by Paul Doiron
I didn’t have long to wait. Jack Spense and another one of his men arrived in their black Suburban while I was still on the line with the state police dispatcher, telling her that a young woman had been killed when a driver in an unidentified pickup had forced her car off the road and into a tree. I didn’t know if this was literally true—Briar might have crashed on her own, without being tailgated—but there was a chance that the truck might yet be spotted if an alert went out to every cop within a fifty-mile radius.
The bodyguards didn’t pause to talk with me. They threw open the doors of the SUV and ran directly to the crumpled roadster. Spense reached his muscular arm through the driver’s side window, and I knew he was searching for a pulse he must have known he wouldn’t find. The other man struggled in vain with the passenger door, just as I had, before he began to methodically break the window with his own tactical flashlight. They were both dressed in jeans and black T-shirts, and they both had shaved heads. I wasn’t sure if the second man was the guard who had let me through the gate. In their informal uniforms, they all looked the same.
“Leave her alone,” I said.
Spense spun away from the car, his right hand red with blood, spitting out curses. The other man stared at me for a moment and then looked at his employer. After a long pause, the second man decided to ignore my command and returned to work, trying to shatter the passenger’s side window.
I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Leave her alone.’”
When Spense finally looked up, his eyes were so full of rage that for an instant I wondered if he might attack me. His fingers had left blood on his face, which only made him seem more deranged. “What the fuck happened here?” he yelled at me.
“She called to say she was being chased again,” I said, trying to temper my own anger through even breathing. “I don’t know why you let her leave the property without a bodyguard after what happened before.”
Spense turned his entire body to face the wreck again, where the other guard stood motionless. “You’re fired! You’re fucking fired!”
The second man gave him a beseeching look. “Jack…”
“Get the fuck out of my sight!”
* * *
The first officer to arrive, fifteen minutes later, was Trooper Belanger, who had been patrolling the desolate section of Route 1 between Indian Township and the Vanceboro border crossing. He was followed by two policemen and an ambulance from the Passamaquoddy reservation. Jeremy Bard lived closest to the crash site, but he had no explanation for his tardiness in responding, or if he did, he didn’t share it with me. My fellow warden preferred to chat with the Passamaquoddies while I briefed Belanger on everything that had happened.
The scene needed to be preserved for the state police to map out the sequence of events leading to the fatality: how fast Briar had been going, whether another vehicle had been directly involved, when she had applied her brakes. The information would be needed if, by some stroke of luck, the driver of the mysterious pickup was ever identified. The district attorney might or might not decide to bring charges at that point; the decision would depend on the strength of the evidence and how well it would stand up in front of a jury. But in my mind, those distinctions were all meaningless technicalities.
The tall trooper peered at me from beneath the wide blue brim of his hat. “So you didn’t see this truck force her off the road?”
“If I had, I sure as hell would have chased him.” The night was getting downright cold, and I’d fetched my red warden’s jacket from the backseat of my car.
“Then there’s no proof she didn’t drive into the tree on her own?”
“That’s for you to determine. Her car might show signs of having been sideswiped.” I stretched my arms out around me. “Maybe there’s paint from another vehicle on one of these trees. You need to reconstruct the crash.”
The trooper had eyes like shards of flint. “But you never saw the truck chasing her?”
“This is a homicide,” I said.
I expected he’d give me the obvious rejoinder that the DA would require a higher standard of proof, but Belanger had looked into the car and seen Briar’s mutilated face. And I think the trooper understood the rage I was doing my best to keep contained inside my chest.
“I need you and Bard to help me direct traffic until Zanadakis and the sheriff arrive,” he said. “I’d like to keep the site as intact as I can. No one gets through except authorized personnel.”
I’d had a few dustups with the state police, but Belanger struck me as a good cop: the kind who doesn’t break the rules but is not averse to bending them in the service of a cause higher than the Maine Criminal Code.
Before I could move my truck, however, we saw headlights coming from the direction of Moosehorn Lodge. It was another one of Jack Spense’s black SUVs. Three people got out quickly: the driver, whose impressive physique marked him unmistakably as another bodyguard; a bearded man in a floppy hat; and a middle-aged woman with a muscular build.
I rushed to intercept Elizabeth Morse before she could get close enough to Briar’s car to see the damage. “Stop, Ms. Morse!”
“Let me through.” Her voice was commanding. Her face, in the flashing blue and red lights of the emergency vehicles, appeared oddly empty of emotion, like a wax museum version of itself.
I spread out my arms to stop her, just as I had in the field on the morning we found the moose. “That’s not a good idea.”
She kept walking, even as I stepped in front of her. “I need to see her.”
I grabbed her arm hard. “Not now.”
She spun around on me, her eyes widening. “Let go of me!”
I shook my head no.
She tried shaking me loose. “I need to see my daughter.”
I took hold of her other arm so that we were facing each other squarely. “Not like this.”
“I need to see Briar.” Her lip began to tremble.
“Ms. Morse,” I said. “Betty.”
She pushed herself into me, thrust her chest against mine, and pressed her head against my neck. She made no sound as she sobbed, but I could feel every muscle in her body shaking. I wrapped my arms around her, and she gave me a hug that nearly broke my ribs. I could smell the herbal shampoo in her hair. Then she collapsed. Her legs just went out from under her, and I found myself bending at the knees to ease the weight of her body gently to the earth. I held her like that for a while, huddled over her almost, as if to protect her from an airborne attack. She seemed like a small and boneless thing, unrecognizable as the powerful businesswoman I’d first met. She was a mother who had lost the only child she would ever have.
After a few moments, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. Tears streamed down Leaf Woodwind’s cheeks.
I let go of Elizabeth Morse and let him take my place. He tossed his hat to the ground and dropped to his knees. Then he wrapped himself around the woman he’d found by the roadside so many years ago.
31
The moon came up while I stood guard on the perimeter of the crash scene. I’d forgotten it was nearly full. Over the next few hours, I watched the white orb rise above the treetops and then climb steadily into the night sky, causing the stars about it to fade, eclipsed by its brilliance. It looked like a heavy stone that might drop unexpectedly from the heavens and smash the world to smithereens.
Elizabeth Morse and Leaf Woodwind packed into their black SUVs with their hired guards. The ambulance took away the lifeless body of Briar Morse, which had been removed from the wreck by using the Jaws of Life. A tow truck lifted the crushed roadster onto its flatbed. The Passamaquoddy policemen drifted away. I never did see Bard leave. Lieutenant Zanadakis and several other state police officers came and went, having taken my statement and begun mapping the accident scene. They would return in daylight to search for additional evidence of the fatal chase. Sheriff Roberta Rhine, who had arrived last, was also the last to leave—except for me.
“You should go home and get some sleep.”
Her breath shimmered as she spoke. She had her hands thrust into the pockets of a black windbreaker with a sheriff’s star on the breast. Her long face had grown tight from the cold. “There’s nothing more for us to do here.”
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?” she said.
“Belanger told me to direct traffic away from the accident scene, but there hasn’t been a single car all night, except for the emergency vehicles.”
She reached up to tug on a turquoise earring. “This is a deserted stretch of road even during the summer months.”
The last words she said before I climbed into my truck were, “It looks like this is a murder investigation now.”
It always was, I thought, remembering the sight of that dead moose in the grass.
* * *
When I got back to my cabin, I cleaned up after the squirrels and then, taking a deep breath, sat down to phone my stepfather. It was late, but I expected him to be awake. Instead, the call went directly to voice mail.
“Neil, it’s me,” I said with a faint stutter. “I’m sorry I missed you before. I was in the woods all day. I can’t always get a signal up here. But I’m home now, so feel free to try me again. I’m glad Mom’s chemo went OK. I promise to call tomorrow. Tell her I love her. I hope you’re hanging in there, too.”
It was only after I’d hung up that I realized I hadn’t mentioned Briar. There hadn’t seemed a point in it. She was just a name as far as he was concerned.
The phone rang just after I fell asleep. It was McQuarrie, wanting an update. He was driving back to Washington County after having been summoned away to help retrieve the corpse of a drunk boater from the lake where the man had crashed his boat. News of Briar Morse’s death was spreading fast, Mack said. Reporters and state officials were demanding information. Rivard had already been feeling pressure over his failure to solve the high-profile crime. Now the daughter of the most powerful woman in the state was dead, possibly killed by the same people who had slaughtered those moose. The meeting the lieutenant had scheduled for seven A.M. was going to be “a real shit show,” Mack said.
“Be sure to wear your ballistic vest,” my sergeant told me.
“I always do,” I replied.
* * *
This time, no one brought doughnuts.
Rivard was running late, and the mood in the crowded IF&W field office was tense and irritable. The unspoken question hanging over every man in the room was: What if we had caught the men who killed the moose? Would Elizabeth Morse’s daughter still be alive if we’d been faster in solving the first crime? The resident fishhead biologists had the good sense to skedaddle.
McQuarrie looked older than I’d ever remembered seeing him. “Didn’t get much sleep,” he admitted. “That poor girl. She was pretty, too. That always makes it harder, for some reason.” He dug his thumb and forefinger into his bloodshot eyes. “This case might just be my swan song,” he said.
Mine, too, I thought.
Rivard might as well have appeared in a puff of sulfurous smoke. He burst through the door, a crimson glow on his cheeks from either the cold wind blowing down from the north or too much blood pumping to his head. In his hand he held a newspaper, rolled up, as if he meant to swipe a naughty dog across the nose with it. Bilodeau slipped in behind him, looking as inscrutable as ever. Lieutenant Zanadakis came last, dressed to the nines in suit and tie, and eased the door shut behind him.
“I want to read you something,” Rivard said without bothering to remove his red wool warden’s coat or the olive fedora that was part of our dress uniform. “This is from this morning’s paper. The headline is ‘Series of Missteps in Moose Massacre Causes Outrage.’ It says here that ‘game wardens are facing new questions about their handling of an investigation into the illegal shooting of ten moose on the property of entrepreneur and environmental activist Elizabeth Morse.’” When he glanced up, the sclera of his eyes were as scarlet as his coat. “There are quotes here from people accusing us of harassment because we detained them at a checkpoint and asked to see their guns. They say our conduct is improper because we entered private property to collect cigarette butts for DNA. You’ve got Karl Khristian—Karl Khristian!—bitching because Bilodeau dug up some bullets from outside his fence. We come across in this story like a bunch of circus clowns.”
Rivard flung the newspaper away. Unrolling in flight, it struck Sullivan in the chest, causing the warden to leap back and nearly fall over a desk chair.
“That paper came out before Briar Morse died,” Rivard said. “There’s nothing in it about her driving into a tree last night. Imagine what’s going to be in tomorrow’s paper. Do you all want to see me crucified?” Before any of us could raise our hands, he continued: “The only way that’s not going to happen is if we start getting some fucking results!”
I’m not sure why it surprised me that Rivard didn’t ask for a moment of silence to remember the dead girl. Our lieutenant was unraveling in front of our eyes.
“Bilodeau, what can you tell us?” Rivard asked.
The warden investigator was wearing street clothes—fleece-lined denim jacket, flannel shirt, and dirty Carhartt pants—as if he intended to do some undercover work. “I’ve got a good feeling about those slugs from Khristian’s driveway,” he said. “Think we might be looking at a match there between them and the ones we dug out of the walls of the Morse place. Should hear about those today.”
“Anyone else got a lead here?” the lieutenant asked, setting his hat down on a desk.
Bard took half a step forward. “I’ve been sweating Chubby LeClair pretty good, and I think he might be on the verge of breaking.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Rivard asked. It was the first time I’d heard him snap at one of his acolytes.
The lieutenant’s response seemed to fluster Bard, too. “I, uh, think he, uh, might be our guy.”
“What’s that, your woman’s intuition?”
Bard stared at the floor.
“The way you build a case is with evidence.” The lieutenant unbuttoned his coat. “You want to impress me? Come back with a fucking confession.” He tossed his jacket over the back of a chair. “I want everyone to tell me what the hell you’ve been doing for the past few days. You’d better not have been sitting around pulling each other’s puds.”
I didn’t doubt that, at his core, Marc Rivard was a decent and dedicated public servant. For all my quarrels with my superiors, I’d never had cause to doubt they had solid reasons for making the decisions they did. But watching Rivard propped against the desk with his arms crossed, throwing insult after insult at the men he was supposed to be leading, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that they’d promoted him too far, too fast. Unlike me, a lot of guys in that room had never been on the receiving end of his anger. You didn’t need a seismometer to sense the shock wave that rippled through their collective confidence.
By the time he got to me, I was braced for the worst. “Bowditch?” he said.
“Ms. Morse told me she didn’t want a liaison anymore,” I replied.
“So what have you been doing?”
“Regular patrol work.”
McQuarrie stepped in front of me to take the bullet. “That was my decision, L.T.”
“Lieutenant Zanadakis says you did everything you could to get that Morse girl to safety. He says you were helpful at the crash scene,” Rivard said.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept my lips locked.
“After this meeting, we’re driving out to the Morse property to brief her. We’d like you to come with us.”
I didn’t have to look around the room to know that everyone was staring at me. Never before had Rivard singled me out for praise. Not a single person envied me, either.
32
A different guard let us through the gate this time. I wondered what had happened to the guy from the crash scene. Had Spense turned him out into the Maine wilderness to hitchhike his way back to civilization?
<
br /> The three of us rode in separate vehicles: Rivard led the way in his black GMC, the state police lieutenant followed in his steel-blue Ford sedan, and I brought up the rear in my scratched and screeching old beater. The sky was as blue as a tarp. The brightness of the sun outside belied the cold wind blowing down from Canada. The treetops whipped back and forth like animate objects placed under an evil spell, and small storms of dust cycloned in the clearings where the dirt road left the shelter of the forest.
There were fewer vehicles parked outside the mansion than I had expected. If you didn’t know better, though, you might’ve thought it was just another chilly autumn morning at Moosehorn Lodge. It was easy for me to imagine Briar shuffling sleepily down the stairs to the kitchen, where her mother would be making tea.
When I got out of the truck, I turned up the collar of my red warden’s jacket against the gusts and shoved my hands deep into my pockets. Looking through the pillars of the trees, I saw whitecaps racing down Sixth Machias Lake. I would have preferred to walk to the end of the dock and be alone with my riotous emotions: the grief I felt for Briar, the dread and regret I felt for my dying mother. But I had unfinished business inside the house that I couldn’t avoid.
Jack Spense himself opened the door for us. As a concession to the sudden arrival of autumn, he had exchanged his black T-shirt for a black mock turtleneck. He’d had the night to regain his composure, and his hard, flat face was as unreadable as the day we’d met. I didn’t want to shake his hand, but he went down the line with us as we entered, trying to crush our hands with his manly grip.
“How is she doing?” Zanadakis asked in a quiet voice.
“Better,” said Spense. “She’s a strong woman.”
The security expert escorted us into the repaired great room to wait. There was a fire crackling in one of the two hearths, giving the air a pleasantly smoky scent, as if the logs had been especially chosen for their applewood aroma. The last time I’d visited the room, the windows had all been shattered, there’d been a shimmer of broken glass on the floors and furniture, and you could’ve played connect-the-dots with the bullet holes in the wall. The transformation was a testament to Morse’s wealth. She had been intent on returning her home to normal as swiftly as possible. That would never happen now that Briar was gone.
