by Paul Doiron
The drive took me off the major roads and down a few winding country lanes. In every thicket I noticed gallon milk jugs hanging from the gray trunks of sugar maples. Early spring is sugaring season in Maine. Because we’d had so many freezing nights and thawing days, the sap was running well this year. A big tree can pour out buckets a day, but it takes something like thirty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. A stand of sugar maples is called a “sugar bush,” a bawdy term that always brought out my inner eighth grader.
I’d just passed one of these stands and was driving through a more densely forested lowland, thick with shaggy spruces and firs, when something Jefferts had said came back to me: “the big tree with all the initials carved into it.”
I hit the brakes of the Jeep hard and slid to a squealing halt in the middle of the road. I unhitched my seat belt so that I could contort my body to grope around behind the passenger seat. It took me a few moments to find what I was looking for: a weather-stained topographical map of the quadrant around Seal Cove.
When I’d first been assigned to this district, I’d spent hours roaming around with that green-and-brown map, exploring every marked road and dirt trail, trying to get my bearings. A game warden has to know every path a poacher might use, every sand pit where teenagers might smoke pot, every boat launch where closeted gay men might sneak into the woods for anonymous sex. I’d made pencil notes all over this document, but rain and time had smudged some of them past the point of readability. When the new topo maps came out, I’d consigned this wrinkled artifact to the back of my Jeep.
On these maps, a line of dashes indicates an ATV trail. The one I wanted lay half a mile behind me, near the end of an unimproved road-the place where Deputy Dane Guffey had discovered Erland Jefferts passed out behind the wheel of his truck. I was tracing it with my left index finger when I heard a horn blare behind me and felt the Jeep shake and shudder as a seafood delivery truck came barreling past at warp speed.
The driver had a right to be pissed. What kind of moron stops in the middle of the road?
Taking better care, I made a quick three-point turn-or as quick a turn as I could manage with one hand-and headed back from whence I’d come. The trail had been marked with an X on Ozzie Bell’s photocopied map. I remembered it was the same place I’d once found a bearded flower child running naked in a mushroom-induced euphoria. His trip ended in a puddle of vomit at the Knox County Jail. So much for the magical mystery tour.
Near the paved road, there were a few ranch-style homes and a squalid house trailer, but as I crept farther down the dirt lane, the going got rougher. The frost had pushed big rocks to the surface and the rain had spooned out deep furrows filled with water the color of milk chocolate. I couldn’t tell whether anyone else had driven a vehicle on this road recently; the sleet and drizzle had washed away all evidence of human activity. But I could see that a big buck had wandered through. His cloven prints meandered down the lane awhile before something scared him and he bounded suddenly into the evergreens. If I’d cared to look, I probably would have found the place where he’d landed about thirty feet away. A stag is nature’s champion long jumper.
Eventually, it became clear that if I ventured any farther, my Jeep was likely to become a permanent fixture in the landscape, at least until the end of mud season.
I stopped, turned off the engine, and got out. The day had felt warm in the light of the resurgent sun, but here beneath the spreading spruce boughs, the temperature was probably ten degrees colder. I shivered and reached behind the seat for my green wool jacket. I had a hell of a time getting my splint down the sleeve.
The air carried the aroma of balsams, like those muslin sachets you sometimes find in the bottom of steamer trunks. The Maine woods smell different-duller, you might say-in winter than in spring, or at least the human nose has a harder time discerning scents. But as I breathed in, I detected a faint fecund odor, which told me the season was turning. In a few weeks, this same trail would reek of skunk cabbages.
It felt good being outside after days cooped up in bed. Despite the Vicodin numbing my nerve endings, I could remember my former self again. The tree Jefferts had mentioned, an ancient sugar maple in which generations of teenagers had carved hearts, initials, and occasional profanities, loomed over my head. Down the road, I heard the white noise of a rushing stream.
The ATV trail left the dirt lane just before a washed-out bridge and ran roughly parallel to the creek about a mile into the woods. The mushy ground would be baked to a hard crust by mid-July, hard enough for a pickup truck to drive on.
I could tell from the depth of the prints that an SUV had struggled to make it this far. The storm had washed away most of the tracks, but Kathy Frost had tutored me in the fine art of reading tire treads. I spotted the serpentine pattern of a pickup or SUV in a sheltered spot, where the arching tree boughs had functioned like an awning to keep out the rain.
I couldn’t say it shocked me to find the sand-colored vehicle. What surprised me was that, given the similarities between the Ashley Kim homicide and the one seven years earlier, no one else had thought to investigate the place in the woods where Dane Guffey had apprehended Erland Jefferts. I crouched down and studied the SUV from a distance, trying to make out the license plate. Was it his or hers? Ruth Libby had said that both Westergaards drove the same model.
I remembered that the wife had a vanity plate-WGAARD, or something like that. But this plate was just a meaningless string of letters and numbers. So that report Skip Morrison had given me-that Hans Westergaard’s SUV had been sighted in Massachusetts-was a case of mistaken identity after all.
My mouth had gone suddenly dry; I couldn’t have spit if I’d wanted to.
The stream seemed very loud here. The noise it made, slipping around rocks, plunging softly over ledges, was like a crowd of people whispering: a chorus of hushed words I couldn’t quite catch.
After a moment, I blew all the air out of my lungs and then refilled them. I took long, purposeful steps straight toward the driver’s door. I had no weapon, nothing to protect myself, but I had a hunch that I wouldn’t need one. That presentiment proved correct.
The window was misted over from the inside, but the splatter of red on the glass told me all there was to tell.
I pulled my left hand back into my sweater sleeve like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell. I didn’t want to contaminate the handle with my own fingerprints.
As I expected, the door was open. And as I expected, Hans Westergaard was inside.
He sat upright behind the steering wheel, his face chalk white, his eyes open but frosted. Ruth Libby was correct that he was a handsome man. He had a strong jaw, a Roman nose, and a head of silver hair I recognized from his portrait on the Harvard Business School’s Web page. He wore a chambray shirt and chinos, but no shoes or socks. Like the Rover’s leather upholstery, all of his clothes were now stained a deep, indelible red.
On the seat beside him was the kitchen knife someone had used to cut his throat.
29
“What the hell brought you here?” asked Danica Marshall.
“It was a hunch,” I said.
She was dressed in an electric blue down jacket, making her eyes that much more vivid, black denim pants that flattered her legs, and shiny black boots. She had a skier’s golden tan-new since the last time I’d seen her.
We were standing around my Jeep-Danica, Menario, Baker, and me.
Somewhere in the darkening woods, the state police evidence-recovery techs were performing their painstaking work while the medical examiner inspected the corpse. Under the Maine attorney general’s Death Protocol, the body couldn’t be touched or moved until Dr. Kitteridge had made his preliminary assessment. I was willing to predict the ME would attribute death to a severing of the carotid artery, but I was less certain about the timing. The Range Rover had certainly been mired in place since before the ice storm.
“We know you came here straight from the prison,” sai
d Menario.
I’d taken a Vicodin after I called in my grisly discovery and now felt a mellow self-confidence. “News travels fast.”
“A guard called to tell me there was an off-duty game warden speaking with Erland Jefferts,” said Danica. “I didn’t need to be Perry Mason to figure out who it might be.”
“What were you doing with that asshole Bell?” asked Menario.
I noticed that Sheriff Baker had slid his hands into his parka pockets and kept gazing dreamily off into the trees. He needn’t have worried. I had no intention of squealing on him.
I cocked my head. “Which question am I supposed to answer first? What brought me here? Or why was I at the Maine State Prison with Oswald Bell?”
“Don’t be a joker,” said Menario.
“We know you spoke with Jill Westergaard, too.” Danica tried to stare me down, to no effect.
“Is that a third question?”
“Are you on something, Bowditch?” asked the detective, looking into my undersized pupils with suspicion.
This was the first question that actually provoked a nervous reaction in me. I had no idea how impaired I was by the Vicodin in my system. I was fortunate that Kathy Frost had been summoned that morning to Aroostook County to help look for a lost girl. The only warden on the scene was Ruth’s cousin, Mark Libby. At the moment, he was off in the woods with the CID techs.
“I went to meet Erland Jefferts at Ozzie Bell’s request,” I said.
Danica opened her mouth and shook her head in disbelief. “Didn’t I warn you about Jefferts?”
I looked over at the sheriff, who was doing his best imitation of an invisible man. “I’m not joining the J-Team, in case you wondered,” I said. “I know Erland is guilty, but I wanted to meet him. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right there,” she said. “What is with you anyway? Do you have some kind of career death wish?”
I rested my body against the cold hood of my Jeep. “I was curious about Jefferts. I wondered why seemingly sane people flock to his defense.”
The detective and the prosecutor waited. They were expecting me to drop a pearl of wisdom on them.
“Go on,” said Menario finally.
“He’s a con man,” I said.
Sheriff Baker coughed into his fist. When he had arrived on the scene, I knew from his glare that Bell must have told him how abusive I’d been to the J-Team’s beloved convict.
“That’s an amazing insight,” said Danica Marshall.
I let the sarcasm roll off my back. “After I spoke with Jefferts, I started thinking about the similarities between the two homicides. He said something about an old tree the kids carve their initials in. I figured this place might be another point of connection to the Nikki Donnatelli killing. Being the district game warden, I decided to investigate. I recognized the tire tracks, found the vehicle, and called you in.”
Menario gave me one of his patented eye rolls. “The district game warden? You’re on sick leave!”
“But this is still my district.”
“Not for long,” said Menario.
I was unimpressed by his bluster. “What are you going to do, punish me for finding the most wanted fugitive north of Boston?”
“I’m having a hard time understanding your personal obsession with this case,” said Danica without animosity. She was genuinely perplexed, and I couldn’t blame her.
I was still formulating a response when a state police evidence tech came running down the trail. “Detective!”
“Don’t go anywhere,” said Menario, stalking off toward the crime scene.
After a moment of indecision, Sheriff Baker hurried along behind. As a clandestine supporter of the J-Team, he wanted to overhear every possible conversation.
I thought maybe Danica Marshall would follow the two men, but evidently she didn’t want to let me out of her sight. She reached into her ski jacket for something. It turned out to be lip balm, which she applied overgenerously to her wide mouth. “I don’t get you at all,” she said. “How long have you been a game warden? Two years?”
“Less than that.”
“I have no idea what to make of you. On the one hand, you have the highest conviction rate of any warden in the service, according to your lieutenant. On the other hand, your colonel is taking bets in Augusta on when you’ll quit or be fired. You strike me as a world-class fuckup, and yet you keep doing Menario’s job for him.”
“Does it really matter what you make of me?” I asked.
“Not anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was worried before about putting you on the stand. Now it doesn’t matter whether you’re an unreliable witness.”
I understood what she was hinting at. “There’s not going to be a trial.”
“Not if it’s a murder-suicide.”
“But Westergaard didn’t kill himself,” I said. “Someone else did.”
She inspected the painted nails on her left hand, pretending I hadn’t offered an objection. “What did Bell tell you about me anyway?” she asked casually.
“I’m assuming you’ve read Bell’s dossier,” I said. “He thinks that you suborned perjury by Detective Winchenback and suppressed evidence at the Jefferts trial.”
“The attorney general and a three-judge panel say I didn’t. You know the J-Team has been shot down on every appeal.”
“Maybe that’s why Bell calls you ‘the Black Widow.’”
When she smiled, I could see that her teeth had been professionally whitened. “The Black Widow. I like that.”
For an instant, the beauty of her smile and the playfulness in her voice almost took me in, but I caught something in her eyes-a calculation behind the seductiveness-that made me bite my tongue. Even candor was just another pose for this woman.
“This peninsula is crawling with sexual predators,” I said. “How come you never looked at anyone else?”
Her eyes narrowed; her lips tightened. “Excuse me?”
“I think Jefferts is guilty, but I also question whether he got a fair trial.”
Instantly, she began oozing venom again. “I’ve devoted my career to punishing men who victimize women. I’m the president of the Coalition to Prevent Domestic Violence. I volunteer at shelters for battered women. So don’t talk to me about that sick predator’s rights. I got into this job to put scum like Erland Jefferts behind bars.”
I sensed that this was just the beginning of what was meant to be a longer tirade, but luckily for me, Menario and Baker appeared again, walking side by side out of the deepening shadows. They were both short guys, but while the detective was all muscle, the sheriff was as soft as an eclair.
“Well?” Her voice echoed loudly through the woods.
Menario was the one who answered. “From the blood splatter, Kitteridge says it could be a suicide.”
“What?” I said.
“The angle of the wound suggests he might have cut his throat with his right hand,” he explained.
“It’s a ridiculous theory,” spat Dudley Baker. The sound of his voice seemed to startle us, as if a dog had been given the gift of speech. “What kind of person cuts his own throat to commit suicide?”
Danica settled back on her boot heels. “The kind of person who rapes a girl, smothers her with tape, and then cuts an obscenity into her skin.”
“It’s only a preliminary assessment,” Menario said.
“An assessment that makes no sense!”
For the first time, I was impressed with my new sheriff. The puffy little man was voicing my exact objections to Kitteridge’s theory.
“Calm down, Dudley. I’m not saying it’s what definitely happened.”
In the dim light of the trees, Baker’s photochromatic glasses had grown clear, and his eyes were wide and fierce. “Are you prepared to tell the media that Hans Westergaard raped and murdered his girlfriend in a manner identical to the Donnatelli homicide, and then he drove to the exact spot Erland Jefferts wa
s arrested, only to commit suicide?”
“Maybe Westergaard had some sort of fascination with the Donnatelli case,” offered Danica. “It could have been a sex game that went wrong, and he killed himself out of remorse.”
“That’s absurd.”
“For whatever it’s worth, there’s an empty bottle of brandy in the vehicle,” Menario told Danica. “The guy was pickled when he died.”
I had a sudden memory of Jill Westergaard’s frantic voice and tear-filled eyes. From the first, she’d believed her husband was a victim. I owed her an apology.
A cell phone rang among us. All three of my colleagues reached instinctively for their pockets. It turned out to be Danica Marshall’s BlackBerry. She didn’t bother to excuse herself, just walked behind my Jeep, out of earshot.
“Come on, Menario,” I said softly after she’d left. “You know this thing is a crock.”
“Stay out of this, Bowditch.”
“Let him talk,” said Baker.
“You’re a professional,” I continued, trying some flattery for a change. “This setup with the Range Rover is obviously meant to distract you from the real killer.”
The detective crossed his powerful forearms. “Are you guys deaf? I’m just reporting what Kitteridge told me offhand. Nothing has been decided here.”
“Both Marshall and Kitteridge have an interest in closing this case.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Neither of them wants the Erland Jefferts investigation dredged up again. We all know they cut corners to convict him. The last thing they want is for the media to start asking overdue questions or for Jefferts to get a new trial.”
“That’s right,” said the sheriff, flying his J-Team flag for the first time. “They have a conflict of interest.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this baloney,” said Menario with palpable heat. “You think the state medical examiner is going to call a homicide a suicide to save himself from embarrassment? I’ve known Walt for fifteen years.”
