The Poacher's Son

9

The State of Maine is the largest in New England, roughly as big as all the others combined. From Portland, on the coast, you can drive to New York City in five hours, but it takes more than six to reach the town of Madawaska, where Aroostook County juts up into Canada. These distances can make it hard for newcomers to get their bearings-everything seems farther away than it should be. As a result, most people never travel beyond the lower third of the state. They cling to the coast, with its lighthouses and beaches and picture-postcard fishing harbors. Relatively few travelers venture into the state’s northwestern mountains, but that was where Lieutenant Malcomb and I were now headed.

It was a familiar road. As a child I had once lived along Route 144 before my mother stole me away to southern Maine. The two-lane forest road forks off the busier Carrabassett highway and curves roughly northwest, through the backwoods townships of Dead River Plantation and Flagstaff, before reconnecting with the highway again near the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. It is the gateway to one of western Maine’s last remote regions, a wedge-shaped section of forested mountains and moose bogs between the Kennebec River and eastern Quebec. Deep in the heart of that wild land, accessible only by logging road or floatplane, is Rum Pond.

We weren’t going that far, thankfully. The search zone, according to Lieutenant Malcomb, was concentrated between the highway and the Dead River, a circle twenty miles in diameter. Even so, it was a forsaken stretch of woods. There were some newer split-level homes and spiffed-up old farmhouses back near the Carrabassett River, but as we traveled north, farmhouses gave way to mobile homes, which in turn gave way to cabins with yards full of junk cars and barking dogs chained to posts. The sight of these shacks filled me with a sort of gut-sick nostalgia. I’d spent the first part of my life holed up in identical white trash mansions-just my mother and father and me. It was a childhood straight out of the Brothers Grimm, and I hated anything that reminded me of it. Which was just about everything at the moment.

This was my father’s country. He used to brag that you could drop him, blindfolded, anywhere in the woods between Rangeley and Jackman and in five minutes he’d deduce his location. It wasn’t an idle boast. He’d hiked hundreds of miles through these mountains with a rifle slung over his shoulder, needing no compass to guide him home. Maybe a man couldn’t actually disappear here anymore, not in this age of heat-sensing helicopters and GPS trackers. There were too many roads, too many people. But if anyone could vanish into these North Woods, it was my dad. I wondered if the searchers knew what they were chasing.

We ran into the first roadblock in a barely settled area of industrial timber south of the Dead River and east of the Bigelow Mountains. Two state police cruisers had angled themselves across both lanes, blocking traffic. There were a handful of cars and campers and pickup trucks pulled off to the side of the road, waiting to be let through the outer perimeter.

A state trooper approached Malcomb’s window. “The command post is set up at the Otter Brook hatchery,” he told us.

“Who’s the OIC?” asked Lieutenant Malcomb.

“The sheriff, sir. But Major Carter is en route.” In other words, the sheriff was temporarily the officer in charge until the state police tactical team arrived.

“Are the K-9 units here?”

“Not yet, sir.”

Which meant the grid search, as such, hadn’t begun. I checked my watch. By my crude reckoning, my father had already been on the run for close to two hours.

There was another roadblock set up at the ditch where Deputy Twombley had careened off the road. Half a dozen police officers, most in body armor and carrying semiautomatic weapons or shotguns, were clustered around their vehicles, waiting for something to happen. I’d never participated in a hunt for an armed fugitive, but I’d taken part in grid searches for an Alzheimer’s patient, missing hunters, and a couple of lost children. Hurry-up-and-wait was the way these operations usually worked.

Yellow police tape marked the spot where the cruiser had crashed off the road. The car had plunged twenty or so feet down, ripping off alder branches and evergreen boughs before landing sideways in a couple of feet of marshy muck. This was the manhunt’s inner perimeter, the zone where searchers would concentrate their efforts and expand out.

I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Earlier this morning, Pete Twombley drove out alone to Rum Pond on his own authority, but to do what? Accuse my dad of murder? Twombley should have called for backup after things turned ugly, but instead he’d proceeded with my father toward the jail in Skowhegan. From Rum Pond, traveling along logging roads, it would have taken them at least an hour to reach this spot, at which point the cruiser went off the road. And Twombley was incapacitated long enough for my dad to take his weapons. Or so the deputy claimed.

My father had been arrested before; he knew when a bogus charge wouldn’t stick. Did he think he was being set up? Again I came back to the question: If he was innocent, why had he fled?

As the nearest government building with working phone lines, the Otter Brook Fish Hatchery was the logical site for a command post. It occupied a cluster of white clapboard buildings arranged around a long row of roofed spillways and tanks. The compound stank like a chicken farm from the meal pellets they fed the trout.

In front of the old office loomed the State Police Mobile Crime Unit, an enormous white-and-blue motor coach nearly the size of the building itself. An ambulance, state police cruisers, patrol cars from Somerset and Franklin counties, warden trucks, and unmarked Dodge Chargers were gathered in the gravel lot.

We went inside. There must have been twenty uniformed officers crowded into that dimly lit space. But the one I zeroed in on was Sheriff Hatch. He was leaning over a topo map spread out across a table, the center of attention. The room smelled of too-warm bodies and coffee brewing.

Dim as it was, I kept my shades on, not wanting to make eye contact.

The sheriff glanced up at me and scowled. “What’s he doing here?”

“You want to step outside for a minute, Bowditch,” said the lieutenant.

“No problem.”

Why was I so surprised by their reactions? As a family member of a suspected cop killer, I should by all rights have been barred from the scene-would have been barred if not for the lieutenant. Uniform or not, I was the son of the fugitive they were all hunting. My loyalties were necessarily suspect.

I drifted over to the nearest spillway. A slanting roof covered the sluice. Beneath the rippling surface of the water the blurred shapes of rainbow trout flashed like silver coins at the bottom of a fountain. I closed my eyes and imagined myself on the Kennebago River casting an emerger over a quiet stream, caddis flies rising around me, the sun hot on my neck.

“Mike Bowditch?”

I turned around. It was a man I’d never seen before. He was a muscular guy-a weekend weight lifter, by the looks of him-maybe forty years old, with a graying crew cut and close-set brown eyes. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a navy tie still tightly knotted despite the heat of the day. There was a holster and a badge clipped to his belt.

He held out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Wayne Soctomah.”

“You’re investigating the homicides.”

“Detective Menario and I are. The sheriff told me you spoke with your father last night.”

“Not exactly. He left a message on my answering machine.”

“You mind if I ask you a few questions about it?”

“No.”

I expected him to pull out a tape recorder, just like the sheriff did, but he didn’t even take notes. He asked exactly what I’d heard on my answering machine, and I told him, word for word.

“Do you have any idea who the woman was with him?”

“A girlfriend, I’d imagine. My dad is something of a ladies’ man.” I nearly said lady-killer.

“No one in particular?”

“Not that I know about. But we haven’t spoken in years.”

“Do you remember him ever mentioning Wendigo Timber?”

“No. The last time I saw him, this was still APP land.” I decided to see how far I could push my luck. “Look, I know your investigation is ongoing, but can you tell me anything about what happened up here last night? I read in the paper about the meeting at the Dead River Inn. Do you think it was connected to the homicides?”

He grinned, amused at my brashness. “In other words, what do we know about how and why those two men were killed?” He considered this for a moment. “I’m not going to say anything to compromise the investigation, but I can tell you that Jonathan Shipman and Deputy Brodeur were gunned down last night about five minutes after they left the Dead River Inn. They were trying to slip away from the crowd by driving down a logging road instead of going out the front way, and it appears that someone was waiting for them and opened fire on the deputy’s cruiser. I won’t say there’s a direct connection between the meeting and the homicides.”

“But it goes to reason, right? You think someone who was upset about the Wendigo deal snuck out of the meeting to set up an ambush.”

“I really can’t speculate. And I’ve already said too much.”

“I appreciate the courtesy.” Actually, I was surprised by the detective’s willingness to say anything at all, considering what was happening with my father. Maybe he was the straight shooter Kathy said he was.

Soctomah smiled again. “I’d be asking the same questions if I were in your place. You want to help your father, so you need to know exactly what’s going on.”

I started to say, yes, but caught myself. Was he suggesting that I’d cover up for my dad to protect him? “I just don’t want you guys wasting your time on a dead end,” I said.

“That’s the last thing we want, too. We’re fortunate to have your help in this.” He glanced up at the sky. “Man, it’s like a sauna out here. What say we get out of the sun?” He gestured toward the mobile crime unit parked across the lot.

This guy is pretty slick, I thought.

Sure enough, when we’d settled down inside the motor coach and he’d grabbed us a couple of bottled waters, out came the tape recorder. “You understand about this, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

We went back over the subject of the answering machine message again, this time for the record, and then moved on to my father’s views on corporate ownership of the North Woods, his marksmanship with high-powered rifles, and general proclivities for violence. Midway through the conversation another detective appeared, a spark plug with a snub nose and a do-it-yourself buzz cut, who sat in the back of the vehicle, watching me with a sullen expression. Detective Menario, I presumed.

“How would you describe your relationship with your father?” asked Soctomah.

“What do you mean?”

“Were you close? Distant?”

“I lived with him, on and off, until I was nine years old. But after my parents got divorced, I only saw him occasionally. I spent a couple of months with him at Rum Pond when I was sixteen, working at the camp, washing dishes, that kind of thing, but it didn’t work out.”

“What happened?”

“I was a kid. I had unrealistic expectations.”

“About what?”

“About everything,” I said. “He had his own lifestyle, and I didn’t fit in.”

“Does he have any friends in this general vicinity? Someone he might turn to if he got himself into trouble?”

“I don’t know. The only friends of his I met were Russell Pelletier and a guide named Truman Dellis. That’s a guy you should definitely talk to. He’s violent and alcoholic, and I wouldn’t put it past him to shoot a cop.”

The detective ignored my suggestion. “Anyone else?”

“There was another guy. I’m not sure he was a friend exactly. I saw my dad talking to him at the Dead River Inn. He had a shaved head and a goatee. My dad called him a ‘paranoid militia freak.’ ”

“Would your mother know about your father’s acquaintances?”

The possibility hadn’t occurred to me before. “You’re not going to drag her into this.”

“Where does she live?” asked the agitated detective, Menario.

“Scarborough. She’s remarried. And she has a different name now, Marie Turner.” I gave them her phone number. “She’s going to freak out when you call her.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s got a new life, a new family. She doesn’t like to be associated with my dad anymore. It was a bad time in her life, and she’d rather forget it.”

“She’s an ex-wife.” Soctomah gave a knowing smile. “Mike, I understand how difficult this situation must be for you. You’ve dedicated your life to enforcing the law, and now your father’s a fugitive. But I don’t have to tell you that your dad’s a lot better off if we can find him quickly and get him to surrender. So if there’s anything else you can think of, any other piece of information that might help us, we need to know about it.”

“Only this,” I said. “He didn’t murder those men.”

Soctomah blinked, clearly taken aback. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I know what’s in his nature. He may be a son-of-abitch-I know that better than anybody-but he’s too smart to kill a cop. I don’t expect you to believe that. But the man you’re looking for is some sort of terrorist kook. He killed that V.P. from Wendigo to send a message. My father wouldn’t do that.”

“So if he’s innocent,” asked Menario, “then why’d he run?”

“I don’t know.”

A look came into Soctomah’s eyes that I didn’t recognize at first. Then I realized: He was embarrassed for me. He thought I was deluding myself, and he felt pity.

“I know it looks bad,” I said. “But you’re mistaken about him.”

Soctomah stood up in such a way as to make me stand up, too. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Mike,” he said, escorting me to the door. “We’ll keep you posted.”

“You know where to find me,” I said, putting on my sunglasses to face the daylight again.