Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

“Why? You didn’t shoot the moose.”

“She’ll say it was my fault somehow for not watching things close enough. Oh fuck, Mike, I’m screwed. I just bought Aimee a new washer. I can’t afford to lose my job again!”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Billy,” I said. “We need to get a bunch of wardens out here pronto. Each one of the dead moose needs to have its location mapped. Cody Devoe’s dog can help us find any spent shell casings I missed, plus whatever other evidence we can scare up. Cigarettes, candy wrappers. And there might still be other animals out there. Basically, I need to call in the whole fucking cavalry.”

He lifted his bristling blond eyebrows. “Is there any way you can do it … quietly?”

“Billy, this is the worst wildlife crime I’ve ever heard about-and it’s taken place on Betty Morse’s property. You don’t think we can hide this from her?”

“I guess not.”

I patted one of his shoulders, but it was like trying to reassure a boulder. “Let me call my sergeant, and then you and I will go talk to Ms. Morse together.”

I rummaged around behind the seat of my truck until I found the rolled-up U.S. Geographic Survey map that showed the quadrangle for Sixth Machias Lake. I tried to spread it open on the griddle-hot hood of my truck, but the edges kept curling back on themselves. The map was only four years old, but it was already terribly out of date, since it failed to show any of Elizabeth Morse’s new construction. With a pen, I marked the approximate locations of the six dead animals, but I detected no obvious pattern, except that whoever had murdered them was obviously familiar enough with the old tote roads to travel through a woodland maze without getting lost or discovered.

I laid out the evidence bags with the shell casings and the cigarette butts in a row beside the map. My division supervisor, Lt. Marc Rivard, was one of those bosses who always tells you to bring them solutions, not problems. His latest bit of managerial wisdom, which he’d taken to quoting frequently in our monthly meetings, was, “Who needs a carrot when you’ve got a stick?” Rivard had been my warden sergeant until he was suddenly promoted over the summer, after our previous lieutenant was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My new sergeant, Mack McQuarrie, didn’t seem to care what I did as long as I didn’t rile up the powers in Augusta.

Given Rivard’s love of the limelight and the sensational nature of this case-a mass slaughter of animals on the property of the richest and most despised businesswoman in Maine-the lieutenant was certain to take a renewed interest in me. If I didn’t handle this investigation by the book, I could expect him to break his proverbial stick across my nonproverbial back.

Based on the initial evidence, I would tell the lieutenant that two guns had been used, suggesting two different shooters. They had left their brass behind, meaning they were unconcerned that their rifles would ever be connected to these crimes (perhaps they’d planned on tossing their guns into the lake). Either that or they were just careless. The relative scarcity of spent shell casings implied that the killers were extraordinary marksmen; they’d barely wasted a bullet bringing down the moose. As far as the cigarette butts went, all I could determine was that one of the guys, at least, smoked menthols, which provide more of a rush than other forms of tobacco, if you don’t mind ripping the lining of your lungs to shreds. So he had a reckless disregard for his own well-being in addition to that of God’s creatures.

Christ, I thought, I’m going to need all the help I can get on this case.

I put in a call to Sergeant McQuarrie and reached him at a backwoods butcher shop.

During the fall, moose- and deer-cutting businesses sprang up in the forested corners of the state. Most of the meat cutters were solid citizens, but a few of them viewed Maine’s wildlife laws as unnecessary limits on commerce. It behooved game wardens to drop in on these fly-by-night outfits for impromptu investigations. Mack and I had our doubts about the Butcher Brothers of Baileyville.

“Bowditch!” McQuarrie had abused his throat with liquor and tobacco for four and a half decades, and you could hear it in his voice over the phone. “I had a feeling I’d hear from you today. I was hoping it was just heartburn from Peg’s chili. What’s the rumpus, kid?” Mack spoke like a person who’d learned English by watching Jimmy Cagney movies.

I cut to the chase. “Someone shot up six moose on Elizabeth Morse’s private estate.”

“Christ on a cracker.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That about sums it up.”

“They take any meat?”

“No. It was just someone riding around and killing things for kicks.”

I heard a woman’s voice in the background, asking him a question. The line went dead for a second while Mack clamped a hand over the receiver. He came back, his voice overloud against the new sound of a bone saw starting up at the butcher shop. “So where do you want to meet?”

I gave him the directions to the new gate. He told me he’d be there in half an hour. He added that he was bringing “company.” He didn’t elaborate.

“The L.T.’s gonna fucking love this,” he said, using the division nickname for the lieutenant.

“Are you speaking ironically?”

“You’re the college boy. You figure it out.”

McQuarrie was my third sergeant in three years as a warden. The first, Kathy Frost, was the best by far: one of the only women in the service, funny, smart, and hard as nails. To this day, she remained among my closest friends, and I wished I could somehow reach across administrative divisions and pull her from the midcoast to eastern Maine to help me with this investigation. My second sergeant was Rivard, and all I could say about that experience was that it had been mercifully brief. McQuarrie didn’t strike me as a bad guy, but he was a conventional thinker who tended to follow his young lieutenant’s orders and then gripe about them behind his back. I guess that was what happened when you were pushing sixty-three and the finish line was just down the hill.

Billy Cronk was standing above the cow moose with his fists clenched, staring at the carcass the way a person looks into a campfire: mesmerized.

“Billy?”

“I’m trying to think of the assholes I know who might’ve done this.”

“Any names spring to mind?”

“Yeah, the whole fucking phone book. You know how popular Ms. Morse is around here.” He glanced at me with his lip twisted into a smile. “I ain’t so popular myself now that people know who I’m working for. Aimee’s brother won’t even talk to me. Kyle works over to Skillens’ lumber mill. He says I picked my side and I’m going to have to live with the consequences, like he’d prefer his nephews and niece just went hungry.”

I could sympathize with Billy’s plight, but I understood his brother-in-law’s argument, too. Skillens’ was the largest employer in the region, a historic sawmill built in the nineteenth century, when there were still miles of virgin forest in eastern Maine. The company had once owned the land on which we were standing, until hard times had forced it to sell out to Elizabeth Morse. I’d heard Skillens’ was losing big money since Morse cut off the supply of quality hardwood. The mood at the mill was that of a deathwatch.

Sometimes life pushes you to make hard choices. People pretend they can spend their whole lives standing on the sidelines, as if taking a stand and not taking a stand are different things, when really they are both ways of choosing. One’s just more cowardly than the other. As a game warden, I knew what it was like to be hated for no other reason than my uniform. Billy had made a choice, too, even if he didn’t fully understand the ramifications yet.