Paul Doiron - Massacre Pond

No such luck. As we rumbled past the carcass, I saw Morse’s green SUV slow and then stop, and I stepped hard on my brakes. I turned off the engine and hopped out of the vehicle. In my peripheral vision, I saw Billy’s truck continue toward the gate. Maybe I could stall them long enough for Mack to ride to my rescue.

Leaf Woodwind and the daughter were content with rolling down their windows to gawk at the body in the weeds. But Morse, true to her reputation, wanted to inspect the carnage firsthand. I caught up to her as she was stepping out of the vehicle.

“Ms. Morse,” I said. “It would be better if you stayed away from the scene until we’ve had a chance to have a closer look around.”

I could smell the floral odor of useless organic bug dope on her skin. “I’d like to say a prayer to mark the departure of this animal’s spirit.”

Under her all-business demeanor, it was easy to forget that she had once been a hippie.

“Let her see the moose!” Briar said through the backseat window.

“I think it would be best for everyone to remain on the road,” I said.

Elizabeth Morse smiled, showing chemically whitened teeth. “Warden Bowditch, you’re not really trying to make an enemy of me?”

“You seem to have more than your share of enemies,” I said. “Would you really notice another one?”

Instantly, I regretted having spoken my thoughts aloud. I’d been making so many strides in carrying myself professionally over the past year. I was about to apologize, but she cut me off with a short, sudden laugh.

“Aren’t you the saucy one.” She tilted her head forward to make eye contact with me over the top of her sunglasses. “I take it you don’t approve of me or my plans for Moosehorn National Park.”

“It’s not my job to approve or disapprove of you.”

“What happened to the brave teller of truths who was just standing here? You don’t like me. Do you?”

I took a deep breath. “Ms. Morse, I don’t know you well enough to dislike you.”

“That doesn’t seem to stop most people.”

I was saved from continuing the conversation by the roar of a truck engine behind me.

An unmarked teal GMC patrol truck rolled to a stop about twenty feet from my front bumper. Two people climbed out.

The driver was a stocky warden with a beet-red face and thick white hair. Even in his sixties, Mack McQuarrie was in no danger of ever going bald. He had other worries, though: melanoma from a life spent outdoors without ever using sunscreen; heart disease from a diet that leaned heavily toward red meat fried in grease; esophageal cancer from daily doses of chewing tobacco and scotch. Mack was one of those rugged Maine woodsmen who can hike up a mountain in a snowstorm without breaking a sweat but are destined to keel over a month after they retire, dead from one of a dozen predictable and preventable causes.

The person with him was a young woman, and the second I realized who she was, the rest of the world dropped away. It was as if I were looking through a tunnel straight at her face. She had a prominent jaw that wasn’t exactly pretty, but the combination of full lips and high cheekbones would have attracted the interest of a fashion photographer if he’d spotted her walking down the street. She was tall and lanky, with long brown hair pulled back tightly from her face and secured by a rubber band. She was wearing cheap sunglasses, oil-spotted jeans tucked into rubber boots, and a khaki shirt with the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife logo stitched over one of her small breasts. I’m not sure how many men’s heads she would have turned with no makeup, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, and defiantly not giving a damn about her pinched hair or the sweat stains under her arms. But behind those sunglasses, I knew, were eyes like Chinese jade.

And on her left hand was a diamond engagement ring. From twenty feet away, I saw it glinting in the sun.

“Where’s the moose?” asked Stacey Stevens before anyone could exchange greetings. The daughter of my old friend and mentor, retired chief warden pilot Charley Stevens, was never one to waste time on pleasantries.

“Over there,” I said.

Mack came straight at us. “You must be Ms. Morse. I’m Sergeant McQuarrie, of the Maine Warden Service.” His own voice was always too loud, in part because his hearing was going, but mostly because he liked to use a tone of command with impressionable civilians.

Elizabeth Morse didn’t seem impressed. “What did you do with my man Cronk?”

“We left him at the gate to admit the other wardens on the way. We understand multiple animals were slaughtered on your property, Ms. Morse.”

Stacey brushed past me, all business. “Which way did you go in, Mike? Never mind. I see your bootprints.”

“You’re not afraid of her disturbing the evidence?” Elizabeth Morse asked me.

“She’s a wildlife biologist,” McQuarrie said.

I tried not to watch Stacey while I spoke to my sergeant, but my eyes kept drifting. “Ms. Morse wants to have a closer look at the moose,” I said, “and I was telling her she needed to wait until we’d done a sweep of the scene.”

“You probably don’t want to get too close, ma’am. Those animals smell pretty bad alive, and dead’s a whole lot worse.”

“I used to be a sheep farmer, Sergeant. I know that mammals of all kinds stink.”

McQuarrie’s face tightened, as if he wasn’t sure whether he’d just been insulted. “Warden Bowditch, can you bring me up to speed here?”

He turned his back on Elizabeth Morse and escorted me through the weeds in the direction of Stacey and the moose. I was glad Morse couldn’t see me wincing. After all my talk about the sanctity of the crime scene, Mack was acting careless and cavalier when there might be ejected rifle shells or other important clues around us.

“Jay-sus,” he whispered. “She really does think she’s the queen of England. So there are six dead critters?”

“I’m betting there are more,” I said.

We stood over Stacey, who was down on both knees beside the moose. She’d put on a pair of latex gloves and was poking and prodding the animal’s body. I tried to observe her actions from a dispassionate distance, but my heart was beating so loudly, I was surprised they both couldn’t hear it.

I’d met Stacey the previous winter, after knowing her parents for years. At the time, I’d been involved with another woman-maybe not the best romantic choice I’d made in my life-and I’d tried to pretend to myself that I was not powerfully attracted to my friends’ daughter. The fact that Stacey didn’t like me for a variety of reasons, some of them legitimate, didn’t help matters. Nor did her engagement to the handsome and well-to-do heir of a local logging company.

“I couldn’t find an entry wound,” I said.

“There are two, actually,” said Stacey. “One behind the mandible-it broke the poor guy’s jaw. The other was a missed lung shot. Basically, he bled to death.”

“The others were all shot cleanly,” I said. “Pretty impressive head shots.”

“Multiple shooters,” McQuarrie pronounced.

“That’s what I was thinking. I found two different-caliber cartridges, too: twenty-two long and twenty-two Mag.”

McQuarrie glanced around in the grass, as if suddenly realizing that there might be actual evidence lying about underfoot. “We need to police this whole area.”

“A little late for that.” It was Elizabeth Morse, who’d wandered up behind us while we’d been focused on the moose.

Mack thrust out his chest. “Ma’am, I asked you to stand back,” he boomed.

“Oh, please, gentlemen. Let’s cut the bullshit,” said Morse. “I followed your own footprints in the weeds, so I can hardly have contaminated anything more than you already have. This animal died because of me, and I have a right to mourn its suffering.”