Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“This whole thing pisses me off,” Billy said by way of apology.

I pointed in the direction our vehicles had entered the clearing. “From the position of the bodies, I’m thinking it was a truck that came in the same way we did. And I don’t think it was just a single shooter who did this.”

“Why?”

“Because one of them had to hold the spotlight while the other took his shots.”

“Couldn’t he have used his high beams?”

I drew an imaginary arc in the air with my hand. “That’s what I thought at first, but the angle is wrong, based on the position of the road. Is it possible any of the gates were left unlocked?”

Billy looked down at his boots again. “Nope. No way.”

“How can you be sure?”

“That’s my job. Ms. Morse is real clear when it comes to rules, and keeping the gates locked is rule number one.” He reached back, grabbed his ponytail, and gave it a thoughtful tug. “So you think there were two guys?”

“At least two.”

“I guess that makes sense. Jeez, I’d like to get my hands on them sons of bitches.”

I shuddered to imagine the punishment my friend would inflict. Over beers one night, he’d told me how he’d seriously injured a man in the pugil-stick-fighting ring at Fort Benning. He’d sent the recruit to the hospital with such a severe head injury, the man was discharged from the army with full medical benefits.

I decided to give my brooding friend some space and walked slowly back toward the road, looking for human footprints in the jimsonweed but finding none but our own. The shooter hadn’t even bothered to venture out into the field to review his marksmanship. He had just opened fire from his vehicle and then driven off.

There were truck tracks in the road, but the conditions were too arid and the ground was too hard to grab any prints. I did come across a cigarette butt lying in a tuft of rabbit’s foot clover. The filter was white, not tan. A Salem, maybe? Or a Marlboro Light? It had rained two nights earlier, but this cigarette didn’t look like it had ever gotten soggy. I returned to my GMC to find an evidence bag.

“Hey, Mike!”

Billy was standing at the edge of the grass. He motioned me toward him emphatically, the way you do with a small child when you come across a frog in a pond. He knelt down to inspect the metal cylinders at his feet.

“Don’t pick those up,” I said. “There might be fingerprints on them.”

He dropped a brass casing onto the ground. “Sorry.”

There were four shells, all from a.22 Magnum rifle.

“That’s a small caliber to take down a moose,” said Billy. “I wouldn’t use my twenty-two on a varmint bigger than a woodchuck.”

That was because Billy Cronk didn’t take reckless potshots at animals, hoping to get lucky. In his mind, it was a cardinal sin for a hunter to use too small a gun on a living creature. You might miss your kill shot and leave an animal mortally wounded. But I knew plenty of cruel and careless men who didn’t worry about the casualties they left behind.

“My dad always used a twenty-two Mag when he was poaching,” I said. “He told me that a twenty-two was powerful but quiet. He said it was deadly in the right hands.”

“Or the wrong ones,” said Billy.

“Or the wrong ones,” I agreed.

In addition to his many other sins, my father had been one of the most notorious poachers in the mountains of western Maine, a man who killed deer, moose, and grouse at will, daring ineffectual game wardens to catch him-which they never did. The idea that his only son had become a warden himself either amused or disgusted him. He kept his emotions in a hermetically sealed box that he refused to open in my presence. But even my poacher father had never committed an act this cold-blooded. To steal the life from another creature as if it had zero value, to kill for fun rather than food or self-defense or revenge-even Jack Bowditch would have been nauseated by this meaningless slaughter.

When I surveyed the distant tree line again, I discovered that the ravens had vanished. They must have flown off while I focused on the moose. I remembered that in Norse mythology, the god Odin had two ravens-Thought and Memory-that he sent out each day to collect information. They were his personal spies. In the evening, the black-bearded birds would return to Asgard, perch on Odin’s shoulders, and whisper the world’s secrets into his ears. What would they tell the father of gods tonight? I stared at the empty tree where the birds had last perched and tried to make sense of an utterly senseless crime.

Four dead moose, all seemingly killed by the same gun in the same night. What had started this killing spree? And what had ended it?

The realization took hold in my mind.

“There are others,” I said.

“What?”

“Whoever did this didn’t just stop at four. They were on a joyride, and they were having too much fun. If we keep looking, we’ll find more bodies. I’m sure of it.”

The image in my head was of redneck punks at a carnival shooting gallery, plinking one target, then the next, until their time was up or they were out of quarters. How many moose could someone shoot in a single night? There was only one way for me to find out.

“I want you to take me everywhere in the area you can remember seeing a moose,” I told Billy.

We found two more corpses before noon: a bull and a cow.

The bull was a monster that had survived many hunting seasons in this pathless forest. For nearly a dozen years, judging from his tremendously humped back and the wear on his lower incisors, he had managed to elude hunters who had hoped to mount his head above a fireplace. And then one night, when all the orange-clad humans had departed the woods for another season, this majestic animal had walked face-first into a.22-caliber bullet. His killers hadn’t even bothered to take home their thousand-dollar trophy; instead, they’d left those magnificent antlers to be gnawed at by porcupines while the moose’s body rotted in the sun.

The cow was just a delicate little thing that most hunters wouldn’t even have troubled with. Billy found it within a mile of Morse’s new mansion, sprawled at the edge of a grove of northern white cedars that the landscape architects had chopped back to make way for a scenic driveway with a view of the lake. I located two.22 long rifle cartridges and a Salem cigarette filter in the roadside needles.

“That’s a different caliber,” Billy said. “The other shells were twenty-two Mags.”

“Yeah, but there was a Salem with the first moose,” I said. “The manner of death is the same, too: an opportunistic shot taken at medium range, probably with the help of a jacklight to blind the animal. This could have been the second man using a different gun.”

Billy glanced up the road in the direction of his employer’s residence. “The Morses should have heard the shot, this close to the house.”

“Maybe they did hear it,” I suggested.

“Ms. Morse didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Did you talk with her this morning?”

“Not yet. But she would have called if she’d heard gunshots.”

“Is she the only one who lives there? Does she have any family?”

He gave me an embarrassed smile. “Yep.”

“What does that shit-eating grin mean?”

“Her daughter Briar’s been living there since she dropped out of college last May.”

“Briar?”

He shrugged as if to suggest the name made no sense to him, either. “Plus, there’s her assistant, Leaf,” said Billy, “and the housekeeper, Vera; the cook, Meagan; and sometimes Mr. Albee spends the night.”

“Who’s he, her boyfriend?”

“No, he’s helping her with this park thing.” A look of alarm widened his blue eyes. “Oh fuck. She’s going to blame me for this.”