Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

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 Chateau 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?”

“Trying to catch a ride.”

“Seriously?”

She gave me a sour-lemon expression. “No.”

“Then what?”

“Get out of the truck, and I’ll show you.”

I followed her down the gravel road, trying to keep my eyes trained on her shoulders. Under the heavy boughs of the hemlocks and cedars, the air felt wetter and heavier than out in the open sun. Somewhere, off to the side of the road, I heard the musical sound of water tumbling down cascades in a hidden stream. A white-throated sparrow sang in the distance: a pretty, thin whistle that sounded like Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody.

“Here,” Stacey said, pointing at a clump of fallen birch leaves.

It took me a moment to spot the shell casing.

I squatted down and poked at the brass with a twig. It was a.22 Magnum.

“This was where that first moose was shot,” she said. “I followed the blood trail from the meadow on Morse’s land through a beaver flowage and back through that cedar stand.”

“You tracked the blood through a beaver pond?” I asked in amazement.

“Not through the water. The moose stumbled along the edge for a while. And it left some blood on the pondweed out in the middle. You could see it from a certain angle.”

“I’m impressed.”

She shook her head as if I was being ridiculous and then knelt down beside me. I could smell her perspiration, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all.

I smiled at her, but her face was impassive as she rolled up her pant legs above her calf. It was tan and beautifully shaped. I didn’t know why she was showing it to me. Then she reached down into the top of her Bogs boot and extracted something black, red, and wriggling. It was a leech, swollen with blood. She nonchalantly flicked it off into the bushes. “Thought I’d missed one,” she said, rolling the pants back down over the boot.

“I need to call this in,” I said.

“Before you do, I should show you something else.”

She motioned me farther down the road. This time, she didn’t need to point to get my attention. Approximately ten feet from the shell casing, in a dry ditch that the road makers had carved to keep the road from washing out in the springtime, lay a crushed red-and-white piece of aluminum. It was a sixteen-ounce beer can.

“Do you think they’re connected?” Stacey asked. “The cartridge and this can?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the Budweiser tall boy I’d seen on Billy Cronk’s picnic table three weeks earlier.

My first call was to McQuarrie, alerting him to the.22 cartridge Stacey had found. He told me to hang tight while he sent another warden to “assist.”

My second call was to Billy Cronk’s cell phone. There was no answer.

I tried his home number and got Aimee on the fifth ring. “Oh, hello, Mike,” she said. “Is everything OK?”

“Sure, Aimee. Everything’s fine. Why do you ask?”

In the background a child bawled in that unconvincing way a hurt-acting child tends to do. “Billy said he was meeting you this morning, and he sounded real upset over the phone-I can always tell-and I haven’t heard from him. Now here you are calling the house. It has to do with Ms. Morse, don’t it?”