Trespasser (12 page)

And then I had driven home.

The ER doctor was a little guy in a big white coat and sneakers, with blond hair and a pearly-white smile. He didn’t look a whole lot older than me when he finally appeared to suture up my arm.

“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked brightly.

*   *   *

Sarah was in the waiting room when I came through the automatic doors. She had a
Parenting
magazine open on her lap and the television was broadcasting an infomercial, but she wasn’t paying attention to either. Her eyes were soft and unfocused, and I knew that she had gone someplace deep inside herself.

I had to call her name to get her attention.

Without a word, she threw her arms around my shoulders and pressed her face against my chest. When she looked up at me, my shirt was wet where her cheek had been. “I should have listened to you,” she said.

“Let’s go home.”

Driving back to Sennebec in her little Subaru, neither of us spoke. The blower pushed hot air into our faces. Behind us in the east, the sky had turned a plum color, a harbinger of the false dawn.

“I don’t want to know the details,” Sarah said at last. “I’ll find out eventually. Everyone will be talking about it. But right now, tonight, I don’t want to know what that maniac did to her. OK?”

“OK.”

I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but she went on. “I feel responsible somehow. You kept saying you were worried about her, and I just thought it was you working too much again. It made me mad.” She sniffed back a sob. “If I had listened to you, maybe you would have found her sooner.”

I reached for her hand. “The state police will catch whoever did this.”

“Will they?” she said, wiping back a tear. “Because they don’t always.”

How far could Westergaard run before someone spotted him, before he had to use his credit cards? “They will.”

“You shouldn’t promise things like that.”

She was right. Menario’s investigation was beyond my power to influence, and Maine had its share of unsolved mysteries. There were too many cases, most involving women, where the police knew beyond a shadow of a doubt which dirtbag had committed the crime but lacked the evidence to make a charge stick. In horrific cases like Ashley Kim’s, was it any wonder that cops might push the limits to get a conviction? When your responsibility is bringing a monster to justice, who’s to say that the ends don’t justify the means? Not me.

“Charley came by to get Ora,” Sarah said absently. “A deputy dropped him off as I was leaving.”

“How did he seem?”

“Like he’d just come from a murder scene.”

Sarah had left every light burning in our house. I could see it from a long ways away, glowing like a beacon through the pine trees. Inside, though, the untended woodstove had grown cold, the rooms were drafty, and the brightness seemed like just another false promise of comfort.

There was a message on the answering machine from Lieutenant Malcomb, asking me to give him a call in the morning. He said he had volunteered my assistance to the state police to help in any way possible. But with my direct supervisor, Kathy Frost, still on vacation, we would need to coordinate certain bureaucratic details, since I had my own duties to perform in the district, and the cash-strapped Warden Service needed to be prudent with its overtime allowances. Even a murder investigation ultimately came down to money.

I peeled off my jail jumpsuit and tossed it in the trash. “How was Ora?”

“Worried. I can’t imagine what their marriage has been like for her.”

I let that one drift by on the breeze.

“I think she’s having problems with one of her daughters,” continued Sarah.

“It’s probably Stacey.” Charley had led me to believe that his younger girl was something of a wild child. The last I’d heard, she’d become a part-time whitewater-rafting guide out west, after graduating with a degree in biology from the University of Maine.

Sarah removed her wristwatch and set it in a box where she kept her jewelry in the closet. “When I asked Ora about her children, she changed the subject.”

In the bathroom, I inspected the bandage on my arm—the disinfectant had already stained the gauze—and I brushed my teeth. When I returned to the bedroom, I found Sarah standing, fully dressed, at the window. With the lights going, you couldn’t see outside; the glass was a mirror reflecting her stricken expression.

“Why don’t you pull the shades and get undressed,” I said.

“I was just thinking that the person who killed her is out there right now. He might be a few miles away.”

“Well, he’s not coming here.”

“Maine seems like such a safe place compared to New York, and then something like this happens, and it makes you rethink all your assumptions,” she said. “People live so far away from one another in this town. If somebody broke in while I was alone, nobody would hear me cry for help.”

“Come to bed.”

“You know, I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

I turned off the lamp beside the bed. In the dark, I saw her silhouetted as she turned away from the window. “I’ve offered to teach you,” I said.

“I’m not that kind of person.”

She didn’t budge from where she was standing.

“Is there something else bothering you?” I asked.

“You mean beside a young woman being brutally raped and murdered?”

“Why don’t you come to bed. It’s too late to have a conversation.”

For some reason, what I’d said made her chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Too late is right.” She turned around, but in the darkness I couldn’t see her expression.

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

When she was naked under the covers with me finally, I put my arms around her, but her whole body remained rigid. Then she started to shake. At first, I thought she was crying again, and then I realized it was laughter.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Do you know what I saw on my way home this afternoon? A turkey vulture. Talk about an ill omen.”

Bird-watching was one of Sarah’s great joys in life. She kept a list of every species she had ever seen and recorded the date in the springtime when each of the migrant warblers returned from its southern vacation. The happiest I had ever seen her was one bright morning as we stood on a sunlit hillside listening to the first redstart of the season, a vivid black-and-orange bird singing from atop a distant tree.

“Vultures are some of the first birds to come back after the winter,” I said, repeating something she’d once told me. “So it was just a sign of spring.”

“Tell that to Ashley Kim,” she said, rolling away from me.

14

I almost never remember any of my dreams. Sarah says that my eyelids twitch like any normal person engaged in REM sleep, but as a matter of course, I awaken each morning with no nocturnal memories. A psychologist would probably say that this amnesia is a symptom of some deep repression, but it just happens to be the way I sleep—like a machine being turned off for six or seven hours a night.

When I do recall a dream, it always startles me. The temptation is to search for profound meanings, as if my subconscious is so accustomed to being gagged that it must be screaming at me from the depths of my brain.

Take this one: I am walking through a forest of birches, trees as white as bone. I’m not lost, but I have no idea where I am headed. After a while, I become aware of footsteps in the leaves behind me. I turn, and there is a young Penobscot Indian woman with braided hair following me, and I feel a shudder because I know that she is dead. But the expression on her face is passive. We walk on together for a while. I look over my shoulder again. Now a man with a black mustache and a red spot over his heart is part of our silent procession. The trail begins ascending a steep hill and a breeze whispers through the leaves. Glancing farther back now, I see a sight that should terrify me, but it doesn’t. It’s a shambling corpse whose face has been blown to smithereens. Where are we all headed? I look up the hill and there is my father’s cabin at Rum Pond. Smoke is rising from the chimney. The door opens before me, and I step inside. But it is my own house I am entering, and no one is there.

*   *   *

There was a knock at the door. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window. I flopped over and found Sarah’s side of the bed empty. I had been so exhausted that I’d slept through her leaving for school.

She’d sounded so strange the night before. The shock of the murder had affected her almost personally. And she hadn’t even seen the corpse.

The knocking at the door continued with greater emphasis. From the bed, my view of the driveway was blocked. If I wanted to discover who was bothering me, I’d have to get up.

I slipped on some jeans and shambled out to greet my visitor.

On my steps, in the freezing cold, stood a stocky gray-haired woman. She wore the standard uniform of a game warden, with one noteworthy exception—around her throat was a white clerical collar. Along with the Reverend Kate Braestrup, Deborah Davies was one of the Maine Warden Service’s two female chaplains. An ordained Methodist minister, her job was to counsel the parents of children lost in the woods, the families of victims of careless hunters, and wardens like myself who had suffered some trauma in the line of duty. She wore her hair cut fashionably short and spiky, and the red frames of her eyeglasses made her look like a refugee from a New York ad agency. In her hands, uplifted, she bore a doughnut box and a cup of coffee.

“‘Then the Lord said to Moses,’” she intoned, “‘Behold, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.’”

“No thanks,” I replied. “I’ve already eaten.”

Her smile didn’t falter. “You’re not going to make me eat
another
doughnut, are you? I’ve already had two honey-dipped and one chocolate-glazed. Show some compassion for an overweight woman with weak willpower, will you?”

Without really thinking about it, I accepted the greasy box and the cup. We regarded each other across the threshold.

“I thought I’d invite myself on a ride-along,” she said with a flash of teeth.

“Today’s really not the best day, Reverend.”

“Lieutenant Malcomb said I needed to drag my keister over here and park it in your passenger seat.”

So this was an order from on high, then: Comply or else. “I’m not even sure if I’m going out on patrol. I’m supposed to go over to the jail to watch some video taken of the Ashley Kim crime scene. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here. To talk with me about last night.”

She shrugged, never losing that megawatt smile of hers for an instant. “I can keep you company either way.”

“I haven’t even showered yet.”

She removed a Rite in the Rain notebook from her pocket. “I’ll work on my Sunday sermon while I wait.”

Resisting Deb Davies was obviously futile. “Come on in,” I said, stepping aside.

*   *   *

In the shower, I stood under the stream of hot water and thought about the blood-spattered diorama I’d discovered at the Westergaard house the night before.

I wondered if they’d nabbed the professor yet. It was only a matter of time until they did. “It’s always the boyfriend,” Skip Morrison had said.

So why had Charley seemed unconvinced? He always cautioned me against jumping to conclusions. But who else could have killed Ashley Kim? I supposed the Driskos needed to be considered suspects, especially if the DNA evidence came back linking the deer blood on their truck to the sample I’d taken from the road. Those bastards seemed capable of murder—although the timing didn’t make sense. I’d visited their trailer before Ashley Kim was murdered. It scarcely seemed possible that they could have been hiding her somewhere without giving themselves away.

Then there was the anonymous caller who had initially reported the collision. He, too, had been at the scene. But I doubted Menario was investing time or manpower in tracking down the Good Samaritan.

Who else? The caretaker, Stanley Snow, had keys to the house. Add his name to the list.

The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor argues that the simplest explanation is almost always the right explanation. By that reasoning, the murderer had to be Westergaard. Why else would he go missing if he hadn’t killed her?

The eerie similarity of this homicide to the Jefferts case defied my ability to understand. What was the point in Westergaard making the murder look like a replay of the Donnatelli slaying, especially if he was going on the lam? Occam was no help with that question.

When I got out of the shower, I heard the growl of a vacuum cleaner. The Reverend Deborah Davies was, incredibly, vacuuming my living room carpet.

“What are you doing?” I asked, buttoning up my uniform shirt.

“I tracked some mud in.”

This was a fib. Her boots were spotless. “Do you always come into someone’s house and start cleaning?”

“I’m a neat freak.” She wrapped the cord in perfect loops. “But I’ve come to terms with my addiction and admitted I have a problem. That’s the first of the twelve steps. Just eleven more to go.”

“I thought you were writing a sermon.”

“Finished! Do you want to hear it?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’m going to talk about Dante’s
Inferno
.”

“Sounds uplifting.”

She laughed a little too raucously. “Did you ever read
The Divine Comedy
?”

“I was supposed to read it in college.”

“It’s actually pretty funny in places. Dante used his poem to settle a bunch of personal scores. He devised all sorts of elaborate tortures for his enemies in Hell.” She eyed the cardboard box on the coffee table. “Are you going to eat that last doughnut? I get the feeling you don’t really want it.”

“Go ahead.”

More and more, I was coming to the conclusion that Deborah Davies was one of the oddest ducks in the pond. But Ora had told me how helpful she’d been with Charley after their plane crash. I just couldn’t square the idea of a cleric with this chirpy little woman. In my life, I’d known plenty of Roman Catholic priests. Some of them were cold fish, some were a little creepy even, but none was a Bible-quoting, hyperactive goofball.