Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

I positioned my body so that I was between Leaf and the other men. “Betty needs you, Leaf,” I said.

“The fuck she does. She never has.”

Whatever reconciliation they’d experienced last night hadn’t survived the wee hours of the morning. “I think you should get some rest,” I said.

“And I think you should get out of my face,” he replied.

I’d always sensed an undercurrent of rage beneath that mellow smile and those glassy eyes. It seemed important to remember that this seemingly comical man was a former soldier; he had fought in a land where rice paddies contained hidden land mines and punji traps opened up under your feet. Back in Maine, a warden pilot had busted him for cultivating marijuana on his back forty. Out of desperation, he’d been forced to become the gopher to a cold woman who had shared nothing-neither her wealth nor their daughter’s affections-with him. What did I really know of the darkness in Leaf Woodwind’s heart?

“Get the hell off my land!” he said.

Zanadakis at least seemed to realize that we weren’t accomplishing anything by further antagonizing the distraught man. My lieutenant, however, could never let any perceived insult go unanswered. The prick.

“It’s not your land, sir,” said Rivard through his truck window. “Never was.”

“Fuck you, man.”

As we drove off, I saw Leaf stoop for a handful of pebbles, which he hurled harmlessly into the bed of my truck. “Pigs!” he shouted.

I had been insulted hundreds of times in my job, but this blast from the past was a new one for me.

The lieutenant radioed me from his truck. The colonel had summoned him to Augusta for a briefing. He didn’t say more than that, but I could guess what was happening behind the scenes. Powerful people inside and outside the government had begun asking questions about Marc Rivard and the investigation he’d been running for the past week. No doubt the national networks had begun calling, too, since Elizabeth had just made the rounds of morning TV shows. This story was exploding into a full-blown scandal. When you are a state employee, it is almost always a bad thing if your name begins to surface repeatedly in conversations. I knew this from personal experience.

If I knew Rivard as well as I thought I did, he would have already started searching for someone to blame. For once, that scapegoat wouldn’t be Mike Bowditch. One advantage to being pushed to the periphery of the moose investigation was that no one could accuse me of having screwed it up. My suspicion was that the lieutenant intended to throw Bilodeau-or maybe McQuarrie-to the wolves. Being a political animal himself, Rivard would claw and bite to survive.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Go with Zanadakis and see if you can help him reconstruct the crash scene,” Rivard said. “He’ll want to know where Briar went after she left the property and where she saw the pickup.”

“I already shared that information with him.”

“Just do whatever you can to assist the Crash Reconstruction Unit. I promised them full cooperation.”

Even over the radio, which tends to distort your voice in the worst way, he sounded like a man headed to the dentist’s office-or the torture chamber.

“Good luck today, L.T.,” I said, trying not to sound too phony.

“Ha,” he said.

* * *

I followed Zanadakis back to the place where Briar had hit the tree. The road was still cordoned off, and a skinny Washington County deputy had been given the thankless task of detouring traffic around the lake. A team of state and local officers were already on the scene from the Forensic Mapping Unit. They’d done some of their analytical work the night before-as much as could be done in darkness using two-thousand-watt spotlights-but this morning they had brought along a Leica Total Station, a one-eyed contraption that looked like a surveyor’s computer mounted atop a fluorescent yellow tripod. In a nearby garage, another team of police vehicle technicians and civilian mechanics from the Vehicle Autopsy Unit would be tearing apart the remains of Briar’s roadster to inspect the brakes, suspension, and steering components for clues. And in Augusta, the medical examiner would be running a tox screen on her blood to determine whether she’d been drunk or drugged at the time of death.

Because district wardens are charged with reconstructing boat accidents and snowmobile collisions, we are taught the basics of crash reconstruction at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. We learn terms like occupant kinematics and vehicle dynamics. Our instructors quiz us on the three phases of a collision: precrash, at crash, and postcrash. We are trained to calculate approach vectors and determine velocity by using distance-based positioning analysis. We diagram fatalities using CAD software the same way architects design the contours of new patios.

The science of death is an awesome thing, I thought.

But what difference was technology going to make? All of these experts, all of this precise measuring equipment, and none of it was worth a damn thing compared to a single eyewitness to the event. Briar Morse had lost control of her car and driven into a pine tree. No computer in the world could tell me more than my own eyes.

“Everything will be fine,” I had told her. “Just watch your driving, and everything will be fine.”

Zanadakis did have questions for me. He wanted me to plot out on a topo map where I had been when I’d spoken with Briar: the first occasion, when I’d told her to head east toward Grand Lake Stream, and the second time, when we reestablished contact again. One of his officers would probably retrace my path to test the signals.

The detective seemed to sense my weariness. Maybe he shared my cynicism about the limits of technology to solve the mysteries that occur when neurons misfire in the brains of sociopaths. If there is one thing every cop learns, it is that humans are understandable and predictable constructs-until the moment they go completely haywire.

“So she couldn’t tell you the color of the truck that was following her?” he asked me again.

“All she could see were its headlights. It could even have been an SUV.”

He let out a sigh, His breath smelled of cinnamon chewing gum. “How about the size?”

“She said it seemed ‘big.’”

“So more like an F150 than a Ranger?”

“I doubt Briar could have told the difference,” I said. “I’ve gone over every word she used to describe it, and there’s nothing to narrow it down.”

He sighed again and scribbled something else into his notebook. Then he told me to wait while he conferred with his technicians.

My ex-girlfriend Sarah used to joke about my being a Luddite. She’d made fun of my ineptness using a computer or setting the time on the oven when the clocks fell back in the fall. I couldn’t even program a special ringtone to play on my cell.

“You really are the second coming of Davy Crockett,” she used to say with a laugh.

But it wasn’t as if I was mechanically incompetent. I understood how my Bronco’s engine worked. I could fix balky electrical wires in a wall without electrocuting myself. It was more that I had a deeply seated suspicion of miracles of all sorts, technological and otherwise. My mother had raised me as a Catholic, and she professed to be observant, but temperamentally, she had always been more a person of doubt than of faith. She had no more confidence that science was going to cure her cancer than I had confidence that science would lead us to Briar’s murderer.

A brown creeper landed on the shattered pine and began working its way up the off-kilter trunk, investigating the cracks in the bark for insects. The little bird paid no attention to the uniformed men below with their high-tech gear. The fact that a young woman had collided with the tree and lost her life was of no consequence to the creeper. All it cared about was finding the bugs. I found nature’s indifference to my cares and concerns oddly consoling. If I ever started sinking into despair, I need only step outdoors and look around at the glorious green world.