by Sarah Graves
“This is no local yokel, Lizzie. Or if he is, he’s a yokel with some unusual connections. Now, it could’ve been a coincidence, the hit-and-run.”
“But you don’t think it was.”
He hesitated. Stranger things had happened and they both knew it. But then he shook his head.
“No. Or at any rate it’s not safe to assume that. Because it’s possible that after the shooting, someone else got a look at that guest register of Nussbaum’s, too, and realized he’d made a mistake.”
And then made a phone call to New York, to someone who could correct it. Which of course implied knowing someone there who could and who would want to.
“But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Dylan. “Because if we’re not wrong, we need a plan. We need to find out more, starting with exactly where this camp that the lost hunter saw is, how many people are there, how many weapons …”
She nodded again. He was right, of course. And she’d step away from him in a minute; she would. But for right now …
“I’ve always known I’d have to do this,” she whispered into his shoulder.
“Find her, no matter what. But I put it off, made excuses, I told myself she was probably dead,” she went on. “I told myself that and somehow the time went by until—”
Until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I know. I knew back when we were together.” He moved her gently away from him, his hands on her shoulders. “You’re an open book to me, kiddo. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. And I’m on your side, whether you like it or not. Got it?”
She got it, and for a moment she was tempted yet again, remembering how it had been between them: everything she’d wanted and more.
Much more. “Oh,” she said, which was when Trey Washburn came through the door, head down, not seeing them until he was inside.
But then he did see, and he understood, too. “Sorry, I—”
Confusion and hurt clouded the big veterinarian’s gaze. “Lizzie, I just wanted to say I heard about the trouble at your place last night, wondered if there’s anything I can do to help.”
He glanced at Dylan, then at Lizzie again. “But I see you’ve got all the help you need,” he finished with a last, terribly communicative look at her.
Wordless. It didn’t need words, did it?
Way to go, Lizzie, she thought. Way to go.
“So I guess I’ll be leaving now,” Washburn said evenly, and went out again, closing the door very firmly behind him.
Then Dylan spoke. “Lizzie? Look, Lizzie, I’m sorry if I—”
She whirled on him. “Shut up, Dylan, okay? That right there, what just happened? Him coming in? That was luck.”
Because Dylan was a heartbreaker; he’d done it before and if she let him, he’d … She stalked to her desk.
“Like a jumper getting yanked back off a ledge,” she went on cruelly, seeing him flinch.
“We might be working together—you’ve got connections I need so I don’t seem to have a lot of choice about that.”
Or about some other things, either, her still fast-beating heart added wickedly.
She told it to shut the hell up, too. Just …“But don’t touch me anymore. And no more of your meaningful little looks. Stop—”
“Stop what?” he inquired innocently, and from the mischief in his grin she knew she might as well have been shouting into the wind. But at the moment, she wasn’t being carried away by it, anyway, and for that she felt almost grateful.
Almost. Meanwhile her search for Nicki had just taken a sharp turn, hadn’t it? A ninety-degree swerve into who-the-hell-knows-land.
“I’m calling the warden service,” she told Dylan. “Because you’re right, we need more info, and to get it, we need to find this guy and check out his whole setup. Weapons, personnel …”
“Might be hard to hold off the bod squad,” he warned, “if the wardens deliver a solid fix on their suspect.”
The homicide guys, he meant. They’d be hot to make their collar, grab up a shooter who’d already killed at least two and maybe more, and who’d attacked her and Dylan besides. And if there ended up being a little blond girl in the crossfire …
Well, if there was crossfire, they’d try to avoid her, of course. They’d try as hard as they could. But—
“That’s where you’ll come in,” she told Dylan. “You know them, you’re on the same team. So you’re going to exert what I’m sure is your considerable influence, when needed.”
For right now, though … She punched numbers into the phone.
“Hi, yeah, this is Lizzie Snow, deputy with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department. I need to get a bulletin out to the deer-tagging stations. Is that possible?”
She waited while Dylan eyed her in surprise. Probably he’d thought it would take a while for her to be able to get things done. But when she hung up the phone, she’d extracted the promise that the tagging stations would post the flyer she’d be emailing, pronto; now all she had to do was assemble it.
So: scan in the Nicki photograph, specify the general area where she wanted the wardens to keep their eyes open, write up what she had of a campsite description …
She was pressing Send on the computer’s fax function when Cody Chevrier burst in, his face furious.
“Come with me,” he ordered her. “Now. You, too,” he added to Dylan, either forgetting or not caring—the latter, she saw from his expression—that Dylan Hudson wasn’t his subordinate.
Not until they were in his Blazer, speeding out of town with siren howling and roof lights blazing, did he explain. Even then it was in a voice so taut with anger he could barely speak.
“Another one,” he grated out through clenched teeth.
Trees and fence posts flashed by. Cars, too, Chevrier passing with ferocious abandon. Lizzie clutched her seatbelt and grabbed the handgrip over the passenger-side door, while in the back seat even Dylan held on, looking taken aback.
“Another what?” she demanded as they screamed around a slow-moving potato truck.
Chevrier hit the horn, swerving back into his own lane just in time to avoid an oncoming motorcycle. The look on the biker’s face was horrified, like he was witnessing his own death.
Which he nearly had been. But that wasn’t the death Sheriff Chevrier was so exercised about this morning.
“Another ex-cop,” he said, stomping the gas in response to a sign that read SLOW. The rural countryside flew by in a blur.
“Dead,” he said. “And this one—”
He yanked the wheel hard, avoiding a flock of ducks waddling across the road only by the length of a single feather.
“I don’t care what anyone says—”
In the side mirror, an aproned farm wife ran down the road behind them, shaking her fist.
“This one,” he snarled furiously, “was definitely murder.”
At the top of the driveway cut roughly through the leafless trees, the small, log-cabin-style house had a low-roofed porch running the full length of its front. A couple of wooden rockers flanked a bentwood table on the porch, next to a large gas grill, a metal shelf unit loaded with grilling equipment, and a picnic table spread with a red-checked cloth.
None of it had been touched in a while, the gas grill’s top littered with blown-in leaf bits and the tongs rust-edged. An electronic bug zapper hung from one of the porch posts, and on a wooden chair by the post, a woman sat stunned.
“Hi, Cody,” the woman said, looking up incuriously as they crossed the lawn. From the deadened expression on her slack face, it seemed that she might never be curious about anything ever again.
“I came to ask him if he wanted firewood from us this year.” Even her voice sounded distant. “I guess not, though.”
She smiled eerily. Her eyes did not participate. Lizzie was not even sure those eyes were focusing on anything, their pupils dark pinpoints and their gaze flitting this way and that.
“She’s in shock,” Dylan told Chevrier. He crouched
by the woman in the chair, speaking to her gently.
Yeah, you’re good at that, Lizzie couldn’t help thinking.
At making women, especially, think things are going to be okay when they’re absolutely not.
But in this case, at least, the talent was useful; she put the thought away as Chevrier came back, his face tight with repressed emotion.
“Hudson, put her in my car. Give her some coffee out of my thermos. Go on, Hannah, go with him.”
Obediently the woman got up, looking as if she’d have jumped off a cliff if someone told her to. As if, after what she’d just seen, she really didn’t care what happened.
Then Chevrier brought Lizzie inside. “You need to see this. Because later they’re going to say that he did it. That he did it to himself. You need to know why they will.”
She followed him through neat, knotty-pine-paneled rooms filled with the same kind of oversized, plaid-upholstered furniture that was in her own rented house, ugly but comfortable.
Whoever lived here had health problems, she saw; by the recliner in the living room stood a small oxygen tank with tubing and a vaporizer of some kind connected to it.
The bedroom, small and plain, held the usual furnishings plus three more small tanks: two solid green ones like the one in the living room and one more, solid brown. In the kitchen, a large old-fashioned cookstove featured gas burners plus a wood-burning firebox to one side.
A percolator on the stove had boiled over sometime in the recent past, spilling coffee grounds into the burner. In the sink stood a rinsed plate and cup, two spoons, and a knife and fork.
“This way.” Chevrier jerked his head sideways. She could already see through the doorway from the kitchen into the small bathroom.
The walls, floor, and fixtures in there were all splattered with blood and brain matter, so she guessed already what she was about to confront: a small tiled room, a tub or shower enclosure, and a shotgun, fired by pushing the trigger with a yardstick or some similar tool, or by pulling on it with a string looped back around the gunstock.
Only a shotgun made that kind of a mess. Steeling herself against the thick, nauseating smell in the room, Lizzie stepped in and stood by the sink to take in the details:
Shaving things on a shelf. A wastebasket containing a few used tissues. Tooth glass and toothbrush. And in the tub a man’s body, fully dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a flannel shirt, and a pair of sneakers, but no longer possessing anything that could even remotely be said to resemble a head.
He’d chosen the string-around-the-gunstock method. “Okay,” she said. “Anything special I should notice?”
Chevrier shook his head. “That’s his shotgun. I’ve been out hunting with him many a time. But this,” he said, “isn’t how he would do it.”
Dylan looked in. “Cody, you want me to drive Hannah Dodson home? She walked over from her place, but it seems kind of harsh to let her just …”
“Yeah, Dylan, thanks. Make sure someone’s there with her, all right? And we’ll wait here for you,” said Chevrier.
“I wanted you to see it,” he told Lizzie when Dylan had gone. “So when you hear later about how it’s open and shut—”
Something struck her; she glanced back into the bathroom. “How sick was he?”
The collection of pill bottles on the windowsill consisted of at least a dozen small orange plastic containers with white printed pharmacy labels.
“As bad off as Carl Bogart, maybe worse,” said Chevrier. “Hey, guys get old,” he added sadly. “Anyway, he had pancreatic cancer, couple of months left. Another reason they’ll say it was suicide, besides the method.”
And besides the fact that it was hard to fake a thing like this, she thought, because despite the chaotic first impression it made, blood spatter came in recognizable patterns. You could drug a man, lay him down, shoot him, then pose him as if he’d done it himself, taking care to get all the details just right: the angle, the point-blank distance, the powder tattooing, even.
You’d still have a telltale hole in the back-splatter, though, caused by your body being smack-dab in the bloody middle of it when the gun went off.
“You think somebody talked him into it? Or threatened him?”
That way, the evidence would look right. And a guy dying of cancer might not be hard to persuade.
On the other hand, though, what could you threaten him with that was worse than his own near-certain imminent fate?
She followed Chevrier back out onto the porch. “Why are you so sure he didn’t kill himself in there?”
Chevrier turned to her. “Weren’t you listening? Terminal cancer, already it was painful, and he was expecting worse. A lot worse.”
The lightbulb went on: those pills. “He had another method planned? Something not so …”
In her experience suicides were of two kinds: the ones who didn’t want to hurt someone on their way out and the ones who did. A self-administered dose of shotgun shell argued strongly for the latter variety.
Just ask that poor woman who found him …
“Bingo,” Chevrier replied sarcastically. “All those bottles in there on the windowsill? They’re full. Pain pills, sleeping medications, he’d been saving them up. Got a supply of anti-nausea medicine, too, the kind that really works, so he wouldn’t puke ’em all back up after he …”
He stopped, sudden tears coming into his voice. “He was a good guy, Wilson Sirois was. Game warden all his life, loved being out there, knew the woods way up along the Canadian border like his backyard.”
Chevrier kicked at a clod of dirt left by one of the cops that had been in and out of Sirois’s house. “He was gonna go out there when the time came, had his spot all picked, a nice little glade by a stream we used to fish. And I …”
Lizzie waited, looking out across the valley from the long front porch. Far to the west, the northern Appalachian mountains shone white with snow at their tops, the endless forests below a greenish-black charcoal scribble.
“You know all this because you were going to go with him,” she finished for Chevrier. “To help him, and stay with him?”
He nodded, starting down the porch steps. “Yeah. That was the plan. He said he would let me know.”
Dylan pulled the Blazer back up into the yard and sat behind the wheel waiting. “But I guess that won’t be happening now. He did it without me. Yeah, sure he did,” he snarled sarcastically.
Chevrier spat on the half-frozen ground, looked around in bleak misery. “Freakin’ epidemic of it around here, wouldn’t you say?”
They climbed into the Blazer. “What if the weather got too bad, though?” The weather forecaster on the radio this morning had been hinting at snow, and there’d be more of it soon.
And it didn’t sound as if Sirois was going to last until a spring thaw. “Or he was too sick to do it.”
Or, she didn’t add, if it all just went south too fast for Wilson Sirois to swallow his pills.
“Or if something else went wrong.” Sirois could’ve ended up in an ambulance instead of by his stream in any number of ways. “And anyway, as a method, pills are iffy.”
No need to go into detail. But she’d seen pill overdoses back when she was on patrol, many of them deliberate.
She had not, however, seen very many successful ones. The human gut tended to rebel before enough of the substance had been absorbed, or at least that was how it had been explained to her by a Boston emergency-room resident, one long-ago midnight just before Christmas. Even anti-nausea meds might not help.
Chevrier understood. “Sirois knew everybody and they knew him. There wasn’t an ambulance tech or ER doc in the County who’d have resuscitated him.”
He took a breath. Dylan drove carefully and well, keeping thoughtfully quiet. Not until they got to the highway and turned toward Bearkill did he speak up.
“The woman who found him says he was a retired game warden,” he said. “Does that mean he’d have been able to help find someone in the woods? O
r a campsite way off the beaten track? Sick as he was, could he have gone along, or maybe at least helped out with suggestions from home?”
Nice one, she thought about the connection he’d just made. Some hidden place that a lifetime in the woods might’ve made the game warden aware of … a place where someone might be hiding a child?
Coming toward them, a boxy red and white emergency vehicle flashed its lights at the sight of the Blazer. No lights or siren running, though, and they weren’t racing anywhere, either.
They’d been told what awaited, no doubt, and who the hell would be in a rush to confront that?
“Yeah,” said Chevrier when the ambulance had passed, another county car with a deputy at the wheel right behind it.
“Sirois could’ve done that. Out in those woods, there, he was the man. Everyone around here knows it, too.”
His voice grew reminiscent as he recalled his dead friend; his second loss in a month, she realized.
“Yeah, you needed somebody located up there, he was the one you wanted out hunting for them. People said Wilson Sirois could find an eyelash in the Allagash, and it was true.”
At first, Margaret Brantwell thought she must simply have made some kind of mistake. Things had been noisy around the house all morning, what with the hired guys outside trying to get the last bales of hay under cover before the snow got here and the dogs barking in their pen, trying to get at the hired guys.
Also, the baby had been crying, fussy and not wanting to go down for his morning nap. But finally he’d quieted; she’d left him in his crib in the sunroom, a peace lily shading him and the small mechanical fountain she’d had put in when the room was added onto the house trickling pleasantly.
And then … She remembered very well thinking how lovely it all looked, and how glad she was to have time with her grandson even if he could be a little fussy now and then.
For a while she had thought she might never make peace with Missy again. Missy’s father was a proud man, and he’d taken his daughter’s pregnancy—and her refusal to name the baby’s dad—very hard. Margaret had been sorely torn, caught between her husband’s anger and her daughter’s obdurate stubbornness.
