Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (7 page)

BOOK: Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries)
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Bilodeau had closely set eyes, a pointed nose, and a thin-lipped mouth, which I had never once seen in the shape of a smile. He wore his sandy hair cut straight across his forehead. He had a toothpick pressed between his lips.

I didn’t know the man well, but I coveted his job. Investigators in the Maine Warden Service were the closest things we had to detectives. They worked undercover, often for months at a time, to break up poaching rings; investigated boating accidents where the evidence didn’t quite match up with the testimony of the survivors; pursued all hunting homicides, of which there were still too many, even after the introduction of strict blaze orange and target-identification laws; and otherwise stuck their noses into every suspicious-smelling case that drifted our way. Being a warden investigator was my dream job, but I had zero shot at ever getting it while bureaucrats like Rivard were in a position to deny me promotions.

The lieutenant went on: “All of us are familiar with Elizabeth Morse and her idea for a national park.”

Behind me, someone coughed the word
bullshit
into his fist. McQuarrie scowled, but I heard a few chuckles from the peanut gallery.

“I do not want personal politics interfering with this investigation!” said Rivard, thrusting his jaw forward. “Whatever you think of Elizabeth Morse and her scheme, you need to leave those opinions at home. I will serve as the liaison between her estate and this investigation. I have already convinced her to grant us complete access to her employees. We will run a textbook forensic investigation that will result in swift arrests and an ironclad case for the DA to bring to court. That is the pledge I made to Ms. Morse.”

There was no way in hell that Rivard had ever considered delegating the liaison job to another warden. This case was a career maker for the lieutenant, his next step on the road to colonel. You could hear his excitement in the raised pitch of his voice.

It hadn’t dawned on me until now what an ungodly spectacle was going to take place in these woods once the media got hold of the story. Elizabeth Morse was already front-page news across Maine, and that was before some psychos started murdering moose outside her mansion. Rivard had probably already called the television stations in Bangor, encouraging them to send out news vans with satellite antennas to broadcast from the scene. The only thing I cared about was busting the men who’d shot these animals, no matter who got the credit. Nothing Rivard was saying gave me confidence that we shared the same priorities.

The lieutenant took a deep breath, as if considering the best way to conclude his stem-winder. “You might not know this,” he said. “But in China, they use the same word for
crisis
as they do for
opportunity
. I believe we have an opportunity here to make history as conservation officers. Someday, I expect this investigation will be taught to every recruit at the Advanced Warden Academy. So I am not exaggerating when I say this will be a textbook case.” Suddenly, his face broke into a grin that made his mustache wriggle. “OK. That’s enough hot air from me. The day is already hot enough, and we have lots of work to do. Bilodeau and I will be meeting with the sergeants now, and they will be responsible for assigning specific duties to each of you. Understood?”

I raised my hand. “Can I ask a question?”

This time, Rivard chose to ignore me. “Make me proud, Wardens,” he said.

Cody Devoe came over, with his dog trotting close to his knees. “What question were you going to ask?” he whispered.

“I wondered if he knew the Chinese word for
clusterfuck
.”

8

The actual question I’d wanted to ask Rivard was whether he was bringing in a pilot to scout for additional moose kills. Charley Stevens lived just a few townships away. Despite being officially retired from the Warden Service, he was constantly volunteering his aerial assistance on search-and-rescue missions and other details requiring eyes in the sky. Knowing Stacey’s dad the way I did, I expected the old bird already had his Cessna gassed up and ready to go. All he needed was a formal invitation from the lieutenant.

I understood that Rivard needed to formulate a plan, but the sun was lobbing itself across the sky, and we weren’t any closer to finding the shooters. And where had Stacey disappeared to? I hadn’t seen her drive off with anyone.

Cody Devoe’s dog sniffed my knee. I bent over and scratched the panting K-9 behind her velveteen ears. “How are you doing, Tomahawk?”

“She doesn’t like the heat,” Devoe said.

“She’s not the only one.”

He waved absently at a yellow jacket that was noisily circling his head. “So everyone is saying you were the first one on the scene here.”

“Me and Billy Cronk.”

“I saw Billy on the way in. I didn’t know he was working for Queen Elizabeth. That’s an odd couple to be sure.”

I straightened up and brushed the dog fur from my hands onto my pants legs. “You shouldn’t call her that, Cody.”

“Why not?”

“It seems disrespectful.”

Devoe shrugged, ceding the point. My friend had the blocky shoulders and heavy brow of a caveman, but he was no Neanderthal. Anyone else might have needled me for defending Elizabeth Morse, but not Cody. “How do you think the shooters got in here anyway?” he said. “There are gates on every access road coming in.”

“Billy says he supervised the construction crew who built the gates, and he thinks they might have missed an old tote road or two.”

“No way,” said Cody. “I used to hunt these woods hard for partridge and woodcock. They didn’t miss any roads, so I don’t know what Billy’s talking about.”

I chewed over this nugget of information, unsure whether to swallow it. McQuarrie had stationed Billy at the Sixth Machias gate to let in whatever law-enforcement vehicles arrived on the property. For a moment, I considered hopping in my truck to go press my friend on this point, but I reconsidered when I saw my sergeant coming toward us across the field. Mack’s face was as red as a canned tomato, and his uniform was splotched with perspiration.

He whistled with his fingers. “OK, Wardens, time to get to work!”

In his job, McQuarrie supervised six men, only five of whom happened to be present. He gathered us together like a coach assembling his basketball squad before a game. “Here’s how it’s going to go,” he said. “Bayley and Sullivan, you get moose A. The lieutenant wants you to retrieve whatever lead or bullet fragments you can from the carcass. The site’s been pretty trampled, but do a sweep again to see if you can pull anything out of the weeds. Use Polson’s metal detector. Devoe, I want you to take your K-9 and see if you can backtrack the moose to the point where he was shot. That’s assuming Stacey is right about it not being killed here.” He turned his head. “Where is our pretty little biologist?”

“She disappeared,” I said.

“What do you mean she disappeared?”

“She wandered off while the rest of us were listening to the lieutenant’s rousing speech.”

“Hopefully, we won’t need to send out a search party.” He spat toward the ground and accidentally hit his own boots. “Bard, I want you to drive out to the gate and get a statement from Billy Cronk.”

“Shouldn’t I be the one to do that?” I asked.

“The L.T. wants Bard to do the interrogation, since you and Cronk are so chummy. Tibbetts, your job is to inspect every gate along the Stud Mill Road. See if anybody’s fucked with any of them. We’re looking for signs of forced entry. I’m going to take the lieutenant around to the kill sites using Mike’s map.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense for Mike to do that?” asked Cody.

I was relieved that I didn’t need to ask the question myself.

“We’ve got another job for Bowditch.” McQuarrie looked me in the eyes and, without blinking, said, “We want you to check out the gravel pits.”

“What gravel pits?”

“All the local ones. You’re looking for anyplace where these guys might have done some target practice beforehand. Check around for twenty-two shell casings. If we can get a match on the brass these guys used, we might be able to link their guns to the ones used to kill the moose.”

I clenched my molars together to keep from spitting out an expletive.

Again, Cody Devoe did my speaking for me. “Isn’t that kind of a shot in the dark, Mack?”

“This case is going to live or die on whatever circumstantial evidence we gather.”

The other wardens turned their heads in my direction. For reasons that made no sense at all—beyond the fact that Rivard disliked me—I was being deliberately marginalized from my own case. Even more than that, I was being assigned a task so obviously useless that the insult was plain for anyone to see. The lieutenant
wanted
me to waste my time. His treatment of me was a warning to other wardens who might choose to think for themselves. But instead of telling Mack McQuarrie what he could do with his gravel pits, I turned and walked toward my truck.

“Hey, Bowditch!” said Bard, a classmate of mine from the academy who was widely known to be one of Lieutenant Rivard’s pet poodles. “We’re not done here.”

“Let him go,” I heard McQuarrie say. “It’s OK.”

*   *   *

I noticed the ravens circling high overhead as I drove back toward the gate, small black specks twirling against the deep blue sky. There were two of them again, probably the same two. And I knew they were ravens, because crows do not soar.

Hugin and Munin: Those were the names of Odin’s ravens.

My Viking friend could have told me as much. But as I passed into the shade of the conifers and peered forward at the closed gate, I saw no one standing guard. Billy Cronk had deserted his post. How was I supposed to get off the estate, or anyone else get in?

I stopped the truck and left the engine idling while I inspected the hunk of steel blocking my way. The heavy bar was set on a metal post and pivoted open and shut if you unlocked it and gave it a shove. It probably weighed several hundred pounds and looked like something scavenged from an abandoned military installation. Billy had told me that Morse’s first gate had been an expensive wooden affair, hand-crafted by an artisan in Bar Harbor, with leaping stags and calling loons engraved in the red cedar surface. It was a thing of beauty until some maniac had driven his truck, kamikaze-style, straight through it one night. Billy had spent the next morning collecting the splintered boards to burn in Morse’s lakeside fire pit.

The next gate, she told her caretaker, should be made of iron.

I scanned up and down the pine-needle road but didn’t see Billy’s blue pickup anywhere. Behind me, the serpentine belt screeched like a migraine. I got out my phone and was on the verge of punching in my friend’s number when it occurred to me to give the gate a gentle pull.

It moved.

I put the phone away and pulled with both hands. The gate groaned and swung heavily toward me on its axis. My absent friend had left the damn thing open.

Maybe Morse called him away, I thought. Billy spent his waking hours running fool’s errands for the woman. It didn’t matter that Rivard had asked him to help protect the integrity of the crime scene, not if Betty Morse had called and commanded him to drive into Grand Lake Stream for a case of Château Margaux. I couldn’t think of any other reason he would have left the gate unlocked, except that his employer had ordered him to do something, and he knew that wardens would need to drive in and out. He was already terrified of losing his job.

Unless the shooters had torn one down, then they had to have driven in through an open gate. But Billy swore that keeping the gates locked was Elizabeth’s rule number one at Moosehorn Lodge. You had to think that after all the death threats Morse had received, she would have impressed that point sufficiently on all the people in her circle. There was always the possibility that someone had forgotten, I supposed. McQuarrie had assigned Tibbetts to check the other gates along the Stud Mill Road. Maybe he would discover that one of them had been bulldozed to the ground overnight and that was how the shooters had gained entry to the killing ground.

Meanwhile, I had gravel pits to inspect.

There were at least a dozen in my district alone, deep holes excavated out of the forest to provide crushed rock to make logging roads. People had been using them for target practice for generations. The sheer number of spent .22 casings scattered amid all that sand and bottle glass made my head hurt. Did Rivard honestly expect the forensics guys in Augusta to dust all that brass for prints?

I was fighting a strong urge to drive to Charley Stevens’s house outside Grand Lake Stream and ask him take me aloft in his floatplane. We could fly low over Morse’s estate, looking for additional dead moose in the beaver bogs, and I would prove to the lieutenant that I was right about there being additional kill sites.

The only problem was that Rivard
wanted
me to go rogue. By sending me away from the action and giving me a fruitless task, he was hoping to goad me into disobeying a direct order. Then he would have another complaint against me, another piece of paper to add to my already-fat personnel file. I had never worked for a man I hated before, and the experience was testing me in ways I’d never imagined.

Not long ago, I would have taken his bait, but not this time. For once, I decided, I was going to be a good soldier. I would follow the chain of command even if it drove me crazy. There was one consolation I could cling to in all this, I realized: When Rivard learned that I’d actually carried out his absurd commands, thoroughly and without complaint, it would send his blood pressure through the roof.

I was smiling at the thought when I nearly ran over Stacey Stevens. She was standing in the leafy shadows at the edge of the road with her thumb out. I had to brake hard to keep from clipping her.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she saw my slack-jawed face through the driver’s window. Her pants were soaked and brown with mud all the way up to her waist. Her shirttail was hanging out, and there was a crescent of perspiration above her breasts.

“What are you doing out here?”

BOOK: Massacre Pond: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries)
4.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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