Paul Doiron - Trespasser

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ask your friends on the J-Team. While you’re at it, tell them to stop slandering me in the newspapers.”

“They’re not my friends. And maybe if you stopped lying about Jefferts, they’d get off your back.”

My jujitsu must have worked, because he poked me hard in the ribs. “Everything I put in my report was the truth. I can’t be held responsible for what Winchenback said.”

“What did he say?”

He ran his tongue across his teeth and spit again, but nothing much came out.

I repeated the question. “What did Winchenback say?”

Guffey began gathering his turnout gear and stuffed it into its oversize bag. Over his shoulder he muttered, “I told you I’m done talking about it.”

“Where can I find Detective Winchenback, then? I’ll ask him myself.”

He gave a snorty laugh. It reminded me of the sound a neighing mule makes. “Sennebec Cemetery. Six feet under. Cancer of the tongue, ironically.”

“So Winchenback lied in his testimony,” I said.

“I never said that.”

“But it’s why you quit the sheriff’s department.” It was a wild guess, but I knew instantly from the way his back muscles tensed that I was correct.

Guffey threw his turnout bag on top of a pile of planks in the bed of his pickup. “I quit for a bunch of reasons, and they’re none of your fucking business. What do you care about my life anyway?”

“I care because I was the one who found that dead girl, and I want to nail the bastard who raped and smothered her.”

“Good luck with that.”

“I don’t think you’re as cynical as you pretend to be.” Hadn’t Sheriff Baker said almost those exact words to me a few days ago?

“I’m going home now.” Evidently, Guffey was as jaundiced as he seemed. He reached for the truck door handle.

I felt my opportunity to learn something from him slipping away. Anger and desperation caused me to grab the top of the door as he slid behind the wheel. “I don’t know what happened to make you curl up inside a shell. But if this psychopath kills another person, you’ll have blood on your hands.”

He yanked the door closed so hard, I had to snatch my hand away to avoid having my fingers amputated. “Go fuck yourself,” he said through the window.

I had to shout to be heard above his revving engine. “You think Winchenback and Marshall railroaded Erland Jefferts, don’t you? You think someone else might have killed Nikki Donnatelli and planted evidence to incriminate Jefferts.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror to see if the coast was clear to back up. “Read my report.”

“If Jefferts didn’t do it, who did?”

“I’m sure your buddy Hutchins has some ideas.”

“Curt Hutchins? The state police trooper?”

To my surprise, he rammed the gearshift into park. The truck sat where it was, idling. Whatever dark secret Guffey was keeping wanted to come out. “Ask him why the J-Team hasn’t dragged his name through the mud like they did mine.”

I thought I understood what the ex-deputy was getting at, but I wasn’t certain. “Do you mean Curt Hutchins was living around here seven years ago?”

“Living around here?” Guffey snorted again. “He and his buddies were drinking at the Harpoon the night Nikki vanished.”

I’m not sure I staggered, but I definitely felt the mud slide beneath my feet. “Did the police ever look at Hutchins as a suspect?”

“Why should they?” said Guffey. “Winchenback had a ‘confession’ from Jefferts.”

I was stunned. “Well, what do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think.” The ex-deputy threw the truck into reverse again. “That’s a lesson I learned seven years ago.”

I watched the former deputy swing his pickup around and then rumble down the wet hill and out of view.

Now what? I wondered. Should I call Menario and tell him what Guffey told me? But why would the detective listen to me about Hutchins or anything else? Sheriff Baker might believe me. I reached inside my jacket for my phone and instead encountered the grip of my pistol. I kept forgetting that I’d lost my cell.

I saw Morrison ambling down the hill toward his police cruiser. “Skip!”

He turned to wait for me. “Can I borrow your phone?”

Grinning, he offered me his cell. “You’re not going to call one of those phone-sex numbers, are you?”

It occurred to me that if I called the sheriff and mentioned Hutchins’s name as a suspect, I’d be incriminating him without any evidence-exactly what Ozzie Bell and the J-Team did to half the men in Seal Cove. For whatever reason, the trooper had allowed me to drive home the previous night. It seemed pretty low to repay his leniency by making him the subject of a homicide investigation based on nothing but Guffey’s hearsay.

“Maybe you can tell me,” I said to Skip. “Is Hutchins on duty today?”

“I heard they put him on paid leave while Internal Affairs finishes its proctological exam.”

“Ouch.”

“You got that right, brother.”

The only fair thing to do was talk with Hutchins man-to-man. I owed him that courtesy at least. I said good-bye to Morrison and started my Jeep.

But as I drove north along the crooked peninsula, I began to wonder about the wisdom of confronting the man in his own home when I was suffering from a broken hand and acute Vicodin withdrawal. If Hutchins really had murdered two young women, what did I imagine would happen-that he would just admit his guilt and accompany me to the Knox County Jail for booking?

As had been the case the previous week, I saw a state police cruiser parked in the drive. The Dodge Durango wasn’t there, but a set of wet tire tracks led across the asphalt to a closed garage door. The lawn was the same muddy mess, although a few green shoots were pushing up in random places and the red buds of the sapling maples had started to swell.

I climbed out of the Jeep and took a deep breath. Behind Hutchins’s house, mauve-colored hills rose in the distance. A kettle of turkey vultures-I counted twenty-one birds soaring in tight spirals-wheeled overhead.

When I looked down again, Hutchins was standing on his front step with the door swung open behind him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt with stained underarms. He was barefoot and unshaven. He didn’t look well. There was an unhealthy pallor to his skin.

“You didn’t have to drive all the way over here.” It sounded like he’d been expecting me.

“I thought I should.”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Let me go get it.”

Then he disappeared inside the house.

Get what? I felt as if I’d wandered into the middle of a Shakespeare play.

There seemed to be something different about the place. Then I realized that all the shades were drawn. It made me think of the Driskos’ trailer. Lonely men liked to live in caves.

But Hutchins was married. I tried to remember the name of his wife. Katie, was it? I remembered her skittishness at meeting me, the sunglasses, the way she kept her face turned away when we spoke. Had she been hiding an injury?

I marched up the flagstone walkway to the front stoop and ran smack into Hutchins. I kept forgetting how big a bruiser he was until I found myself looking up at the cleft in his chin. Standing so close, I could tell he hadn’t applied any deodorant that morning.

“Here.” In his enormous hand was my cell phone.

“Where did you find it?”

He frowned, as if this question was one he’d already answered. “On the roadside after you drove off.”

“If you had the phone with you last night, why didn’t you just drop it off at my house? I know you followed me there.”