Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (2 page)

For three years, my fellow wardens had been taking bets on my own longevity in the service. In the minds of my superiors, Warden Mike Bowditch was the human equivalent of a grenade with a pulled pin. How, they wondered, can anyone behave so self-destructively without ever actually destructing? Here they’d gone and exiled me to the easternmost county in the United States—a desolate outland where game wardens were hated and oxycodone abuse was epidemic—but still I refused to explode. Instead, I kept doing my job as if I were oblivious to the contempt in which I was held. I had decided that the only way for me ever to be happy was to be true to my own values. And while I can’t say I was the embodiment of joy, I was beginning to understand the emotional rewards that come from living in the moment and doing good work.

Billy had opened Betty Morse’s iron gate and was standing beside the new
NO HUNTING
sign, waiting for me to drive through. He was wearing blue jeans tucked into tall neoprene-sided boots, a Western-style belt with an actual tarantula embedded in the buckle, and a blue Henley pullover that showed off his impressive musculature when he swung the gate shut behind my pickup. The heavy metallic
clang
reminded me of past visits to the state prison and other hopeless places. I felt a growing sense of dread as I rolled down my window.

Glancing in the side mirror, I watched Billy stoop to reset the combination lock and then come striding up alongside the truck. He peered down at me, his eyes flat, his sharp cheekbones shining with perspiration.

“What’s going on, Billy?”

“The first one is up here a ways,” he said, pointing at the rust-colored road. There were no hardwoods in this part of the forest, only pines, firs, and hemlocks. Over the decades, the trees had shed their needles, forming a soft carpet for any vehicles that might pass beneath them. I saw Billy’s blue F250 parked in the shadow of the boughs.

“You want to ride with me?” I asked.

“It would be better if I went ahead.” His voice started as a rumble down around his spleen and was as intimidating as the rest of him. “We got some ground to cover, and I ain’t sure where we’re going to end up.”

I waited for him to start his pickup and then tagged along behind his trailer hitch a few miles, wondering what all the mystery was about. Billy had a flair for the dramatic—witness the tarantula belt and the heavy-metal hairstyle—but this seemed different: a reluctance, or even inability, to put what he’d discovered into words.

Eventually, the road emerged from beneath the evergreens and crossed a meadow overgrown at the edges with poplars, paper birches, and speckled alders. The road was powder-dry from baking in the sunlight, and Billy’s tires kicked up a cloud of dust so thick I almost ran into the back of his tail bed when he applied the brakes.

I watched him unfold himself from his Ford—no vehicle made offered enough headroom for my towering friend—and then I unbuckled my shoulder belt.

A dead moose lay in the ragweed ten feet from the road. It was a young bull, a little bigger than a Clydesdale, but with the long, knobby legs of a camel. It had a modest rack of antlers, five feet across or so, and a brownish red coat stuck all over with brambles and wisps of cattail fluff. Green flies buzzed loudly around its open mouth. Its tongue was hanging out like a gray inner organ it had half-expelled from its gut, and its drying eyeballs were coated with an abrasive layer of dust. At first glance, I couldn’t see any obvious wounds or dried blood on the carcass. Nor were there any of the telltale signs of the fatal brainworm that often afflicts moose in Maine.

“What do you think?” Billy asked.

I crossed my bare arms, slick with SPF-45. “I’m thinking someone shot it last week during the hunt but didn’t bring it down. It might have stumbled around for a few days—and wandered across the road onto Morse’s property—before it bled out or the wound got infected. It’s not unusual to find a gut-shot moose after the hunt.”

“That’s what I thought at first.”

I squinted to get a better look at the moose’s underbelly. “Or it could have gotten paunched by a bigger bull during the rut.”

“I thought of that, too.”

“But that’s not what happened, is it?”

“Nope.”

I crouched down beside the moose, scattering the winged insects that had come to lay their eggs in its mucous membranes. A faint odor—like crushed wet acorns—rose from its obscene tongue. I lifted one of the floppy ears and saw a cluster of blood-swollen ticks attached to the underside. During a bad year, like this one, a moose can play host to tens of thousands of parasitic ticks, not to mention the mosquitoes and other biting insects—no-see-ums, black flies, deerflies, and moose flies—that are its constant, lifelong companions. For the thousandth time, I reflected on how much it must suck to be a moose.

“Well, there’s no smell of putrescence,” I said, “and there are still ticks feeding on the blood, which means it hasn’t been dead long enough for the blood to totally dry up. The birds and coyotes haven’t been at it yet, either.”

“It was alive last night,” said Billy. “I drove by here to close the gate, and I would have seen it in my headlights.”

“Do you think it might have been a poacher, and you scared him off, either last night or this morning? Before he could take the meat and head, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“I guess that means you found something else.”

Billy hitched his jeans up on his narrow hips and spat hard into the road. “Yep,” he said.

We returned to our trucks and set off again. I had to roll up my window to keep from choking to death on the billowing dust. I put on my expensive new pair of Oakley sunglasses, hoping they would help against the glare, but they didn’t.

Whatever this trouble was, I already knew I didn’t need it. I’d spent the previous week running myself ragged during the annual Maine moose hunt. I’d patrolled miles of logging roads and clear-cuts and visited every tagging station within a hundred-mile radius of my cabin. The nonstop action had frayed my nerves. I’d been hoping to spend some time with my friend Charley Stevens hunting partridge and woodcock, or scouting around for chanterelle mushrooms down in the wetlands behind the house. Maybe even read an actual book for once. Now I would have to cancel my plans for the morning—and probably the afternoon and evening, as well.

The dirt road entered a thicket of yellow birches and white pines that someone had logged fifty years ago and then allowed to grow back in anticipation of a future harvest that never came. Every now and then, I caught a reflection of the sun hitting the surface of a half-hidden pond through the trees: a brilliant sparkle that reminded me of light shining on shattered windshield glass. Eastern Maine is beautiful country—not particularly mountainous, but expansive and largely empty of people, with evergreen forests that stretch to the horizons and blue lakes so numerous as to almost defy counting. It was how I always pictured northern Minnesota, around Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. No wonder Queen Elizabeth wanted to protect this magnificent forest forever. Wasn’t it for the same reason I’d become a game warden—to guard places like this from reckless human intrusion?

The road branched a couple of times, heading away from the lake into the wilder country of the Machias River watershed. After fifteen minutes of spine-jolting bumps, we came to another treeless meadow. This one was significantly larger and damper than the first. Despite the August-like temperatures, the vegetation was painted with the palette of autumn: sun-faded greens, tarnished golds, and burnt umbers. On one side of the meadow, a sluggish brown stream flowed out of a pond shaped like a kidney bean. Fallen leaves, red and yellow, drifted on the surface of the water.

As Billy rolled to a stop, I saw two ravens lift up from the puckerbrush, big black birds that beat the air heavily with their wings. One of them called, making a distinctive
quork
sound, to express its displeasure at being interrupted in the middle of its meal. The ravens flapped across the clearing to the exact distance where they would be safe from a man with a shotgun—ravens somehow know these things—and settled together at the top of a tree to await our eventual departure.

I followed Billy through the dying grass. Late damselflies flitted in the air, blue-bodied and faster than thoughts. I felt sweat ooze down my spine beneath the ballistic vest the Warden Service made us wear beneath our olive-drab uniforms.

“The ravens were here when I found them,” Billy said quietly, speaking with the hushed tone one uses in a house of worship. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

I swallowed hard to keep my breakfast from coming up in my throat.

“Those beaks of theirs ain’t too sharp,” he said, “but they really did a job on the little calf’s face.”

I took note of the location: seventeen yards from the road.

“You ever seen anything like this before?” Billy whispered.

I shook my head no.

The cow moose had both sets of legs crossed, almost as if someone had posed her that way for a formal portrait, but I knew the big animal had fallen heavily, dropped by a single bullet to the head. The first calf, the baby, lay beside her, with its face torn open by the ravens and the bloody skin peeled away from its mouth. The birds had pecked away at her lips, giving her a perpetual smile that she would wear into eternity. The other calf—a yearling bull that had the gangling look of a teenager that hadn’t grown entirely into his body and now never would—was lying closer to the pond. It had been shot through the eye. The bullet had left a star-shaped hole that you could slide your index finger into all the way to the knuckle.

I would need to dig the slug out of its brain for evidence, I realized. I would need to cut them all open with my knife to find the bullets. The entire family.

I removed my black duty cap and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, but the perspiration just streamed back into my burning eyes. Billy was still speaking, but his words were unintelligible; it was as if I were lying at the bottom of a pool, my ears full of water, while things happened in the world above.

In my imagination, I watched a vehicle creep slowly through the trees under the cover of darkness. I saw the small moose family turn curiously toward the sound of the engine, their eyes glowing green in the handheld spotlight. How long had they been blinded by the intense illumination? Thirty seconds? Less? Enough time for three bullets to be fired in rapid succession. The animals had died so quickly, they’d never even realized they should run.

As Billy’s voice rose, I found I could understand his words again. “Whoever shot them didn’t even bother to take the meat! He just killed them for the fun of killing, and then he drove off down the lane to shoot another one, like it was a fucking video game. What the hell is this, Mike?”

The sun seared the back of my neck. “It’s a serial killing, Billy. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

3

The ravens watched us from the edge of the clearing like nosy witnesses lingering at the scene of the crime.

“What did you see?” I heard myself mutter.

I’d recently picked up the alarming habit of thinking out loud. My job meant that I worked alone a lot, patrolling remote places without backup, and sometimes I felt the need to hear a human voice, even if it was only my own. Living in the woods does strange things to lonely men.

I turned in a complete circle beneath the rising sun, trying to get my bearings. The air smelled of pine pitch and stagnant water. There were no hilltops or other landmarks visible, but my internal compass placed us four miles northwest of the gate we’d entered.

“Are we still on Morse’s property?” I asked Billy.

“This whole township belongs to Ms. Morse, from Sixth Machias west to Mopang.”

“It’s all gated?”

“Yep. I supervised the crew that put the gates in over the summer. Ms. Morse wanted someone from the staff on-site during the construction.”

“So if this section of woods is blocked off, how was the shooter able to drive in here?”

Billy blinked a couple of times and then lowered his head to look at my boots, his braid dangling down. “Maybe he walked in.”

“That’s a long haul in the middle of the night. There wasn’t even much of a moon with those clouds.”

“We might have missed one of them old Jeep trails when we were installing the gates,” he said. “There are so many logging roads to keep track of. Christ, I don’t know! Maybe the shooter came in on an ATV. What does it matter?”

“I’m trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. How the killer got in here and his specific movements are important if I hope to solve this case.”

“This whole thing pisses me off,” Billy said by way of apology.

I pointed in the direction our vehicles had entered the clearing. “From the position of the bodies, I’m thinking it was a truck that came in the same way we did. And I don’t think it was just a single shooter who did this.”

“Why?”

“Because one of them had to hold the spotlight while the other took his shots.”

“Couldn’t he have used his high beams?”

I drew an imaginary arc in the air with my hand. “That’s what I thought at first, but the angle is wrong, based on the position of the road. Is it possible any of the gates were left unlocked?”

Billy looked down at his boots again. “Nope. No way.”

“How can you be sure?”

“That’s my job. Ms. Morse is real clear when it comes to rules, and keeping the gates locked is rule number one.” He reached back, grabbed his ponytail, and gave it a thoughtful tug. “So you think there were two guys?”

“At least two.”

“I guess that makes sense. Jeez, I’d like to get my hands on them sons of bitches.”

I shuddered to imagine the punishment my friend would inflict. Over beers one night, he’d told me how he’d seriously injured a man in the pugil-stick-fighting ring at Fort Benning. He’d sent the recruit to the hospital with such a severe head injury, the man was discharged from the army with full medical benefits.

I decided to give my brooding friend some space and walked slowly back toward the road, looking for human footprints in the jimsonweed but finding none but our own. The shooter hadn’t even bothered to venture out into the field to review his marksmanship. He had just opened fire from his vehicle and then driven off.