How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  Barrett leaned down so Ronnie Lord could see his face.

  “Aw, shit,” Ronnie said. “What are you doing to me, Kimmy?”

  “Where are you taking her, Ronnie?” Barrett said.

  “I’m not taking her anywhere. This is bullshit. This is entrapment, man. You had her text me—that’s not legal. That’s not…nothing you find is legal.” He was already putting the car in park, prepared for the inevitable search.

  “It’s your lucky night, Ronnie. If you tell me the truth, you get to drive out of here with no searches. Where were you taking her?”

  “Nowhere. Seriously. I was just…” He wet his lips, studied Barrett, and decided that honesty was the lowest-risk option. “I was dropping off for her, man. She hit me with this address, and I was dropping off what she needed. I don’t know what you’re asking about, where I was taking her, all that. I’m not a damn cabdriver.”

  “Of course not. It’s legal to drive a taxi.” Barrett stepped back from the window and smacked the Saturn’s door. “Get out of here. I’d dump whatever shit you’ve got, though. Cops can hear you coming from Belfast to Bangor. And, Ronnie? If I learn that you told anybody about where you stopped tonight—”

  “Nah, nah, nah.” He held up his hands, the picture of innocence. “I don’t remember a thing, bro.”

  “Go home, Ronnie.”

  Ronnie Lord shifted the car back into drive. The exhaust clattered like a sawmill and he pulled away. Barrett watched his taillights disappear, and when he turned to look at Kimberly, he saw Liz standing in the driveway behind her.

  “That was Ronnie Lord?” she said. “At my home in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes,” Barrett said, feeling a building rage like distant thunder. “Kimberly needed a package. Strange, considering she told me she’s been clean.”

  “I have been clean! But then you took me to the pond and made me remember it again, and now all I can see is them! I close my eyes and I see the way the blood bubbled up in all that plastic and how it got caught in his mouth when he tried to breathe! I just wanted something to make it go away.”

  “We’re leaving now,” Barrett said. He was hearing Kimberly but it was Liz’s voice that resonated with him—a drug dealer had pulled up to her driveway in the middle of the night, and it was, ultimately, Barrett who’d allowed that. “Pick a destination, Kimberly. Pick a bus station, pick Ronnie’s basement, I don’t give a shit. But you are leaving.”

  “Take me to Mémère’s, I guess.”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t know if she’ll even open the door for me.”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Barrett said, suddenly exhausted. He went around the car and pulled the passenger door open and waited. Kimberly finally walked over to it. Just before she climbed inside, she stopped and looked back at Liz.

  “Miss Street? I’m sorry. I just…I just needed to make it stop for a little while, that was all. If you’d seen the same things I did, you’d understand.”

  She ducked into the car without waiting for a response.

  28

  They made the drive in silence, with Kimberly facing away from him. Only when they were back in Port Hope, closing in on her grandmother’s house, did she speak.

  “I’ve been clean, Barrett. I’ve been trying real hard.”

  “You’ve tried to buy at least twice this week.”

  “That doesn’t mean I haven’t been trying hard!”

  He’d been around enough addicts to know that wasn’t a lie.

  “We’ll get you help,” he said. “There are good programs.”

  Her face told him that was a nonstarter, but she nodded and said, “All I need is a little bit of rest. Get to see my baby girl. She always puts a smile on my face, you know?” And her face did brighten a touch, just thinking about it. “I’ll see her, and I’ll get some rest, and I’ll be okay.”

  They were two blocks from her grandmother’s house when she said, “Stop here. Mémère isn’t really a fan of yours. I got enough trouble without letting her see you.”

  He didn’t argue, just pulled up to the curb and watched her climb out, still wearing Liz’s too-long jeans. She’d rolled them up before she made her break for the road and Ronnie Lord’s promised fix, and now she looked like a little girl who’d been out wading.

  “When I call, you need to answer,” he said. “Promise me that, Kimberly.”

  “I will. Same goes for you.”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated before closing the door. “Where you going now, Barrett?”

  He looked at the band of pink light that was clawing up along the eastern horizon. “I’m going down to see Bobby Girard. I’ve got some ground to make up with the truck.”

  “Be careful with him,” she said. “He might not be as bad as Mathias, but I haven’t heard anything good about the Girard family.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Barrett said. “And you’ll stay clean. Deal?”

  “Deal.” She stepped back from the car and closed the door. He watched her walk past the old saltbox houses and occasional trailer that lined the less-tourist-friendly backstreets of Port Hope, a lost child off to reunite with her own child, and he thought of Ronnie Lord driving out in the middle of the night with a needle for her arm or powder for her nose and wished he’d hauled Ronnie out of the car and kicked his ass once more.

  Don’t get your blood up.

  He wasn’t here to roust small-time dope dealers. He was here to put Mathias Burke in prison for two murders.

  He pulled away from the curb and headed for Biddeford, to the salvage yard where just nine months earlier his life had spun out of his control. When he passed Kimberly, she turned and waved. It was such an odd, cheerful gesture—like one friend bidding another farewell after a long and raucous but ultimately fun night—that he didn’t even react. He just stared at her as he passed by, and then she was facing back toward her grandmother’s house, and he was pulling away.

  Girard’s body shop and salvage yard seemed to be decaying at an accelerated rate. The weeds were taller, the cars were fewer, the siding on the garages more dirty and mildewed. Business had not boomed for Bobby after the revelation that his cousin was a multiple murderer.

  He was there, though, and he was at work. When Barrett got out of his car, he heard the high shriek of a saw cutting through metal, and he remembered the staccato clatter of the air hammer and winced.

  The gate was unlocked today, so he didn’t have to climb the fence, but he felt a sick sense of déjà vu. Although he knew the Dodge truck had been impounded, he still glanced at the spot where it had been.

  Unlike his first advance on the property, this time the garage doors were up, and he could see a man moving around a car that was chained to a frame rack. He wondered how much of a difference it would have made if the doors hadn’t been down and the air hammer hadn’t been in use. What might have happened? And what might Jeffrey Girard have been able to tell him?

  Bobby Girard was cutting a crumpled hood off a prehistoric Cadillac, sparks flying, goggles over his eyes. He was facing the front of the garage, though, so he saw Barrett approaching and shut off the saw and lifted the goggles. He looked relaxed, even friendly, until Barrett was almost inside the building. Then he recognized him.

  “Get off my property.”

  “I understand that reaction,” Barrett said, “but I think you’ll want to hear me out.”

  “I want to use this saw on your spine, actually.”

  “I didn’t pull the trigger on him, Bobby.”

  “I don’t give a damn. You were here when it happened.”

  Barrett glanced to his left, at the spot where he’d knelt over Jeffrey Girard as the man tried desperately to keep his life from leaking out. The grass was tall and bright and green where he’d died.

  “I also don’t think he murdered those two,” Barrett said. “And I’ve come back to try and prove it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Let me ask you s
omething, Bobby—how’d all this work out for me?”

  “A hell of a lot better than it did for Jeff. Or my family.”

  “Better than that, yeah. But I lost my job over this case,” Barrett said, which wasn’t entirely untrue because the transfer to Bozeman had felt like a firing. “Now I come back and tell you that I want to set the record straight, and you’re sure you don’t want to hear me out?”

  Bobby Girard stood behind the wrecked car, glowering at Barrett, the goggles perched up on his head like the eyes of an insect.

  Barrett said, “I think he was trying to give us the gun.”

  Bobby blinked at him. “What did you say?”

  “He came out holding it across his body. It was never pointed at us.”

  “That’s not what you pricks said to defend yourselves!”

  “It’s always been what I said, at least. He came out here holding it like this…” Barrett mimed the position of the shotgun. “And then later, after he had bullets in him, he tried to push it toward me. He couldn’t talk then, but he was trying to communicate through the gesture. I think he was trying to show me that what he’d always intended to do was give up the gun.”

  At the description of his cousin dying on the ground, Bobby Girard clenched his jaw and looked away. “He’d gone to jail before on the same charge,” he said. “Felon in possession of a firearm. He’d have wanted to give it up to you, yeah. I bet he thought that’s what you were here for. He’d pulled it out of a wrecked car and was talking about selling it. That’s probably what he was going to admit to before you shot him.”

  Barrett wanted to say It wasn’t me again, but what was the point? “Or maybe he was going to admit to being involved in heroin,” Barrett said. “I heard he was part of the trade.”

  “You wanna talk drugs, go get a warrant.”

  “I don’t give a shit about your drugs, but I’ll be more than happy to use them as leverage if I need to. The only thing I care about, Bobby, is making sure the right man goes down for those murders. Now, we can talk about that, or I can find ways to get your back up against the wall and see if you’re more talkative when you’re looking at charges of your own.”

  “I don’t talk to cops,” Girard said.

  “Actually, you do. You told them that Jeff had loaned his truck to someone up around Rockland.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you don’t know who?”

  Bobby shook his head. “He’d had a bad summer up around there, was feeling guilty about some shit he’d gotten into with a friend, and I didn’t ask many questions. That doesn’t mean I’m lying, though. I just don’t know, plain and simple. All I know is I had to give Jeff a loaner because he’d taken money from somebody to give up his truck for a few days. To be clear, he didn’t loan it to anybody. They paid him to use it.”

  “That’s not a truck many people would pay for,” Barrett said.

  “Exactly what I told him. But he had cash in hand, and his truck was gone.”

  Barrett stepped into the garage, and Bobby didn’t attempt to stop him. There were tools scattered around the concrete floor, and workbenches overflowed with parts, and the chains on the frame rack were coated with thick, coarse grease. The impression was chaos, but Barrett bet that Bobby Girard knew where every wrench was and which old coffee cans held which bolts.

  “There’s a lot of evidence that isn’t explained just by the truck. Fingerprints on the bags, the barrels.”

  “Man, I don’t know. Maybe that shit was stolen.”

  “Mathias had to have a partner,” Barrett said. “He was in custody when the bodies’ location was reported. Someone on the outside was helping him. That person knew where they were too. Would Jeff have helped him with the bodies? Let’s say Jeff didn’t kill them, wasn’t even around when it happened. Fine. Could he have been talked into moving those bodies or sending that e-mail? Maybe Mathias paid him, maybe bribed him with drugs, maybe threatened him. Would he have helped hide the bodies?”

  Bobby took one of the chains on the frame rack in his hand and squeezed. The tension seemed to ripple up his body, hand to shoulder to neck.

  “I don’t want to believe it, but maybe. If he was high? Yeah, maybe. He was feeling so guilty about what had gone down with this dude in Rockland…I don’t know. Jeff was a good guy, man. When he wasn’t high, he would give you the shirt off his back, let you track it through the mud, and then put it back on without complaint. Which is pretty much how everybody treated him, because he was slow. People picked on Jeff from the time we were kids. He never learned how to guard against that. Jeff trusted everybody. From the day he was born until the day he died, he couldn’t believe anyone he met had bad intentions.”

  He stopped talking. His gaze had gone distant and sad.

  “You really think he was trying to give you the gun?” he asked. “I didn’t see any of it, you know? I just saw you come in, and I was so scared I damn near pissed down my leg. But all of my family, they keep asking me how it went, and I got no idea.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,” Barrett said. “But what I can tell you—all I can tell you—is that I saw the way he looked at me, and I saw what he did with the gun. He was trying to push it toward me. I think he wanted me to understand something that had been miscommunicated.”

  “That would be just like Jeff. It always took him a couple swings before he made contact.”

  Barrett leaned on the frame of the old Cadillac.

  “He never painted that truck hood?”

  “Jeff never touched the truck with any paint. That whole story about the way the hood looked had to be bullshit.”

  “Kimberly talked about how bright it was,” Barrett said. “If you listen to her specific words, she talked about the way the paint looked, not just the design. She thought the paint itself looked strange. Too bright. That was her phrase. Could that have been done with some type of sticker, a vinyl logo, like the kind with the company name that Mathias Burke uses on his trucks and vans?”

  Bobby Girard reached out and touched the hood of the old Cadillac as if imagining the method Barrett had just suggested.

  “It’s possible, I suppose, but I think it would be hard to get the whole hood just right.” He ran his palm across the expanse of metal and frowned. “But if you actually believe what she said, then it almost had to have been done that way.” He looked up, eyes bright with surprise. “You really believe that girl’s story, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Barrett said. “I do. So the truck is a problem.”

  They silently stood there beside the gutted Cadillac, and ten feet behind them the wind ruffled the grass where Jeffrey Girard had died. There would be no answers coming from that place. It was doomed to memory and questions now.

  Barrett finally broke the silence by saying, “What was he feeling guilty about up in Rockland?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said he’d gotten into some shit with a friend up there.”

  Bobby’s chest filled with a deep breath and then he said, “He’d sold a sick batch. Wasn’t his fault, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.”

  “Heroin?”

  “With fentanyl, yeah. Jeff didn’t even know what he had. Fool’s luck saved him. Most times, whatever he had went into his own bloodstream, but this time, he sold it to some buddy of his up in Rockland, and that cat was dead the next morning. I remember when he wasn’t going on about feeling guilty, he was carrying on about feeling lucky. Think about that, right? A couple months before two cops show up and kill him and then a murder rap gets hung on his neck before his funeral, and he’s talking about good luck.”

  “Did this guy in Rockland die before or after Jackie and Ian disappeared?”

  “Around the same time.”

  “You know his name?”

  “Something with initials. J.R. or J.D., maybe?”

  Barrett nodded, filing this away. “How often did Jeff sell?”

  “Not much. You’ll hear other tal
k, I’m sure, because that’s what people do once a guy is dead, but he wasn’t some regular dealer. He didn’t sell as much as trade, really.”

  “With who?”

  Bobby bowed his head like a battered boxer, closed his eyes, and gripped the chain on the frame rack again, as if to take strength from the steel. “I don’t know the names, just the place, but it’s only going to make you think he’s guilty because of where it is. Some dive bar in Port Hope. I know that’s close to where they went missing, but I still don’t think—”

  “What bar?”

  The intensity in Barrett’s voice drew Bobby’s attention. He looked surprised. “The Harpoon, I think?”

  For a moment Barrett couldn’t find his voice. Bobby seemed to take his silence as confusion, so he said, “Maybe that’s not what it’s called, but it was something like that.”

  “Yeah,” Barrett said finally. “That’s what it’s called.”

  “You know the place?”

  “I know the place.”

  29

  If the FBI ever got serious about improving efficiency, they’d do well to hire librarians.

  Barrett had been in the beautiful Camden Public Library beside the harbor for less than fifteen minutes before the woman at the reference desk found the case he was looking for.

  “There were at least forty-two overdose deaths in Maine in August of 2016, but only four in Knox County,” she said, clicking away at her keyboard while the printer hummed beside her.

  “Forty-two?” Barrett said.

  “That’s right. It was a very bad summer. For the year, Maine averaged about one overdose death per day, but that summer it was even higher.”

  It was moving around like a fever that summer, Kimberly Crepeaux had said.

  In the year of their deaths, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly had accounted for 10 percent of Maine’s murder rate, two of the state’s twenty homicides. In the same year, 368 Mainers had died from drug overdoses.

  Dealers found lucrative ground in the state. A tenth of a gram might fetch five dollars in Queens or Newark, but it would pull fifty dollars in the rural reaches of Maine. Supply and demand were the age-old arbiters of price, and out in the deep woods or along the lonely coast, supply was scarce, and demand was high. In areas where police resources were overstretched and addiction resources nonexistent, the drugs held sway. One of the state’s more uncomfortable problems was the prevalence of drug abuse in its famous lobstering industry, an industry essential to both the state’s economy and its identity. Maine lobstermen were portrayed as tough and tireless, the cowboys of the sea, up before dawn and out on the water in all weather, hauling their traps with rugged relentlessness. All of this was true. Also true was that plenty of the men hauling traps now were high while they were doing it. In a business that required bruising work through brutal conditions, prescription painkillers were a valuable aid, and when their cheaper, easier-to-acquire cousin heroin was made available, it found willing customers.