Massacre Pond

26

It made sense for me to enter the Morse estate from the north, rather than circling around to the Sixth Machias gate at the edge of my own district. I left the main drag in Indian Township and drove eight miles into the woods. The little village of Grand Lake Stream was jammed, as usual, with late-season salmon fishermen. Guys in waders and vests were hanging around outside the Pine Tree Store, laughing and sipping coffee, and I saw fly anglers packed shoulder-to-shoulder when I crossed the little bridge over the gin-clear river.

At Morse’s north gate, there was no security guard waiting, although I noticed a new video camera twenty feet up a red pine, focused on the entrance. I put the squealing truck into park and called Elizabeth’s personal number.

A man answered. “Yes?”

“Hello,” I said. “I’m calling for Elizabeth Morse. Is this the right number?”

“Who is this?”

“Mike Bowditch, with the Maine Warden Service.”

“This is Spense. What can I do for you, Warden?”

“I’m at the north gate,” I said. “Ms. Morse is expecting me.”

“Hold on, please.”

The security consultant put me on hold for five minutes. My whining truck belt seemed worse than ever this morning. When I turned the engine off, the sensation was similar to having a bad tooth pulled-a sudden sense of physical relief. I rolled down the window and breathed in that moldering late-autumn smell the forest gets as fallen leaves begin to decompose on the ground. The thermometer on my dashboard said it was sixty-five degrees.

By now, Neil and my mom would be in Boston. My mother would be in a dressing gown, or maybe pajamas, getting ready to receive her first dose of the powerful drugs that might or might not kill the malignant tumors growing near her womb. She might already have the needle jammed into the vein of her thin arm. I could imagine the fear my mom was feeling. It was as if our nervous systems were connected across those hundreds of miles.

“Warden Bowditch?” It was Elizabeth Morse now; those aristocratic inflections were unmistakable.

“Good morning, Ms. Morse.”

“I won’t be needing you today.”

She seemed incapable of speaking to me except as a master addressing a servant. “Are you sure? I can make myself inconspicuous.”

“I have construction crews beginning work to repair the house, and I’m going to be preoccupied overseeing them.” I heard a saw start up in the background. “Frankly, I’d prefer it if you were out looking for whoever did this, rather than just sitting around my lake house, flirting with my daughter and drinking tea. Mr. Spense is not particularly impressed with the caliber of your investigation so far. It’s been five days since you found those moose, and you haven’t made a single arrest.”

Rivard’s instructions to me had been to share as little information about the case as possible, but I knew her impatience would rise as the days went on without a break in the case. Now that she had an internationally renowned security specialist whispering in her ear, even I was falling out of favor. Having her new mansion strafed with semiautomatic-rifle fire probably hadn’t helped.

“We’re continuing to narrow the list of suspects, and Warden Investigator Bilodeau has some strong leads based upon evidence he collected last night from your property.” I had no idea if any of this was true, but I was certain that it was the sort of goulash Rivard would have wanted me to dish up for her.

“What about my reward? Have you received any tips?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve received a number of promising calls.” This, too, was bullshit.

“Don’t patronize me, please,” she said. “I know that Lieutenant Rivard thinks I’m some rich bitch who’s used to getting her way and needs to be ‘handled.’ He’s not entirely wrong about that. But someone shot up my house two nights ago. Tell your lieutenant that if I don’t get a call from him soon telling me that you have a suspect in custody, my next national interview is going to include a comparison of your organization with the Keystone Kops. Have I made myself clear?”

“Crystal clear,” I said.

The problem with being the messenger, I realized, is that sometimes you get shot.

I decided to drive back into Grand Lake Stream and grab a cup of coffee while I plotted my next move. What was I going to tell McQuarrie about my encounters with Jeremy Bard and Elizabeth Morse? I was astonished to find a familiar teal-colored GMC Sierra parked outside the Pine Tree Store and the man himself sitting at one of the picnic tables with a newspaper spread across the wet tabletop. It was as if, by thinking about him, I had conjured the sergeant out of thin air.

His face was even redder than usual. He had removed his black baseball hat. His swirl of white hair reminded me of meringue. “I thought you were supposed to be standing guard over at the queen’s palace,” he said, sounding as dry-mouthed as a man crawling through the desert.

“She released me from her service for the day.” I peered at the newsprint as I sat down across from him on a bench dampened by the rain. “What’s in the paper?”

Mack took a sip from a Styrofoam cup filled with steaming black coffee. “You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He showed me the front page of the Bangor Daily News. The headline couldn’t have been much bigger:

SNIPER TARGETS HOME OF ELIZABETH MORSE

No One Injured in Nighttime Attack

An accompanying photograph, taken from the lake, showed Moosehorn Lodge on its piney point, but no signs of damage were evident. My guess was that it was a file photo the editors had used in a pinch.

“And then there’s this one,” said Mack, pointing to a smaller article beneath the lead item:

STILL NO LEADS IN MOOSE MASSACRE

Wardens Continue to Seek Answers

“Has the lieutenant seen this?” I asked.

“We just got off the phone. I think he broke one of my eardrums.”

“What do the stories say?”

“Basically, that we’re all a bunch of fuckups. The L.T. keeps saying we expect to make an arrest ‘imminently.’ But after five days without a bust, the reporters are starting to smell the horse manure. There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar reward out there, and we can’t make a case? How do you think that’s playing in the governor’s office?”

“So we’re not getting anything good from Operation Game Thief?”

McQuarrie removed a tin of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and unscrewed the lid. He pinched out a few brown threads and tucked them inside his cheek. “We’re getting a shitload of calls, but nothing useful so far. That kind of money always brings out the crazies. Yesterday I was on the phone with a psychic from California! She said she was in touch spiritually with the souls of our dearly departed moose.”

“What about the evidence we collected at the kill sites?”

“No DNA matches on the cigarettes. No prints on the candy wrappers. None of those twenty-two shells you collected were worth a damn, either, by the way.”

I tried not to think of the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees collecting them. “Bilodeau seemed to be excited about the shell casings and bullets he collected at Morse’s house.”

“Bill’s got some trick up his sleeve, same as always. But who knows? Maybe this time he’s cracked it.”

“You don’t sound very confident, Mack.”

Using both hands, he wadded up the newspaper into a softball-size projectile and hurled it at the top of the nearest garbage can. He missed by a mile. “There goes my second career with the Celtics,” he said. “I’m probably gonna need a new job after next week.”

“So what do you want me to do today?” I asked. “I can run down some of those OGT calls.”

“Maybe,” he said. “The L.T.’s talking about having another strategy session tomorrow. He wants to bring in the state police, which shows you how desperate he is. He’s got Tibbetts at a checkpoint way the fuck out on the Stud Mill Road, like that’s going to do anything. Devoe’s been hanging around gun shops, trying to see who bought twenty-twos recently. Bayley and Sullivan are visiting the local sporting camps for the second time. As if the guides are suddenly going to remember they had a couple of sports last week boasting about slaughtering moose.”

McQuarrie had a reputation as a company man; he might crack wise occasionally about the lieutenant or some of the other officers up the chain of command, but he never displayed any lack of confidence in the decision-making ability of his superiors. What I was witnessing from him-this outburst of exasperation-was surprising, if not completely shocking.

I hesitated before asking my next question. “What about Bard?”

“He’s doing a surveillance detail on Chubby LeClair.”

“Yeah, I know. Chubby’s been calling me, bitching about him. I’m not sure how he got the idea we were friends. Have you talked with Jeremy recently?”

He spit tobacco juice into his half-filled coffee cup. “Just before you got here. Why?”

So Bard hadn’t told Mack about my trip to Talmadge or our confrontation in the gravel pit. That seemed strange. It went completely against my sense of the man as a whining kiss-ass. “I was just wondering.”

“Speaking of friends,” said McQuarrie, “the lab guys found your buddy Cronk’s prints on a can of Budweiser in the road where Moose A was shot. Bilodeau’s been out to see him a few times. You talk to Billy recently?”

“Couple of days ago,” I said. “He asked me if he was eligible to receive Morse’s twenty grand if he helps catch the guys who shot the moose.”

“That’s all we need-a mountain-man vigilante.” The sergeant’s knees made a creaking sound as he rose to his feet. “If you want to make yourself useful, keep an eye on him. Billy Cronk on the rampage is a scary thought.”