there with the palm of her hand.
The image showed the face of a disfigured man. It seemed to have been taken while he was asleep. The skin had melted away like wax from a red candle. His nose and one of his ears were missing. He had no lips, either, just a slash where you’d expect to see a mouth. There was hair on only one side of his crimson skull.
Lyla Gammon’s voice was distorted, muffled, coming through the window. “This is not my son,” she said. “You can see it’s not him.”
I was glad when her husband caught up to her and wrestled her body away from the idling car. When the two of them were clear of the Cutlass, I threw the gearshift into reverse and gave the engine some gas. Lyla was still clutching the photograph in her hand the last time I saw her.
25
I’d been on the road for five minutes, maybe more, when it occurred to me that I should have warned the Gammons about Kurt. Just because he hadn’t arrived at the estate yet didn’t mean he wasn’t on his way. The police needed to send a cruiser to watch the place.
I reached in my back pocket for my cell phone and saw that I’d missed two calls. One was from Soctomah. He hadn’t left a message, which seemed typical. I didn’t recognize the other number, but it was a Maine area code. This caller had left a voice mail.
The mountain road was narrow, with no shoulder, but there was a boat launch down the hill from the Gammon farm, on the south shore of Megunticook Lake. I used to stop at the ramp when I was the district warden, checking licenses and registrations. I’d chat with the local kids fishing for yellow perch and bluegills in the weedy water, trying to teach them how important it was to follow the rules when no one was watching you. The boys weren’t interested in my lectures on ethical behavior. What they wanted to know about were the guns I carried and whether I’d ever shot anyone with them.
I pushed the button to listen to the message from my unknown caller. The female voice caused my breath to catch in my throat.
“Mike? It’s Sarah. I heard about Kathy, and I feel absolutely devastated. You must be a wreck about it. Is she going to be all right? Can I visit her at the hospital? You know I’m back in Maine now. I’m living down in Portland, and—well, it’s a long story. I got a phone call from Maddie Lawson the other day. She said you were working as a fishing guide somewhere up north! I hadn’t heard that you’d left the Warden Service. I guess we both have gone through some pretty big changes. You don’t have to call me back—it’s fine if you don’t—but I just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you. God, this must seem like the most random phone call ever.”
Maddie had warned me that she planned on calling my ex-girlfriend. And Sarah knew how close I was with Kathy. If anyone could understand the agony I was going through in the aftermath of the shooting, it was the woman I considered my first love.
But our relationship had ended a long time ago by mutual consent. Sarah had resented my decision to take a low-paying job as a game warden when I was just out of college—a choice she could never understand, having come from a wealthy and ambitious family in Connecticut. She’d also seen the darkest and most self-destructive parts of my personality and had come to view me as fundamentally unsalvageable. At the time, I didn’t disagree with her assessment. I was curious to hear what “big changes” she’d been through, but the last thing I needed at the moment was another distraction.
Better not to think of her, I decided. I’d call Sarah back after the state police caught the bastard. When all of this was behind me.
The thought of Eklund driving around pissed off and drunk scared me. My best bet was to enlist the state police. I punched in the number for Lieutenant Soctomah and got the detective on the first ring this time.
“It’s Bowditch,” I said.
“I got your message earlier. So you’ve taken up residence in the Frost house?”
“Her brother is living there, Kurt Eklund. The guy’s a total mess. Alcoholic, unstable, probably has PTSD. I thought someone should watch out for him while Kathy’s in the hospital. How is she doing? What have you heard?”
“She’s in a coma.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to the news.
“When there’s that much trauma to the body and that much blood loss, it’s always a risk,” he said. “The docs have no idea when she might come out of it. There’s also the likelihood of brain damage.”
“You don’t believe in sugarcoating things, do you?”
“Would you prefer that I did? It won’t change the situation.”
He was right, of course. I realized that the time had also come for me to make my confession. I told him that Kurt had gotten away from me while I was in the shower.
“So if you were watching Eklund,” he said, “how did he manage to give you the slip?”
“I forgot to lock up the keys to Kathy’s Nissan. I looked out the window and saw him racing down the hill. I was afraid he might have been headed to the Gammon house.”
“Why?”
“He was pissed about the quote in the paper, where Gammon called Kathy a murderer. I went over there to check, but there was no sign of him.”
“You what?”
“Jimmy Gammon was sort of a friend of mine.”
“You forgot to mention that detail earlier.”
“I was bleeding from the head at the time. You need to find Eklund, Lieutenant. He’s driving drunk, and there’s no saying where he might go or what he might do.”
“I’ll put out an alert,” he said.
“He’s driving a Nissan Xterra registered to his sister.” I had nothing to lose and so decided to test my luck. “Can you tell me anything about the status of your investigation?”
“You know I can’t.”
“What about Littlefield? It could be that whoever shot Kathy had a grudge against her and was just using the Gammon thing as cover. He wanted to make it look like retribution for what happened to Jimmy.”
The phone went silent for a while. “I’m not going to spitball ideas with you.”
“How about doing me a different kind of favor, then?”
“You have a pair of brass balls on you, Bowditch. I’ll grant you that.”
“What sort of relationship do you have with the Department of Corrections?”
“That sounds like a loaded question.”
“Can you pull some strings and get me a pass to visit a friend in the Supermax? His name is Billy Cronk.”
“I know who he is,” Soctomah said. “He’s in for a double homicide. Just swear to me this doesn’t have anything to do with my investigation.”
“I swear it has nothing to do with your investigation.”
“You have an interesting assortment of friends, Bowditch. I still want my windbreaker back, by the way.”
* * *
I hadn’t been lying to Soctomah, not entirely. I wanted to see Billy because I’d promised Aimee I would.
But I had another reason to visit the jail. Jimmy’s buddy from the 488th, Angelo Donato, worked as a corrections officer there. There was a decent chance Billy knew the former MP and could tell me something about the man.
When I arrived in the prison lobby half an hour later, I found that my name had magically appeared atop the visitors’ list. The weasel-faced guard who had given me grief had been replaced by a tall man with coffee-colored skin and a hairless skull he had shaved smooth that morning. He glanced at my driver’s license and said, “You must have a powerful friend to jump to the top of the guest list.”
“You make it sound like this is a nightclub.”
“A nightclub?” the lobby officer said with a chuckle. “I haven’t heard that one before.”
He told me to leave my keys and whatever else I had in my pockets in the coin-operated lockers across the room. I waited a few minutes on a bench, and then another guard—the visit officer—appeared. He unlocked a door and led me down a cinder-block hallway equipped with two metal detectors. The second machine had a problem with my belt buckle. The guard, a barrel-shaped man with a lazy eye, asked if he could frisk me.
“What happens if I say no?”
“Exit’s back that way.”
After he patted me down, he escorted me to a cubicle with a table and chairs bolted to the floor. The fluorescent lights were too bright, and a stinging chemical smell hung in the air, which made me wonder if an inmate had ever attempted suicide by guzzling the disinfectants they poured over everything inside the prison.
I waited close to twenty minutes for the guard to return with Billy. I found myself growing nervous as the minutes ticked by, afraid my brawny friend would appear diminished by his months behind bars. Eventually, the lock clicked and he came through the door, looking very much like the man I remembered. At six-four, Billy loomed over the guard assigned to restrain him. His woodsman’s tan had faded, and his long blond hair had been chopped as short as Sampson’s, but the guards had allowed him to keep most of his beard, which looked like it had been spun from gold and copper wire.
He was wearing a light blue shirt, darker denim pants, and the sort of sneakers you see on old people who gather at shopping malls to walk for exercise.
“Now, who could this stranger be?” he asked, cracking a broad smile I hadn’t expected.
I extended my hand, but the guard intervened. “This is a no-contact visit.”
Billy gave him a deadpan expression. “I guess a tug job is out of the question, then.”
“Just sit the fuck down, Cronk.”
We settled down across the table from each other. Now that I had a better look at his face, I could see that there were gray shadows under his eyes.
“How are you holding up in here?” I asked.
“Finestkind.” The word was Down East slang for “first-rate,” except when used ironically, which was most of the time. Billy spoke with one of the thicker Maine accents I’d heard among men my own age. “What happened to your face?” he asked.
“It’s a long story. First I want to hear why you got transferred to the Supermax. Aimee thinks you’re in the Medium Custody Unit.”
At the mention of his wife’s name, he hung his handsome head. When he glanced up again, his pale eyes had filled with mist. “I’ve been meaning to say something, but I don’t want her to worry.”
“What happened, Billy?”
He leaned back, but the stiff chair didn’t give. It was odd seeing him without his customary blond braid. “There was a new guy who came into the prison—some bookkeeper who embezzled from a church—and I guess he was scared silly of being raped, so some wiseass told him he should find the biggest, scariest person on the block and sucker punch him, just to show the other cons to leave him alone. Guess who the biggest, scariest person was.”
I had seen firsthand Billy’s capacity for violence, watched him brutally kill two men in a gravel pit. To me, it had looked like self-defense, but the prosecutors claimed it was manslaughter, and the jury had unanimously agreed. At the time, I was still trying to talk Billy into appealing the verdict, if only for his family’s sake, but I had discovered that when a man believes he deserves to be punished, it is nearly impossible to persuade him otherwise.
“Jesus, Billy. What did you do to the guy?”
“He’s having trouble remembering things now. His name, for instance.”
“How long are you in the SMU for?”
“There’s going to be a trial in superior court. I could get a few more years tacked on to my sentence, I suppose.”
I wanted to curse his stupidity, but what was the point? He already felt bad enough. “Can’t you claim self-defense?”
“I seem to recall you offered the same advice last year.” He was referring to the manslaughter trial, in which I’d been called to testify against him as a hostile witness, but the faint smile told me he wasn’t harboring ill feelings. “About time you came for a visit. Thought I was going to see you here yesterday.”
“Do you remember me mentioning my field training officer, Kathy Frost?”
“Course I do.”
“Last week, she and another warden killed a guy. It was a case of suicide by cop. He was drunk and high and pulled a shotgun on them. He was a veteran, Billy.”
“Vietnam vet or one of the younger guys?”
“Afghanistan. He was an MP at Sabalu-Harrison.”
“I met a few MPs when I was at Bagram. What was this one’s name?”
“Jimmy Gammon.”
He shook his head to indicate he was unfamiliar with the man. “So if your sergeant shot this guy, why are you the one who looks like you walked through a plate-glass window?”
“Two nights ago, I was at Kathy’s house when someone shot her with a turkey gun, killed her dog, and took a few shots at me. Blew out the windshield on my Bronco.”
“What happened to your sergeant?”
“She’s in a coma.”
He stroked his beard. “They get the son of a bitch who done it?”
“Not yet.”
“I guess I can excuse you for missing our appointment.” His voice became even deeper, which didn’t seem possible. “So tell me about this dead MP.”
“He was with the Four eight-eight and he was pretty badly wounded. I saw a picture of him after he came back from Afghanistan. He looked like a reject from a wax museum. He was in and out of Togus, living with his parents most recently. One night, they called for help because he was intoxicated, and when Kathy and her trainee arrived, he pulled a shotgun.”
“The cops think there’s a connection between the two shootings?”
“It’s one of their theories.”
“Like maybe one of his buddies from the Four eighty-eighth decided to get revenge on your sergeant for what she did?”
“I take it you have an opinion,” I said.
Billy Cronk had one of the coldest stares on the planet. “Revenge can be a powerful motivator. In Iraq, a PV-nothing in my company got fragged for stealing another guy’s iPod. The MPs could never prove it, but everyone knew what went down.”
“There’s a guard at the prison who was with the Four eighty-eighth,” I sai
d.
He leaned back against the plastic chair. “So that’s why you’re here.”
“I also made Aimee a promise I’d come visit you.”
Billy seemed unpersuaded. “What’s the name of this guard?”
“Donato,” I said.
“Yeah, I know him. He’s a supervisor. Tough, but fair. He’s not your guy, though.”
“How can you be sure?”
“MPs are cops,” he said. “They might not like what happened to their wounded friend, but they’d know your sergeant was just doing her duty in taking him down. When was the last time you heard about one cop shooting another out of revenge?”
I’d read of isolated instances, but most of those cases involved police officers who had been fired for misconduct.
“You should tell the detectives to stop barking up that tree,” Billy said.
“They’re not going to listen to me. You forget I’m no longer a warden.”
He curled his lip. “You should be out there asking questions yourself, then. Who else might have wanted your sergeant dead? Why are you wasting your time talking with me?”
He stood up, as if he saw no point in making further pleasantries.
I followed his lead. “It’s not a waste of time.”
“Come back after you’ve caught the guy. And forget about Donato.”
Easier said than done. “If you say so.”
“I’m serious, Mike.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?” We both knew I was in no position to improve his situation.
“Don’t tell Aimee I am in the SMU,” he said. “She’s going to figure it out, but I don’t want her worrying in the meantime.”
After the guard had escorted Billy back to his cell, I realized he hadn’t asked me how his wife was doing or anything about his kids. We hadn’t made small talk about my guiding job or what it was like working for his old nemesis, Elizabeth Morse. I’d assumed that he would have been starved for information about the world he’d left behind. But Billy had avoided those delicate subjects. Thinking about life outside the prison walls was probably too painful for him to contemplate. I doubted he was the first inmate who had ever felt that way.
