Bad Little Falls (16 page)

“No visitors,” he said, barring our way.

“This woman is his sister,” I explained.

“The sheriff doesn’t want him talking to anyone until we get a statement from him.”

“Has he been charged with anything?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t stop her from visiting his bedside.”

“Look, man, I’m just following orders.”

“Is he even conscious yet?” I asked.

“Every once and a while, he starts yammering, but then he passes out again.”

“I need to see him,” Jamie said. “Please.”

“What is it with this guy?” he said. “How many times do I have to tell people he can’t be disturbed?”

The deputy’s nameplate said
DUNBAR.

“Jamie, can you just wait outside for a second?” I said.

She removed her ski jacket and folded it over her arm. Dunbar watched her hips jiggle as she paced across the room, past the nurse’s desk at the center, hugging herself tightly.

“Why don’t you let her look in on her brother for a few minutes?” I said to Dunbar. “If the guy’s asleep, there’s no harm in her holding his hand.”

He gnawed on the edge of his mustache. “Is she your girlfriend or something?”

“I just gave her a ride to the hospital.”

His eyes followed her ass closely. “She’s the one banging Randall Cates?”

In the interest of helping Jamie see her brother, I resisted the urge to smack him across the chops. “Not anymore.”

He rolled the magazine into a tight tube and thwacked it like a nightstick against his open palm a few times. “I need to be in the room.”

I motioned to Jamie.

Prester Sewall lay prone on the wheeled bed. Some time over the past hours, the doctor had wrapped white bandages around his face, so that only his closed eyes showed now. He looked small with the sheet pulled up to his narrow chest and his skinny arms extended at his sides. We could hear his labored breathing through the strips of gauze.

“Prester?” Jamie whispered, taking his hand.

His eyes snapped open, bloodred and filled with terror. “Jamie?”

“Oh shit, he’s awake,” said Dunbar.

“I’m so happy to see you,” she said, but her voice cracked.

“What have they done to me, Jamie?”

His sister started to sob and shudder. Reflexively I set my hand on her shoulder.

“You’re OK,” she said. “Prester, you’re OK.”

“I’m not OK! They’re going to cut off my fingers!”

“Prester…” Her folded coat slid off her arm onto the floor.

“They’re going to cut off my nose!”

“Prester…”

He tried to sit up but didn’t have the strength and dropped his head against the pillow. “They won’t show me my face. I keep asking for a mirror, but they won’t bring me one.” He waved his bandaged arms. “What do I look like, Jamie? I look like a freak, don’t I?”

She put a hand to her mouth to hide her sobs. “Maybe they can do plastic surgery. Doctors in France gave a woman a new face.”

“I don’t want a new face! I want my normal face. I’m never going to have sex again in my life!”

“The doctors can repair your face.” She looked at me with pleading eyes. “Can’t they, Mike?”

“Doctors can do some amazing things,” I replied, fully aware of the lameness of this as a response.

“Who’s he? What’s he doing here?” His crimson gaze turned on the deputy standing behind me. “Why are the cops here, Jamie?”

“This is my friend Mike. He’s the warden who found you. He said you and Randall got lost in the snow.”

Again the injured man tried sitting up, and again he flopped back against the pillow as if attached to it by a string. “Where’s Randall? Is he here in the hospital? Is his chest OK?”

“We’d better cut this off,” the deputy whispered in my ear.

Jamie dropped down to one knee and clutched at her brother’s freckled arm. “Randall’s dead, Prester.”

“Jamie,” I cautioned.

“He’s dead?”

“The cops won’t tell me what happened,” she said.

“OK, that’s enough.” Dunbar tapped his rolled magazine against his open hand. The gesture was meant to be intimidating but came across as comic—as if he was really going to club anyone into submission with an old issue of
American Snowmobiler.

Prester’s voice rose to the level of a wail. “Randall’s dead?”

If Sewall really did kill his friend, I thought, he’s a terrific actor.

“Give me a fucking break,” Dunbar muttered.

Prester was breathing heavily through his bandages. His bloody eyes were locked on mine. “What happened to him? Did he freeze to death?”

The deputy had forgotten his own orders to prevent the injured man from having any conversations. “You know exactly what happened.”

“Leave him alone,” said Jamie. “My brother’s an injured person.”

“Your brother’s a murder suspect.”

“Dunbar,” I said, my voice heavy with warning.

Prester Sewall had begun to flail his arms and kick his legs. “The cops think I killed Randall?”

“Hey! Hey!” a woman said, stepping into the fray. She wore an unbuttoned sweater over surgical scrubs. She was as lean as a marathon runner and had short sandy hair and a voice like an army bugle. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said.

“I’m not a doctor. I’m the charge nurse.”

“This is Mr. Sewall’s sister,” I explained.

“I don’t care who she is. This man is in serious condition. He’s recovering from hypothermia, and he’s detoxing off alcohol and opiates. Are you officers trying to give him a heart attack?”

“Everything is under control,” Dunbar said.

“The hell it is.” She thrust her finger in the direction of the nearest door. “I want you out of here right now.”

Prester seemed to be hyperventilating. “The cops think I killed Randall, Jamie.”

“No, they don’t,” she said. “It’s got to be some kind of mistake. Isn’t it, Mike?”

My silence must not have reassured her because a look came into her widening eyes, as if she’d just guessed the answer to a riddle.

“You all need to leave this instant,” said the nurse.

“You heard the nurse,” said Dunbar in his “Move along” voice.

“Including you, Deputy,” said the nurse.

“I want to wake up now,” Prester sobbed. “I’m having a nightmare!”

Jamie grabbed her coat from the floor and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll bring Tammi and Lucas.”

“I want to wake up,” wailed the injured man.

“If you don’t all leave this instant, I’m calling the sheriff,” said the nurse.

“We’re leaving,” I said.

The nurse yanked the drapes shut across the glass windows; it was like a curtain closing at the end of a play.

“You need to calm down, Mr. Sewall,” I heard her say. “Take deep breaths.”

*   *   *

Jamie stormed down the hall to the admittance desk as if she’d forgotten I was in her company.

I glared one last time at Deputy Dunbar, who looked like a kid who’d just broken a window with a baseball, and followed her out into the stark light of the parking lot.

By the time I caught up with her, she’d beeped open the van and was rummaging around the passenger side for something.

“Jamie?”

She spun around with an ice scraper in her hand and went to work on the layer of frost that had built up across the windshield. Her motions were quick, compact, and violent.

“So when were you planning to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

She stopped scraping but kept her back to me. “The cops think my brother killed Randall.”

“I’m not part of the investigation,” I explained.

Jamie turned around. In the cold light of the parking lot, I became aware of the bones beneath her skin. I could easily imagine the shape of her skull. “What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know what theories the state police are pursuing.”

“Prester wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said.

“Not even if he was provoked?”

The question seemed to catch her off balance, because she took her time answering. “My brother loved Randall. Don’t ask me why.”

“And you have no idea what they were doing in the Heath?”

“You asked me that before.”

“Look, I know this has been a horrible shock.” I dug my bare hands into my parka pockets. “But if you want to help your brother, you need to tell me what you know.”

“You just said you weren’t part of the investigation.”

“I’m not, but maybe I can help you.”

She let out a sharp laugh. “Because you care so much for my well-being.”

“I know we just met,” I said. “But I understand what you’re going through.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

It was a good question. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, and I’ll try to explain.”

“I thought you were different,” she said.

“I am different.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just a guy with a stiff dick like all the rest.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but really, what was there to say?

17

After Jamie screamed off into the night, I decided to grab a late, lonely dinner and reflect on the absurdity of my day.

I made a circuit of the mom-and-pop restaurants that constituted the Machias dining scene and found that all of them had ceased serving for the night. Eventually I put aside my scruples and returned to the McDonald’s on Route 1.

I paused in front of Jamie’s portrait on the wall and felt my pulse speed up. Her golden brown eyes looked so clear in the photograph, and her smile seemed so genuine, as if being named Employee of the Month were truly an honor. And maybe it was an honor after all she’d been through: a busted marriage, the death of her parents, caring for a brain-damaged sister, an alcoholic brother, and a weird little boy. I remembered her sobriety chip and her breakdown in my truck, when she’d blamed her past behavior for the calamities that had befallen Prester.

She’d accused me of being no different from all the leering men she met at the restaurant, as if somehow my desire to save her was just a deluded manifestation of lust. Looking at her portrait again, feeling the effect her smile had on my heart and groin, I found I couldn’t totally deny the accusation.

My dinner consisted of a rubbery Big Mac, served with some wilted lettuce, too much special sauce, and a side order of oversalted fries. To compensate for the empty calories, I ordered a Diet Coke, as if that would make any difference. I settled down in a corner booth and watched a party of intoxicated young people nervously watching me. A hulking kid with his back to me was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan
YOU AIN’T HAVING FUN TILL THEY DIAL 9-1-1.

Was that Barney Beal? I contemplated going over to speak with him. But then one of the giggling girls leaned over to kiss him, and I saw that it was just another pimple-faced lunk.

Poor Prester. I wasn’t sure how often he’d been getting laid before—he looked handsome enough on his driver’s license—but having a nose was usually the minimum requirement to lure a woman into bed. I needed to remind myself what the sheriff had told me: As pathetic as he now seemed, he and Randall Cates had been dealers in deadly narcotics. At least one person, a young woman, had died from ingesting the poison they’d peddled. Wasn’t there poetic justice in the idea of a man who’d traded in snortable drugs losing his nose? The sheriff, I was certain, would say yes.

My brief encounter with Roberta Rhine led me to believe that Dunbar might be headed for an extended stay in the doghouse if the sheriff got wind of what had happened at the hospital. For the first time, I began to wonder how my own sergeant would react when he learned I’d showed up in the med-surg unit with the sister of a murder suspect. And here I’d been so pleased with my professional development as a law-enforcement officer. My old reckless self was still lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out and say “Boo!” as soon as I turned my head.

When we’d first arrived, Dunbar had made a cryptic remark, but in the ensuing chaos I’d forgotten to pursue the matter with him: “What is it with this guy? How many times do I have to tell people he can’t be disturbed?” The comment suggested that someone else had shown up, asking after Prester.

What the hell had happened out in the Heath? It seemed impossible for someone so distraught, so emotionally naked, to lie about his innocence with such skill. Unless he’d killed his friend in some sort of irrational state brought on by severe hypothermia and could no longer remember his actions, it meant that someone else had suffocated Cates.

When I was busing my plastic tray, I realized that the drunken teenagers had slipped out without my seeing them. What are the odds, I wondered, of my being summoned in a few short hours to scrape their dead bodies off the road?

Instead, I received a call from Detective Zanadakis. I glanced at the automated clock on the BlackBerry screen. It was 10:30. I was half an hour late for my interview.

“Is there a problem?”

I apologized and told him I was on my way.

*   *   *

The Washington County Sheriff’s Department occupied one wing of a sprawling brick building in a neighborhood of handsome houses and venerable maples in downtown Machias. On one side was the county courthouse; on the other was the jail. Yard-long icicles hung from the eaves above the concrete front steps. I eyed them cautiously, thinking about swords hanging over unwitting heads and other metaphors of impending doom.

Whenever I entered the sheriff’s office, I had the sensation of having blundered into the sitting room of someone’s run-down, albeit historic home. On my first tour of the building, a deputy had told me that in bygone days the sheriff used to live in these very suites and that his wife would cook for the prisoners. The current sheriff lived with her female partner in a fancy house on the water in Machiasport, and the guy who cooked for the prisoners was a taciturn fellow who went by the nickname “Chef” and tended to reduce all solid food to mush because he himself was missing most of his teeth.

Rhine and Zanadakis were waiting for me in a parlor with a bricked-up fireplace and tall windows that dated from Edith Wharton’s girlhood. On either side of the mantel stood flags in stands, the Stars and Stripes to the left and the Maine state flag to the right. The sheriff’s Nike gym bag was wedged into the bookcase, below a shelfful of heavy legal tomes. A white-muzzled golden retriever sprawled on the hooked rug. The dog snored soundly, drawing deep and even breaths. It reminded me of Doc’s old mutt, Duchess.