by Paul Doiron
It was rude to interrupt him, but I could feel the morning slipping away. “What have you heard?”
“The rumor is that Nat Pillsbury was the one sleeping with Ariel. I mean, what was her name again?”
“Miranda. Yes, I already know they were lovers.”
“You do?”
“Pillsbury pretty much confirmed it to me this morning down on the dock.”
The constable reacted by withdrawing into a trancelike state.
“What was the second thing?” I said, eager to return to my conversation with Ariel.
He blinked three or four times to break his self-hypnosis. “Detective Klesko called me.”
It was no surprise. “And?”
“He said he’s been trying to reach you. I explained about how hinky the cell signals out here can be, but, well, it didn’t seem to satisfy him. He’s still stuck at the courthouse in Bangor, and that might explain why he’s so frustrated. That and the weather forecast. The fog won’t be lifting until late tomorrow. He said that I should help you.”
I pressed my teeth together so hard I could have cracked a walnut. Steve Klesko wanted the constable to spy on me.
“As a matter of fact, there is something you can do for me right now, Andrew.”
“Whatever you need.”
“Dispose of this dead deer.”
The human bobblehead began doing his thing. “It’s not what I expected you to say, but sure. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Give him to someone poor and hungry who needs the meat.”
I opened the tailgate of the Datsun. Rigor mortis had taken hold of the buck. His broken limbs had grown so stiff that he resembled one of the plastic decoys wardens use to entice night hunters into firing illegal shots.
“Watch out for ticks,” I said. “The body’s still warm enough, they haven’t jumped ship yet.”
The blood drained from his cheeks.
“And get me that list of hunters.”
My last sight of Andy Radcliffe was of him struggling to drag the stiffened, hundred-pound carcass out my truck.
* * *
She had her stocking feet propped on the table and was squinting hard into her phone when I stepped into the dry warmth of the cottage. Without glancing from the screen, she said, “It says I have a signal, but I can’t get through to my aunt. That Pillsbury woman told me this place had Wi-Fi. She didn’t say I’d be unable to make phone calls or send text messages.”
“That seems to be the way it is on this island. I got a strong signal down the road, not far from the turnoff to the lighthouse. It’s where you first get a view of the Gut.”
“The Gut is the channel between Maquoit and Stormalong?”
“It might be worth your taking a walk down there when we’re done.”
“Gail is going to be heartbroken when she hears what happened. She and Miranda were kindred spirits. How did you manage to keep the news out of the media, by the way?”
“We didn’t want to release a statement before we understood what had happened.”
“Maine doesn’t have a law requiring your department of public safety to issue statements when someone dies under suspicious circumstances?”
“We were being cautious.”
“Bullshit.” The new intensity in her voice reminded me that, whatever her quarrels with her colleagues, she was still very much a member of the fourth estate. “You were stonewalling because you didn’t want the morning ferry packed full of reporters. Not to sound egotistical or anything, but most editors would have found my violent death to be kind of newsworthy.”
“I guess I’d better hurry up my investigation, then.” I wrestled with my peacoat, trying to find the armholes.
She swung her feet off the table, nearly knocking over a vase of dried roses. “Where are you going? I thought we had a deal. I’d submit to your interview, and in return, you’d tell me what you’ve discovered so far.”
“It’ll have to wait. The constable says I need to phone the mainland.”
Now she leapt to her feet. “Did the autopsy turn up something?”
I kept forgetting how much she knew about police procedure. “One of my calls will be to the medical examiner.”
“Can I come with you?”
“It would be better if you stayed here for the time being, but I can send someone to check in on you.”
“What did I tell you about men being condescending—”
“It’s not that you’re a woman, Ariel.”
She smirked. “It’s that I’m a journalist.”
“No, it’s because you’re the sister. I know firsthand what a mistake it can be allowing the next of kin access to a homicide investigation. It’s best for everybody if you don’t get involved.”
When my father had been accused of killing two men, one a deputy sheriff, the Warden Service had violated its own policies to include me in the manhunt. Looking back on the terrible events that followed, even I had to admit what a fiasco it had been.
“So basically you’re putting me under house arrest.”
“I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to. Personally, I would recommend you stay close to the cottage. But there’s a bicycle outside. If you do go out, wear blaze orange. I have a vest in my bag I can loan you.”
“Was Miranda wearing orange when she was shot?”
“No.”
“So that’s going to be the defense of the person who killed her: that he thought she was a deer.”
I expected the shooter’s lawyer would indeed pursue that strategy, if I could ever bring the case to court. But I said nothing now.
Her eyes rounded with recognition. “She’s going to be crucified in the Maine media. Rich girl from New York gets shot because she wasn’t smart enough to wear orange in the woods. And your juries here have a history of excusing negligent hunters. What was that woman’s name? The one with the white mittens?”
“Karen Wood. I’m surprised you heard about it.”
“I read the series the Globe published about it in J-school.”
“I promise I’ll be back later this afternoon. Maybe I’ll have some news.”
She stood in the doorway as I took my first steps across the sodden lawn. “So that funny little man is the constable?”
“Yes, he is.”
“He must have been one of the first people on the scene, then?” She was determined to interrogate me.
“That’s right.”
“He doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. You’d think a constable on a fishing island would be a bruiser, considering how lobstermen are always cutting each other’s traplines and setting fire to each other’s boats. But he’s not very intimidating, is he?”
“I think that’s why he was elected.”
“Do you know who he reminds me of? A Jane Austen character. Those rosy cheeks and long sideburns. That wavy, flyaway hair. If only this were a Regency romance instead of a neo-Gothic nightmare.”
23
The truck was totaled, and there was no question in my mind that Blackington would expect full compensation from the State of Maine for the loss of his vintage Datsun. I drove slowly back to the village, my spine rigid, my foot hovering above the brake pedal. But on this trip, I saw no deer and killed no deer.
I hadn’t noticed previously, but the road passed an old structure built on piles over the water. Its shingles had once been painted red, but were now mostly a weathered gray, and it had two hinged doors large enough to admit a lobsterboat in need of repairs. This was the Trap House: Maquoit’s private BYOB saloon. Miranda must have pressured Nat Pillsbury to take her inside, and Pillsbury, being the surviving son of the island’s founding family and its current alpha male (however much Harmon Reed might argue otherwise), had opened those doors for his seductive guest. He must have known the scandal it would cause. He must have realized the story would get back to his wife. Yet he had gone boldly ahead anyway.
Why?
One possible answer was that he was a ca
llous bastard: Miranda’s devil.
Another possibility was that the man was genuinely lovestruck.
Whatever Pillsbury was, I needed to talk to him.
First, though, I had a few calls to make. I might have tried my phone at other locations but, in the interest of saving time, drove directly to the cemetery’s lower gate. It hung open on its busted hinge. I made my way up the stepped terraces of graves until my phone buzzed, and the backlog of emails and voice mails downloaded in a rush. DeFord had emailed me once, as had Charley Stevens. There were two emails from Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall. None from the medical examiner, Walt Kitteridge (which suggested he hadn’t finished the autopsy). Detective Steve Klesko had left me three messages.
Instead of opening any of these official communications, my finger tapped on a note from Trooper Danielle Tate.
Hi Mike
Just heard through the grapevine that your vic was impersonating her own sister! I’m pretty sure that I saw that same twist on a soap opera once. Only the sisters were identical twins (same actress). It was my mom’s soap so don’t give me grief, man.
Klesko must be going nuts that he’s not out there.
I know it’s not my place but I spent a couple of hours last night researching Ariel Evans. At the time I thought she was dead so it seemed more interesting than alarming. But knowing she’s out there with you now … be careful of her. She seems pretty shady even for a reporter. Don’t trust her is what I am trying to say.
If you need someone to bounce ideas around with, gimme a holler.
Dani
To my surprise I felt gladness—almost a sense of buoyancy—at the thought that Dani Tate was secretly assisting me on this case.
I made my way through my other messages.
DeFord had reviewed my videos and photos, as well as the first draft of my report, and said that he saw nothing that might prove problematic at trial. (I had to read the email again to be sure it said what I thought it said.) He’d also sent along a PDF of every Maquoit resident who had obtained a hunting license over the prior ten years. Very few had. I was not surprised to read that the Warden Service had issued zero citations for fish and wildlife violations over that same time.
Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall wanted to lecture me. She wrote that the Warden Service spokesman was going to issue a statement on the Maquoit hunting homicide shortly. It was paramount that she “consult with” me before I gave some reporter a potentially damaging quote.
Too late for that.
Finally, I was ready to tackle Klesko’s trio of messages. His tone was consistently upbeat and supportive from first to last.
Like DeFord, he’d read my report, but unlike DeFord, he had some suggestions to make it “bulletproof.” He’d also heard about Ariel’s arrival on the island and how it upended all of our initial premises. He hoped to be done with court by early afternoon and planned to be back on Maquoit before sunset. He concluded each of his messages by requesting I update him at my earliest convenience.
I gave Klesko the call he’d repeatedly requested.
I won’t lie and say I was disappointed to get his voice mail.
“I’m sorry for not being better at staying in touch, Steve. But I have things in hand here, so you don’t need to worry that I’m not following proper procedures in your absence. I’ll upload the interview I recorded with Ariel Evans as soon as I can. If you want to be helpful on your end, put me in touch with whoever interviewed Jenny Pillsbury when she got off the boat in Bass Harbor. It turns out that Jenny’s husband, Nat, was Miranda’ lover. Yes, I wish we’d known that earlier. One last thing. Radcliffe told me you called him. It sure sounded like you ordered him to keep tabs on me. If I were the sort of person who’s easily offended … Wait a minute, I am the sort of person who is easily offended. Don’t ever pull a stunt like that on me again. I’ll see you when I see you.”
While I doubted Klesko would be able to find a plane to fly him to the fog-shrouded island, maybe he could get a Marine Patrol boat to bring him out. Or maybe he knew a lobsterman who could ferry him over for a price. I had a sneaking feeling I might be seeing the detective before the day was done.
All the more reason for me to take control while I still could.
I phoned the office of the medical examiner and managed to catch the man himself. Dr. Walter Kitteridge had been the state coroner since before the Stone Age. He was famous in the law enforcement community for his love of golf, his appreciation of fine cigars (his preferred bribe when you needed him to expedite something), his chummy relationship with our no-account governor, and a work ethic that had started out as dubious and had only grown more so with age.
“I finished the autopsy,” he said in his smoker’s rasp. “I was going to lunch at the club before I wrote up my notes.”
“Glad I caught you, then.”
“I am actually on my way out the door. Talk fast.”
“Cause of death?”
“Gunshot wound to the head. X-rays demonstrate apparent large-caliber missile fragments in the central head region with other fragments in the forehead and smaller fragments dispersed through the midcranial. No powder residue or charring of the wound means she was shot at a distance.”
“Time of death?”
“Yesterday morning between nine hundred and twelve hundred hours. Stomach contents, lividity, etcetera. Look, Warden, I really need to run.”
“One last question. Those puncture marks between her toes, any chance they occurred postmortem?”
He coughed out a laugh. “What are you suggesting? That someone molested the body so we would conclude she was a user of hypodermic drugs? You need to stop watching television, Warden. She had vestigial scars indicating she’d injected herself in the past. There was some left ventricular hypertrophy unusual for a female of her age. That would be typical of a person who’d abused cocaine for an extended period.”
“Any coke in her system?”
“Toxicology reports take time to come back to me. Your victim was a heavy cocaine user, but drugs didn’t play a role in her death. A hollow-point bullet did. Let me give you a piece of advice since I know you are new in your job. Occam’s razor nearly always obtains in these cases: the most straightforward explanation is the correct explanation. I’ll send you a copy of the complete report on Ariel Evans, as soon as we have it.”
Clearly no one had told the medical examiner that the body he’d dissected belonged to someone other than the person whose name was on the toe tag. Maybe I’d call Kitteridge back later, after he’d heard the news of Ariel Evans’s miraculous return to life, and I would have him tell me more about Occam’s razor.
24
I relocated the home of Nat Pillsbury by watching for the dead deer Joy and I had seen hanging the night before. Orange buoys and toggles hung like Halloween decorations from tree limbs, marking the house as the home of a lobsterman.
The man himself was in his trap lot readying the hundreds of lobster traps he planned to set on the opening days of Maquoit’s upcoming fishing season. His traps (not pots) looked as if they’d been tossed around the sea bottom. They were dented and dirty and not all of one color—some were blue, some were green, but most were yellow—which suggested he hadn’t had the funds to replace the entire set. Nor were they weighted with newfangled ceramic blocks. When Pillsbury tossed his traps overboard, they would sink to the murky depths with the aid of good, old-fashioned bricks.
The lobsterman had removed his raincoat since I’d last seen him. He wore a long-sleeve thermal that showed off his utter lack of body fat. The secret to getting six-pack abs was evidently hauling hundreds of lobster traps in freezing weather.
Pillsbury was working with concentration, snapping numbered and color-coded tags onto his traps so they could be identified as his property by the Marine Patrol. At first, I assumed he was alone. Then I saw Hiram Reed sitting in the shadows atop one of those enormous wooden spools that telephone companies use for their cab
les. He was sipping from a sixteen-ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Hiram, it seemed, was forsaking the six-pack abs in favor of the six-pack itself.
Harmon’s son didn’t look so hot. His face had a grayish cast beneath his whiskers. And there was something unfocused about his eyes. One of his empty cans of beer rolled onto the grass as he slid off his makeshift seat.
“What do you want?” Reed barked.
“Mr. Pillsbury and I have an appointment to talk.”
“What about?” said the shorter, more pugnacious lobsterman.
I raised my face in the direction of the hanging deer carcass. “For one thing, I was going to compliment him on his buck. It looks like a monster compared to the others I’ve seen on the island.”
“You are so full of shit.”
“Yeah, I am. I’m here to talk to your friend about his relationship with Miranda Evans.”
Pillsbury, who’d been listening to this back and forth without expression, paused in his trap-tagging and let his hands fall to his side. “So that was her real name. Miranda. I like it better than Ariel.”
“You shouldn’t talk to this guy, Natty. Not without a lawyer.” Hiram Reed had assumed the role of Pillsbury’s personal guard dog.
I put my hands on my hips in such a way that my holstered sidearm showed beneath the hem of my peacoat. “Why does he need a lawyer?”
Reed pitched his voice high to mimic me. “‘Why does he need a lawyer?’”
“It’s OK, bud,” Pillsbury told his sidekick. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Reed set his beer on the table, crossed his denim-covered arms across his denim-covered chest, and leaned back against the wobbly, makeshift table. “I’m going to stay here. I’m going to be your witness in case this guy tries to twist your words. Trust me on this, Natty. I know cops better than you. They ain’t ever your friends. You remember the way they tried to entrap my old man. ‘Oh, yeah, Mr. Reed, it was clearly self-defense, shooting Eli Washburn. You’ve got nothing to worry about. There’s no way the DA’s going to bring charges. If you could help us out with a few quick questions, though.’ Quick questions my ass.”
