Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (5 page)

No such luck. As we rumbled past the carcass, I saw Morse’s green SUV slow and then stop, and I stepped hard on my brakes. I turned off the engine and hopped out of the vehicle. In my peripheral vision, I saw Billy’s truck continue toward the gate. Maybe I could stall them long enough for Mack to ride to my rescue.

Leaf Woodwind and the daughter were content with rolling down their windows to gawk at the body in the weeds. But Morse, true to her reputation, wanted to inspect the carnage firsthand. I caught up to her as she was stepping out of the vehicle.

“Ms. Morse,” I said. “It would be better if you stayed away from the scene until we’ve had a chance to have a closer look around.”

I could smell the floral odor of useless organic bug dope on her skin. “I’d like to say a prayer to mark the departure of this animal’s spirit.”

Under her all-business demeanor, it was easy to forget that she had once been a hippie.

“Let her see the moose!” Briar said through the backseat window.

“I think it would be best for everyone to remain on the road,” I said.

Elizabeth Morse smiled, showing chemically whitened teeth. “Warden Bowditch, you’re not really trying to make an enemy of me?”

“You seem to have more than your share of enemies,” I said. “Would you really notice another one?”

Instantly, I regretted having spoken my thoughts aloud. I’d been making so many strides in carrying myself professionally over the past year. I was about to apologize, but she cut me off with a short, sudden laugh.

“Aren’t you the saucy one.” She tilted her head forward to make eye contact with me over the top of her sunglasses. “I take it you don’t approve of me or my plans for Moosehorn National Park.”

“It’s not my job to approve or disapprove of you.”

“What happened to the brave teller of truths who was just standing here? You don’t like me. Do you?”

I took a deep breath. “Ms. Morse, I don’t know you well enough to dislike you.”

“That doesn’t seem to stop most people.”

I was saved from continuing the conversation by the roar of a truck engine behind me.

An unmarked teal GMC patrol truck rolled to a stop about twenty feet from my front bumper. Two people climbed out.

The driver was a stocky warden with a beet-red face and thick white hair. Even in his sixties, Mack McQuarrie was in no danger of ever going bald. He had other worries, though: melanoma from a life spent outdoors without ever using sunscreen; heart disease from a diet that leaned heavily toward red meat fried in grease; esophageal cancer from daily doses of chewing tobacco and scotch. Mack was one of those rugged Maine woodsmen who can hike up a mountain in a snowstorm without breaking a sweat but are destined to keel over a month after they retire, dead from one of a dozen predictable and preventable causes.

The person with him was a young woman, and the second I realized who she was, the rest of the world dropped away. It was as if I were looking through a tunnel straight at her face. She had a prominent jaw that wasn’t exactly pretty, but the combination of full lips and high cheekbones would have attracted the interest of a fashion photographer if he’d spotted her walking down the street. She was tall and lanky, with long brown hair pulled back tightly from her face and secured by a rubber band. She was wearing cheap sunglasses, oil-spotted jeans tucked into rubber boots, and a khaki shirt with the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife logo stitched over one of her small breasts. I’m not sure how many men’s heads she would have turned with no makeup, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and defiantly not giving a damn about her pinched hair or the sweat stains under her arms. But behind those sunglasses, I knew, were eyes like Chinese jade.

And on her left hand was a diamond engagement ring. From twenty feet away, I saw it glinting in the sun.

“Where’s the moose?” asked Stacey Stevens before anyone could exchange greetings. The daughter of my old friend and mentor, retired chief warden pilot Charley Stevens, was never one to waste time on pleasantries.

“Over there,” I said.

Mack came straight at us. “You must be Ms. Morse. I’m Sergeant McQuarrie, of the Maine Warden Service.” His own voice was always too loud, in part because his hearing was going, but mostly because he liked to use a tone of command with impressionable civilians.

Elizabeth Morse didn’t seem impressed. “What did you do with my man Cronk?”

“We left him at the gate to admit the other wardens on the way. We understand multiple animals were slaughtered on your property, Ms. Morse.”

Stacey brushed past me, all business. “Which way did you go in, Mike? Never mind. I see your bootprints.”

“You’re not afraid of
her
disturbing the evidence?” Elizabeth Morse asked me.

“She’s a wildlife biologist,” McQuarrie said.

I tried not to watch Stacey while I spoke to my sergeant, but my eyes kept drifting. “Ms. Morse wants to have a closer look at the moose,” I said, “and I was telling her she needed to wait until we’d done a sweep of the scene.”

“You probably don’t want to get too close, ma’am. Those animals smell pretty bad alive, and dead’s a whole lot worse.”

“I used to be a sheep farmer, Sergeant. I know that mammals of all kinds stink.”

McQuarrie’s face tightened, as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d just been insulted. “Warden Bowditch, can you bring me up to speed here?”

He turned his back on Elizabeth Morse and escorted me through the weeds in the direction of Stacey and the moose. I was glad Morse couldn’t see me wincing. After all my talk about the sanctity of the crime scene, Mack was acting careless and cavalier when there might be ejected rifle shells or other important clues around us.

“Jay-sus,” he whispered. “She really does think she’s the queen of England. So there are six dead critters?”

“I’m betting there are more,” I said.

We stood over Stacey, who was down on both knees beside the moose. She’d put on a pair of latex gloves and was poking and prodding the animal’s body. I tried to observe her actions from a dispassionate distance, but my heart was beating so loudly, I was surprised they both couldn’t hear it.

I’d met Stacey the previous winter, after knowing her parents for years. At the time, I’d been involved with another woman—maybe not the best romantic choice I’d made in my life—and I’d tried to pretend to myself that I was not powerfully attracted to my friends’ daughter. The fact that Stacey didn’t like me for a variety of reasons, some of them legitimate, didn’t help matters. Nor did her engagement to the handsome and well-to-do heir of a local logging company.

“I couldn’t find an entry wound,” I said.

“There are two, actually,” said Stacey. “One behind the mandible—it broke the poor guy’s jaw. The other was a missed lung shot. Basically, he bled to death.”

“The others were all shot cleanly,” I said. “Pretty impressive head shots.”

“Multiple shooters,” McQuarrie pronounced.

“That’s what I was thinking. I found two different-caliber cartridges, too: twenty-two long and twenty-two Mag.”

McQuarrie glanced around in the grass, as if suddenly realizing that there might be actual evidence lying about underfoot. “We need to police this whole area.”

“A little late for that.” It was Elizabeth Morse, who’d wandered up behind us while we’d been focused on the moose.

Mack thrust out his chest. “Ma’am, I asked you to stand back,” he boomed.

“Oh, please, gentlemen. Let’s cut the bullshit,” said Morse. “I followed your own footprints in the weeds, so I can hardly have contaminated anything more than you already have. This animal died because of me, and I have a right to mourn its suffering.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Stacey said. “See that blood trail in the grass there.” She gestured with a stained finger at bent goldenrod and steeplebush. “It goes all the way back to that snag of dead firs. You’re not going to find any shell casings here, Mack, because this animal was shot somewhere else. He only happened to collapse in this spot.”

I’d missed the blood trail, along with the two bullet wounds, in my initial inspection of the moose. And Stacey had found them right off. Why should I have been surprised? Her father, Charley, was the best game warden I’d ever met, an expert tracker and investigator, not to mention a crazy daredevil pilot. I’d had the white-knuckle experience of flying with Stacey before, as well. Father and daughter were alike in many ways.

McQuarrie rubbed his chapped lips and looked at Morse. “What do you mean, it died because of you?”

Her voice sounded like she’d swallowed a bitter piece of fruit. “Some monster couldn’t bring himself to take a shot at me, so instead he drove around on my land killing innocent animals. This is an atrocity against nature—but it’s also a personal attack against
me.
”

“Ms. Morse believes these shootings are an act of retaliation against her proposed national park,” I said.

Stacey gave a sudden laugh. “Well, that’s pretty obvious.”

“I don’t appreciate your tone of voice, young lady,” Morse said to her.

When Stacey rose to her feet, I saw that she was taller than the other woman. “My tone of voice?”

“Stacey,” I warned.

She ignored me, as usual. “Is it news that people around here don’t like you, Ms. Morse?” Stacey didn’t have a diplomatic bone in her body. “I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.”

McQuarrie stepped between the two women. He was braver than I was in that respect. “The first question to ask, Ms. Morse, is have you recently received threats of a suspicious nature?”

“As opposed to threats of an
unsuspicious
nature?” Elizabeth Morse threw up her arms. “You people really are professionals. Yes, I have received dozens of
suspicious
threats. I just showed the most recent one to Warden Bowditch.”

“Ms. Morse has provided copies of all the threatening letters to the state police,” I said.

“Those documents might be the appropriate place to begin your investigation,” said Elizabeth. “But what do I know? I’m just a naive tree hugger.”

Another patrol truck came rumbling up the dirt road, raising a billowing cloud of dust. It was the first time in my life I was glad to see Lt. Marc Rivard.

6

The pickup was an onyx GMC with all the bells and whistles. District wardens like myself mostly drove beaters that we could bang the shit out of on patrol. The higher-ups who worked the desks in Augusta, or spent their days inside one of the five division headquarters around the state, got the fancy unmarked vehicles. Lieutenant Rivard’s new Sierra was a gift he’d given himself upon the occasion of his recent promotion.

Marc Rivard was one of the youngest lieutenants in the history of the Maine Warden Service, having risen faster through the ranks than anyone would have deemed possible, thanks to his deft political skills. In the eyes of the Augusta brass, Rivard embodied the four stated values of the service—honor, loyalty, compassion, and trust. But to the men he supervised, he was widely regarded as a grudge-holding prick. If you kissed his ass and laughed at his off-color jokes, he would bestow upon you whatever perks a district lieutenant has to give. If you pissed him off on a regular basis—by answering his questions candidly instead of the way he wanted; or by following your own ethical compass, as opposed to the politically expedient alternative; or simply by embarrassing him or, worse, outshining him in the eyes of the Augusta brass—he would fling you into a distant orbit. My own current position was somewhere out beyond Pluto.

So it was no surprise that Rivard made a beeline for Mack McQuarrie and Elizabeth Morse without tossing a glance in my direction. He removed his signature sunglasses, an act he only performed before rich and powerful people he hoped to charm.

“It’s unfortunate to meet you under these circumstances, Ms. Morse,” he said, extending a palm. “I’m Marc Rivard, the lieutenant in charge of this division. I want you to know my men are going to work around the clock to find the individuals who did this.”

Elizabeth Morse accepted his handshake, but I detected a barb in her reply. “That’s very reassuring.”

Despite being only half a dozen years older than me, Rivard had a touch of gray around the temples, which gave him a certain gravitas. He also wore a Clark Gable mustache, which three wives, at least, had found dashing. Out of uniform, he looked middle-aged and paunchy, but with his stomach flattened beneath his ballistic vest, he projected a barrel-chested manliness.

He next addressed himself to my sergeant. “Mack, I want to see each of the kill sites myself ASAP.”

“You’re going to need Bowditch for that,” said McQuarrie. “This is his case.”

It was the first time Rivard made eye contact with me. Let’s just say there was no love in his deep brown gaze. “You were the first on the scene, Bowditch?”

“Yes, sir. Billy Cronk and myself.”

“That’s Joe Brogan’s former guide? The one he fired from Call of the Wild?”

“Mr. Cronk works for me now,” said Elizabeth Morse. “He’s one of my caretakers.”

“So he has access to all this land. That’s very interesting.” Rivard stroked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Ms. Morse, I’m thinking it might be best for you and me to have a conversation before we go rushing around your woods here.”

“I would welcome the opportunity, Lieutenant.”

“Mack, get the coordinates for all the kill sites from Bowditch.” He returned his sunglasses to their familiar position between his private thoughts and the rest of the world. “That’s assuming you wrote them all down,” he said to me.

“Yes, sir. I’ve got latitude and longitude for each of the shooting sites.”

“Then I want you to give the sergeant a complete report of what you found, including any evidence you recovered.”

I watched Rivard and Morse stroll down the dirt road, heads down, talking like two world leaders at Camp David.

I felt someone standing at my shoulder.

“He really doesn’t like you, does he?” whispered Stacey.

“Are you kidding? I’m his fair-haired boy.”

As the first officer on the scene, I had the most information about the case, but the lieutenant disliked the power this gave me over him. If he had the coordinates and my full report, he’d no longer need me to direct him around the Morse property on a dead moose safari. I looked hard at McQuarrie. “He’s not going to bring me in on this case at all, is he? Even though it happened in my district and I was the responding officer?”