Massacre Pond

30

Racing back along the logging road, worried about the very real possibilities of getting a flat tire or crashing into a moose, I tried to conjure the crazy map of logging roads between Grand Lake Stream and the Airline. My district crept into this wild country as far as the southernmost section of Morse’s estate, and so I had learned the ins and outs of these particular woods over the course of the past year. I’d also familiarized myself with Cody Devoe’s district to my west, which included a lengthy stretch of the Stud Mill Road. But the winding dirt lanes to the north belonged to Jeremy Bard, and he hadn’t exactly hung out a welcome sign for me.

I paused for a few minutes at the top of the hill where I’d gotten Neil’s e-mail earlier, hoping to see a bar or two on the BlackBerry display, but whatever genie had allowed a signal to reach me before had vanished in a puff of smoke. The best I could hope for was that Briar Morse would find her way safely out of the woods on her own. Why had she foolishly gone for a drive again after her last experience on these same logging roads? I was surprised that Jack Spense’s guard had even let her through the gate, and I had no doubt that Betty would unleash holy hell on her new “threat-assessment specialist.”

The wind blew fallen leaves into my windshield like kamikaze birds. I pushed my foot hard on the gas.

After what seemed like an eternity, I passed the road that led down to Little Wabassus and the Stevenses’ house along the shore. I knew that if I could just get past the low hills to the west of the lake, I might find myself in range of the new cell tower outside Grand Lake Stream.

My phone chimed in the cradle of the signal booster. I grabbed at it and pressed it to my ear.

“Briar?”

“Mike,” she said. “I’ve been trying you forever!”

“Where are you?”

“Outside Grand Lake Stream.”

I let out a deep breath. “Great,” I said. “So you can find your way back to your mother’s north gate.”

“No! You don’t understand. I tried that, but there was a pickup truck waiting on the road to the gate.”

My hand clenched the wheel. “Are you sure it was the same one? What did it look like?”

“I don’t know! It snapped on its high beams as I came around the corner, like it was waiting for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I got the fuck out of there.” The signal was clear now, and I could hear how terrified she was. “You’ve got to rescue me!”

“Is the truck still following you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you drive into town?”

“Yes, but I don’t know where to go.”

I tried to think of a safe haven, somewhere public where she could seek protection. But Grand Lake Stream was too small a village to maintain its own police force. A couple of times a day, a deputy sheriff or state trooper might swing through town, but most of the time, if the residents needed the assistance of a law-enforcement officer, they would call the local game warden. Why did I have misgivings about sending her to Jeremy Bard’s house?

I glanced at the clock on the dash. The Pine Tree Store would be closed now. There would be men fishing the stream this time of night, but the unlighted parking lot at the Dam Pool would hardly seem to Briar like a refuge. “Go to Weatherby’s.”

“The sporting camp?”

“You’ll be safe with them, Briar. I promise. Honk on your horn if you need to wake people up. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can. I’m going to call Jack Spense. He and his men might be able to get there before me. OK?”

“OK.” She didn’t sound assured.

“Everything will be fine,” I said. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”

After I hung up with Briar, I tried to key in the number for Moosehorn Lodge without crashing into a pine tree. There are good reasons so many states outlaw using a cell phone behind the wheel.

“Warden Bowditch?” said a man’s voice.

“Mr. Spense?” I should have figured that he had installed some sort of caller-recognition device with my number in it. I’d certainly phoned the house enough at this point.

“What can we do for you?”

“Briar is in trouble,” I said. “She went for a drive.”

“What?”

“Someone must have let her through the gate. A pickup truck is chasing her again. She didn’t get a good look at it, but I bet it’s the same one. She tried going back home, but it was waiting to intercept her, so she turned around.”

“Why didn’t she call here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve told her to go to Weatherby’s. That’s a sporting camp in town, on the left past the store. I told her to seek shelter there-the owners are good people-and wait for me to arrive.”

The phone went dead, and not because the call had been dropped. The bastard had hung up on me. He must have realized the urgency of the situation and decided not to waste time with pleasantries. Either that or he realized the hit his reputation would take if his company failed to protect the daughter of one of the wealthiest women in America.

As I turned onto the Little River Road, I wondered if I should call Briar back to keep her talking. Would it be safer to have me on the line while she drove into town, or would it be better for her to focus on the road? The girl was such a speed demon. I worried that she would disregard my warnings about trying to outrace her pursuer on the winding woods road.

I was right to have worried.

I saw the red brake lights as I came around a sharp corner a few miles from the village. They stared at me out of the darkness like the eyes of a demonic creature. My high beams revealed the new skid marks in the gravel, and then they touched the bumper of the cherry-red BMW, angled off the road in a ditch. The front end of the vehicle was crushed against the trunk of an enormous white pine that the area loggers had let stand for unknown reasons, since they had already chopped down so many towering trees here. It was as if they had sensed that the pine had some other destiny than to be turned into a ship’s mast, that it was fated to loom over this stretch of road for untold years until the moment when a young woman would drive her car into its trunk, snapping it finally in two.

The beams from my truck cast a white light around me as I approached the car. They projected my frantic shadow against the horrible backdrop. I tried both doors and found them crushed permanently shut. Briar’s headlights had gone out in the split second it had taken for the front end to hit the tree, pushing the engine back into the driver’s compartment.

I might have called her name. I honestly don’t remember. What lingers in my memory now is the brightness of the blood splattered across the air bag-as red as the car itself.

Maine game wardens are issued two flashlights. One is a small SureFire about the size of a quarter in diameter and not much longer than a pencil. It has a clip that fastens to your shirt pocket. The other is a black Maglite the length of a man’s forearm. It is heavy enough to be used as a club and can be carried through a rubber loop on the back of your duty belt.

I used the Maglite to attack the already-spiderwebbed glass separating me from Briar. I had no illusions about what I would discover once I pulled back the useless air bag. I had seen my share of fatal crashes. But I had never looked into the open, lifeless eyes of a woman who had kissed me.

After I saw Briar’s shattered face, I didn’t want to see the rest of her. I could imagine what the damage might have done to her rib cage and pelvis, the possibility that her legs had been severed below the waist. I backed away from the vehicle, lost my footing in the ditch, and fell backward onto my rear end. The Maglite slipped from my hand and rolled into the standing water; its light continued to shine even though submerged.

I closed my eyes and sat there until the thundering of my pulse was no longer the only thing I could hear. Then I grabbed my wet flashlight from the ditch and returned to my truck to call 911 and await the arrival of Morse’s ineffectual guards.

I didn’t have long to wait. Jack Spense and another one of his men arrived in their black Suburban while I was still on the line with the state police dispatcher, telling her that a young woman had been killed when a driver in an unidentified pickup had forced her car off the road and into a tree. I didn’t know if this was literally true-Briar might have crashed on her own, without being tailgated-but there was a chance that the truck might yet be spotted if an alert went out to every cop within a fifty-mile radius.

The bodyguards didn’t pause to talk with me. They threw open the doors of the SUV and ran directly to the crumpled roadster. Spense reached his muscular arm through the driver’s side window, and I knew he was searching for a pulse he must have known he wouldn’t find. The other man struggled in vain with the passenger door, just as I had, before he began to methodically break the window with his own tactical flashlight. They were both dressed in jeans and black T-shirts, and they both had shaved heads. I wasn’t sure if the second man was the guard who had let me through the gate. In their informal uniforms, they all looked the same.

“Leave her alone,” I said.

Spense spun away from the car, his right hand red with blood, spitting out curses. The other man stared at me for a moment and then looked at his employer. After a long pause, the second man decided to ignore my command and returned to work, trying to shatter the passenger’s side window.

I raised my voice. “I said, ‘Leave her alone.’”

When Spense finally looked up, his eyes were so full of rage that for an instant I wondered if he might attack me. His fingers had left blood on his face, which only made him seem more deranged. “What the fuck happened here?” he yelled at me.

“She called to say she was being chased again,” I said, trying to temper my own anger through even breathing. “I don’t know why you let her leave the property without a bodyguard after what happened before.”

Spense turned his entire body to face the wreck again, where the other guard stood motionless. “You’re fired! You’re fucking fired!”

The second man gave him a beseeching look. “Jack…”

“Get the fuck out of my sight!”

The first officer to arrive, fifteen minutes later, was Trooper Belanger, who had been patrolling the desolate section of Route 1 between Indian Township and the Vanceboro border crossing. He was followed by two policemen and an ambulance from the Passamaquoddy reservation. Jeremy Bard lived closest to the crash site, but he had no explanation for his tardiness in responding, or if he did, he didn’t share it with me. My fellow warden preferred to chat with the Passamaquoddies while I briefed Belanger on everything that had happened.

The scene needed to be preserved for the state police to map out the sequence of events leading to the fatality: how fast Briar had been going, whether another vehicle had been directly involved, when she had applied her brakes. The information would be needed if, by some stroke of luck, the driver of the mysterious pickup was ever identified. The district attorney might or might not decide to bring charges at that point; the decision would depend on the strength of the evidence and how well it would stand up in front of a jury. But in my mind, those distinctions were all meaningless technicalities.

The tall trooper peered at me from beneath the wide blue brim of his hat. “So you didn’t see this truck force her off the road?”

“If I had, I sure as hell would have chased him.” The night was getting downright cold, and I’d fetched my red warden’s jacket from the backseat of my car.

“Then there’s no proof she didn’t drive into the tree on her own?”

“That’s for you to determine. Her car might show signs of having been sideswiped.” I stretched my arms out around me. “Maybe there’s paint from another vehicle on one of these trees. You need to reconstruct the crash.”

The trooper had eyes like shards of flint. “But you never saw the truck chasing her?”

“This is a homicide,” I said.

I expected he’d give me the obvious rejoinder that the DA would require a higher standard of proof, but Belanger had looked into the car and seen Briar’s mutilated face. And I think the trooper understood the rage I was doing my best to keep contained inside my chest.

“I need you and Bard to help me direct traffic until Zanadakis and the sheriff arrive,” he said. “I’d like to keep the site as intact as I can. No one gets through except authorized personnel.”

I’d had a few dustups with the state police, but Belanger struck me as a good cop: the kind who doesn’t break the rules but is not averse to bending them in the service of a cause higher than the Maine Criminal Code.

Before I could move my truck, however, we saw headlights coming from the direction of Moosehorn Lodge. It was another one of Jack Spense’s black SUVs. Three people got out quickly: the driver, whose impressive physique marked him unmistakably as another bodyguard; a bearded man in a floppy hat; and a middle-aged woman with a muscular build.

I rushed to intercept Elizabeth Morse before she could get close enough to Briar’s car to see the damage. “Stop, Ms. Morse!”

“Let me through.” Her voice was commanding. Her face, in the flashing blue and red lights of the emergency vehicles, appeared oddly empty of emotion, like a wax museum version of itself.

I spread out my arms to stop her, just as I had in the field on the morning we found the moose. “That’s not a good idea.”

She kept walking, even as I stepped in front of her. “I need to see her.”

I grabbed her arm hard. “Not now.”

She spun around on me, her eyes widening. “Let go of me!”

I shook my head no.

She tried shaking me loose. “I need to see my daughter.”

I took hold of her other arm so that we were facing each other squarely. “Not like this.”

“I need to see Briar.” Her lip began to tremble.

“Ms. Morse,” I said. “Betty.”

She pushed herself into me, thrust her chest against mine, and pressed her head against my neck. She made no sound as she sobbed, but I could feel every muscle in her body shaking. I wrapped my arms around her, and she gave me a hug that nearly broke my ribs. I could smell the herbal shampoo in her hair. Then she collapsed. Her legs just went out from under her, and I found myself bending at the knees to ease the weight of her body gently to the earth. I held her like that for a while, huddled over her almost, as if to protect her from an airborne attack. She seemed like a small and boneless thing, unrecognizable as the powerful businesswoman I’d first met. She was a mother who had lost the only child she would ever have.

After a few moments, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. Tears streamed down Leaf Woodwind’s cheeks.

I let go of Elizabeth Morse and let him take my place. He tossed his hat to the ground and dropped to his knees. Then he wrapped himself around the woman he’d found by the roadside so many years ago.