Paul Doiron - Trespasser

“He used rigging tape to smother the Donnatelli girl,” Lori said. “And he carved a word in her body, too. I’m sure all those nuts who think Jefferts is innocent are going to pounce on this girl’s death.”

At that moment, Charley appeared in the hall. His brow was deeply furrowed and his eyes were baggy. “I’ve been looking over hill and dale for you,” he said.

“They’re sending me to the hospital to get stitched.”

He looked at my red and dripping arm and shook his head in amusement. “I would hope so!”

“Morrison is supposed to give you a lift back to my house.”

“Can I speak with you in private before we go our separate ways?”

“I need to get back to my APU,” Lori said. “Take care, Mike. Get some sleep.”

After she’d left, I said, “What’s up?”

“I thought you might like to see this.” He handed me a piece of paper printed from a computer; it was a screen shot from the Web site of the Harvard Business School:

Dr. Hans Westergaard is a Harvard Business School Professor of Management practice. He holds degrees from the the University of Copenhagen, the Harvard Business School (M.B.A.), as well as (Econ) from the London School of Economics (Ph. D.). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm School of Economics and is the author of the book Magt Ford?rver: Svig og Fejl i de Multinationale Corporation (Power Corrupts: Fraud and Failure in the Multinational Corporation). Dr. Westergaard has been identified in a variety of rankings and surveys as one of the world’s most influential thinkers on leadership and accountability in the financial services industry in the context of the financial crisis.

The accompanying photo showed a dignified older man in a black suit. He had thick silver hair that looked expensively styled, a prominent nose, and puckish gray eyes. I wouldn’t have identified him as a European except for his open collar-no power tie for Hans Westergaard-and rimless eyeglasses.

“He doesn’t look like a sexual psychopath,” I offered.

“Most of them don’t.” Charley gestured for me to take a seat at the table in the training room. “You’re going to hear this anyway, and I figure it should come from me.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember the Erland Jefferts trial?”

“Lori and I were just talking about it.”

“I didn’t want to spout off back at the house, because I don’t believe in leaping to conclusions. But there are certain resemblances between the two homicides.”

“But Jefferts is still in the Maine State Prison,” I said. “No wonder Baker is nervous. People have been claiming for years that he’s innocent. Either there’s a copycat killer out there or those fanatics were right and Jefferts was imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit.”

Charley fell silent. He leaned his knobby elbows on the table and pressed the fingertips of both hands together. It seemed as if he was searching for the right words to tell me some bad news.

“Is there something else?”

He nodded. “I heard a deputy talking. He was down to the Westergaards’ house when Walt Kitteridge was examining the body. You know Walt? He’s the state medical examiner. According to the deputy, Walt said that rigor mortis was still progressing in the deceased. It hadn’t reached its peak.”

In the back of my mind, a half-recollected textbook triggered an alarm. “What does that mean in terms of time of death?”

“It could mean a lot of things, but I guess there was still some residual body heat in the inner organs.” His voice was hoarse and he paused to get some saliva going. “The indication is that Ashley Kim didn’t die last night after the accident. She was probably killed sometime this afternoon.”

The realization was like a hand closing around my throat.

I could have saved her.

Seven years ago, a pretty waitress named Nikki Donnatelli disappeared on her way home from a late-night shift at the Harpoon Bar in Seal Cove. The next morning, while searching for the missing girl, the cops instead found Erland Jefferts passed out behind his steering wheel on an isolated woods road.

A local lobsterman known for his dashing good looks and substance-abuse problems, Jefferts had been bounced out of the Harpoon for making lewd advances to Donnatelli. Fearing the worst, the Maine state police and game wardens began an extensive search of the surrounding forest. The hunt took the better part of two rain-soaked days, but eventually Warden Kathy Frost and her cadaver dog, Pluto, located the body of the lost girl. Nikki had been bound with rigging tape to a tree, tortured, and raped. Because of the presence of a petechial hemorrhage, the medical examiner determined that she had died from asphyxiation after Erland Jefferts taped shut her nose and mouth.

Or so the prosecution claimed. The defense argued otherwise, and there were certain inconsistencies in the evidence to back up Jefferts’s story. Problems with the autopsy, a plausible alibi placing the accused in police custody at the medically determined time of death, some shucking and jiving by one of the investigating detectives on the witness stand-there were holes in the prosecutor’s case, but not enough to persuade the jury of Jefferts’s innocence. When the judge sentenced the handsome and articulate lobsterman to life imprisonment in the Maine State Prison without the possibility of parole, a group of his supporters began organizing to prove his innocence and secure his release. They called themselves “the J-Team.”

For seven years, they’d worked with a pro bono legal team to hire private investigators, write letters to newspapers, and file friend-of-the-court briefs to secure a new trial. But it was all for nothing. Erland Jefferts was still rotting away in his cell. And no more beautiful girls had gone missing in Knox County in all the years since.

That was before Ashley Kim took a wrong turn on a fog-darkened road on Parker Point.

I still remember the morning I first read the story. It was the summer following my graduation from high school, a rainy July day. My stepfather, Neil, was at his law office and my mother was having lunch with one of her tennis friends when I shuffled into the kitchen. The Portland Press Herald was spread out on the breakfast table. The headline read

WAITRESS MISSING IN SEAL COVE

The story was sensational, but what caught my attention was the accompanying photograph. It showed an achingly beautiful brunette, a few years older than I was, smiling at the camera. I knew from the moment I saw her that Nikki Donnatelli was dead. My heart didn’t care. I was smitten by a ghost.

That summer, I was working as sternman on a lobsterboat out of Pine Point. The previous year, I had gone to work in a remote sporting camp in the North Woods, where my estranged father lived, to wash dishes and scrub floors. Mostly, I had gone to be with my dad. The experiment had proved a disaster. So the next year, I decided to try my luck at sea. The sternman acts as the lobsterman’s assistant, which means you do all the shitwork-emptying the rancid bait bags and throwing the decaying remains to the gulls, rebaiting the mesh sacks with “fresh” herring, coiling the algae-slick lines, stacking the brick-weighted traps. You don’t actually get to haul traps or pilot the boat, or at least I didn’t. And while my employer earned a small fortune, he paid me only a flat wage. Still, I preferred lobstering to selling sneakers at the mall.

Most lobstermen listen to country-and-western music while they work, but my boss preferred talk radio. All the news that summer was about the beautiful Nikki Donnatelli and her despicable killer, Erland Jefferts. As a result, I found myself following each development in the case as the story shifted daily.