Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  Behind me, Stacey strained to speak. “Who would—? How could someone—?”

  I couldn’t even bring myself to reply. My mind was caught up in a whirlwind of questions.

  Had the baby been alive when it was abandoned here?

  No, this seemed to be some sort of halfhearted ceremonial burial. The pink swaddling sheet said as much.

  A homicide then? Shaken to death by an angry parent? Or dropped on its head during an alcoholic binge?

  Those were all solid possibilities.

  Maybe it had been an innocent crib death, and the parents just freaked out because they were afraid of going to the authorities because they were felons or drug addicts or suffered from mental defects.

  That kind of thing happened all too often.

  Or it might have been a stillbirth and the distraught mother hadn’t known what to do.

  I’d read of women who had hidden their pregnancies and then, in unthinking panic, abandoned their newborns in trash cans. And still other women who didn’t even realize they were pregnant until they’d doubled over in pain with amniotic fluid leaking from between their legs.

  “Mike?” Stacey said. “We need to call someone.”

  I blinked my eyes until the tears cleared. Then I reached into my jacket pocket for my cell phone. I hit the autodial for the dispatcher.

  “Twenty-one thirty-two,” I said, giving my call numbers. My voice sounded as if my throat were stuffed with cotton balls.

  “Go ahead, twenty-one thirty-two.”

  The dispatcher’s first name was Sue, but even though we spoke nearly every day, I didn’t know her last name; didn’t know what she looked like or how old she was; whether she was married or had kids.

  “I’ve got a possible homicide. It’s a dead infant in a shallow grave. Location’s about a hundred yards from the Knife Creek trailhead off the Saco Road. Requesting a medical examiner and state police crime-scene investigators. Tell them I’ll meet them at the parking lot and can lead them to the death scene.”

  I decided to leave the hogs unmentioned for the time being.

  “Anything else?” The tremor in Sue’s voice told me she was not unaffected by my report.

  I glanced at Stacey, hand clasped to her red calf, a look of agony on her face that had more to do with what we’d found than her injured leg. She had forbidden me from asking for a paramedic. She didn’t appear to be in shock or in danger of passing out from blood loss. Reluctantly I acquiesced to her wishes.

  “I think that should do it.”

  “I’ll call you back with an ETA,” the dispatcher said.

  Stacey rested a heavy hand on my shoulder as I cleaned and bandaged the slash on her leg. The bleeding had already begun to slow. But as a man with more scars than Frankenstein’s monster, I recognized she was going to need stitches.

  “Why here?” she said, the question a mere whisper in my ear.

  I raised my head and we locked eyes again. “What did you say?”

  “Why bury a baby here of all places?”

  I glanced around at the leafy green woods. From an investigative standpoint, the clearing was an absolute disaster. Three dead hogs. Pig tracks everywhere. Ferns and saplings trampled. Swarms of flies laying eggs in the stinking piles of manure. I had never witnessed a crime scene more contaminated than this. Aside from the cadaver itself, the state police techs would be lucky to find a single piece of evidence that might prove useful at a trial.

  “It’s near the trailhead,” I said. “Close enough to the parking lot but far enough from the path so that it wouldn’t be stumbled over.”

  “You told me you found the wallow two days ago. You said it looked like the pigs had just been here.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Her fingers dug into my trapezius muscle. “Think about it, Mike.”

  Of course, I realized. The baby couldn’t have been here three days earlier or the feral pigs would have sniffed it out immediately. Which meant the dead infant had been buried sometime in the past forty-eight hours.

  “There’s no way they chose this spot by accident,” Stacey said. “They had to have known about the pigs.”

  The awfulness of the revelation unfolded itself before me. “They left it here to be eaten.”

  She clenched her jaw as if to keep from vomiting again. “This is officially the worst thing I have ever seen.”

  I had stopped keeping my own list of moral obscenities years ago. It had gotten too long.

  I rose to my feet, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and pressed her muddy head to my stomach. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that might console her.

  After a minute, she pulled away. “Now what do we do?”

  “I told Dispatch I’d meet the first responders at the trailhead.”

  “Can I go instead? The idea of waiting here alone—”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  I watched her limp painfully off, using her rifle to steady herself, through the alders and bracken in the direction of the road. She knew enough about preserving evidence at a crime scene to use the same path we’d made coming into the clearing.

  To Stacey, what we had found seemed inconceivable. But I had ceased putting limits on my imagination. As a law enforcement officer, I had seen and heard about atrocities that I would never have believed if I’d read about them in a thriller.

  For example, a serial killer in British Columbia had fed his female victims to his pigs. Robert Pickton had a farm outside Vancouver called (and I am not making this up) the Piggy Palace Good Times Society. He may have slaughtered as many as twenty-seven women and fed their bodies to his hogs. Some he may have ground up and mixed with pork to sell at farm markets. Certified organic. The BC health authority was forced to issue a warning against eating ground pork or sausage that might have come from the area, but there had probably already been plenty of unwitting cannibals in Greater Vancouver.

  The Canadian tabloids called him the Pig Farmer Killer.

  The Pigheaded Killer.

  Pork Chop Rob.

  As if there were anything funny about his abominable acts.

  The murders Pickton committed had been enabled by incompetent investigators and negligent prosecutors. Good men, charged with protecting the public from harm, had been unable to bring themselves to believe that monsters walk among us in human form. They discounted their own intuitions and so allowed a rapist and a murderer to go about his grisly business, unmolested. The moral of the story, as I understood it, was that the persistence of evil in the world is often made possible by failures of imagination. As a rookie fresh out of the criminal justice academy, I had suffered from the affliction myself.

  But I would be damned before I let it happen again.

  I removed my sopping cap and used my shirtsleeve to wipe my skull. I’d shaved my buzz cut down nearly to the scalp for the summer. Then I scanned again the pool of mud and the flattened ferns and bushes that surrounded it.

  Blowflies were already seeking out the open mouths and glazed eye sockets of the pigs. The insects were going to have plenty of time to lay their eggs in my dead hogs. The state police were unlikely to give me permission to remove them until they had thoroughly searched every square inch of this messed-up clearing.

  I followed my own footsteps back to the dead infant. I took a breath and steeled myself to study the remains again.

  “Why here?” Stacey had asked.

  In some ways the choice made sense. The nearby trail was infrequently used. Its parking lot was mostly hidden from the main road by pines and oaks. Whoever had buried this child would have assumed the evidence would be eliminated within days if not hours. The gravedigger had to have been someone local. The chances that a stranger to the area had blundered down the path and happened on this oh-so-convenient pig wallow were so slim as to be negligible.

  Birnam was a hamlet of fifteen hundred people—so rural it lacked even a village center. The slow-flowing Saco River looped in oxbows along the eastern edge of
town. Thousands of hard-partying rafters and canoeists rode the river each summer and camped on its sandy banks. Most of them put in upstream, in Fryeburg, and floated south in the bathtub-warm water. South of Birnam the Saco entered a bog so expansive and pathless it was more like a watery maze. Already this summer, I had been called in twice to help boaters find their way out of the labyrinth.

  The Burnt Meadows highland was on the opposite side of town from the river. The name came from the wildfires of 1947 when 87 percent of Birnam was burned to ashes—a sign of natural disasters to come if one listened to climatologists. The paths up the granite hills led through scrub oak barrens and stands of rare pitch pine, but they were seldom used. Hikers seemed to prefer the far more spectacular trails of the White Mountains across the state line in New Hampshire. Knife Creek dropped in a series of steps down from the top of the mountain.

  Until the previous month, the town hadn’t even been part of my territory. But then the warden who had been assigned to District Six had quit the service, and my sergeant had said that I would be doing double duty, patrolling an area twice the size of Washington, D.C., for the foreseeable future.

  The river and the hills—that was pretty much all I knew about Birnam.

  And now I’d stumbled on a dead baby. I already understood that this was a morning I would spend the rest of my life trying and failing to forget.

  I heard voices in the woods behind me and turned to see who was approaching. Stacey’s camouflage outfit made her hard to pick out, but the other person with her, a short woman in a blue uniform and a wide-brimmed hat, clashed so dramatically with the forest backdrop that I knew at once she was a state trooper. Then she stepped into a circle of sun as bright as a stage spotlight and I saw her all-too-familiar face. My heart sagged inside my rib cage.

  For weeks, I had been dreading this inevitable encounter, but there was no avoiding it now.

  I waited as Stacey led the short blond officer to the edge of the clearing.

  “I should have known it would be you,” said former Maine game warden and current Maine state trooper Danielle “Dani” Tate.

  3

  Dani Tate had been the warden who’d taken over my old district on the midcoast after the first of my several transfers. At the time, she’d been a raw rookie, just out of warden school, with a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore.

  Her attitude was partly a result of certain innate physical traits. At five feet four inches tall, she had been the shortest warden in the service—probably the shortest warden ever. She was also one of only 4 females in a force of 120 men. The Maine Warden Service might have served as the original inspiration for the term old boy network.

  To establish herself, she had felt compelled to deemphasize her gender by strapping down her breasts, speaking in an artificially deepened voice that cracked just often enough you knew it was a put-on, and concealing her natural prettiness behind a permanent scowl. That she held a black belt in Brazilian jujitsu and could outrun, outshoot, and outdrive her fellow cadets had spared her the usual hazing. But her classmates didn’t go out of their way to include her in their reindeer games, either.

  Our relationship had been fraught from the beginning. She’d heard I had been a reckless, headstrong screwup in my early years as a warden. (The truth, in other words.) My reputation for insubordination had offended everything she believed in as a law enforcement officer, and when we’d first met, she did absolutely nothing to hide her contempt.

  In time, she came to see that I wasn’t the disgrace my enemies had said I was. While many other wardens wrote tickets resulting in fines, I arrested genuine bad guys, who ended up in jail. My methods might have been unorthodox, but they yielded results.

  But with this revelation came something even worse. Danielle Tate had developed an infatuation with me. Just as I’d begun dating Stacey, everyone clearly saw the crush that Tate couldn’t hide. Stacey, being her confident self, thought it was cute, but I had found it mortifying.

  Tate hadn’t reacted well to being rebuffed. It must have embarrassed her to admit that she had feelings for me and then have me publicly dating the hot wildlife biologist in the department.

  For that reason, I was relieved when I’d heard that Tate had transferred out of the Warden Service over the winter and had taken a job as a trooper with the state police. The news had startled me because I’d thought Dani would be a warden for life, and I asked our mutual friend Kathy Frost, a retired warden, what had happened.

  Kathy had answered evasively, “You need to ask her yourself. I tried to talk her out of it, but she’s as stubborn as you, which is hard to believe. I don’t feel like I should be sharing her secrets.”

  Which only piqued my curiosity even more. But I’d resolved to let Tate keep her secrets and make a fresh start. Besides, we might not even cross paths again. Maine is the largest state in New England—almost as big as Hungary in total square miles—and the state police are spread thin. I figured she’d be assigned to some distant barracks near the New Brunswick border or in the heart of the central farmland—far from me, in any case.

  Then I’d gotten word that she’d joined Troop B, headquartered in the nearby town of Gray, and I realized her patrol would take her through my district each and every day. Tate and I would be seeing each other at traffic stops and bail enforcement checks and the dozens of other occasions that bring emergency responders into contact with each other.

  And sure enough now, here she was: the first officer to arrive at the death scene.

  “Bowditch,” she said.

  “Tate.” My tongue seemed pasted to the top of my mouth. “I’d heard you’d joined the state police.”

  “It wasn’t exactly an official secret.”

  Tate had flat features and flint-colored eyes. She had shoulder-length blond hair, which she wore tucked under her campaign hat. Her body had always appeared solid and square to me, but I’d only seen her in civilian clothes on several occasions—not wearing a uniform cut for a male body—and so I doubted that I had any clue how she truly looked under that masculine, armored costume.

  Stacey was watching us with a barely suppressed smile. “Small world, you being assigned to Troop B.”

  “I didn’t request it,” Tate said as she set a black backpack on the ground.

  “So who else is coming?” I asked.

  “Pomerleau and the CSI guys. The sheriff will be sending a couple of his people. Grant is the ME on call. I’m not sure if he’s bringing an anthropologist. I’m supposed to cordon off the area until the sergeant arrives. You’re going to have to show me how you walked in and out of here so we can preserve as much of the evidence as possible.” Tate moved her gaze to the flyblown corpses of the pigs in the mud. “Nice shooting. Did you get any of the squeakers?”

  Of course, Tate had noticed the smaller hoofprints in the mud. She’d always been an expert tracker.

  “Afraid not,” I said. “I’m going to have to come back here later to hunt them.”

  “That’ll have to wait until the scene is mapped.”

  The three of us stood there without speaking. The sound of an eighteen-wheeler grinding its gears carried up from the road.

  “Do you want to see it?” I asked, meaning the corpse.

  “Only after the evidence techs bag it.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  “Not enough to further contaminate the scene. I know you’ve always considered regulations to be suggestions, Bowditch. But the state police isn’t as forgiving as the Warden Service when it comes to making your own rules.”

  Same old Tate.

  “I’m going to sit down if you two don’t mind,” Stacey said, returning to her log and touching her bandage. No blood had seeped through at least.

  Tate hitched her thumbs under her gun belt. “So he got you pretty good in that leg?”

  “I think my swimsuit-modeling career is over.”

  “Ha ha,” the trooper said without smiling. She turned away from u
s, snapped on a pair of blue gloves, and removed crime-scene tape from her bag to begin stringing a cordon.

  “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Stay out of the way.”

  The white-throated sparrow sang again from his place of hiding—a beautiful lonesome song.

  “That woman is seriously steamed at you,” Stacey whispered. “You are such a heartbreaker, Bowditch.”

  “She’s right about one thing, though. We shouldn’t be making jokes here.”

  Suddenly, Stacey leaned forward and put her forearms on her knees so that her dirty hair hid her face. She made no sound that I could hear, but from the way her head and shoulders were shaking I could tell that she was sobbing.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Baby, I wasn’t criticizing you.”

  “It’s just that it’s so horrible.” Her throat sounded raw. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. My brain is just…”

  “No one can predict how they’ll react to things like this.”

  “There’s just been so much death lately. It’s everywhere I look. It’s the only thing I see. I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind.”

  When she finally glanced up, the tears had run rivulets through the dried dirt on her face. “I’m not a heartless person!”

  “I know that, Stacey. Your problem is—I’m not even sure it’s a problem. You have too much heart.”

  I squeezed her shoulder again and felt how unyielding her muscles were to my touch. “Let’s go wait in the truck for the detectives,” I said. “I’ve donated enough blood to the mosquitoes of Birnam Wood.”

  At that moment, Tate shouted from across the clearing, “Bowditch, did you see this?”

  She was pointing at the trunk of an ancient beech. It had the craterlike scars of the blight that was devastating so many of the forest giants. Leaving Stacey, I made my way around the fence of yellow tape to where Tate was standing. It was the nearest tree to where the baby had been buried.

  Four feet off the ground, facing away from the grave, letters had been carved into the bark. They were too faint to have been made by a knife or some other metal or plastic instrument. A sharp piece of wood might have made them, but my first impression was that someone had scrawled the initials using his or her fingernail.