by Paul Doiron
Why didn’t Folsom phone the police? That question took prominence at the trial. The barman’s confession was that he was worried about losing his liquor license, since Maine law prohibits serving drinks to anyone who is visibly intoxicated, and it was no secret that Jefferts had consumed the better part of a bottle since sundown.
After Jefferts left, the fiesta started up again. There were no more fights. Last call was at twelve-thirty, and then at one o’clock, Folsom locked the doors, and he and his staff went home.
With one exception.
Nikki Donnatelli lived less than a quarter of a mile from the Harpoon Bar. A notoriously poor driver who had just wrecked her car, she typically walked home or caught a ride from Folsom or one of the waitresses. But with the night being warm and the moon shining in the harbor, she made a fateful decision to take the shore path that stopped by Compass Rock. She was never seen alive again.
Several hours later, her mother, Angela, awoke from a nightmare. Because the walls of the summer house were cardboard-thin, she always heard Nikki washing her face and brushing her teeth, she told authorities. Angela roused her husband, Nick, and they agreed to telephone the police. The dispatcher informed them that Nikki couldn’t properly be termed missing. People her age frequently spent entire nights out without informing their parents, despite the Donnatellis’ assurances that their daughter would never do such a thing. The dispatcher eventually agreed to write down a physical description of Nikki, promising to alert sheriff’s deputies and state troopers on patrol in the area. “If anyone sees her,” the dispatcher said, “we’ll let you know.”
Shortly before dawn, a first-year sheriff’s deputy with the odd name of Dane Guffey was patrolling a stretch of isolated road about five miles from the Harpoon Bar when he decided to check out a forested ATV trail popular with teenagers looking for privacy. He had received word about Nikki Donnatelli, and he had a hunch that she might have sneaked into the woods with some Romeo. At the very least, he hoped he might surprise some amorous teens. Interrupting a couple having sex is one of the beat cop’s prurient pleasures.
The dirt road was heavily rutted but passable to four-wheel-drive vehicles, and Guffey had been assigned one of the county’s new SUVs. About half a mile into the forest, he was surprised to find a rusted blue Ford Ranger parked with its tailgate down and driver-side door ajar. He recognized the truck as belonging to Jefferts.
Guffey hit his spotlight, bathing the scene in brilliant whiteness, and announced his presence as a police officer over the radio loudspeaker. There was no movement, no response. He took his flashlight and, resting his right hand on the grip of his pistol, carefully approached the vehicle.
In his report, he wrote that the first thing he noticed was a pile of greenish vomit near the passenger door. His testimony evolved over time. At the trial, he testified that his eyes went first to a roll of marine rigging tape resting oddly on the tailgate, as if someone had just set it there.
Inside the vehicle, Guffey found Erland Jefferts passed out across the passenger seat. He was curled into something resembling a fetal position and would not awaken when the deputy called his name. Guffey said he had to shake Jefferts’s leg hard repeatedly before the intoxicated man awoke with a groan.
The deputy asked Jefferts if he had been drinking and received a firm no. Guffey then pointed to the pile of vomit outside and indicated the strong odor of alcohol filling the cab. At this point, Jefferts relented. Yes, he said, he had been drinking-but just a shot and two beers.
Why was he parked here in the woods? the deputy asked.
Jefferts’s confused explanation was that he had been returning to his apartment from a house party, where he had eaten some clam dip that disagreed with him. He felt that he needed to throw up, and so he drove down the ATV trail, looking for privacy. After he had puked, it occurred to him that having an empty stomach might boost his blood-alcohol level, and since he was fearful about being arrested for operating under the influence, he decided to take a nap until he was safe to drive again. That, he said, was when the deputy had found him.
Jefferts seemed excessively agitated, Guffey later testified. His eyes were wide and jumpy, and his upper lip was slick with perspiration. He kept glancing at his truck as if it might reveal some falsehood in his story and incriminate him.
The deputy decided to radio the dispatcher to find out if Nikki Donnatelli had returned home. It was then that he discovered that Angela had telephoned Nikki’s employer, Mark Folsom, and that the bar owner had reported the earlier run-in with Erland Jefferts as cause for concern.
Guffey asked the dispatcher to send backup.
The first officer to respond was a veteran Knox County detective, Joe Winchenback, whose testimony would be the linchpin of the case against Jefferts. It was Winchenback who took the young lobsterman aside and asked him if he knew Nikki Donnatelli.
No was the answer.
“She’s a waitress at the Harpoon Bar,” the detective informed him gently. Wasn’t it true that he’d been drinking there earlier that very evening?
No.
There were many witnesses who said that he had, in fact, been present at the bar, explained Winchenback.
Maybe he was there, Jefferts admitted.
Wasn’t it true that he had touched Nikki in an inappropriate way?
Absolutely not.
Would he at least admit that Mark Folsom had thrown him out of the bar because of something Nikki claimed he did.
Folsom was an asshole and a liar, responded Jefferts.
The detective changed his approach and asked the lobsterman if he had seen Nikki after he left the Harpoon Bar.
He couldn’t remember.
Did he know what time Nikki usually left the bar?
One a.m. That was when the bar closed.
Did he happen to know where she lived?
Yes, because she had told him once.
With Jefferts having changed his story several times, Winchenback made a decision to inform Jefferts of his Miranda rights. The process was just a technicality, he said, but he didn’t want to get into trouble with the sheriff for not going by the book. Jefferts asked what crime he was being accused of, and the detective said suspicion of operating a motor vehicle under the influence of intoxicating liquor.
Was a breath test really necessary?
Maybe not, said the detective. If Jefferts could be helpful in finding Nikki Donnatelli, it would improve his situation. Nikki hadn’t come home, and her parents were very worried. They just wanted her back safe and sound, so if Jefferts had any information about where she might be found, the police would be in a better position to help him on the drunk-driving matter.
Jefferts lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if I know where she is?”
These were the words the detective was waiting for. “Do you?” he asked.
Maybe he had seen her at the party, Jefferts admitted.
What would happen if they were to search his pickup truck? Winchenback asked. Would they find evidence of Nikki’s having been in it?
He had given her a ride home one night, so yes.
The detective pointed out that earlier in the interview, Jefferts had claimed never to have met Nikki Donnatelli.
The young man became angry. He said he was confused because he was tired and he wasn’t feeling well. He was having trouble remembering things. He felt the police were harassing him for no good reason and that he probably shouldn’t say anything more without a lawyer.
Winchenback responded that a girl was missing, and time was of the essence. “If you know something and don’t tell us,” he said, “it will haunt you forever. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?”
“No,” said the lobsterman.
Winchenback saw another opening and walked through it. “Do you remember what you did with Nikki?” he asked.
“What if I said yes?” replied Erland Jefferts.
Winchenback would later swear-and the prosecutor, Assist
ant Attorney General Danica Marshall, would argue in court-that Jefferts’s words were tantamount to a confession of guilt.
Seven years ago, I never would have imagined my future connection to any of these people. Like the rest of Maine, I’d found myself caught up in the mystery of a photogenic girl gone missing and a model-handsome lobsterman under suspicion. But my fascination was rooted more in hatred than in prurience. I fantasized driving to Rockland and shooting Jefferts with a deer rifle as he was being taken in chains from the courthouse. If I were Nikki’s boyfriend, I wondered, would I have had the guts to seek revenge?
But of course I wasn’t her boyfriend. I was just a testosterone-crazed kid. And frustrated lust, of the kind Jefferts must have felt for Nikki Donnatelli, was an intimate sensation for me, even more than my teenaged self dared to admit.
13
Being a game warden is an old-fashioned job. As professions go, it seems to belong to some lost and legendary age, right along with blacksmithing, lamplighting, and the harpooning of sperm whales. The Sheriff of Nottingham is history’s most famous game warden. What does that tell you?
Even among my friends and family, the widely held belief was that my job was all about animals. And in certain moments I did see myself as the heroic protector of voiceless creatures. Without wardens in the woods, how many more deer would be slaughtered? How many more ducks would be killed? There was nobility in what we did, even if our salaries were paid for by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. So in our case, you could say that death subsidized life. Game wardens represented society’s recognition that humans need to be protected from their own predaciousness. That bloody desire to kill and keep killing. The inability to ever stop.
Ultimately, my job wasn’t about animals at all. It was about people-and the cruelties they will commit when no one is watching.
Ashley Kim had needed protecting. Tomorrow the newspapers would say the responsibility to safeguard her had belonged to Maine state trooper Curtis Hutchins. A young woman goes missing on a darkened road after an automobile accident and the investigating officer does nothing? In law enforcement, you pay as much for your sins of omission as you do for your sins of commission. Sometimes you pay more. Hutchins had either just reached the ceiling of his career or the floor had dropped out from beneath his scaffold. An internal investigation would determine which of these descriptions proved most apt.
At the moment, I was torn between pitying him and hating his guts.
But what about my own responsibility?
As I waited in the emergency room to have my forearm stitched, legs dangling from a steel table, I kept returning to the scene of the accident on Parker Point. When I shut my tired eyes, I saw Hutchins staring out from beneath the brim of his wet trooper’s hat, saying, “It’s a state police matter now.”
What was my response? “It’s all yours.”
And then I had driven home.
The ER doctor was a little guy in a big white coat and sneakers, with blond hair and a pearly-white smile. He didn’t look a whole lot older than me when he finally appeared to suture up my arm.
“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked brightly.
Sarah was in the waiting room when I came through the automatic doors. She had a Parenting magazine open on her lap and the television was broadcasting an infomercial, but she wasn’t paying attention to either. Her eyes were soft and unfocused, and I knew that she had gone someplace deep inside herself.
I had to call her name to get her attention.
Without a word, she threw her arms around my shoulders and pressed her face against my chest. When she looked up at me, my shirt was wet where her cheek had been. “I should have listened to you,” she said.
“Let’s go home.”
Driving back to Sennebec in her little Subaru, neither of us spoke. The blower pushed hot air into our faces. Behind us in the east, the sky had turned a plum color, a harbinger of the false dawn.
“I don’t want to know the details,” Sarah said at last. “I’ll find out eventually. Everyone will be talking about it. But right now, tonight, I don’t want to know what that maniac did to her. OK?”
“OK.”
I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but she went on. “I feel responsible somehow. You kept saying you were worried about her, and I just thought it was you working too much again. It made me mad.” She sniffed back a sob. “If I had listened to you, maybe you would have found her sooner.”
I reached for her hand. “The state police will catch whoever did this.”
“Will they?” she said, wiping back a tear. “Because they don’t always.”
How far could Westergaard run before someone spotted him, before he had to use his credit cards? “They will.”
“You shouldn’t promise things like that.”
She was right. Menario’s investigation was beyond my power to influence, and Maine had its share of unsolved mysteries. There were too many cases, most involving women, where the police knew beyond a shadow of a doubt which dirtbag had committed the crime but lacked the evidence to make a charge stick. In horrific cases like Ashley Kim’s, was it any wonder that cops might push the limits to get a conviction? When your responsibility is bringing a monster to justice, who’s to say that the ends don’t justify the means? Not me.
“Charley came by to get Ora,” Sarah said absently. “A deputy dropped him off as I was leaving.”
“How did he seem?”
“Like he’d just come from a murder scene.”
Sarah had left every light burning in our house. I could see it from a long ways away, glowing like a beacon through the pine trees. Inside, though, the untended woodstove had grown cold, the rooms were drafty, and the brightness seemed like just another false promise of comfort.
There was a message on the answering machine from Lieutenant Malcomb, asking me to give him a call in the morning. He said he had volunteered my assistance to the state police to help in any way possible. But with my direct supervisor, Kathy Frost, still on vacation, we would need to coordinate certain bureaucratic details, since I had my own duties to perform in the district, and the cash-strapped Warden Service needed to be prudent with its overtime allowances. Even a murder investigation ultimately came down to money.
I peeled off my jail jumpsuit and tossed it in the trash. “How was Ora?”
“Worried. I can’t imagine what their marriage has been like for her.”
I let that one drift by on the breeze.
“I think she’s having problems with one of her daughters,” continued Sarah.
“It’s probably Stacey.” Charley had led me to believe that his younger girl was something of a wild child. The last I’d heard, she’d become a part-time whitewater-rafting guide out west, after graduating with a degree in biology from the University of Maine.
Sarah removed her wristwatch and set it in a box where she kept her jewelry in the closet. “When I asked Ora about her children, she changed the subject.”
In the bathroom, I inspected the bandage on my arm-the disinfectant had already stained the gauze-and I brushed my teeth. When I returned to the bedroom, I found Sarah standing, fully dressed, at the window. With the lights going, you couldn’t see outside; the glass was a mirror reflecting her stricken expression.
“Why don’t you pull the shades and get undressed,” I said.
“I was just thinking that the person who killed her is out there right now. He might be a few miles away.”
“Well, he’s not coming here.”
“Maine seems like such a safe place compared to New York, and then something like this happens, and it makes you rethink all your assumptions,” she said. “People live so far away from one another in this town. If somebody broke in while I was alone, nobody would hear me cry for help.”
“Come to bed.”
“You know, I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
I turned off the lamp beside the bed. In the dark, I saw her silhouette
d as she turned away from the window. “I’ve offered to teach you,” I said.
“I’m not that kind of person.”
She didn’t budge from where she was standing.
“Is there something else bothering you?” I asked.
“You mean beside a young woman being brutally raped and murdered?”
“Why don’t you come to bed. It’s too late to have a conversation.”
For some reason, what I’d said made her chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Too late is right.” She turned around, but in the darkness I couldn’t see her expression.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
When she was naked under the covers with me finally, I put my arms around her, but her whole body remained rigid. Then she started to shake. At first, I thought she was crying again, and then I realized it was laughter.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you know what I saw on my way home this afternoon? A turkey vulture. Talk about an ill omen.”
Bird-watching was one of Sarah’s great joys in life. She kept a list of every species she had ever seen and recorded the date in the springtime when each of the migrant warblers returned from its southern vacation. The happiest I had ever seen her was one bright morning as we stood on a sunlit hillside listening to the first redstart of the season, a vivid black-and-orange bird singing from atop a distant tree.
“Vultures are some of the first birds to come back after the winter,” I said, repeating something she’d once told me. “So it was just a sign of spring.”
“Tell that to Ashley Kim,” she said, rolling away from me.
14
I almost never remember any of my dreams. Sarah says that my eyelids twitch like any normal person engaged in REM sleep, but as a matter of course, I awaken each morning with no nocturnal memories. A psychologist would probably say that this amnesia is a symptom of some deep repression, but it just happens to be the way I sleep-like a machine being turned off for six or seven hours a night.
