Paul Doiron - Trespasser

“I got a call from my troop commander, telling me I was suspended. I just called your house to tell you I’d found it. If you didn’t get the message, what are you doing here?”

“I just spoke with Dane Guffey.”

His smile was wide, and I detected the smell of beer on his breath. “‘Dane the Stain!’ That’s what we called him in high school. Where did you run into Dane? The guy’s a fucking hermit.”

“This morning, at the Drisko fire. It turns out Guffey’s a volunteer firefighter.”

“What Drisko fire?”

I realized that Hutchins hadn’t heard the news. From his disheveled appearance, he looked like a troglodyte who’d just emerged from a cavern. “The Driskos are dead. They burned to death in their trailer this morning.”

The look he gave me was pure, unadulterated surprise. “No shit?” He rubbed his stubbled skull. His crew cut was so short, he might have appeared bald from a distance. “Hey, do you want a beer?”

Before I could answer, he turned and disappeared back into the darkened hall. Did he expect me to follow him? My good hand drifted into the pocket of my coat and felt the reassuring heaviness of the Walther. After a long hesitation, I stepped inside the shrouded house.

Something about the place was different all right. And it wasn’t just the drawn shades.

The last time I’d visited, the rooms had felt empty, but now they literally were. Most of the furniture was missing. Nothing was hanging on the walls, and the floors were bare. I’d thought Hutchins and his wife were moving in. Now I realized that they were moving out. It was the second time that day I’d walked through a building in the process of being vacated in a hurry.

I found the trooper in his den, seated on a sofa in front of a huge flat-screen television. The sofa and the TV were the only furnishings in the room. The screen showed college basketball players racing up and down a parquet court. It was the NCAA tournament again. The sound was muted.

“Want one?” He held up a six-pack of dangling cans held together with plastic.

The room flickered with the bright red-and-blue light coming from the television. He unsnapped a beer from the plastic ring and held it out to me. I took the can and opened it, but I didn’t drink.

Hutchins cracked one for himself and continued staring at the screen. “On top of everything else, I’m losing a bunch of money on this game.”

“It looks like you’re moving out,” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

That’s when the realization belatedly arrived. “Where’s Katie?”

“Who knows and who cares.”

I studied the scene in front of me carefully. Hutchins had his long legs stretched out in front of him on the bare floor. I noticed that the arm of the couch had been gnawed down to the wood. “She left you?”

“I kicked her out.” He swiveled his head around on his thick neck, giving me a heavily lidded look. “She was cheating on me. Can you believe that?”

“How did you know?”

“She kept denying it, but I knew she was lying,” he said. “Sometimes you just know things. You see it in their eyes. Like when you pull someone over and ask them if they’ve been drinking, and they say, ‘Yeah. I had two beers.’ Why is it that every drunk always claims to have had two beers? You ever wonder that?”

I remained motionless.

“I always knew Katie was going to be my downfall,” he said. “We should never have gotten married. I don’t think I ever loved her. But somehow we ended up getting married. I can’t even remember why.”

“What do you mean, she was your downfall?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

He gave me a look, like I was an imbecile. “I followed her. That’s what I was doing that night. She told me she was going to the movies.”

On the night Ashley Kim was abducted, Hutchins claimed he’d had car trouble-that was why I’d been rerouted to the crash scene-when in reality he’d been stalking his own wife. “I drove to the theater in Thomaston, but Katie’s SUV wasn’t in the lot. When I got home that night, she was asleep. I woke her up, and she gave me a bullshit story about the movies. That’s how I knew she was cheating.”

That explained the bruise on her face the next morning. I felt a sudden urge to pistol-whip the wife beater.

But Hutchins gave me an imploring look. “What would you have done, Bowditch?” He honestly seemed to want my opinion.

“I would have trusted her.”

His lip curled. “That’s a load of crap. Wait until your woman starts fucking another man, and then come here and tell me how noble you acted when you found out.”

The thought that Hutchins believed we were blood brothers turned my stomach.

“Why didn’t you arrest me last night?” I asked.

“I felt sorry for you.”

“You felt sorry for me?”

“Look at you, man-you’re a fucking mess. We’re both fucking messes.”

My first impulse was to tell him he was wrong. But then I heard Sarah’s voice in my head, pleading with me to get help, and I remembered the contempt in Jill Westergaard’s voice as she accused me of being on a mission to atone for my guilty conscience; I thought of the Vicodin and the whiskey and all my troubled dreams, and the words choked in my throat. Hutchins was right: We were both fucking messes. It took staring into this ugly mirror to see how far I’d fallen.

He gulped down his beer like a man dying of thirst. “So what did Dane the Stain say about me?”

I wondered if he’d forgotten that earlier part of our dialogue. “He said you were at the Harpoon seven years ago, the night Nikki Donnatelli disappeared.”

“So what?”

“He suggested you might have had something to do with her death.”

“Dane thinks I killed that stuck-up waitress? That’s pretty hilarious.”

“I disagree. What do you mean, she was stuck-up.”

“She thought she was better than us natives. Jefferts said he got in her pants, but that was just another of Erland’s lies.”

“Tell me about Jefferts.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed and threw his empty can against the wall. I dropped my own beer on the floor and went reaching for my handgun. But then I saw that he was screaming at the basketball game on television. “These assholes can’t play defense.”

I looked down at the can on the ground, the puddled beer around my boots. Hutchins hadn’t seemed to notice the spillage.

“I guess it won’t be long before the newspapers start saying I murdered both those girls,” he muttered. “That’ll be interesting.”

I kept my hand on the butt of my pistol. “You might want to tell Menario yourself first.”

He swung his head around to look at me again. “Tell him what?”

“Tell Menario the truth about where you were the night of the accident.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“What if he interviews your wife about what happened?”

“You leave Katie out of it.”

Hutchins was a paranoid, self-pitying bully, but looking at him now, slumped in his stinking undershirt on his stinking sofa, I didn’t believe he had murdered anyone. “If you don’t tell Menario the truth about that night, I will.”

“Is that a threat?”

“More like a promise.”

He waved his hand like a tyrant king dismissing one of his vassals. “Get the hell out of here, Bowditch. Go home to your girlfriend. I’m sure she’s as pure as the driven snow.”

For the past few minutes, a revelation had been trying to bust through into my conscious thoughts. My gaze went to the chewed-up arm of the sofa again. “What happened to your dog?”

“The bitch took him,” said Hutchins. “Can you believe that? She took my damn dog.”