Massacre Pond

7

My pickup looked like it had been beaten with dirty chalk erasers. Mack told me to pull it into the shade of a pine tree so I could debrief him without the two of us roasting like a pair of rotisserie chickens.

I spread the topographic map across the steering wheel and drew a line to show the meandering route Billy and I had followed through the timber to get from one kill site to the next. My sergeant took careful notes as I offered my theory on how the serial killers had used a spotlight to blind the animals before blowing their brains out.

“Except for the last moose, there was just a single shell casing for each of the carcasses, so these guys were pretty good shots,” I said. “They might have prior poaching convictions. And their choice of calibers seems unusual. Did you ever bust any night hunters around here who used a twenty-two Mag or a twenty-two long?”

“I’ve pinched guys using every armament known to man, from peashooters to tommy guns,” McQuarrie rasped. Even with the windows rolled down, I could smell the chewing tobacco stuck in his teeth and the vinegary odor leaking from his armpits. “Sure, I’ve seen a few twenty-twos in my time, but I don’t got a suspect’s name in my back pocket, if that’s what you’re asking. I can tell you one thing for sure, though. In a few years, every poacher we pinch is gonna be carrying one of those military-type AR-15s. Every night-hunting detail is gonna be like going on patrol during the Tet Offensive.”

I watched through the dirty windshield as a crowd of wardens gathered in the sunstruck meadow. Another patrol truck drove up and stopped beside the dozen others that had already assembled. I recognized my friend, Warden Specialist Cody Devoe, who traveled everywhere with his German shepherd, Tomahawk. The lieutenant was bringing in the entire division, I realized. In a matter of hours, the field would look like a McDonald’s parking lot. Rivard had somehow even managed to persuade Morse and her entourage to return to her house. I saw him shouting and waving, trying to get his men assembled.

On the dash of the truck, McQuarrie had spread out the bags containing the shell casings and cigarette butts I’d collected. “If we’re lucky, the lab is gonna find some DNA on these smokes,” he said. “AR-15s and DNA tests-the miracles of modern science. It’s a brave new world for dinosaurs like me. Except Tyrannosaurus rex never knew he was going extinct.”

To a man like Mack McQuarrie, who had always lived for his work and could never imagine an identity for himself that didn’t include wearing a badge and a sidearm, retiring was just the last stop on the road to the cemetery.

“Did you and Stacey find anything at the Butcher Brothers?” I asked, hoping to change the subject and his mood at the same time.

“Nothing we could nail them on. They had tags for all the meat, and everything matched with the registration book. But those two are shifty all right. And the place was a fucking sty. There were moose legs sticking up out of this fifty-five-gallon drum next to the bay door.”

“What was Stacey’s take on them?”

He gave me a cockeyed grin. “You’re sweet on her. Don’t tell me you’re not. The girl’s a looker, I gotta admit. Smart, too. She charmed old Clay into letting her take a few evidence samples from his taxidermy collection. After his boner went away, it probably dawned on him that they’re headed for the forensic lab. You never know what the DNA’s gonna show now. Maybe there’s a match with a slab of moose steak we pulled out of some night hunter’s freezer. I guess we should be grateful for those DNA tests. It’ll probably be what cracks this case, too.”

So much for changing the subject, I thought.

“I know Rivard is big on forensics,” I said, “but my gut tells me there’s only a handful of guys around here who fit the profile. A couple of borderline psychos with excellent marksmanship skills and a beef with Elizabeth Morse? If we ask around enough, we’re bound to get some good leads. It just seems like old-fashioned police work.”

“Old-fashioned police work!” said McQuarrie. “Who are you-Joe Friday? Tracking down the perps is one thing, kid, but you’ve still got to make a case that stands up in front of a judge and jury.”

“Anyone who slaughters six moose on Elizabeth Morse’s land is going to crow about it, Mack.”

“You willing to bet your career on that?”

I had been on the job only a few years, but I had already learned to stop making absolute predictions about human behavior, especially my own.

“I didn’t think so,” said McQuarrie.

My phone chimed on my belt, indicating I had another e-mail. It was my mother again:

“Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”

— Benjamin Franklin

McQuarrie, studied my expression. “Something wrong?”

I clicked the delete button and tucked the phone away. “Just my mom.”

“It used to be you could never get a signal out here in the boondocks,” Mack said. “Then Queen Elizabeth builds her palace by the lake, and suddenly there’s a new cell tower in Grand Lake Stream. That dame has got some serious pull.”

“Do you think she has a chance of actually creating a new national park here?” I asked. “Every politician in Maine has come out against the idea because it will cost wood-products jobs. They won’t even approve a feasibility study. The whole thing seems like a pipe dream.”

“You want my honest-to-God opinion?” McQuarrie removed his hat and ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Right now, the politicians don’t want to lose the blue-collar vote-the loggers, the papermakers, the guys like you and me who hunt and fish. But we’re an endangered species in this state. Most people down south, in the cities and suburbs, they like the idea of a park. Eventually, the city mice are going to outnumber the country mice. And when that happens, you watch how fast those same politicians flip their positions. Morse knows that time is on her side.”

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re a cynic, Mack?”

“That just means I’m old.” He adjusted his black baseball cap atop his head. “Speaking of politicians, it looks like the L.T. is getting ready to address the masses out there. Come on, Mikey. Let’s go hear what he’s got to say. The man dearly loves to give a speech.”

We walked through the desiccated field, kicking grasshoppers ahead of us with every step. Here it was, the end of October, and we still had seventy-degree temperatures and a plague of locusts. McQuarrie’s talk of end times and extinction must have gotten under my skin.

The lieutenant stood before a semicircle of a dozen or so wardens with his right hand raised in the manner of a politician standing at a podium.

I had first observed Rivard’s dramatic tendencies when he was my sergeant. I’d watched him put on a menacing performance to intimidate a high schooler be believed was robbing cabins for drug money. I’d seen him fall flat on his face. But now he was running his own division, with twenty-six men under his command, and had the stage to himself whenever he wanted it. “Not bad for a poor French kid from Lewiston,” he liked to say in a Francophone lilt.

“I just got off the phone with the colonel, informing him of the facts on the ground here. He said he believes this is the worst wildlife crime in Maine history. Think about that for a minute.” He paused to give us an opportunity for quiet contemplation. “The Warden Service has been around since 1881, and this is the worst wildlife crime on record. Six animals shot and left to rot.”

“At least six,” I muttered.

To my surprise, the lieutenant heard me. “What’s that, Bowditch?”

“We found only six animals this morning,” I said. “There may be others out there we haven’t found yet.”

“That’s a good point.” His accent tended to make his th’s sound like d’s and brought a singsong melody to many of his sentences. “We need to do a canvass of this entire township. For ease of evidence tracking and communication, we’re going to assign letters to each of the carcasses.” He pointed across the field. “This animal is moose A, the next three are B, C, and D, and so on. We’ll be creating a map that shows the kill sites. The initial focus will be on collecting evidence. If you see so much as a candy wrapper, I want it logged and bagged.”

I glanced around, looking for Stacey, but she had disappeared into the woods. I had been such an idiot to provoke her-and to what end? I felt like a hormone-addled teenager who had acted out in order to be noticed by the head cheerleader.

“I don’t want the fuckers who shot these critters getting off on a technicality because one irresponsible warden”-Rivard focused his polarized gaze at me-“decided some detail wasn’t important. This investigation needs to be done by the numbers! We’ve got a metal detector to sweep each of these sites for lead. Sergeant Polson will be in charge of photographing and videotaping the carcasses. You’d better call your wives and tell them you’ll be late for dinner, because we won’t be leaving these woods until it’s too dark to see.”

“What about the other investigations we’re pursuing?” asked Cody Devoe. He was a big-boned guy with a perpetual blue stubble on his chin that no razor seemed able to erase.

“This case takes top priority. I expect these killings to receive intense media attention. That is why I am assuming personal command of this case, so everyone understands the seriousness of this matter.” Rivard gestured toward a whip-thin warden leaning against the door of an unmarked pickup. “I will be assisted by Warden Investigator Bilodeau.”

Bilodeau had closely set eyes, a pointed nose, and a thin-lipped mouth, which I had never once seen in the shape of a smile. He wore his sandy hair cut straight across his forehead. He had a toothpick pressed between his lips.

I didn’t know the man well, but I coveted his job. Investigators in the Maine Warden Service were the closest things we had to detectives. They worked undercover, often for months at a time, to break up poaching rings; investigated boating accidents where the evidence didn’t quite match up with the testimony of the survivors; pursued all hunting homicides, of which there were still too many, even after the introduction of strict blaze orange and target-identification laws; and otherwise stuck their noses into every suspicious-smelling case that drifted our way. Being a warden investigator was my dream job, but I had zero shot at ever getting it while bureaucrats like Rivard were in a position to deny me promotions.

The lieutenant went on: “All of us are familiar with Elizabeth Morse and her idea for a national park.”

Behind me, someone coughed the word bullshit into his fist. McQuarrie scowled, but I heard a few chuckles from the peanut gallery.

“I do not want personal politics interfering with this investigation!” said Rivard, thrusting his jaw forward. “Whatever you think of Elizabeth Morse and her scheme, you need to leave those opinions at home. I will serve as the liaison between her estate and this investigation. I have already convinced her to grant us complete access to her employees. We will run a textbook forensic investigation that will result in swift arrests and an ironclad case for the DA to bring to court. That is the pledge I made to Ms. Morse.”

There was no way in hell that Rivard had ever considered delegating the liaison job to another warden. This case was a career maker for the lieutenant, his next step on the road to colonel. You could hear his excitement in the raised pitch of his voice.

It hadn’t dawned on me until now what an ungodly spectacle was going to take place in these woods once the media got hold of the story. Elizabeth Morse was already front-page news across Maine, and that was before some psychos started murdering moose outside her mansion. Rivard had probably already called the television stations in Bangor, encouraging them to send out news vans with satellite antennas to broadcast from the scene. The only thing I cared about was busting the men who’d shot these animals, no matter who got the credit. Nothing Rivard was saying gave me confidence that we shared the same priorities.

The lieutenant took a deep breath, as if considering the best way to conclude his stem-winder. “You might not know this,” he said. “But in China, they use the same word for crisis as they do for opportunity. I believe we have an opportunity here to make history as conservation officers. Someday, I expect this investigation will be taught to every recruit at the Advanced Warden Academy. So I am not exaggerating when I say this will be a textbook case.” Suddenly, his face broke into a grin that made his mustache wriggle. “OK. That’s enough hot air from me. The day is already hot enough, and we have lots of work to do. Bilodeau and I will be meeting with the sergeants now, and they will be responsible for assigning specific duties to each of you. Understood?”

I raised my hand. “Can I ask a question?”

This time, Rivard chose to ignore me. “Make me proud, Wardens,” he said.

Cody Devoe came over, with his dog trotting close to his knees. “What question were you going to ask?” he whispered.

“I wondered if he knew the Chinese word for clusterfuck.”

8

The actual question I’d wanted to ask Rivard was whether he was bringing in a pilot to scout for additional moose kills. Charley Stevens lived just a few townships away. Despite being officially retired from the Warden Service, he was constantly volunteering his aerial assistance on search-and-rescue missions and other details requiring eyes in the sky. Knowing Stacey’s dad the way I did, I expected the old bird already had his Cessna gassed up and ready to go. All he needed was a formal invitation from the lieutenant.

I understood that Rivard needed to formulate a plan, but the sun was lobbing itself across the sky, and we weren’t any closer to finding the shooters. And where had Stacey disappeared to? I hadn’t seen her drive off with anyone.

Cody Devoe’s dog sniffed my knee. I bent over and scratched the panting K-9 behind her velveteen ears. “How are you doing, Tomahawk?”

“She doesn’t like the heat,” Devoe said.

“She’s not the only one.”

He waved absently at a yellow jacket that was noisily circling his head. “So everyone is saying you were the first one on the scene here.”

“Me and Billy Cronk.”

“I saw Billy on the way in. I didn’t know he was working for Queen Elizabeth. That’s an odd couple to be sure.”

I straightened up and brushed the dog fur from my hands onto my pants legs. “You shouldn’t call her that, Cody.”

“Why not?”

“It seems disrespectful.”

Devoe shrugged, ceding the point. My friend had the blocky shoulders and heavy brow of a caveman, but he was no Neanderthal. Anyone else might have needled me for defending Elizabeth Morse, but not Cody. “How do you think the shooters got in here anyway?” he said. “There are gates on every access road coming in.”

“Billy says he supervised the construction crew who built the gates, and he thinks they might have missed an old tote road or two.”

“No way,” said Cody. “I used to hunt these woods hard for partridge and woodcock. They didn’t miss any roads, so I don’t know what Billy’s talking about.”

I chewed over this nugget of information, unsure whether to swallow it. McQuarrie had stationed Billy at the Sixth Machias gate to let in whatever law-enforcement vehicles arrived on the property. For a moment, I considered hopping in my truck to go press my friend on this point, but I reconsidered when I saw my sergeant coming toward us across the field. Mack’s face was as red as a canned tomato, and his uniform was splotched with perspiration.

He whistled with his fingers. “OK, Wardens, time to get to work!”

In his job, McQuarrie supervised six men, only five of whom happened to be present. He gathered us together like a coach assembling his basketball squad before a game. “Here’s how it’s going to go,” he said. “Bayley and Sullivan, you get moose A. The lieutenant wants you to retrieve whatever lead or bullet fragments you can from the carcass. The site’s been pretty trampled, but do a sweep again to see if you can pull anything out of the weeds. Use Polson’s metal detector. Devoe, I want you to take your K-9 and see if you can backtrack the moose to the point where he was shot. That’s assuming Stacey is right about it not being killed here.” He turned his head. “Where is our pretty little biologist?”

“She disappeared,” I said.

“What do you mean she disappeared?”

“She wandered off while the rest of us were listening to the lieutenant’s rousing speech.”

“Hopefully, we won’t need to send out a search party.” He spat toward the ground and accidentally hit his own boots. “Bard, I want you to drive out to the gate and get a statement from Billy Cronk.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one to do that?” I asked.

“The L.T. wants Bard to do the interrogation, since you and Cronk are so chummy. Tibbetts, your job is to inspect every gate along the Stud Mill Road. See if anybody’s fucked with any of them. We’re looking for signs of forced entry. I’m going to take the lieutenant around to the kill sites using Mike’s map.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for Mike to do that?” asked Cody.

I was relieved that I didn’t need to ask the question myself.

“We’ve got another job for Bowditch.” McQuarrie looked me in the eyes and, without blinking, said, “We want you to check out the gravel pits.”

“What gravel pits?”

“All the local ones. You’re looking for anyplace where these guys might have done some target practice beforehand. Check around for twenty-two shell casings. If we can get a match on the brass these guys used, we might be able to link their guns to the ones used to kill the moose.”

I clenched my molars together to keep from spitting out an expletive.

Again, Cody Devoe did my speaking for me. “Isn’t that kind of a shot in the dark, Mack?”

“This case is going to live or die on whatever circumstantial evidence we gather.”

The other wardens turned their heads in my direction. For reasons that made no sense at all-beyond the fact that Rivard disliked me-I was being deliberately marginalized from my own case. Even more than that, I was being assigned a task so obviously useless that the insult was plain for anyone to see. The lieutenant wanted me to waste my time. His treatment of me was a warning to other wardens who might choose to think for themselves. But instead of telling Mack McQuarrie what he could do with his gravel pits, I turned and walked toward my truck.

“Hey, Bowditch!” said Bard, a classmate of mine from the academy who was widely known to be one of Lieutenant Rivard’s pet poodles. “We’re not done here.”

“Let him go,” I heard McQuarrie say. “It’s OK.”

I noticed the ravens circling high overhead as I drove back toward the gate, small black specks twirling against the deep blue sky. There were two of them again, probably the same two. And I knew they were ravens, because crows do not soar.

Hugin and Munin: Those were the names of Odin’s ravens.

My Viking friend could have told me as much. But as I passed into the shade of the conifers and peered forward at the closed gate, I saw no one standing guard. Billy Cronk had deserted his post. How was I supposed to get off the estate, or anyone else get in?

I stopped the truck and left the engine idling while I inspected the hunk of steel blocking my way. The heavy bar was set on a metal post and pivoted open and shut if you unlocked it and gave it a shove. It probably weighed several hundred pounds and looked like something scavenged from an abandoned military installation. Billy had told me that Morse’s first gate had been an expensive wooden affair, hand-crafted by an artisan in Bar Harbor, with leaping stags and calling loons engraved in the red cedar surface. It was a thing of beauty until some maniac had driven his truck, kamikaze-style, straight through it one night. Billy had spent the next morning collecting the splintered boards to burn in Morse’s lakeside fire pit.

The next gate, she told her caretaker, should be made of iron.

I scanned up and down the pine-needle road but didn’t see Billy’s blue pickup anywhere. Behind me, the serpentine belt screeched like a migraine. I got out my phone and was on the verge of punching in my friend’s number when it occurred to me to give the gate a gentle pull.

It moved.

I put the phone away and pulled with both hands. The gate groaned and swung heavily toward me on its axis. My absent friend had left the damn thing open.

Maybe Morse called him away, I thought. Billy spent his waking hours running fool’s errands for the woman. It didn’t matter that Rivard had asked him to help protect the integrity of the crime scene, not if Betty Morse had called and commanded him to drive into Grand Lake Stream for a case of Chateau Margaux. I couldn’t think of any other reason he would have left the gate unlocked, except that his employer had ordered him to do something, and he knew that wardens would need to drive in and out. He was already terrified of losing his job.

Unless the shooters had torn one down, then they had to have driven in through an open gate. But Billy swore that keeping the gates locked was Elizabeth’s rule number one at Moosehorn Lodge. You had to think that after all the death threats Morse had received, she would have impressed that point sufficiently on all the people in her circle. There was always the possibility that someone had forgotten, I supposed. McQuarrie had assigned Tibbetts to check the other gates along the Stud Mill Road. Maybe he would discover that one of them had been bulldozed to the ground overnight and that was how the shooters had gained entry to the killing ground.

Meanwhile, I had gravel pits to inspect.

There were at least a dozen in my district alone, deep holes excavated out of the forest to provide crushed rock to make logging roads. People had been using them for target practice for generations. The sheer number of spent.22 casings scattered amid all that sand and bottle glass made my head hurt. Did Rivard honestly expect the forensics guys in Augusta to dust all that brass for prints?

I was fighting a strong urge to drive to Charley Stevens’s house outside Grand Lake Stream and ask him take me aloft in his floatplane. We could fly low over Morse’s estate, looking for additional dead moose in the beaver bogs, and I would prove to the lieutenant that I was right about there being additional kill sites.

The only problem was that Rivard wanted me to go rogue. By sending me away from the action and giving me a fruitless task, he was hoping to goad me into disobeying a direct order. Then he would have another complaint against me, another piece of paper to add to my already-fat personnel file. I had never worked for a man I hated before, and the experience was testing me in ways I’d never imagined.

Not long ago, I would have taken his bait, but not this time. For once, I decided, I was going to be a good soldier. I would follow the chain of command even if it drove me crazy. There was one consolation I could cling to in all this, I realized: When Rivard learned that I’d actually carried out his absurd commands, thoroughly and without complaint, it would send his blood pressure through the roof.

I was smiling at the thought when I nearly ran over Stacey Stevens. She was standing in the leafy shadows at the edge of the road with her thumb out. I had to brake hard to keep from clipping her.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw my slack-jawed face through the driver’s window. Her pants were soaked and brown with mud all the way up to her waist. Her shirttail was hanging out, and there was a crescent of perspiration above her breasts.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Trying to catch a ride.”

“Seriously?”

She gave me a sour-lemon expression. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Get out of the truck, and I’ll show you.”

I followed her down the gravel road, trying to keep my eyes trained on her shoulders. Under the heavy boughs of the hemlocks and cedars, the air felt wetter and heavier than out in the open sun. Somewhere, off to the side of the road, I heard the musical sound of water tumbling down cascades in a hidden stream. A white-throated sparrow sang in the distance: a pretty, thin whistle that sounded like Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.

“Here,” Stacey said, pointing at a clump of fallen birch leaves.

It took me a moment to spot the shell casing.

I squatted down and poked at the brass with a twig. It was a.22 Magnum.

“This was where that first moose was shot,” she said. “I followed the blood trail from the meadow on Morse’s land through a beaver flowage and back through that cedar stand.”

“You tracked the blood through a beaver pond?” I asked in amazement.

“Not through the water. The moose stumbled along the edge for a while. And it left some blood on the pondweed out in the middle. You could see it from a certain angle.”

“I’m impressed.”

She shook her head as if I was being ridiculous and then knelt down beside me. I could smell her perspiration, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all.

I smiled at her, but her face was impassive as she rolled up her pant legs above her calf. It was tan and beautifully shaped. I didn’t know why she was showing it to me. Then she reached down into the top of her Bogs boot and extracted something black, red, and wriggling. It was a leech, swollen with blood. She nonchalantly flicked it off into the bushes. “Thought I’d missed one,” she said, rolling the pants back down over the boot.

“I need to call this in,” I said.

“Before you do, I should show you something else.”

She motioned me farther down the road. This time, she didn’t need to point to get my attention. Approximately ten feet from the shell casing, in a dry ditch that the road makers had carved to keep the road from washing out in the springtime, lay a crushed red-and-white piece of aluminum. It was a sixteen-ounce beer can.

“Do you think they’re connected?” Stacey asked. “The cartridge and this can?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the Budweiser tall boy I’d seen on Billy Cronk’s picnic table three weeks earlier.