Trespasser (33 page)

“Maybe you can tell me,” I said to Skip. “Is Hutchins on duty today?”

“I heard they put him on paid leave while Internal Affairs finishes its proctological exam.”

“Ouch.”

“You got that right, brother.”

The only fair thing to do was talk with Hutchins man-to-man. I owed him that courtesy at least. I said good-bye to Morrison and started my Jeep.

But as I drove north along the crooked peninsula, I began to wonder about the wisdom of confronting the man in his own home when I was suffering from a broken hand and acute Vicodin withdrawal. If Hutchins really had murdered two young women, what did I imagine would happen—that he would just admit his guilt and accompany me to the Knox County Jail for booking?

*   *   *

As had been the case the previous week, I saw a state police cruiser parked in the drive. The Dodge Durango wasn’t there, but a set of wet tire tracks led across the asphalt to a closed garage door. The lawn was the same muddy mess, although a few green shoots were pushing up in random places and the red buds of the sapling maples had started to swell.

I climbed out of the Jeep and took a deep breath. Behind Hutchins’s house, mauve-colored hills rose in the distance. A kettle of turkey vultures—I counted twenty-one birds soaring in tight spirals—wheeled overhead.

When I looked down again, Hutchins was standing on his front step with the door swung open behind him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt with stained underarms. He was barefoot and unshaven. He didn’t look well. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.

“You didn’t have to drive all the way over here.” It sounded like he’d been expecting me.

“I thought I should.”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Let me go get it.”

Then he disappeared inside the house.

Get what? I felt as if I’d wandered into the middle of a Shakespeare play.

There seemed to be something different about the place. Then I realized that all the shades were drawn. It made me think of the Driskos’ trailer. Lonely men liked to live in caves.

But Hutchins was married. I tried to remember the name of his wife. Katie, was it? I remembered her skittishness at meeting me, the sunglasses, the way she kept her face turned away when we spoke. Had she been hiding an injury?

I marched up the flagstone walkway to the front stoop and ran smack into Hutchins. I kept forgetting how big a bruiser he was until I found myself looking up at the cleft in his chin. Standing so close, I could tell he hadn’t applied any deodorant that morning.

“Here.” In his enormous hand was my cell phone.

“Where did you find it?”

He frowned, as if this question was one he’d already answered. “On the roadside after you drove off.”

“If you had the phone with you last night, why didn’t you just drop it off at my house? I know you followed me there.”

“I got a call from my troop commander, telling me I was suspended. I just called your house to tell you I’d found it. If you didn’t get the message, what are you doing here?”

“I just spoke with Dane Guffey.”

His smile was wide, and I detected the smell of beer on his breath. “‘Dane the Stain!’ That’s what we called him in high school. Where did you run into Dane? The guy’s a fucking hermit.”

“This morning, at the Drisko fire. It turns out Guffey’s a volunteer firefighter.”

“What Drisko fire?”

I realized that Hutchins hadn’t heard the news. From his disheveled appearance, he looked like a troglodyte who’d just emerged from a cavern. “The Driskos are dead. They burned to death in their trailer this morning.”

The look he gave me was pure, unadulterated surprise. “No shit?” He rubbed his stubbled skull. His crew cut was so short, he might have appeared bald from a distance. “Hey, do you want a beer?”

Before I could answer, he turned and disappeared back into the darkened hall. Did he expect me to follow him? My good hand drifted into the pocket of my coat and felt the reassuring heaviness of the Walther. After a long hesitation, I stepped inside the shrouded house.

Something about the place was different all right. And it wasn’t just the drawn shades.

The last time I’d visited, the rooms had felt empty, but now they literally were. Most of the furniture was missing. Nothing was hanging on the walls, and the floors were bare. I’d thought Hutchins and his wife were moving in. Now I realized that they were moving out. It was the second time that day I’d walked through a building in the process of being vacated in a hurry.

I found the trooper in his den, seated on a sofa in front of a huge flat-screen television. The sofa and the TV were the only furnishings in the room. The screen showed college basketball players racing up and down a parquet court. It was the NCAA tournament again. The sound was muted.

“Want one?” He held up a six-pack of dangling cans held together with plastic.

The room flickered with the bright red-and-blue light coming from the television. He unsnapped a beer from the plastic ring and held it out to me. I took the can and opened it, but I didn’t drink.

Hutchins cracked one for himself and continued staring at the screen. “On top of everything else, I’m losing a bunch of money on this game.”

“It looks like you’re moving out,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

That’s when the realization belatedly arrived. “Where’s Katie?”

“Who knows and who cares.”

I studied the scene in front of me carefully. Hutchins had his long legs stretched out in front of him on the bare floor. I noticed that the arm of the couch had been gnawed down to the wood. “She left you?”

“I kicked her out.” He swiveled his head around on his thick neck, giving me a heavily lidded look. “She was cheating on me. Can you believe that?”

“How did you know?”

“She kept denying it, but I knew she was lying,” he said. “Sometimes you just know things. You see it in their eyes. Like when you pull someone over and ask them if they’ve been drinking, and they say, ‘Yeah. I had two beers.’ Why is it that every drunk always claims to have had two beers? You ever wonder that?”

I remained motionless.

“I always knew Katie was going to be my downfall,” he said. “We should never have gotten married. I don’t think I ever loved her. But somehow we ended up getting married. I can’t even remember why.”

“What do you mean, she was your downfall?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

He gave me a look, like I was an imbecile. “I
followed
her. That’s what I was doing that night. She told me she was going to the movies.”

On the night Ashley Kim was abducted, Hutchins claimed he’d had car trouble—that was why I’d been rerouted to the crash scene—when in reality he’d been stalking his own wife. “I drove to the theater in Thomaston, but Katie’s SUV wasn’t in the lot. When I got home that night, she was asleep. I woke her up, and she gave me a bullshit story about the movies. That’s how I knew she was cheating.”

That explained the bruise on her face the next morning. I felt a sudden urge to pistol-whip the wife beater.

But Hutchins gave me an imploring look. “What would you have done, Bowditch?” He honestly seemed to want my opinion.

“I would have trusted her.”

His lip curled. “That’s a load of crap. Wait until your woman starts fucking another man, and then come here and tell me how noble you acted when you found out.”

The thought that Hutchins believed we were blood brothers turned my stomach.

“Why didn’t you arrest me last night?” I asked.

“I felt sorry for you.”

“You felt
sorry
for me?”

“Look at you, man—you’re a fucking mess. We’re both fucking messes.”

My first impulse was to tell him he was wrong. But then I heard Sarah’s voice in my head, pleading with me to get help, and I remembered the contempt in Jill Westergaard’s voice as she accused me of being on a mission to atone for my guilty conscience; I thought of the Vicodin and the whiskey and all my troubled dreams, and the words choked in my throat. Hutchins was right: We were both fucking messes. It took staring into this ugly mirror to see how far I’d fallen.

He gulped down his beer like a man dying of thirst. “So what did Dane the Stain say about me?”

I wondered if he’d forgotten that earlier part of our dialogue. “He said you were at the Harpoon seven years ago, the night Nikki Donnatelli disappeared.”

“So what?”

“He suggested you might have had something to do with her death.”

“Dane thinks I killed that stuck-up waitress? That’s pretty hilarious.”

“I disagree. What do you mean, she was stuck-up.”

“She thought she was better than us natives. Jefferts said he got in her pants, but that was just another of Erland’s lies.”

“Tell me about Jefferts.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed and threw his empty can against the wall. I dropped my own beer on the floor and went reaching for my handgun. But then I saw that he was screaming at the basketball game on television. “These assholes can’t play defense.”

I looked down at the can on the ground, the puddled beer around my boots. Hutchins hadn’t seemed to notice the spillage.

“I guess it won’t be long before the newspapers start saying I murdered both those girls,” he muttered. “That’ll be interesting.”

I kept my hand on the butt of my pistol. “You might want to tell Menario yourself first.”

He swung his head around to look at me again. “Tell him what?”

“Tell Menario the truth about where you were the night of the accident.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“What if he interviews your wife about what happened?”

“You leave Katie out of it.”

Hutchins was a paranoid, self-pitying bully, but looking at him now, slumped in his stinking undershirt on his stinking sofa, I didn’t believe he had murdered anyone. “If you don’t tell Menario the truth about that night, I will.”

“Is that a threat?”

“More like a promise.”

He waved his hand like a tyrant king dismissing one of his vassals. “Get the hell out of here, Bowditch. Go home to your girlfriend. I’m sure she’s as pure as the driven snow.”

For the past few minutes, a revelation had been trying to bust through into my conscious thoughts. My gaze went to the chewed-up arm of the sofa again. “What happened to your dog?”

“The bitch took him,” said Hutchins. “Can you believe that? She took my damn dog.”

37

The day was dissolving into darkness by the time I escaped from Hutchins’s cave.

I had no doubt that, under the wrong circumstances, he could be a very dangerous man. The idea that this thug identified with me, that he thought we were kindred spirits, bound together by mutual bad luck, a hatred of women, and who knew what else, sickened me more than anything he’d actually said.

I pulled the Jeep over onto the shoulder of the Catawunkeg Road to think through Hutchins’s story. He had been at the bar when Nikki disappeared. He had been at the crash scene when Ashley disappeared. He was a police officer. Women would trust him.

He could have easily shown up at the crash scene while Ashley Kim was still there and offered her a ride to Westergaard’s house. The next day, he could have sneaked back to Parker Point to rape her and abduct the professor. I remembered how Hutchins had gone alone into the house after Charley and I had broken in and the countless minutes he’d spent inside. Had he been searching for incriminating evidence he might have left behind?

I’d begun to wonder if I’d just escaped a close encounter with the Grim Reaper.

But if Hutchins was a cold, calculating killer, how could I explain the drunken mess of a man I’d just found at his house? He’d permitted me to walk into his den, accuse him of murder, and then waltz out again, unharmed, when he could have shot me and dumped my body at the bottom of a flooded quarry.

Something didn’t add up. It was as if I were standing too close to a painting in a museum and could only see splashes of color, when what I really needed to do was take a step back. Only then would I see the larger design.

I needed to return to the intersection where my involvement in this all began, back to the accident scene on Parker Point.

*   *   *

As the temperature had warmed through the course of the afternoon, a fog had crawled up from the sea. Chilled by arctic currents washing down from Labrador, the Gulf of Maine remained unbearably cold all year long. When the sun heated the land, a mist would creep in from the coves and harbors.

I drove directly to the site of the accident. The rain had fallen and the snowplows had come along and scraped the deer blood from the road. I pulled my Jeep over to the approximate place I’d first parked and tried to re-create the scene in my head, but my memories already seemed to be dissolving. The angle of the wrecked car along the road, the location of the blood pool, the places where I’d set up my hazard markers—all the details were melting away into a gray haze.

What if Ashley Kim’s homicide was never solved? Sarah had reminded me of the sad litany of unsolved murders in Maine. Every day that went on without a break in the investigation suggested that Ashley Kim was herself dissolving into some sort of fog. Without the closure of an arrest and conviction, the woman would become a kind of ghost. In time, her name would cease to refer to a specific person—an intelligent young woman from Massachusetts who had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time—and become a local watchword for fear. People in Seal Cove would tell their daughters about her in whispers.

How did that old legend of the vanishing hitchhiker go? A traveling salesman sees a young woman standing along a roadside at night. He stops to give her a ride. She provides him with a street address, then sits mutely while he drives her home. When the salesman arrives at the house, he goes around to the passenger door to let the pale girl out, only to discover she’s disappeared. He knocks on the door, and the man who answers tells him that his daughter died in a car accident one year earlier, at the very spot the salesman saw the apparition.

A car came rushing past me out of the fog. It didn’t have its headlights on, so it seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then disappeared just as fast. My heart clenched up before it began forcing blood back through my circulatory system.