Paul Doiron - Trespasser

She excused herself to use the bathroom, leaving me in the drafty kitchen listening to the windows rattle in their casements. Retelling this story had robbed Kathy of her high spirits. I felt bad about that, knowing she’d just returned from a much-needed vacation.

After a few minutes, she returned and squatted down next to Pluto on his rug and began scratching his throat. “So the next day, we went back out again,” she said, “and it was still raining like Noah should have been building an ark somewhere. We were all exhausted by midafternoon. The adrenaline leaves your bloodstream, and all those hours in the field catch up with you. Well, suddenly we got a message over the radio. It turned out someone had made an error assigning the search areas. We’d missed this big swampy swatch of forest. They shifted my group south to have a look at it. Within half an hour, Pluto started running a track. He nearly pulled me off my feet. When he hit that hard, I knew it was Nikki.”

She paused and collected herself before continuing.

“She’d been tied with her arms around the tree, so he could get to her from behind, if you know what I mean. I remember seeing her white body through the rain and thinking she might be alive. She was on her feet and sort of looked like she was resting her shoulders against the trunk, but that was just the way he’d tied her. I told my search party to stay back. I wanted to preserve a single path to the crime scene and keep everyone from trampling over the evidence.”

Exactly what I had not done at the Westergaard house.

“Her jeans were pulled down around her ankles. The rest of her clothes had been cut away, none too gently. She had all sorts of bloody little wounds on her, and this red mark on her forehead where Jefferts must have clobbered her. They never did find her underwear. Her eyes were wide open, but the flies had already been at them. She’d died knowing she was suffocating, and she still had that look of terror and disbelief you see with so many corpses. Death is never real to some people until the moment they realize it’s happening to them.

“I called her name, but I knew there was no point.”

She took a breath, and I saw the toll it was taking on her to revisit this day, which had been one of the worst in her life. I wanted to ask her a question, but I felt inhibited by the grief I was witnessing, so I just sat there and waited for her to continue.

“My partner from the state police radioed in the Code Blue to the command post,” she said. “The next time I saw her, she was in a bag strapped to a stretcher.

“The trial was a circus, as you know. But fortunately, I wasn’t the focus of the defense’s attention. Jefferts’s lawyer-I forget his name-was a total doofus. On cross-examination, he tried to suggest that I might have fucked up the crime scene in some unspecific way. Time of death was what he was arguing-that it would have been impossible for Jefferts to commit the murder, since he was somewhere else when Nikki died, based on the ME’s own testimony. But Danica Marshall squashed that argument like a bug. I was surprised that the AG had assigned her to such a high-profile case, since she was just a kid at the time. But when I saw her in the courtroom, all my doubts went out the window. Jesus, that little cutie has bigger balls than you do.” She paused for comic effect. “No offense.”

“Offense taken,” I said.

The joke had loosened her mood again. She leaned her elbows on the old table, which caused it to creak in complaint. “It sounds like whoever killed this Kim woman took a few pages from Jefferts’s playbook, but I can tell you we nailed the right perp seven years ago. Erland’s exactly where he belongs-at the prison. If I were you, I’d drop that box of files they gave you in a Dumpster on your way home.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not joining the J-Team.” I cracked my knuckles while I considered whether I had the guts to ask her the question buzzing in my head. “What word did Nikki Donnatelli have written on her body?”

Kathy looked as if I’d just punched her in the solar plexus. “What?”

“Ashley Kim also had a profanity carved into her skin.”

“Jesus H. Christ.”

I could see the color rising beneath her tanned cheeks and knew I’d struck pay dirt. “Just tell me the truth, Kathy. I promise you I’m not on another mission to prove anything.”

“It was slut. ” When she spoke again, it was in a tough voice she reserved for arrests. “That was the word on Ashley, right? So I’ve indulged your curiosity. Let’s talk about your job. What the hell have you been up to anyway?”

I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some ATV vandals harassing Hank Varnum.”

“So are you planning on catching them or what?”

“That’s why I came over here,” I said. “Can I borrow your four-wheeler?”

The snow was turning to sleet as I drove my overloaded truck along the sloping, slippery roads from Appleton to Sennebec. Kathy had helped me set up two boards to drive her ATV up into the bed of my pickup. The weight of the four-wheeler gave my truck excellent traction, but it made me feel a bit top-heavy whenever I rounded a curve, which was every thirty seconds or so.

I wasn’t sure if the snow made it more or less likely that Barter would be venturing out again this evening. Hopefully, the new powder would serve as an enticement. There wasn’t quite enough of the white stuff anymore for snowmobiling, but a person could have some fun skidding around on an all-terrain vehicle.

The story Kathy had told me about the search for Nikki Donnatelli kept intruding on my thoughts. I looked over at the passenger seat, where I’d moved Ozzie Bell’s box of files. Kathy had advised dumping them in the trash on the way home, but somehow I had managed not to do so.

Kathy’s pursuit ATV was a real beast. It had a 71-horsepower engine with an auto-locking front differential and dynamic power steering. She told me that, if properly handled, her Can-Am/Bombardier could go as fast as the fastest four-wheelers on the trails. She’d emphasized the words properly handled when she’d given me the keys, as if she doubted the likelihood of my delivering her prize toy back to her in a single piece. She had reason to worry. Like most overgrown boys, I loved the sensation of going really, really fast.

I parked my truck in the woods half a mile from Varnum’s place and inspected the armor Kathy had loaned me. Her plated riding boots wouldn’t fit, so I was stuck with my own field boots and work gloves. Fortunately, I could squeeze my big head into her helmet and goggles. I knew my uniform was going to get trashed from flying mud and roost-the grit and rocks an ATV’s wheels churn up-but there was no way around that.

I unfastened the tailgate and propped up the ramps Kathy had given me. Then I climbed up into the bed and started the engine. The machine gave a large, harsh growl.

Traveling backward on a four-wheeler is a funky art. I could just imagine explaining to Kathy how I’d flipped her ATV over while getting it out of my vehicle. Like most quads, hers had a winch on the front to pull it out of mud holes, but that wouldn’t do me any good if I found myself pinned beneath the machine.

I did a couple of circuits on the nearest stretch of trail, trying to regain my muscle memory. Posture is everything when riding an all-terrain vehicle, and I needed to get loose, relaxing my shoulders and elbows and tilting my knees into the gas tank. The machine fought against my efforts to master it. The handlebars pulled against my forearms when I tried to turn them, and the vibration from the engine sent a shock wave up my spine that crashed against my cerebellum. The sleet, mixed now with freezing rain, began falling more heavily, screwing with my vision through the plastic goggles.