The Precipice: A Novel

by Paul Doiron

  “It’s a twelve-gauge, and you know what a common load that is. It would be kind of a stretch to call that proof in a court of law. I’m not accusing you of trying to railroad me.”

  “I have a thought,” Stacey said. “Why don’t you let me look inside your truck?”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “If I don’t find any spruce grouse feathers or blood, then I’ll let you go with an apology. Otherwise we’re taking a ride to the county jail in Dover-Foxcroft.”

  His eyebrows descended over his eyes. He bit one end of his mustache into his mouth and began sucking on it. “Fuck it,” he said, holding his dirty hands out to be cuffed. “You got me.”

  19

  The sun was behind us, the shadows in front.

  Stacey sat in the back of my pickup, having given her place to Troy Dow. We’d retrieved his Remington 870, along with an open box of twelve-gauge shells. I’d bagged up the spruce grouse as evidence. Stacey carried the dead bird on her lap with care, the way she might have held a live cat.

  “I don’t like leaving my truck along the road for any of the local assholes to break into,” Dow said with a grumble.

  The pickup swayed as I maneuvered it around potholes and avoided the deeper ruts. “If you make bail, you should be out in no time.”

  “Why are you taking me to jail for a lousy hunting violation? It’s not like I gave you any trouble back there. I barely even lied.”

  “Barely?” said Stacey.

  Troy Dow rubbed the heels of his hands on the worn knees of his pants. “It was that kid who ratted me out, wasn’t it? The one in the sombrero? I knew I shouldn’t have given that fat fucker a ride.”

  I tried not to show my surprise. I had been waiting to bring up Chad McDonough, unsure that my hunch had even been correct. Now here was Troy Dow admitting to having given McDonut a ride. I needed to be careful about what I said next.

  “That’s what you get for picking up hitchhikers,” Stacey said, raising her voice to be heard from the backseat.

  “I knew there was something wrong about that guy,” Dow said.

  “Why’s that?” she asked.

  “The way he kept jabbering the whole time. Some people get paranoid when they smoke pot.”

  “What did he say that made you think he was high?” I said.

  “He didn’t have to say anything. I could smell it on him. But he kept looking in the mirror like he thought someone was behind us, and then when I stopped for the grouse, he started getting all worked up. He said he was in a hurry. I told him he could always walk back into Greenville. That shut him up for a while.”

  It had been fun to pretend that Stacey was my partner in solving a mystery and not the woman I was dating. But I was beginning to realize the pitfalls of involving her in an active investigation. She wasn’t a law-enforcement officer and had no training in how to deal with potential witnesses to a crime, let alone suspects. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror, trying to hint that she should leave the questioning to me, but she didn’t seem to get the message.

  “Where did you drop him off?” Stacey asked.

  “At the corner downtown. The asshole wouldn’t even give me a fucking joint to repay me for the ride.”

  She leaned against the back of his seat. “Did he say where he was headed?”

  “What do you mean?” Dow’s wide shoulders tensed. There was suspicion in his voice, but Stacey couldn’t hear it.

  “Where did McDonough say he was going?” she asked.

  As soon as she’d asked the question, I knew it was too late. She’d given us away.

  “Wait a second.” Dow turned his head slowly toward me, his eyes narrowing. “Who are you looking for—me or him?”

  I tried changing the subject to distract him. “So you must be related to Trevor Dow.”

  “He’s my brother. You didn’t answer my question. Why are you so interested in that kid?”

  Stacey had realized her error and tried to bluff. “We need to get a signed statement from him about you shooting that spruce grouse.”

  Despite her many skills, she was a lousy liar. I had made a mistake by letting her pretend to be a game warden. Troy Dow was too experienced in the ways of cops to be taken in by such a transparent ploy.

  “You’re looking for him, and you have no clue where he is.” His cheeks turned scarlet above his mustache. “It’s got to do with those missing girls, doesn’t it? You came looking for me because you knew I’d given him a ride. You didn’t even know about that grouse until I chucked it out the window. I knew I shouldn’t have taken off when I saw your truck!”

  I removed my sunglasses and set them on the dashboard. I wanted him to see the resolve in my eyes. “Why don’t you just tell me what he said to you.”

  His mustache twitched when he smiled. “Let me go, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

  “No deal.”

  “Fine, then,” he said. “Take me to jail.”

  He settled back against the headrest and intertwined his fingers over his bulging chest. He closed his eyes, as if intending to take a nap. In the mirror I watched Stacey bow her head in regret. I wouldn’t have wanted to play poker with Troy Dow, I decided.

  * * *

  We passed the Wendigo yard again on our way into Greenville. I had lost my advantage with Dow and was desperate to get it back. I considered stopping at the office, in the hope that he wouldn’t want to jeopardize his job by having me parade him in front of his coworkers. But it was apparent that his boss already knew what a miscreant he was, and the thought of threatening the man—however obnoxious he might be—with the loss of his livelihood struck me as beyond the pale.

  Moosehead Lake came into view, bluer than the sky and stretching off toward mountains aglow in the afternoon sun. A white sailboat tacked along in the distance, a reminder of summer. But the water looked cold.

  As I approached the village crossroads, I had a decision to make. To the right was the road south. The highway traveled through Monson and Dexter before it came to the county seat in the picturesque town of Dover-Foxcroft, where all prisoners arrested in Greenville were taken to jail. It was a two-hour round-trip. By the time we’d have brought Troy Dow in for booking and returned to the search area, it was likely that Chad McDonough would be even farther away.

  At the stop sign, I turned north instead.

  Troy Dow sensed the change in direction and snapped his eyes open. “I thought you were taking me to jail.”

  I reached for my sunglasses. “We have a stop to make first.”

  He sat up. “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I followed the eastern shore of the lake for a quarter mile, passing the sign for the Greenville Airport, until I came to Village Street. Up ahead was the Maine Warden Service’s sprawling regional headquarters: a collection of tan buildings with green metal roofs. As promised, Lieutenant DeFord had moved the circus here, and now the paved lot behind the sliding chain-link gate was packed with the same vehicles I’d seen earlier in Monson: Warden trucks and police cruisers, vans used by the search-and-rescue teams, horse trailers, and even the Salvation Army chuck wagon, where someone was now handing out tuna sandwiches to the weary volunteers emerging from the woods. Two television news vans with jutting antennas had joined the ragtag fleet.

  I found a parking spot beside a familiar black Escalade in front of the IF&W office and turned off the engine.

  “What are we doing here?” Dow asked in a low voice.

  “I thought we’d get something to eat before I took you to jail. I’ve heard the food in lockup is pretty nasty. Follow me.”

  A rack of sun-blanched moose antlers hung above the entrance to the main building. I held the door open for Stacey and Troy Dow. She gave me a questioning look as she passed, but I kept the deadpan.

  Dozens of employees of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife—wardens and biologists—worked out of this office, but on any given day, most of them were in the field. It w
as unusual to encounter so much human noise inside the building. At the reception desk, I asked a plump blond woman I hadn’t met before if I could bother Lieutenant DeFord for a few minutes. She directed a glare at Troy Dow that told me he and she were acquainted—an observation that he quickly confirmed.

  “Hey, Megan,” he said. “You’re looking good. Have you lost weight?”

  “Go to hell, Troy.”

  “Ouch, baby.”

  Megan tossed her hair as she picked up the phone and pressed it to her ear. “Let me see if the lieutenant is free.”

  She turned her back so that we couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation. A sudden groan from my stomach caused Troy Dow to break into laughter. I often forgot to eat when I was focused on something; it was a habit I’d had since I was a teenager, sitting all day in a deer stand, listening for the rustle of hooves in the fallen oak leaves.

  The receptionist put down the telephone. “The lieutenant said to go on back to the conference room.”

  “Stacey, why don’t you get something to eat. I’ll track you down when I’m done.”

  Her mouth drooped. “Sure,” she said after a long pause.

  “Hold out your hands,” I told Troy Dow.

  I unlocked his cuffs.

  He massaged his wrists, as if the manacles had caused him discomfort. “So does this mean you’re not going to charge me with shooting that bird?”

  I motioned for Troy to follow me, and we headed down the hall. The door to the conference room stood open. There were maps, binders, and half-empty cups of coffee on the table. DeFord and the FBI agent, Genoways, were huddled over a laptop, conversing in hushed tones.

  Genoways shut the laptop before we’d even entered the room. His black eyes had their usual fierceness.

  DeFord was still wearing his dress uniform, but there was a sheen of perspiration along his forehead and half-moons under his eyes from lack of sleep. The fluorescent lights didn’t flatter him.

  “What’s going on, Bowditch?” DeFord said. “Oh, hello, Troy.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  I should have realized that Troy Dow was a well-known personage among the local wardens.

  “Mr. Dow gave Chad McDonough a lift out of the Hundred Mile Wilderness this morning,” I said. “He told me that McDonough was nervous and in a hurry to leave. We need to find him, sir. I think he knows something about what happened to Samantha and Missy.”

  DeFord and Agent Genoways exchanged glances.

  “Is that true, Troy?” the lieutenant asked.

  Dow settled into one of the chairs and folded his hands across his chest again. His nails were black. “Maybe—but there’s a misunderstanding I’d like to clear up first.”

  I explained to the lieutenant about our wild ride through the forest and the dead grouse Stacey had found in the bushes. “If I let him go, Mr. Dow says he’s willing to be of assistance to our investigation.”

  “Jesus Christ, Troy. Two girls are missing.”

  “Those twats aren’t my concern.” His raspy voice had never sounded so unpleasant.

  The FBI agent leaned over to DeFord and whispered something into his ear.

  The lieutenant shrugged. “Fine. We’ll forget about the grouse. Tell us everything—and I mean everything—that happened this morning with Chad McDonough, and you’re free to go.”

  The bushy tips of Dow’s mustache turned upward when he grinned.

  “I picked him up on the KI Road around seven o’clock, over near where the Long Pond Road comes in. I was bringing a load back into town, and he had his thumb out and looked kind of beat-up, so I decided to give him a ride. Like I told Warden Bowditch, I could smell that he’d been toking up as soon as he got inside the truck. His eyes were all red, and he was wicked paranoid, looking in the side mirror the whole way. Gave me a different name from what you’ve been calling him, too. I forgot to mention that part. He told me his name was Kyle.”

  “Did he say anything about why he was in such a rush to get to Greenville?”

  “He said he’d gotten a call that his father’d had a heart attack and he needed to get home to New Jersey.”

  “I thought he was from Massachusetts,” I said.

  “He is,” said DeFord. “And his father is deceased. Agent Genoways called his house this morning and spoke with the mother.” I was eager to hear more about that conversation. But the lieutenant returned his attention to Troy Dow. “What else did he have to say?”

  “He told me he hated quitting the AT because he’d hiked the whole way from Georgia in just four months, which was near record time. I didn’t believe him, on account of how fat he was. He should have burned off some of that blubber if he’d been climbing all those mountains. I asked him what’d happened to his face, and he said he’d taken a tumble on a wet boulder. I believed that part.”

  “He was with you when you shot the spruce grouse?” I asked.

  Dow paused, as if not wanting to admit his culpability, even though he’d already received a dispensation. “We came up on it in the middle of the road. You know how fool hens are—they just freeze when something scares them. Dumb chickens. I got out of the truck and shot it. He said he didn’t know it was hunting season yet. I said I had a special permit because I am one-eighth Penobscot Indian. He asked me which part was Indian, and I said, ‘My pecker.’”

  He waited for a laugh from us, which did not come.

  “Then he started going on about coyotes, and were they dangerous, and had I ever shot any.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him that shooting predators was my third favorite thing,” said Troy, not needing to name the other two. “I figured he was all paranoid on account of having smoked too much weed when he woke up. I didn’t put any stock in what he was saying.”

  “Where did you leave him, Mr. Dow?” Agent Genoways asked. It was only the second time I’d heard his voice. He had a Baltimore accent.

  “In front of the Citgo station. He asked if I would take him to get his car up on the Golden Road—offered me a hundred bucks—but I said I wasn’t a shuttle service.”

  “The state police found McDonough’s car parked at Abol Bridge,” I told DeFord. “He must’ve had someone drive him back down to Monson before he started on his trek across the Hundred Mile Wilderness.”

  “So the last you saw him he was headed north?” the lieutenant asked.

  “No, he was just standing in the parking lot, talking on his cell phone, with his backpack on the ground.”

  “Any idea who he was calling?” I said.

  “Someone about a ride, I figured.”

  “Probably the same person who shuttled him back from Abol Bridge,” I said. “There aren’t too many people who offer that service around here, Lieutenant. I shouldn’t have trouble tracking them down.”

  Genoways whispered in DeFord’s ear again.

  “You did a good job today, Mike,” the lieutenant said. “But the FBI is going to take it from here.”

  He might as well have punched me in the solar plexus. I had begun to think of finding Chad McDonough as my own personal project. Now I was being told that my place was back in the woods. There is often a moment when a straight-up search for a lost person becomes a criminal investigation. Sometimes it’s only clear in retrospect when the hour has turned. I had a sick feeling that this conversation would be it.

  But why the FBI instead of the state police? Calling shuttle vans to look for a person of interest seemed like a job for troopers. Genoways’s impassive face told me nothing.

  “Can I get a ride back to my truck now?” said Troy.

  The lieutenant folded his strong arms across his chest. “We’re not a shuttle service, either, Troy. You’re just going to have to walk back.”

  “That’s, like, seven miles!”

  “You still have some daylight left. You’d better get moving.”

  A heavy fist began beating against the conference room door. Investigator Pinkham stuck his head in without
being invited. His glasses were askew. “You need to get out here, John.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Reverend Mott just slapped Stacey Stevens in the face.”

  20

  The lieutenant ran out to the parking lot. People began to hurry past the open door.

  Troy Dow gave me a toothy grin. “I want to see this.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The lieutenant said I was free to go. Do you want to come with me or not?”

  I couldn’t stop him, and it sounded like Stacey might need my help. We followed the other curiosity seekers out into the sunshine. The sudden brightness blinded me. The breeze blew the froggy smell of the lake across the asphalt.

  “Who is this person? What is she doing here?” I heard a man yell.

  “Reverend, please!” another man replied.

  If I squinted, I could make out a scrum gathered around the Salvation Army wagon. I picked out Missy’s mother first, the heavyset woman in the pleated green skirt. The distinctive gold pompadour of the Reverend Mott caught the afternoon light. I couldn’t see Stacey at all over the heads of the others, but I could hear her voice.

  “No, I am not going to apologize.”

  “Would everybody please calm down!” DeFord said. “Wes, can you help me out here?”

  “Go back inside, everyone,” Wes Pinkham said. “Let’s get back to work.”

  I circled the wagon to get a clear view. Except for Missy’s mom, who seemed borderline catatonic, everyone looked livid.

  “It was just a simple question,” Stacey told the lieutenant.

  “What is this woman’s position here?” Mott asked. He had a rich, resonant voice, as if his throat were coated with honey. “Are you her supervisor, Lieutenant?”

  DeFord stood between Stacey and Mott, like a referee in a ring with two boxers. The reverend had removed his sharkskin jacket at some point since I’d last seen him. His handsome, haughty face was the color of an unripe tangerine.