Massacre Pond

6

The pickup was an onyx GMC with all the bells and whistles. District wardens like myself mostly drove beaters that we could bang the shit out of on patrol. The higher-ups who worked the desks in Augusta, or spent their days inside one of the five division headquarters around the state, got the fancy unmarked vehicles. Lieutenant Rivard’s new Sierra was a gift he’d given himself upon the occasion of his recent promotion.

Marc Rivard was one of the youngest lieutenants in the history of the Maine Warden Service, having risen faster through the ranks than anyone would have deemed possible, thanks to his deft political skills. In the eyes of the Augusta brass, Rivard embodied the four stated values of the service-honor, loyalty, compassion, and trust. But to the men he supervised, he was widely regarded as a grudge-holding prick. If you kissed his ass and laughed at his off-color jokes, he would bestow upon you whatever perks a district lieutenant has to give. If you pissed him off on a regular basis-by answering his questions candidly instead of the way he wanted; or by following your own ethical compass, as opposed to the politically expedient alternative; or simply by embarrassing him or, worse, outshining him in the eyes of the Augusta brass-he would fling you into a distant orbit. My own current position was somewhere out beyond Pluto.

So it was no surprise that Rivard made a beeline for Mack McQuarrie and Elizabeth Morse without tossing a glance in my direction. He removed his signature sunglasses, an act he only performed before rich and powerful people he hoped to charm.

“It’s unfortunate to meet you under these circumstances, Ms. Morse,” he said, extending a palm. “I’m Marc Rivard, the lieutenant in charge of this division. I want you to know my men are going to work around the clock to find the individuals who did this.”

Elizabeth Morse accepted his handshake, but I detected a barb in her reply. “That’s very reassuring.”

Despite being only half a dozen years older than me, Rivard had a touch of gray around the temples, which gave him a certain gravitas. He also wore a Clark Gable mustache, which three wives, at least, had found dashing. Out of uniform, he looked middle-aged and paunchy, but with his stomach flattened beneath his ballistic vest, he projected a barrel-chested manliness.

He next addressed himself to my sergeant. “Mack, I want to see each of the kill sites myself ASAP.”

“You’re going to need Bowditch for that,” said McQuarrie. “This is his case.”

It was the first time Rivard made eye contact with me. Let’s just say there was no love in his deep brown gaze. “You were the first on the scene, Bowditch?”

“Yes, sir. Billy Cronk and myself.”

“That’s Joe Brogan’s former guide? The one he fired from Call of the Wild?”

“Mr. Cronk works for me now,” said Elizabeth Morse. “He’s one of my caretakers.”

“So he has access to all this land. That’s very interesting.” Rivard stroked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Ms. Morse, I’m thinking it might be best for you and me to have a conversation before we go rushing around your woods here.”

“I would welcome the opportunity, Lieutenant.”

“Mack, get the coordinates for all the kill sites from Bowditch.” He returned his sunglasses to their familiar position between his private thoughts and the rest of the world. “That’s assuming you wrote them all down,” he said to me.

“Yes, sir. I’ve got latitude and longitude for each of the shooting sites.”

“Then I want you to give the sergeant a complete report of what you found, including any evidence you recovered.”

I watched Rivard and Morse stroll down the dirt road, heads down, talking like two world leaders at Camp David.

I felt someone standing at my shoulder.

“He really doesn’t like you, does he?” whispered Stacey.

“Are you kidding? I’m his fair-haired boy.”

As the first officer on the scene, I had the most information about the case, but the lieutenant disliked the power this gave me over him. If he had the coordinates and my full report, he’d no longer need me to direct him around the Morse property on a dead moose safari. I looked hard at McQuarrie. “He’s not going to bring me in on this case at all, is he? Even though it happened in my district and I was the responding officer?”

My sergeant was fidgeting like he had a line of fire ants marching up his trouser leg. “It ain’t fair, Mikey, but you know it’s his call.”

There was no point in complaining or arguing the matter, I realized. “You want the shell casings I collected, too?”

“Give me a minute first,” said McQuarrie. “I need to use the little boys’ room.”

After my sergeant had gone off to find a private pine tree, Stacey said, “Mack must have the biggest prostate on the planet. The poor guy has to take a piss every half hour.”

Stacey Stevens wasn’t the most beautiful woman I’d ever met, or the most emotionally grounded, and God knows she wasn’t the nicest. So why did I get all googly-eyed when she was near? I couldn’t explain the attraction, except to say that she felt real to me in a way that no other woman had before. Her vices were as familiar to me as her virtues. And it pained me that she didn’t feel the same sense of recognition when she looked into my eyes.

She removed the bloody latex gloves she’d been wearing and stuffed them in her pockets. Having spent the morning inspecting butcher shops, she obviously wasn’t fazed by a little gore.

“How’s your dad doing, by the way?” I asked.

“You should ask him yourself,” she said. “He said the two of you were supposed to go partridge hunting before the moose hunt but that you kept canceling on him. He thinks you’re two-timing him with some other old geezer.”

“I’ve had a lot of work.” The truth was that I’d been afraid of running into Stacey, who lived in a guest cabin on their land, especially in the company of her fiance.

“That’s between you and my dad,” she said. “I’d just prefer not to see him disappointed, you know?”

Ornery was the term Charley often used to describe his daughter. He said it with affection, but I knew that Stacey blamed him for the plane accident that had left her mother a paraplegic. Charley had been teaching Ora to fly when they’d crashed. The experience hadn’t dissuaded Stacey from getting her pilot’s license, though. My working hypothesis was that the reason father and daughter knocked heads so often was because they were actually so much alike. Her impatience with me seemed like a guilt-by-association deal, because the old bird had taken me under his wing as a fledgling warden.

She stared down at the dead moose. It was drawing a swarm of large and loud blowflies. “What kind of sick bastards would do something like this?”

“I guess it’s our job to figure that out,” I said. The sun shone off her hair, showing dimensions of subtle color: every strand a different shade of brown. “You were a little rough on Ms. Morse before.”

“She doesn’t strike me as the delicate type.”

“I think all this bothers her a lot more than she lets on.”

“She has a soft spot for animals-just not the two-legged variety.” Her voice, which was always a little throaty, as if she’d screamed herself hoarse, began to rasp even more. “Her whole scheme for creating a national park is just incredibly condescending. A lot of people around here are really scared about their futures. It’s one thing for her to have this … vision. It’s another for her to toy around with real people’s lives.”

Why did it surprise me to hear Stacey take this position? She was engaged to Matt Skillen, whose family owned Skillens’ Lumber.

And yet I’d also heard Stacey talk in awe over her parents’ dinner table about visiting Yellowstone National Park for the first time. At that same meal, I’d listened to her rant about the oil company that had destroyed an entire ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico. So whose politics was I hearing now? Stacey’s, or those of the man she happened to have fallen in love with instead of me?

“I thought you were an environmentalist,” I said.

She took a step forward, as if intending to shove me in the chest. “The woman is an opportunist and a hypocrite, Mike. She made her millions selling herbal supplements-snake oil, basically-but she presents herself as this righteous do-gooder. She says she wants to create this giant ecopreserve, and yet she builds a megamansion right on the edge of it? On top of that, she’s given millions to animal rights groups that hate everything you stand for. Or have you forgotten that she’s banned hunting and fishing on her entire property?”

“None of that excuses death threats,” I said. “None of it excuses what someone did to these animals.”

“I can hate what happened to this moose and still wish Elizabeth Morse would go somewhere else to play Earth Mother. Those ideas aren’t mutually incompatible, you know. And how dare you accuse me of justifying the slaughter of six innocent animals?”

“I wasn’t accusing you of anything, Stacey.”

“Screw you.”

Inevitably, McQuarrie chose this moment to return. He came striding back through the wilted goldenrod, straightening his belt beneath his solid stomach. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” said Stacey as she walked off into the woods.