Trespasser (2 page)

“That’s all right, Mike,” she said in a muted voice.

“It’s just that a car hit a deer in this fog,” I said.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Just the deer. Maybe we can see that movie tomorrow night.”

“Amy said it wasn’t a good film anyway.”

Neither of us spoke for a while. Something was definitely bothering her.

“I’m sorry I missed dinner,” I offered.

“It was just pea soup. You can heat it up.”

I tried lightening the mood. “Why do they compare fog with pea soup anyway? It’s not like it’s green.”

But she wouldn’t play along. “I’ll see you when you get home, all right?”

“I love you.”

“Please be careful,” she replied. It was the way she ended many of our calls.

2

The night was getting colder, or maybe it was because my uniform was damp. The sensation was that of being wrapped in wet gauze. Shivering, I got on the radio. “Lori, I’m ten-twenty on the Parker Point Road. I’ve located the Ford Focus, but there’s no one here. Who called in the accident—was it the driver?”

“Negative. It was someone passing by. He said he’d stopped and spoken to the young woman who hit the deer. She called a tow company and was waiting for the wrecker. The caller said she was a little shaken up but uninjured. He said he wanted to make sure an officer dealt with the deer in the road.”

“But the caller didn’t identify himself?”

“He said he didn’t want to get involved.”

In my experience, this meant that the guy who’d phoned in the accident was probably driving drunk—or operating under the influence, in Maine lingo. What we had here was the Good Samaritan impulse versus the fear of being arrested on an OUI charge.

“Was the caller on a cell or a landline?”

“He was on that pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage.”

It was an abandoned repair shop located two miles down the road. “Can you contact Midcoast Towing and see if they got a phone call about this from the driver?”

“Ten-four.”

The car, I noticed, was a rental with Massachusetts plates. So where was the driver? I walked up and down the road a hundred yards in either direction, shining my flashlight along the mud shoulder to see if the young woman had staggered off into the trees. But there was no sign of any footprints.

I applied myself to the problem of the missing deer.

There were hunks of hair caught under the fender and more of it floating in the viscous pool of blood in the road. This evidence established that the Focus had indeed struck a deer and not some weirdo who happened to be walking in the fog dressed like Daniel Boone.

I wondered if my anonymous Good Samaritan had been the one to help himself to the deer. Under Maine state law, any driver who hits a deer or moose has first dibs on the meat. After that, it’s up to the responding officer to dispose of the carcass as he or she sees fit. Dealing with a hundred pounds of dead but still-warm animal is usually the last thing someone who’s just totaled a car wants to worry about. I routinely brought the remains to a butcher who worked with the Rockland food bank or traded it to my informants in exchange for tips on local poachers. Other officers passed the meat along to families that were going through tough times.

Sometimes the underprivileged took a more active role in their own nourishment. I knew of some penniless backwoods characters who sat around the cracker barrel listening to police scanners. If they heard about a deer/car accident, they would rush to the scene to beg for free venison. Half the time, the officer was just glad to be rid of the hassle. Other times, if no cop happened to be present yet, the game thieves would abscond with the roadkill. It was possible the man who’d reported the accident fell into this category of self-help opportunists.

I decided to collect blood and hair samples for DNA evidence. Pinching someone for stealing roadkill wasn’t at the top of my priority list, but the samples might come in handy if I needed to prove serial wildlife violations someday. Poaching convictions had been won on slimmer bits of thread.

I was squatting on the cold asphalt, tweezing hair into a paper bag, when I heard a diesel engine approaching. On cue, my radio squawked: “Twenty-one fifty-four, Midcoast Towing said they did receive a call.”

“Thanks, Lori. The wrecker’s here now.”

As the truck rumbled to a halt, the driver turned on his flashing amber lights and rolled down his window. I recognized the ruddy, blond-bearded face inside. We often sat at the same lunch counter at the Square Deal Diner in Sennebec, but I couldn’t remember his name. I’d been assigned to the area for only a year, and there were still plenty of days when everyone I met was a stranger.

“Warden Bowditch, whatcha got?” The inside of the truck cab smelled fragrantly of pipe tobacco.

“I was going to ask you that.”

“I heard a lady from Boston hit a deer. I’m supposed to haul off her car. Hey, you look like you’ve been mud wrestling.”

“Yeah, I took a spill. Did the woman say she needed a ride? Because she doesn’t seem to be around here anywhere.”

“Well, I didn’t talk to her myself, you know. That’s not the way it works. But I can find out for you.” He picked up a clipboard from the passenger seat and held it close to his eyes to read the chicken scratch. “Her name is Ashley Kim. What’s that—Korean?”

I shrugged.

“My old man fought in Korea,” he said. “He hated that show
M*A*S*H,
though.”

While the trucker got on the CB to his dispatcher, I ransacked my memory for the blond man’s name. I’d learned all sorts of mnemonic tricks at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy to help recall information for my police reports, but for some reason, I never applied these strategies to my personal life. As a result, I was constantly forgetting dentist’s appointments, high school classmates, et cetera. I had a vague recollection that the driver went by some odd nickname.

He swung open the truck door and hopped down: a misshapen man whose legs seemed too short for his torso, as if he’d been cobbled together out of two different bodies, a small and a tall. Just like that, his name came to me: Stump Murphy.

He wore canvas duck pants with the bottoms rolled up, a blaze orange hunting shirt, and a camouflage vest. Curly blond locks escaped from beneath his watch cap, only to be recaptured in a ponytail. On his belt, I noticed a small holster contraption holding a corncob pipe.

“Here’s the scoop,” said Murphy. “I guess Miss Kim said she didn’t need a ride. I don’t know if she was calling her husband or friend or what, but she said she already had a lift. She just wanted the car hauled off. She said she’d contact the rental company later.”

I followed him around to the passenger door. He reached under the flaccid air bag for the glove compartment and groped around until he found the rental agreement. “Here you go, Warden.”

Ashley Kim had reported her address as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Probably she’d been visiting someone on Parker Point.

“Did she leave a cell-phone number with your dispatcher or any way to contact her locally?”

“Nope.”

“Does your phone system have caller ID?”

“I have no clue.”

I worked my flashlight beam around the inside of the car, but there were no personal belongings to be seen. Same with the trunk. The situation seemed to be exactly what it appeared. “I need to fill out an accident report.”

“Guess Miss Kim didn’t know she was supposed to stick around,” he said.

“She’s not the first.”

“Maybe she was afraid of the Breathalyzer.”

I left Stump Murphy to refill his pipe and went to start the paperwork. My sergeant, Kathy Frost, jokingly referred to her own GMC pickup as her “office,” but mine was more of a dusty shed. Inside I kept a laptop computer, toolbox, rain gear, change of clothes, personal flotation device, ballistic vest, spotting scope, binoculars, Mossberg pump shotgun, shells and slugs, tire jack, come-along, assorted ropes, flashlights, body bag, fold-out desk, batteries, law books, maps, spare .357 ammunition for my service weapon, a GPS mapping receiver, wool blankets, an official diary, and lots of bags to stuff animal parts in. If I was lucky, I might even find what I was looking for.

I had the interior dome light on and was readjusting the movable arm that held my computer in place above the passenger seat when a state trooper arrived. He pulled up behind my truck and paused awhile inside, as if making a phone call, before he finally got out. He cast a damned big shadow as he came toward me.

“What’s the story, gentlemen?” He was the size of an NFL offensive lineman: shoulders a yard wide. I’m a big guy—six-two, 180 plus—but he made me feel like one of the Seven Dwarfs. He had on a heavy raincoat and that wide-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat Maine state troopers wear. At first glance, I didn’t recognize him.

Murphy broke the news: “A woman hit a deer.”

“So I heard.” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. He could have palmed a basketball with that hand. “I’m Curt Hutchins,” he said by way of introduction.

“Mike Bowditch. You’re the new guy at Troop D.”

“New? I grew up in Thomaston. But, yeah, I transferred over from the turnpike.” His hair had been shaved so close to the scalp that he looked bald, but his face was handsome and boyish, with a big dimple in the middle of his chin. “Sorry, I couldn’t get here sooner. The engine wouldn’t start after I went home for supper.”

“Dead battery?”

“Bad spark plugs.” He pointed at the crash site. “So where’s our unlucky driver?”

I told him the entire sequence of events, from the initial call I’d received from Dispatch, to my belated appearance on the scene, to Murphy’s arrival shortly thereafter and our quick search of the vehicle. “I have this bad feeling I’m having trouble shaking,” I admitted.

“Because somebody stole the deer?”

“Not just that. I’m just wondering where she could have gone. This is an isolated stretch of road. I’d feel better if I knew where to find this Ashley Kim.”

“She caught a ride,” he said confidently. “She was probably shit-faced and called a friend before the cops showed. I ran the plates just now with the rental company, and her Mass. license says she’s twenty-three. Probably a party girl.”

His characterization of a woman he didn’t even know grated on me. “I’m thinking I’ll poke around in the woods.”

Hutchins didn’t respond.

His silence made me uncomfortable, so I rambled on: “I just want to make sure she didn’t wander off, injured.

He crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. I could tell he’d just made a mental connection. “You’re Jack Bowditch’s son.”

Seven months had passed, but I still couldn’t escape the notoriety. No matter what else happened in my life, I would always be the son of Maine’s most notorious criminal. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing. I’d just heard a rumor that you’d left the Warden Service.”

“You heard wrong.”

Without meeting my eyes again, he said, “I’ll handle things here if you want to take off.”

“What about the missing woman?”

“I’ll make a few more calls, take a look around.” Somehow, I doubted his intentions. After mere minutes of knowing him, Hutchins already impressed me as an arrogant asshole who operated with utter disregard for protocol. He wouldn’t be the first cop to fall into that category. My own conduct during my father’s manhunt had made me the poster child for the fuck-the-rules school of law enforcement. “I guarantee you she ran away before we could bust her for OUI,” he said.

Stump Murphy ambled over, trailing a pungent cloud of pipe smoke. “What’s the holdup, fellas? I’ve got other calls, you know.”

“I’ll file the report,” Hutchins said. “It’s a state police matter now.”

I glanced at the wrecked car one last time. I was exhausted, cold, and slathered in mud. An hour earlier, I’d embarrassed myself in front of Hank Varnum. Now this jerk trooper was rubbing my nose in my father’s guilt.

To hell with Hutchins, I thought. To hell with this lousy night.

“It’s all yours,” I said.

I climbed into my truck, started the engine, and turned carefully in the road to avoid the pool of blood.

And then, God forgive me, I went home.

3

I first met Sarah Harris during our freshman year at Colby College, in central Maine. I’d fallen asleep in the back row of Chemistry 141, and she gently touched my shoulder after the lecture had ended and the classroom was emptying. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty” were the first words she ever spoke to me. From the start, I knew I was bewitched.

Sarah had grown up in suburban Connecticut, and she’d come from money. Her father had started a profitable Web site in the nineties, during the first round of the dot-com boom, only to lose millions when the bubble burst. The specter of poverty continued to haunt her. In college, she had a recurring nightmare of the bursar kicking her out of school because her tuition check had bounced.

We didn’t share many interests, beyond an insatiable sexual appetite for each other and a passion for the outdoors. Her hobbies were less bloody than mine—she was an avid hiker, swimmer, and bird-watcher—but she found it fascinating that I would get up before dawn to go deer hunting in the woods outside Waterville. Her city friends used to call me “Bambi killer” and mock my camouflage jacket and L.L.Bean boots. But Sarah ignored them. She recognized something feral underneath my clean-cut exterior, and like many good girls from proper families, she was aroused by the scent of danger.

After graduation, when I told Sarah I wanted to become a game warden, she initially took the news as a prank. When she realized I was serious, she came to the conclusion that the experience would merely be a rite of passage for me—like riding a motorcycle across Mongolia or working on an Alaskan crab boat for a season—but that eventually I would settle down and make money. Maybe move to Boston and get a law degree.

Sarah’s own obsession was with kids, early-childhood education specifically. Her life’s plan was to teach for a few years—“get my hands dirty,” she said—then enter a Ph.D. program. She saw the radical transformation of the nation’s school systems as being one of the historic imperatives of our times and talked about dedicating her life to educational reform.