Bad Little Falls (28 page)

There were no messages from Rhine or Zanadakis, either. They, too, had more pressing subjects on which to focus than Mitch Munro’s snowmobile.

The sky was blue-black, almost indigo, and there was again the feeling of imminent snow in the air. Some early chickadees were whistling in the pines across the right-of-way as I backed out of the drive and headed toward Machias. Rivard had told me to meet him at the little park on the eastern side of Bad Little Falls.

By the time I arrived, a cluster of patrol trucks was already jammed into the tiny lot. A woman in a bathrobe was standing on the doorstep of a clapboard house across the street, smoking a cigarette and watching the show. I spotted Sergeant Rivard, Cody Devoe, and Mack McQuarrie out on the pedestrian bridge that stretches across the waterfall. I made a beeline for my colleagues.

The bridge is normally barred in the wintertime, but Rivard had arranged for the gate to be opened. He was pointing at a deep-looking plunge pool beneath one of the falls. “See that eddy there?” His voice was loud above the roar of the river. “We need to drop a sonar head into that pocket.”

“Probably full of dead trees,” said McQuarrie.

Devoe nodded. “And God knows what else. Dead deer, dead moose.”

They raised their eyes from the water as I stepped onto the icy bridge. “Gentleman,” I said, touching the brim of my cap.

“Good morning, sunshine!” McQuarrie turned his head and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice over the railing. He was barrel-chested, with a shock of white hair you could see from a distance, like the tail of a deer. “How nice of you to join us.”

“I take it Prester didn’t wash up overnight,” I said.

“No such luck,” said Devoe. He had probably shaved an hour ago, but already there was a blue shadow along his caveman’s jaw.

“So what’s the plan?”

“This one is going to be a bitch,” Rivard said. “There’s a chance he got stuck upriver—snagged in a tree or wedged behind a boulder—but the current’s pretty powerful, so I figure no. That would be a good thing. We can’t put divers in above the falls, and we can’t put them into those pools because of the hydraulics and debris. Let’s hope he made it all the way down to the bottom. With any luck, we’ll find him stuck in the mud down there.”

I cast my gaze downriver and breathed in the fetid smell of the tidal flats. Dawn was breaking above the humped eastern shoreline, and I saw gulls bobbing in the dirty foam line of the river, where the freshwater met the salt.

“I just got off the horn with Petey,” said McQuarrie. “He said the airboat’s on the way.”

“That’ll wake up the neighborhood,” said Rivard with a laugh.

I pointed at the woman in her bathrobe across the street. “The neighborhood’s already awake.”

The prop-powered airboats we used were identical to the ones that skim along the Everglades. They made such an ungodly racket, you needed to wear protective headphones in order to have a conversation on board. Hearing loss is an occupational hazard in the Maine Warden Service. Hours of exposure to airplane engines, outboard motors, snowmobile and ATV four-strokes, and the occasional shotgun or pistol blast do a number on the eardrums.

“Let’s go find the dead guy,” Rivard said.

McQuarrie clapped me hard on the shoulders. “Ain’t this the greatest job in the world?”

I followed Mack to his patrol truck. The snow in the park was already dirty and beaten down with boot prints. Beer bottles and cigarette butts littered the banks.

“Thanks for the tip about that snowmobile,” I said. “You were right about Munro being my guy.”

McQuarrie grunted. “Little prick. You wouldn’t believe the crap he gave me. ‘Yes, sir. I always obey the speed limit. No, sir, I never drink or take drugs when I’m riding. Thank you, sir, for giving me this ticket.’ I wanted to slap the smile off his pretty little face.”

“Was he with any buddies?”

“No, but he had a girl on the back of the sled.”

I found myself breathing more quickly. “Did you get her name?”

“If she’d mouthed off, I would have, but she knew enough to keep her mouth shut. She was just some chick with a show-off boyfriend. It’s the ones who chime in who’re the worst.”

“What did she look like?”

“She didn’t take her helmet off. She seemed pissed at him, though, judging from the body language. She was short.” He cupped his hands around imaginary breasts and winked at me. “But big in other ways, if you know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did.

*   *   *

Rivard hurried past on his way to confer with the state police dive team guys who had just arrived. He strode with a sense of purpose, which made him seem taller than usual. The division lieutenant would become the officer in charge, or OIC, once he arrived from Bangor, but at the moment, my sorehead sergeant was glorying in his position of responsibility.

“Hey, Marc. Can I talk with you?”

He glanced at his wristwatch. “Make it fast.”

“Did you get that e-mail I sent? The one with the pictures of the snowmobile?’

He gave me a frown. “I don’t have time for your conspiracy theories right now, Bowditch. I need you upriver to direct the search along the banks.”

“Understood,” I said. “But there’s something else you should hear. I received a threatening e-mail from Brogan last night. I think I should show it to the DA.”

The mention of the district attorney caught his attention. “Threatening, how?”

“He took responsibility for putting the skunk in my trailer. He said he’d been watching me and that I was headed for a bad end. He sent the message from one of those anonymous e-mail addresses, but he signed it ‘George Magoon.’ I know it was Brogan.”

“He did what?”

“He signed it ‘George Magoon.’ That means he was also responsible for nailing that coyote pelt to my door. The note establishes a pattern. I think there might be enough for a stalking or criminal-threatening charge.”

Rivard rubbed his face with his gloved hand. “Jesus Christ. Why can’t you just give it a rest?”

“Give what a rest?”

“
I’m
George Magoon, not Brogan.”

“What?”

“I found that coyote skin in an abandoned trapper’s cabin and nailed it to your door as a joke. You’re so paranoid. I knew it would drive you crazy trying to figure out who put it there.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You were so gung ho to bust Billy Cronk. I wanted to teach you a lesson about how wardens are viewed Down East before some poacher shot you in the head.”

“What about the skunk?” I asked, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Brogan, probably. The fucking idiot. I keep meaning to knock some sense into him. But right now, we’ve got something more important to do.”

Charley had cautioned me against connecting the two pranks; he’d observed that with the skunk, there had been no note left with Magoon’s signature. But if Rivard had been behind the coyote skin, and Brogan had let the skunk loose, then who had sent the threatening e-mail?

“You’re an asshole, Rivard.”

“And you’re an arrogant fuckup who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the Warden Service. So, do you want to stand here and trade insults all day, or do you want to help us find Prester Sewall before he floats off to Nova Scotia?”

“Warden Bowditch!”

Roberta Rhine slammed the door of her Crown Victoria and started up the steep road in our direction. She wore a black Gore-Tex parka and black chinos tucked into rubber-bottomed boots. She had arranged her long braid so that it protruded through the hole in the back of her sheriff’s baseball cap. Her lips were thin, red, and unsmiling.

“Sheriff Rhine,” Rivard said.

“Am I interrupting something?” she asked.

My sergeant dropped his voice a couple of octaves. “I was just telling Warden Bowditch that we have a search and recovery operation to begin.”

“Indeed you do.” She smiled at me without any warmth. Her lipstick had left a crimson smear on one of her front teeth. “But first I need to speak with Warden Bowditch. I got the e-mail he sent me last night. I’m not sure what you hoped to accomplish by sending it.”

“I assumed Lieutenant Zanadakis might want to interview Mitch Munro about his whereabouts at the time of Randall Cates’s death.”

“That’s very conscientious of you. It’s not often that a warden offers his assistance to a homicide investigator in such a determined fashion. Your efforts to absolve Prester Sewall of responsibility are quite heroic. You’d think it was because you had a personal interest in this case. Did you ever see your girlfriend last night, by the way?”

“No, ma’am.”

“So you didn’t confer with her about the new ‘evidence’ you unearthed at the home of her ex-husband?”

I couldn’t guess what garden path Rhine was trying to lead me along; there was clearly some ulterior motive behind this line of questioning. “I haven’t talked with Jamie Sewall since you and I left her house last night.”

“And you don’t know how she spent the rest of the evening?”

“Come off it, Sheriff.” I said. “What’s going on? Did something happened to Jamie?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

A lump in my throat made it hard to speak. “Is she OK?”

“That depends on your definition,” Rhine said. “Your girlfriend had quite a night after she kicked us out of her house. I just came from seeing her. She’s my guest in the fishbowl over at the jail.”

31

“Trooper Belanger picked her up around three
A.M.
,” the sheriff explained. “She was driving back to Whitney from somewhere in Machias. Her van was weaving across the center line. When he pulled her over, he detected a strong smell of alcohol on her breath. She refused to take a field sobriety test. He found a vial of Adderall in her pocket. We’re holding her at the jail on drunk-driving and drug-possession charges.”

The sensation was of all the blood in my body draining down out of my head and heart and pooling down around my ankles. I was devastated by what she’d done to herself. Depending upon the quantity of the drugs in her possession, she might be facing mandatory jail time. If Jamie went to prison now, who would care for Tammi? Who would look after Lucas?

I felt heartsick and culpable, but the sheriff used another adjective to describe my bloodless expression.

“You look shell-shocked,” she said.

“Disappointed is more like it,” I said. “Her brother just committed suicide, and I was worried she was going to fall off the wagon.”

“I’d say she leapt off the wagon—with both feet. She wasn’t particularly coherent when Belanger brought her in. Still isn’t, in fact.”

I wanted to rush over to the jail anyway, wanted to see her myself. I figured that even if she was totally wasted, the enormity of the crime she’d committed and the implications about what it might mean for her family must already be sinking in. If the Department of Health and Human Service removed Lucas from the house, Jamie would destroy herself for sure.

“I’d like to see her,” I said.

“No dice,” said Rivard. “I need you here.”

“Prester will still be dead an hour from now.”

Rivard moved the tobacco wad around in his mouth, causing his cheek to bulge out as if he’d tucked a golf ball in there. “Bowditch, I’ve had it up to here with you. OK? We’ve got a bunch of people ready to search. We need to find the stiff before it starts snowing again. You have a job to do, and I expect you to do it.”

I stared across Bad Little Falls at the road that curved around the corner storefronts in Machias and climbed through a neighborhood of neat houses and yards to the courthouse and the jail. It was beyond my power to rescue Jamie from the fate she’d brought upon herself. But at least I could find her brother.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked Rivard.

*   *   *

Cody Devoe and Tomahawk took the northern bank of the river with one group of searchers while I led another team along the southern shore above the falls.

Devoe had brought along a cork lobster buoy. While we watched, he dropped it into the channel below the spot where Prester had fallen in, and we watched the buoy bob along in the current. It bounced off a couple of ice-crusted rocks and lingered amid foaming eddies. Eventually it found its way into the rapids and was swept quickly downstream, where it was lost from our view over the falls. A man’s body is significantly heavier than a lobster buoy, but Devoe’s science experiment gave us a better understanding of the river’s specific hydrodynamics. We made notes of the places where Prester’s cadaver might have gotten stuck beneath the surface.

Drowned corpses will usually sink before they rise. Once water has flooded the lungs and filled the gastrointestinal organs, a human body will submerge and drift down to the bottom of a lake or river. Eventually, if it stays there long enough, the decomposition process will begin, and methane and other gases will cause the cadaver to swell. In time, it will rise like a volleyball that you’ve held beneath the surface of the water with the palm of your hand. Watching your first bloated corpse ascend from the depths is a special moment in a young warden’s education.

I led a team of four firefighters who had been trained extensively in search and recovery techniques. They were a no-nonsense bunch of guys who made my job considerably easier by actually shutting up and paying attention. Some volunteers will leap into a search with real enthusiasm, but once the hours stretch on without the subject being located, their concentration flags. My guys seemed untroubled by the bitter temperature and overcast skies.

The circuitous path taken by the lobster buoy suggested that Prester should have fetched up on the north side of the river—since there was no chance that he had swum even ten strokes before the cold and current overpowered his best efforts—but there was a slim possibility he might have lodged against one of the boulders midstream, so we turned our binoculars on every square inch of the Machias, recording our findings on maps and GPS, watching our counterparts on the opposite shore do the same.

I kept expecting to hear Tomahawk begin barking, indicating she’d found our drowned fugitive, but the only sound was the constant rush of water and occasionally a shout when someone spotted some bright shard of plastic or a flesh-colored branch. After a time, and despite all my willpower, my own mind began to wander. I couldn’t keep out the distractions.