Knife Creek

by Paul Doiron

  I waited for her to continue.

  “If you had worked that search four years ago, you would understand better.” She lowered the tailgate as quietly as she could so as not to wake the dog. “With some searches, you have a bad feeling from the start. There’s this fear that you might never find the missing person. But no one felt that way about Casey. We were all positive we’d recover her body from that swamp. It was a river, and dead bodies wash downstream. How many thousand people paddle around that river system? The odds of someone stumbling on something …

  “You always want closure, right? I never spoke directly with the stepfather. But I saw him around the command post, and he came across as such a strong, reasonable man. He never panicked or broke down once, according to DeFord. His response was always ‘I understand that didn’t work, so now what do we do?’ You want closure for a parent like that—because he’s acting the way you hope you’d act in his position. I remember saying to Pluto in the truck, ‘OK, bud, we gotta find this girl today. We gotta do it for her dad.’ I’d go into someone’s office—one of the cops on the case or another warden working the search—and there would be a picture of Casey on their desk. People felt like she was their daughter or little sister. You don’t just want closure for the family, you want it for yourself.”

  “Menario clearly did.”

  “He was a good detective before Casey. Did you know that saltwater crocodiles have a bite pressure that’s something like thirty-seven hundred pounds per square pinch? Well, that was Menario back then, he would bite down and not let go.”

  “It sounds like he might have gotten his teeth stuck.”

  “The man had a distinguished career. It’s not fair what is going to happen to him now. The press is going to nail him to a cross, while the people who were in that room stand by and watch it happen.”

  The front door of the crime lab opened behind me and slammed shut. A car engine started. But I didn’t turn to look.

  “It doesn’t help to know that she’s still alive?” I asked.

  “If we find her, it will. But what if she slips away again? Christ, if that happens someone should put Menario on a suicide watch.” Kathy took a breath. “You know that Pluto and I searched the area between the swamp and that cabin. We didn’t get as far as the building itself. What if he was just getting too old and losing it and I didn’t recognize the signs?”

  “Frost! Bowditch!”

  The captain was coming toward us across the lot, stepping into and out of the bright circles made by the arc lights on their steel poles. He moved with the loose-limbed ease of a natural athlete. No one ever believed me when I said Jock DeFord was in his midfifties.

  “Is the meeting over?” I said.

  “Pomerleau and her team want to get busy chasing some leads. Thanks to you, Mike, we might actually have made some progress tonight.”

  “Why don’t you give him the investigator job already?” said Kathy pointedly.

  DeFord pretended he hadn’t heard the comment. “I’ll call you both in the morning with an update.”

  Kathy gave me a long hug good-bye that reassured me that, no matter what, she and I would always be the best of friends.

  As she was about to drive off, a question sprang to mind. I knocked on her window and she pushed the button to roll it down. “I wanted to ask you about Tate again. What made her quit the Warden Service? You can tell me, Kathy. You know I can keep a secret.”

  “It would be best for Dani to tell you herself.”

  “What makes you think she’ll tell me?”

  “Warden’s intuition. Dangle loose, Grasshopper.”

  Kathy had picked up this curious expression in southern Louisiana, when she and Pluto were sniffing through the flooded streets of New Orleans and dragging corpses out of the bayous, after Hurricane Katrina had given us all a foretaste of the Apocalypse.

  * * *

  Driving home, I took the back roads instead of the turnpike. At one point, a mink bounded across the asphalt—eyes shining green in the headlights—and disappeared into the fading lupines beyond the sand shoulder.

  I told myself that I needed some time to process all the information that had been dumped into my brain. But deep down, I knew that I was looking for an excuse to delay my return to Stacey. She had seemed understanding about my having to leave the barbecue in a rush, but I had a feeling that an argument might be waiting for me tonight behind our bedroom door.

  What I hadn’t expected to find was an empty house. Not only were the vehicles of all of our guests gone, but Stacey’s Outback was nowhere to be seen. Had there been some sort of emergency?

  In the living room I found half-finished bottles of beer and dirty plates on the coffee table. In the kitchen I found a sink full of crusted casserole dishes and unwashed pots.

  My voice only echoed up the staircase when I called Stacey’s name.

  I slid open the kitchen door and stepped onto the patio. The night sky was a uniform brownish gray. Not a single star was bright enough to pierce the humid haze. The air was calm, but I felt something like a breeze raise the hairs along my bare arms.

  In 1872 a British brig spotted a ship adrift on choppy seas, east of the Azores. When the crew boarded the wayward craft, they found the table set for dinner, nautical charts scattered about, the single lifeboat missing, and not a single soul on board. My house had become that ghost ship of legend, the Mary Celeste.

  Before I could send a distress call to Stacey’s cell, I heard a car pull into the driveway.

  I met her at the front door. “What happened?”

  “I didn’t expect you home so soon.”

  “Where is everyone?”

  Her shirt was untucked and her hair was tied in a halfhearted ponytail. “Gone home. The party ended hours ago.”

  “What about your parents?”

  Her eyes were intense with anger. “I took them back to their plane.”

  “What?” The plan had been for Charley and Ora to stay another night.

  She swatted a mosquito on her cheek. “Can I come inside, please?”

  She strode down the hall to the kitchen, where she immediately filled a tall glass with tap water and drank it down in four gulps. The mosquito bite was already raising a red welt on her cheekbone.

  “My dad and I had another fight,” she said at last.

  “Over what?”

  “He got a call from Barstow after you left.”

  “He got a call from your boss?”

  “Barstow didn’t want him hearing the news that I’d been fired over the grapevine. I’m thirty-one years old. Where does he get off calling my father?”

  Only now did I remember that she hadn’t said a word about her end-of-day meeting with her superiors. “Wait a minute. You were fired yesterday?”

  “I was going to tell you tonight, after everyone left. I didn’t want it hanging over the party.”

  “How could they fire you? What cause did they give you? Have you called your union rep?”

  “What cause did they give me?” Her voice rose. “I deserved it. I’ve missed I don’t know how many days. I wanted to be fired. I’m glad I was fired.”

  “But why?”

  “I need to get out of here, Mike. I need to start my life over.”

  I felt the same wooziness I might have experienced having donated blood. “Does that mean leaving me, too?”

  “No! God no! I told you before. I want you to come with me. Your mom left you enough money. We can go to New Zealand or the Amazon. We could drive across Canada. We could do anything we wanted—together.”

  I couldn’t imagine how bad an argument she must have had with her parents for them to have packed up and left before I’d returned home. I could see it happening with Charley, but not Ora. I really had boarded a ghost ship adrift on a dark sea.

  “Stacey, it’s late. Let’s talk about this in the morning. You’re still worked up about what happened with your dad.”

  “You have no idea. My old man
still treats me like I’m a teenager, but you walk on water.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “Mike, don’t you see? With him, it’s always about you.”

  That night, I slept again on the sofa.

  34

  While I was tossing and turning on the couch, Dani Tate was returning to her overnight patrol.

  I have read the reports and heard from officers who were on the scene, and this is what I imagined happened. Not having been there, I can’t make any claims to its accuracy. But sometimes imagination can be a touchstone.

  Shortly before midnight, Trooper Danielle Tate got a call from Dispatch. The owner of a convenience store said his wife was late returning home after working the closing. He’d tried calling her for the past hour but had gotten no response and, being too intoxicated to drive himself, wanted a trooper to check in at the business.

  “Where is it?” Dani asked.

  “Fales Variety in Birnam. I can give you the address.”

  “No need.” She switched on the light bar in her cruiser. “I know where I’m going.”

  As she raced to the scene, pushing her Interceptor well past the speed limit, she’d had a strange feeling—almost a premonition—that she was going to hit a deer. It was all she could think of as she rounded every backwoods corner: that there would be a doe in the road ahead, about to come crashing through her windshield.

  But she arrived in Birnam safely without having seen so much as a single animal anywhere along the darkened, tree-strewn highway.

  Dani knew to turn off her pursuit lights before she got near the store. She needed to be stealthy to scout out the situation. She didn’t want to spook someone inside into making a bad decision.

  The building was completely dark except for the token security lights outside the entrance. A CLOSED sign hung prominently in the window. But a Ford Fiesta was parked next to the side door: Connie Fales’s car, according to the information Dani had gotten from the dispatcher. There were no other vehicles on the premises.

  Dani radioed in her location and reported that Mrs. Fales’s car was still parked in the lot, but that the business appeared to be closed for the night, and there was no sign of forced entry. The dispatcher asked if Dani wanted backup.

  Everything about this situation had alarm bells ringing in Dani’s head. Connie Fales was a witness in an important investigation, capable of identifying a dangerous fugitive. Under the circumstances it would be foolish not to wait for backup.

  Dani knew all these things, but still she said no.

  She was a rookie state trooper, and a woman, and the last thing she wanted was to start her new career with the reputation as someone who easily panicked.

  She removed her flashlight from her duty belt and approached the entrance from an angle that would keep her from being seen by someone inside. She took a deep breath at the threshold, reached out for the handle, and pulled. The unlocked door swung open.

  Then she lost her grip and it swung shut again under its own weight.

  A car passed along the Saco Road, heading toward Fryeburg, but didn’t slow down.

  She waited until the sound of its engine had been replaced again by the peaceful piping of frogs in the marsh across the highway. The night was warm with a gentle breeze that felt like a lover’s breath on the back of her neck.

  She hadn’t been this afraid in years.

  She removed her .45 from its holster. As a warden, she’d carried a .357, and she’d had to relearn how to shoot using this unfamiliar weapon. She’d always thought of herself as a crack shot, but that had been at the practice range.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the door again, just enough this time to slide half of her body in. She felt with her fingers for a light switch on the wall but found nothing. An eerie blue glow radiated from the back of the store where a wall of refrigerators and freezers hummed.

  To call out or not? To risk being shot by a startled store owner or by a drugged-out robber lying in wait?

  This time, she obeyed her training. “Mrs. Fales? Police officer! Are you here? Are you all right?”

  There was no answer. Not that she had expected one.

  Dani stepped inside. She flashed her light around the store in a broad arc, illuminating shelves of canned goods and racks of potato chips. She saw the beer display with the Red Sox pitcher she’d heard so much about. The flashlight beam touched another darkened doorway behind the counter, the entrance to an office.

  The darkened interior smelled of coffee grounds and dried-out pizza slices dumped in an unemptied trash can. Connie Fales was the kind of owner who would have bagged up the garbage before she turned out the lights for the evening.

  At that moment Dani finally admitted to herself that she should retreat to her cruiser and call for backup. True, Mrs. Fales might have suffered a heart attack in the back room. It was equally plausible that an armed person was crouched out of sight, waiting to rise up and begin blasting away at the careless police officer who’d dared walk into his—or her—gun sights.

  The register was fifteen feet away. Dani could close the distance in less than a second. How could she turn back now without looking over the edge at what might be beyond?

  Dani made her fateful decision. She rushed the counter.

  * * *

  An hour later Detective Finch arrived at Fales Variety to find the store lit up from within and without. He had just fallen asleep when he’d gotten the call about the homicide in Birnam. With Pomerleau assigned to the Donaldson investigation, he had caught the case.

  Trooper Tate’s cruiser was parked at an angle, as if she’d come in when the lot was empty, before all the other cruisers converged on the scene of the shooting. The Oxford County sheriff had sent two deputies and the Fryeburg police had sent one of their units. An ambulance had initially been called for; then it had become clear that it should be the medical examiner who responded. He was bringing the van he used to transport corpses to his autopsy table.

  Someone had propped the front door open with a cinder block, and now all manner of insect life—moths, caddises, and mayflies—was swarming inside.

  Finch unzipped his nylon jacket and entered the glowing building.

  One of the deputies was conversing with the sole Fryeburg officer. “Imagine burying a baby in a souvenir baseball shirt. Isn’t that the sickest thing you ever heard?”

  “Disgusting,” agreed the local cop, an enormously overweight man.

  Both officers stopped their gabbing and straightened up when they caught sight of the detective. The deputy was gray around the temples and should have known better than to hang out at a homicide scene, chewing the fat. But at least both of these bozos had known enough to put on gloves lest they touch anything.

  Trooper Danielle Tate stood silently behind the counter, staring at the floor with a look of shocked sadness.

  “You two, outside,” commanded Finch.

  As he approached the register, Tate raised her eyes. She had only seemed dazed. In fact, she had been studying the corpse at her feet while enduring the jabbering of her fellow officers.

  Connie Fales lay like a flung doll behind the counter. The ragged hole in her forehead left no doubt as to the cause of death.

  “Whoever killed her used her own gun to do it,” said the trooper.

  Tate pointed to a big Colt revolver lying on the warped linoleum, next to a toppled stool. The gun looked as if it had been tossed there after being fired.

  Finch saw all the usual signs of a botched armed robbery. The register drawer was open. The cash was gone with only an unwanted roll of pennies left behind.

  “How do you know that was the gun that killed her?” Finch asked.

  “I smelled the barrel.” Tate added quickly, “Don’t worry. I didn’t touch it.”

  He glanced around the store. “Maybe she got a shot off herself.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Tate squatted down and with the tip of the pen she used to write traff
ic tickets indicated a tiny cut in Connie Fales’s throat.

  “I’m not following you, Tate.”

  The trooper pointed the pen at one of the dead woman’s breasts. “There’s also a bloody tear in her blouse.”

  Finch blinked his tired eyes. “I’m still not following you.”

  Tate seemed mystified by his inability to understand. “She was shot with a Taser. One electrode hit her neck, the other dart pierced her blouse and hit her breast. It’s how her killer got the jump on her. She was electrocuted into submission and then shot, point-blank, in the head before she could recover her muscle function.”

  “That’s a new twist. A robber using a Taser to incapacitate the person he’s robbing.”

  Tate’s voice couldn’t hide her disbelief at her superior’s stupidity. “This wasn’t an armed robbery, Detective. This was an execution. Becky Cobb did this to eliminate one of the only witnesses who could identify her by sight.”

  35

  The next morning I awoke with a start when Stacey touched my arm. I nearly rolled off the couch.

  In the half-light of the living room I saw that she was dressed in a sleeveless T-shirt, shorts that showed off her long legs, and fluorescent-yellow running shoes. She’d pulled a Red Sox cap down over her head and threaded her ponytail through the hole in back.

  “Dani Tate is on the phone.”

  I felt a jolt of energy as Stacey handed me my cell. “What’s happened? Did they find Casey?”

  “I wish.” Dani inhaled and exhaled. “Connie Fales is dead, Mike. She was murdered last night in her store. Shot with her own gun.”

  Without thinking, I rose to my feet. “Jesus!”

  Stacey put a hand to her mouth. Cell phones being as loud as they are, she could hear both sides of our conversation.

  “It was the Cobbs,” Dani said.

  “Of course it was them. Who else would have done it?”

  “They tried to make it look like a robbery that had gone wrong. Someone waits till closing time. Then when the owner’s getting ready to lock up, they make their move. Things go wrong. The owner gets killed.”

  “Right. As if anyone would believe that.”