Massacre Pond

33

The lieutenant radioed me from his truck. The colonel had summoned him to Augusta for a briefing. He didn’t say more than that, but I could guess what was happening behind the scenes. Powerful people inside and outside the government had begun asking questions about Marc Rivard and the investigation he’d been running for the past week. No doubt the national networks had begun calling, too, since Elizabeth had just made the rounds of morning TV shows. This story was exploding into a full-blown scandal. When you are a state employee, it is almost always a bad thing if your name begins to surface repeatedly in conversations. I knew this from personal experience.

If I knew Rivard as well as I thought I did, he would have already started searching for someone to blame. For once, that scapegoat wouldn’t be Mike Bowditch. One advantage to being pushed to the periphery of the moose investigation was that no one could accuse me of having screwed it up. My suspicion was that the lieutenant intended to throw Bilodeau-or maybe McQuarrie-to the wolves. Being a political animal himself, Rivard would claw and bite to survive.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Go with Zanadakis and see if you can help him reconstruct the crash scene,” Rivard said. “He’ll want to know where Briar went after she left the property and where she saw the pickup.”

“I already shared that information with him.”

“Just do whatever you can to assist the Crash Reconstruction Unit. I promised them full cooperation.”

Even over the radio, which tends to distort your voice in the worst way, he sounded like a man headed to the dentist’s office-or the torture chamber.

“Good luck today, L.T.,” I said, trying not to sound too phony.

“Ha,” he said.

* * *

I followed Zanadakis back to the place where Briar had hit the tree. The road was still cordoned off, and a skinny Washington County deputy had been given the thankless task of detouring traffic around the lake. A team of state and local officers were already on the scene from the Forensic Mapping Unit. They’d done some of their analytical work the night before-as much as could be done in darkness using two-thousand-watt spotlights-but this morning they had brought along a Leica Total Station, a one-eyed contraption that looked like a surveyor’s computer mounted atop a fluorescent yellow tripod. In a nearby garage, another team of police vehicle technicians and civilian mechanics from the Vehicle Autopsy Unit would be tearing apart the remains of Briar’s roadster to inspect the brakes, suspension, and steering components for clues. And in Augusta, the medical examiner would be running a tox screen on her blood to determine whether she’d been drunk or drugged at the time of death.

Because district wardens are charged with reconstructing boat accidents and snowmobile collisions, we are taught the basics of crash reconstruction at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. We learn terms like occupant kinematics and vehicle dynamics. Our instructors quiz us on the three phases of a collision: precrash, at crash, and postcrash. We are trained to calculate approach vectors and determine velocity by using distance-based positioning analysis. We diagram fatalities using CAD software the same way architects design the contours of new patios.

The science of death is an awesome thing, I thought.

But what difference was technology going to make? All of these experts, all of this precise measuring equipment, and none of it was worth a damn thing compared to a single eyewitness to the event. Briar Morse had lost control of her car and driven into a pine tree. No computer in the world could tell me more than my own eyes.

“Everything will be fine,” I had told her. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”

Zanadakis did have questions for me. He wanted me to plot out on a topo map where I had been when I’d spoken with Briar: the first occasion, when I’d told her to head east toward Grand Lake Stream, and the second time, when we reestablished contact again. One of his officers would probably retrace my path to test the signals.

The detective seemed to sense my weariness. Maybe he shared my cynicism about the limits of technology to solve the mysteries that occur when neurons misfire in the brains of sociopaths. If there is one thing every cop learns, it is that humans are understandable and predictable constructs-until the moment they go completely haywire.

“So she couldn’t tell you the color of the truck that was following her?” he asked me again.

“All she could see were its headlights. It could even have been an SUV.”

He let out a sigh, His breath smelled of cinnamon chewing gum. “How about the size?”

“She said it seemed ‘big.’”

“So more like an F150 than a Ranger?”

“I doubt Briar could have told the difference,” I said. “I’ve gone over every word she used to describe it, and there’s nothing to narrow it down.”

He sighed again and scribbled something else into his notebook. Then he told me to wait while he conferred with his technicians.

My ex-girlfriend Sarah used to joke about my being a Luddite. She’d made fun of my ineptness using a computer or setting the time on the oven when the clocks fell back in the fall. I couldn’t even program a special ringtone to play on my cell.

“You really are the second coming of Davy Crockett,” she used to say with a laugh.

But it wasn’t as if I was mechanically incompetent. I understood how my Bronco’s engine worked. I could fix balky electrical wires in a wall without electrocuting myself. It was more that I had a deeply seated suspicion of miracles of all sorts, technological and otherwise. My mother had raised me as a Catholic, and she professed to be observant, but temperamentally, she had always been more a person of doubt than of faith. She had no more confidence that science was going to cure her cancer than I had confidence that science would lead us to Briar’s murderer.

A brown creeper landed on the shattered pine and began working its way up the off-kilter trunk, investigating the cracks in the bark for insects. The little bird paid no attention to the uniformed men below with their high-tech gear. The fact that a young woman had collided with the tree and lost her life was of no consequence to the creeper. All it cared about was finding the bugs. I found nature’s indifference to my cares and concerns oddly consoling. If I ever started sinking into despair, I need only step outdoors and look around at the glorious green world.

I was leaning against my truck, thinking deep thoughts about the uselessness of science and the false promises of miracles, when Zanadakis returned with a big pearly smile. He carried his cell phone tucked into the palm of his hand. “You’ll never believe this,” he said. “Bilodeau just arrested Karl Khristian outside the Cigarette City in Calais.”

“What?”

“Those shell casings he fished out of the lake matched cartridges he collected from Khristian’s property. Not only that but the slugs he dug out of Morse’s walls matched a round Khristian fired into the sand at that guy Cronk. The ballistics techs are sure they came from the same AR. That son of a bitch Bilodeau-he actually made a case.”

My gaze drifted from the detective’s beaming face back to the crash site. The creeper had flown off. I was having trouble registering the news. “Khristian just gave up without a fight?”

“Bilodeau showed up at the smoke shop with two wardens and three deputies. I guess one of Rhine’s men had spotted his truck in the lot. Khristian came out of the store carrying a couple of bags. He must have figured he didn’t have a chance to reach for his shoulder holster.”

In my imagination I could picture the scene: the bald little man emerging from the tobacco shop, squint-eyed and sour-faced in the late-morning sunlight, to find himself staring down the barrels of half a dozen pistols and shotguns. For a moment, he must have wondered if he had time to drop the bags and draw the Colt 1911, or whatever death-dealing device he wore strapped beneath his armpit. For years, Karl Khristian must have contemplated that eventuality-one final shoot-out with the socialists. How disappointed and impotent the sovereign citizen must have felt to be denied his rightful blaze of glory.

“Those rounds only mean that KKK was the one who shot up the mansion,” I said.

“He also drives a Dodge Ram.”

“So you think he was the one who forced Briar off the road?”

“My vehicle techs will go over every inch of his truck to find evidence that he was.”

“Huh,” I said.

Zanadakis’s tanned face hardened. “You sound disappointed.”

“Just surprised.” I still couldn’t reconcile the notion that Khristian had been the one who’d killed the moose, not least because he must have had a partner in crime that night.

The look the state police detective gave me might almost have been described as friendly. “Sometimes this is how it goes down,” he said. “You kill yourself trying to solve a case, and then it breaks while you’re busy doing something else, and you miss out on the takedown.”

He flashed another chemically whitened grin and then went off to tell the officers from the Forensic Mapping Unit that he had an appointment with a nutcase at the Washington County Jail.

After a few minutes of watching the surveyors continuing with their measurements and waiting for that brown creeper to reappear, I decided that Khristian’s arrest had freed up my own schedule. I found myself suddenly at loose ends for the first time in what seemed like weeks, which meant that I should be able to visit my mom. On the way back to my cabin, I would follow Zanadakis to Machias. If I hung around the county jail and jawboned with the deputies, maybe this overwhelming sense of anticlimax I was feeling would wear off and I would come to accept that the monster I’d been searching for had been apprehended without my lifting a finger.

Unless the evidence techs could find a scratch of cherry-red paint on Khristian’s truck, then the only hope of holding him accountable for Briar’s death would be to get a confession. The wizened little man seemed like he would be a tough walnut to crack. And I sincerely doubted that Zanadakis would give me a chance to use my rubber hose. Hell, Rhine would probably bar me from the jail as a precaution against the two of us coming face-to-face.

I took the scenic route through the village of Grand Lake Stream because I needed gas again and figured a slice of pizza from the Pine Tree Store wouldn’t hurt, either. There seemed to be fewer fishermen in town than the last time I’d passed through the village. The cold might have discouraged the fair-weather anglers from making the trip to what seemed like the ragged end of the earth. They didn’t realize that spawning salmon grew more feisty as the temperature plunged. Maybe Charley and I could get together for one last evening on the water before the season closed at the end of the month.

Imagining my life returning to normal was a pleasant fantasy. My mother’s illness would make such a thing impossible in any case. I checked my messages to see if I’d missed a call from Neil, but my stepfather must have taken my belated voice mail as an insufficient display of concern. If the investigation was winding down, and if Karl Khristian was indeed the guy, then I would request time off before deer season to spend with my mom. Not that a few days of hanging around her bedside would make up for years of freezing her out of my life.

And sooner or later, I would need to make a decision about the Warden Service. I should have felt more of a sense of satisfaction at the thought of Bilodeau making his big arrest. No doubt Rivard had received the news with joy and relief. Knowing that the lieutenant might have just escaped an official ass whipping didn’t make my future as a warden seem any brighter.

Then there was Stacey, whom I had resolved to forget. How easy would that be with us both working in the same state agency and assigned to the same wildlife division? Whether I wanted to or not, I was bound to run into her in the course of my patrols or over her parents’ dinner table. Every time I passed Skillen’s lumber mill, I was going to think of her sitting in the passenger seat of my truck. And it wasn’t like Washington County, Maine-population twenty thousand or so-was the best place in the world for horny young men to go looking for new girlfriends. I had tried that before, to bad effect.