Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“Crystal clear,” I said.

The problem with being the messenger, I realized, is that sometimes you get shot.

I decided to drive back into Grand Lake Stream and grab a cup of coffee while I plotted my next move. What was I going to tell McQuarrie about my encounters with Jeremy Bard and Elizabeth Morse? I was astonished to find a familiar teal-colored GMC Sierra parked outside the Pine Tree Store and the man himself sitting at one of the picnic tables with a newspaper spread across the wet tabletop. It was as if, by thinking about him, I had conjured the sergeant out of thin air.

His face was even redder than usual. He had removed his black baseball hat. His swirl of white hair reminded me of meringue. “I thought you were supposed to be standing guard over at the queen’s palace,” he said, sounding as dry-mouthed as a man crawling through the desert.

“She released me from her service for the day.” I peered at the newsprint as I sat down across from him on a bench dampened by the rain. “What’s in the paper?”

Mack took a sip from a Styrofoam cup filled with steaming black coffee. “You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He showed me the front page of the Bangor Daily News. The headline couldn’t have been much bigger:

SNIPER TARGETS HOME OF ELIZABETH MORSE

No One Injured in Nighttime Attack

An accompanying photograph, taken from the lake, showed Moosehorn Lodge on its piney point, but no signs of damage were evident. My guess was that it was a file photo the editors had used in a pinch.

“And then there’s this one,” said Mack, pointing to a smaller article beneath the lead item:

STILL NO LEADS IN MOOSE MASSACRE

Wardens Continue to Seek Answers

“Has the lieutenant seen this?” I asked.

“We just got off the phone. I think he broke one of my eardrums.”

“What do the stories say?”

“Basically, that we’re all a bunch of fuckups. The L.T. keeps saying we expect to make an arrest ‘imminently.’ But after five days without a bust, the reporters are starting to smell the horse manure. There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar reward out there, and we can’t make a case? How do you think that’s playing in the governor’s office?”

“So we’re not getting anything good from Operation Game Thief?”

McQuarrie removed a tin of chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and unscrewed the lid. He pinched out a few brown threads and tucked them inside his cheek. “We’re getting a shitload of calls, but nothing useful so far. That kind of money always brings out the crazies. Yesterday I was on the phone with a psychic from California! She said she was in touch spiritually with the souls of our dearly departed moose.”

“What about the evidence we collected at the kill sites?”

“No DNA matches on the cigarettes. No prints on the candy wrappers. None of those twenty-two shells you collected were worth a damn, either, by the way.”

I tried not to think of the hours I’d spent on my hands and knees collecting them. “Bilodeau seemed to be excited about the shell casings and bullets he collected at Morse’s house.”

“Bill’s got some trick up his sleeve, same as always. But who knows? Maybe this time he’s cracked it.”

“You don’t sound very confident, Mack.”

Using both hands, he wadded up the newspaper into a softball-size projectile and hurled it at the top of the nearest garbage can. He missed by a mile. “There goes my second career with the Celtics,” he said. “I’m probably gonna need a new job after next week.”

“So what do you want me to do today?” I asked. “I can run down some of those OGT calls.”

“Maybe,” he said. “The L.T.’s talking about having another strategy session tomorrow. He wants to bring in the state police, which shows you how desperate he is. He’s got Tibbetts at a checkpoint way the fuck out on the Stud Mill Road, like that’s going to do anything. Devoe’s been hanging around gun shops, trying to see who bought twenty-twos recently. Bayley and Sullivan are visiting the local sporting camps for the second time. As if the guides are suddenly going to remember they had a couple of sports last week boasting about slaughtering moose.”

McQuarrie had a reputation as a company man; he might crack wise occasionally about the lieutenant or some of the other officers up the chain of command, but he never displayed any lack of confidence in the decision-making ability of his superiors. What I was witnessing from him-this outburst of exasperation-was surprising, if not completely shocking.

I hesitated before asking my next question. “What about Bard?”

“He’s doing a surveillance detail on Chubby LeClair.”

“Yeah, I know. Chubby’s been calling me, bitching about him. I’m not sure how he got the idea we were friends. Have you talked with Jeremy recently?”

He spit tobacco juice into his half-filled coffee cup. “Just before you got here. Why?”

So Bard hadn’t told Mack about my trip to Talmadge or our confrontation in the gravel pit. That seemed strange. It went completely against my sense of the man as a whining kiss-ass. “I was just wondering.”

“Speaking of friends,” said McQuarrie, “the lab guys found your buddy Cronk’s prints on a can of Budweiser in the road where Moose A was shot. Bilodeau’s been out to see him a few times. You talk to Billy recently?”

“Couple of days ago,” I said. “He asked me if he was eligible to receive Morse’s twenty grand if he helps catch the guys who shot the moose.”

“That’s all we need-a mountain-man vigilante.” The sergeant’s knees made a creaking sound as he rose to his feet. “If you want to make yourself useful, keep an eye on him. Billy Cronk on the rampage is a scary thought.”

Mack told me to “go do warden stuff” for the rest of the day. If Morse changed her mind and decided she needed me, I should drive over to Moosehorn Lodge and seek to calm the troubled waters. Otherwise, I should patrol my district and catch up on the calls that had come in while I’d been preoccupied with the moose massacre.

A woman with a heavy New York accent had reported an injured bald eagle in the backyard of her waterfront estate in East Machias. I drove over to have a look. It turned out to be a seagull, which took off on two strong wings when I approached. Two guys were fishing illegally on Mopang Stream, which had closed for the season on the first of the month. I wrote them summonses and confiscated the two brook trout they had caught on jigs. The fish were beautiful: fat and orange-bellied, with hooked jaws and brilliant yellow dots along the sides. Another woman-a wizened lady in Dennysville, whose house smelled of cigarettes and gin-had a problem with a saw-whet owl that had flown down her open chimney and taken roost atop a bookcase. After chasing the bird around the house for half an hour, breaking a Hummel figurine in the process, I managed to capture it in my stinky salmon net. The little owl, which was no bigger than a pigeon, seemed no worse for wear, but I put it in a box and drove it to the house of the local wildlife rehabilitator. He inspected the bird’s primary and secondary flight feathers, found no signs of damage, and tossed the bird into the sky above my head. It winged away, making a direct line for Dennysville, as if intent upon returning to its roost atop the bookcase.

Out of curiosity, I made a detour past Karl Khristian’s walled compound. He’d hoisted a new Confederate flag on a pole-an ironic choice for a man whose ancestors had almost certainly fought for the Union-but otherwise I saw nothing noteworthy at the castle. The bald little man seemed to have gone into his bunker.