by Paul Doiron
But I couldn’t. It was as if some gentle hand was pulling me off the man and a soft voice was whispering “Enough” in my ear. When Decoster had finally stopped struggling and I was sure he wasn’t playing possum, I found myself releasing my grip and letting my legs fall loose.
I’d had my eyes squeezed shut through most of our wrestling match, afraid he might gore them out. When I opened them, I saw his wife standing over us with her hand over her mouth and a look of shock on her face. The pistol hung at her side.
“Did you … Did you kill him?”
As out of breath as I was, I had difficulty spitting out the word no.
I became aware of the sound of the idling ATV engine. She was standing in the glow of its headlights, so that half of her face was illuminated and half was a black mask. She raised her arm until the barrel was weaving back and forth between my exhausted body and her husband’s unconscious one.
“People deserve the bad things that happen to them,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Yeah, they do.”
I took a breath, trying frantically to think what I could say to stop her.
In the end, it didn’t matter. She dropped the gun in the mud and then turned and walked in silence back to the house, where her children were sleeping.
39
I sat on the ATV and waited for Decoster to wake up. It was a Yamaha Grizzly: the high-end 700 FI model, painted in stealth black. I had no handcuffs or plastic cable ties to secure the big man’s wrists. There was some rope stowed with my gear in the back of the car, but I didn’t like the idea of leaving him alone until the state police arrived.
Not having heard from Soctomah, I called the dispatcher in Houlton. It took a while to explain what had happened. I started in the wrong place, talking about how Kathy had been shot, when I should just have said, “There is a dead body here, and I’m holding a gun on the man who killed him.” I didn’t know for certain that Kurt’s corpse was in a hole down along the tree line, but I was willing to wager on it.
I had maneuvered the Yamaha around so that the headlights would shine in Decoster’s eyes if he lifted his head. He was lying on his back, with his arms and legs spread, as if enjoying a snooze. I leaned over the handlebars and looked at him. Destiny had been right about the unibrow and about the hair that sprouted from his unbuttoned shirt and ran all the way around his neck. He was wearing dark brown Carhartt bib coveralls over a tan chamois shirt. I estimated his weight to be about 250 pounds.
The thought occurred to me that I could simply rev the engine and crush his spine under the saw-toothed tires, but I had already called the police and committed myself to a different course of action. There would be no vigilante justice tonight, not unless he forced me to use the pistol. It was a Glock 17. The magazine was fully loaded with hollow-tipped 9mm cartridges. I had made certain of it.
Jason Decoster began coming around in a few minutes. It was a slow, strange process, which I observed with the detachment of a scientist. His chest began to rise and fall, and then his limbs went rigid, almost as if he were undergoing rigor mortis before my eyes. It took a few more minutes for him to groan and raise his mud-smeared head. He squinted into the blinding beams of his own four-wheeler.
“Huh?” he said.
“Stay down, or I’m going to put seventeen bullets in you.”
“What?”
I couldn’t tell if his synapses were having trouble flickering back to life after I’d put out his fuse box, or if he was just a moron. The possibilities weren’t mutually exclusive.
“Just don’t move.”
His head slumped back into the damp soil and he crossed his hands over his heart the way you see corpses arranged in coffins. I found myself hoping he’d try something so I would have an excuse to shoot him. I was having a hard time ridding myself of the murderous impulse.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?” His voice sounded peaceful. He seemed content to lie on the cold ground.
“Murder your mother, shoot Kathy Frost, kill Kurt Eklund.”
“No idea what you’re taking about.”
Every cop learns not to trust appearances. Jason Decoster might have looked like an extra who had walked off the set of Quest for Fire, but he was no idiot.
“I’m guessing that you ditched the shotgun you used on Kathy,” I said. “But they’re going to find Kurt Eklund’s body down at the end of your field. Too bad you didn’t have time to move it after I called your wife.”
He kept his eyes closed and a faint smile spread across his ugly face, as if he were asleep and enjoying a pleasant dream. He had no plans of saying a word to me. I could only keep goading him and hope for a slip.
“So what’s the story? You wanted vengeance for your old man. The same guy who used to beat your mom with a belt. I’m betting he beat you, too. But you forgot all about the whippings after the nasty game warden put a hole in him. Poor Jason. It must have made you so angry to think about all those women who deserved to be punished—your mother, the warden, your wife. I bet you had all sorts of dark fantasies. You thought about what you’d do if you ever had a chance to get back at that bitch warden.”
He yawned.
My ankle throbbed from where I’d knocked it against the side of the all-terrain vehicle. “And then one day, you hear on the news that she’s shot another guy. And you think to yourself, My chance has come. Because the police are going to assume her death was an act of revenge over the soldier she’d just killed. They won’t look back twenty-five years—”
“Twenty-eight years,” he said.
“What?”
“My dad was murdered twenty-eight years ago.”
I sat up on the padded ATV seat. “You blamed your mom for what happened to him, didn’t you? That’s why you killed her.”
“My dad was tough on us, but so what? That’s what fathers are supposed to be. And that stupid old bitch took him away from me. If she hadn’t called the cops—” Decoster seemed to catch himself. “My mother was an old woman. She fell down the stairs.”
It wasn’t the full confession I needed. “We’ll see if your wife tells the same story.”
The threat amused him. “She can’t testify against me.”
“What’s her name, by the way?” I asked. “Your wife, I mean.”
“Trisha.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“Three.”
“The Supermax doesn’t allow contact visits, even from family members, so don’t plan on holding them for a while. You’re never going to fuck another woman again, by the way. Why don’t you lie there in the mud and let those facts sink in.”
“When are the real cops getting here?”
I’d thought that because he had anger issues, it wouldn’t take much to work him into a violent rage. But Jason Decoster reserved his fury for the people in his life who had hurt him personally. I was nobody to him, just a voice in the dark.
“I was there that night, you know? I was the guy who drove up in the Bronco, the one who shot at you.”
He opened his eyes.
“If it wasn’t for me, you would’ve finished the job. But I scared you off and saved Kathy Frost’s life. You’ll see her when she testifies at your trial. I’ll be there, too. It’ll be a grand reunion.”
He rolled over, lifted himself onto his shoulder, and squinted back into the headlights. “Go fuck yourself.”
Blue lights were twirling up on the road. The state police had finally decided to show up.
* * *
I gave my statement to a trooper named O’Keefe. He said he was a sergeant at the Houlton barracks. We stood in the potato field, talking, while other officers appeared on the scene. We watched two deputies lead Decoster in handcuffs to a waiting cruiser. Another local cop escorted Trisha out the front door with her hands behind her back. The woman screamed back at the house, words directed at the children inside, who would soon be in the custody of social workers from the Department of Human Services
.
“I love you!”
I doubted the kids even heard her.
Sergeant O’Keefe asked me where I’d first seen the headlights of the ATV, and I pointed at the line of trees across the field.
“I think he was trying to dig up the body and move it off the property,” I said. “My call from his mother’s house had rattled him. I haven’t been down there yet.”
He looked like most of the troopers I’d met: tall, wide-shouldered, hair barbered down to bare skin. “I heard you used to be a warden.”
“Until two months ago.”
He motioned for me to accompany him.
It was a beautiful evening. Overhead, chip notes sounded in the sky at random intervals—a flight of warblers was migrating on the southwest breeze. I almost forgot about my sprained ankle.
We followed the tire tracks down to the tree line. A tumbled old wall of stones ran away from us into the darkness. It reminded me of the rock walls on Kathy’s land. The two farms had a similar feel to them.
“I shouldn’t be letting you down here,” he said, making sure I understood the courtesy he was extending me.
“I appreciate it.”
On the far side of the newly green oaks an oblong hole had been dug into the ground. Nearby, a shovel stood upright in a mound of damp soil. The trooper shined his flashlight into the shallow grave. Decoster had worked fast. He had gotten all the way down to the black trash bags in which he had wrapped Kurt Eklund’s corpse.
“You think that’s him?” O’Keefe asked.
“I don’t know who else it would be.”
“We have to wait for the evidence techs to open it up.”
I wasn’t particularly certain my stomach could stand seeing Kurt’s one-eyed face again.
Another trooper came across the field, holding a flashlight in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other.
“It’s for you,” he said.
I took the phone. “Hello?”
“Bowditch? It’s Soctomah.”
“I thought you might have gone on vacation or something.”
“I was at Maine Med.”
I held my breath, realizing he had news.
“She’s awake,” he said.
“And?”
“She’s having a little trouble speaking, but the neurologist says it could just be a side effect of the coma. They need to do some testing. She doesn’t remember much of anything about that night.”
“What have you told her?”
“As little as possible. I heard you found a body. Is it definitely Eklund?”
“We’re waiting for the forensic guys to unwrap the trash bags. But yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“How the hell did he know about Jason Decoster?”
“I don’t think he did,” I said. “He drove out to Marta Jepson’s house because Kathy had said something to him about her death sounding suspicious. He called a phone number on a sign, hoping it might lead him somewhere. He was a bright guy, but he was drunk and not thinking rationally. It was easy for Jason and Trisha to lure him down to Presque Isle and then ambush him. Tell me something: Was Jason Decoster even on your list of suspects?”
“We were looking into Kathy’s entire history.”
In other words, no. “That’s what I thought.”
“I’ll be there soon—I’m flying up in an hour—and you can pick apart our investigation to your heart’s delight.”
I wasn’t pissed off at the lieutenant so much as angry and sad about the entire sequence of events. “So who’s going to break the news to the Eklunds about their son?”
“Once we have a positive ID on the body, Malcomb will do it.”
“Did he tell Kathy about her dog yet?”
“She was asking about him. I think she sensed something.”
I didn’t need to ask how that scene had gone. “What do you want me to do until you get here?”
“There’s a room booked for you at the Northeastland in Presque Isle. Go get some sleep. You and I can talk in the morning.”
By Aroostook standards, the hotel was an expensive place to spend the night. “Who paid for my room?”
“The wardens chipped in on it when they heard you’d caught the son of a bitch.”
40
The next morning, Soctomah met me in the breakfast room at the Northeastland Hotel. He put a tape recorder on the plate beside my eggs and asked me to go through the series of decisions that had led me to Aroostook County. He’d been up all night, flying under the stars to the Northern Maine Regional Airport, then watched quietly while his forensics team removed Kurt Eklund’s plastic-wrapped body from the grave. The techs had scanned the corpse’s fingers and pulled the prints off the database to make a positive ID. Kurt had been arrested on multiple occasions for drunk driving and public intoxication. His biometric data was just a click away in the system.
“How do you feel about flying back to Augusta in the same plane with the body?” Soctomah asked. He looked weary.
“As long as I get the window seat.”
What was there left for me to do but joke about it?
He stared at me over the rim of his coffee mug. “What do you think we should have done that we didn’t do?”
I pushed my scrambled eggs aside. “Nothing. Kurt Eklund had a death wish.”
“It sounds like he wanted one last chance to be a hero.”
“I’m not going to begrudge him that.” I took a sip of my own coffee and found it had grown cold. “Has Malcomb told his parents yet?”
“Yes.”
“What about Kathy?”
“They asked to break the news to her.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “You’d better finish eating. You have a plane to catch.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Knock on a bunch of doors around here that I should’ve tried a few days ago.”
I reached into the duffel at my feet and handed him back the windbreaker he had loaned me. In return, he gave me back my Walther. I hefted the pistol in my palm, feeling its familiar weight, and tucked it in the back of my pants.
* * *
The plane was a propeller-driven Cessna 182. I stood aside while an evidence technician and a deputy medical examiner manhandled the body bag from the wheeled gurney into the space behind the rear seats. The plane was small, and it was a tight squeeze. Because of the weight of the load (four bodies, three living), the tech stayed behind while the coroner and I clambered into the available seats. The pilot put me up front. It didn’t bother me, having some distance from the dead man.
The 182 had a bigger engine than the 172 Skyhawk that Stacey Stevens flew. I hadn’t thought of her in a few days, but now I found myself wishing that she was the one flying this plane and not some middle-aged dude with a cheek stuffed full of Black Jack chewing gum. I hadn’t been this lonely in days.
At first, the pilot tried to make conversation over the intercom, but the deputy medical examiner—a graying woman with tightly bound hair and even a tighter face—was in less of a talkative mood than I was.
At least Kurt had died in a heroic attempt to find his sister’s assailant. All of his adult life, he’d been searching for some opportunity to atone for one bad night in Vietnam. It might have been a foolish quest—but so what? The only difference between his efforts and mine was that he was lying cold in the rear of the plane and my heart was bruised but still beating.
Mostly, I found myself worrying about Kathy. I had witnessed the effects of brain injuries in too many people to count. Nearly every family I’d met in the boonies had a brother who’d crashed his snowmobile into a tree or an uncle who’d wrapped his Mustang around a telephone pole. Some of these invalids were near vegetables. The others were even scarier. They reminded me of zombies: shambling, unreasoning creatures who were no longer recognizable as the self-directed human beings they once had been.
Jimmy Gammon had suffered a traumatic injury when the IED had exploded in that pile of garbage. His mother had no longer been a
ble to identify his personality as belonging to her son. I was terrified of finding Kathy similarly altered beyond recognition.
Flying from Houlton to Augusta, we covered most of the state of Maine. The land turned greener and greener beneath us, from a pale, almost yellowish tone that reminded me of the pea soup my French-Canadian relatives used to serve us when I was a kid to a deep, almost jungle-green color down south. There were still a few threadbare hillsides and valleys that the sun hadn’t yet warmed—where you could see winter hanging around in the shadows—but those chilly corners would be gone in a matter of weeks.
We passed from the potato fields of Aroostook County over the commercial timberland east of Baxter State Park. It was a clear day and the summit of Katahdin was bright white with unmelted snow, which caught the glare of the rising run. Then we were flying over fields again: hardscrabble farms carved out of the second-growth forest and great fenced pastures full of white dairy cows. My window faced west, not east, so I had no view of Appleton Ridge or the Camden Hills. Mine was an inland perspective.
I did see a great many turkeys bobbing along at the weedy edges of the cow and sheep farms. Hunters, too, although they were inevitably set up in blinds far from the nearest flocks. The season would be over in a few days, and, as usual, most of the big toms would survive to service their harems. Next year, there would be even more poults.
We landed at the Augusta State Airport, where we were met by another emergency vehicle, this one owned by the state medical examiner’s office. Men were waiting to remove Kurt Eklund’s body from the plane. I started to unhook my headset, but the pilot reached over and gripped my left wrist.
“This is just a pit stop,” he said over the intercom. “You and I are headed for Portland.”
It always amazed me how quickly a small plane could get up and down. We weren’t more than ten minutes on the tarmac in Augusta, and then we were zipping along the runway again, my stomach pressed against my spine. The next thing I knew, I was looking up at a cloud as the nose of the Cessna pointed skyward.
“This won’t take more than fifteen minutes,” the pilot assured me. “Are you feeling airsick?”
