Paul Doiron: Trespasser

“That’s a possibility.”

“There was another thing that had me puzzled. I read Ozzie Bell’s files, and Stanley Snow was never mentioned. All of your other cousins attended your trial or signed letters demanding that you be pardoned. Snow never did either of those things, and I wondered why.”

He adjusted his shirt collar but didn’t respond.

“The J-Team has been pretty aggressive in naming other people as potential suspects in Nikki’s murder,” I continued. “Calvin Barter, Mark Folsom, the Driskos, and half a dozen others. Why not Stanley Snow? The rigging tape used to suffocate Nikki had been exposed to salt water, so it might have come off his uncle’s lobsterboat, the Glory B. If your defense team was throwing darts against the wall, how come one didn’t hit your buddy Stan?”

His eyes were hooded now. “You should ask Ozzie that.”

“I asked Sheriff Baker. He said you told the J-Team to leave Stanley out of their witch-hunt.”

“Because I didn’t think he did it. He was my friend and I didn’t think he did it.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Simple as that.”

“All along, you’ve been presenting everyone with only two choices. Either you’re totally guilty or you’re totally innocent. Nobody ever considered the possibility that you might first have been complicit in Nikki’s abduction-and then later been played for a patsy by your cousin.”

Two bursts of color appeared on Jefferts’s cheeks. “Go to hell.”

I decided not to respond to the personal attack. “You did say one thing that I believed. I think you and Nikki did fool around a little. Mark Folsom said he threw you out of the bar that night because you grabbed Nikki, but I bet there was some history there. My theory is that you waited for closing time to apologize. I think that somehow you sweet-talked her into going for a ride with you.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“There’s no way Nikki would have gone anywhere with a troll like Stanley Snow.”

Beads of sweat had appeared along his forehead. “You’re just making this shit up.”

I continued my story. “You drove Nikki to your secret spot down lover’s lane, and then something happened. Maybe you tried to force yourself on her and she said no. Whatever happened, you knocked her senseless, because the coroner’s report said she had a wound on her forehead that no one could explain. She was hurt, and you panicked. That’s when you called ‘Steady Stanley’ for help.”

Jefferts restrained himself from flying across the table. “Fuck you.”

“When Snow showed up, he found you passed out from drinking a gallon of booze. Even better, Nikki was out cold, too. Here was this hot little waitress lying helpless in front of him, this stuck-up rich girl. I’m guessing it was then he realized he could rape her and pin it on you. So your good friend-the man you called for help-snatched her away and left you lying in your own puke.”

On the tabletop, his hands were balled into bony fists. “You can’t prove any of that.”

“The only evidence linking Snow to Nikki’s disappearance was the call you made to him from your phone, asking him to come help you deal with her. He needed to get rid of it. That’s why the police never found a BlackBerry in your truck.”

He settled back in his chair, composing himself. “That’s a nice story,” he said with a twitchy grin. “But I’m getting a new trial, Bowditch, and it’s all thanks to you. After Stanley killed those people, there’s no way they’ll be able to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Within six months, I’m going to be out of this shithole.”

I rested my good elbow on the table and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Do you want to hear a secret? When Snow was beating the crap out of me, he did something strange. I was too fucked-up to understand what he meant at the time, but he held up his cell phone and told me it was his ‘Get Out of Jail Free card.’ What do you think he meant by that?”

“Who the fuck knows?” he asked, but I could tell he did know.

“He kept your message, Erland, from the night you called him. It’s what he’s had hanging over you all these years, the reason you never gave him up to the cops. He told you that if you ever mentioned his name to anyone, he’d just play the message, and any hope you had of ever getting out of here would go up in smoke.”

Jefferts’s mouth went slack with disbelief. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Stanley Snow dropped his BlackBerry inside my house, Erland. Whose message do you think was on it?”

Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the prison. It was another dreary, misty day. A light rain had fallen near dawn, stopped for a while, and then started drizzling again. The extended forecast called for more of the same. It was mud season, after all.

My sergeant opened the door of her patrol truck for me and helped guide me inside. Then she went around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“I think I scared him.”

She started the engine. “So you told him about Snow’s cell phone?”

“Yep.”

She pressed on the gas and turned the truck in the direction of the prison gate. “I don’t suppose you mentioned that there was no message on it from Erland Jefferts.”

“I didn’t say there was-not in so many words.”

“His defense will subpoena it. They’re going to find out you were lying to Jefferts.”

“By the time they do, Menario’s going to have found the actual phone with that message. Snow must have kept it somewhere safe. It was his ace in the hole in case Erland ever tried to strike a plea bargain.”

I could feel her looking at me out of her peripheral vision. “That’s high-stakes poker, Grasshopper.”

The windshield was fogging up. I reached down and hit the defroster. “It’s my ass on the line, not yours.”

She scratched her nose absently. “My question is why Snow stopped killing for seven years and then started again. He must have had other opportunities. I guess we’ll never know what really happened.”

I’d thought a lot about this question over the past forty-eight hours, trying to piece together the sequence of events that occurred the night Ashley Kim vanished. Snow had known that Hans Westergaard was secretly driving over from Bretton Woods to meet his mistress, and he must have plotted an ambush. My guess was that he’d already attacked and tied up the professor before Ashley hit her deer. Snow had probably answered the phone when she called Westergaard asking for a ride. She knew him from her visit to Maine the previous summer, knew he was her lover’s caretaker, and thought nothing of blithely getting in his pickup.

What Snow hadn’t counted on was that the Driskos would arrive at the crash scene while he was there. Dave and Donnie weren’t the sharpest tacks in the box, but even those morons could put two and two together. And so father and son embarked upon their ill-fated scheme to blackmail him.

The medical examiner had determined that Ashley Kim and Hans Westergaard died within hours of each other. Snow had evidently kept them imprisoned in the house overnight while he repeatedly violated the young woman. Had he made Westergaard watch? My gut told me he had.

The next day, Snow had left the unfortunate couple alive in the house so he could set about creating alibis for himself. I had seen him at the Square Deal Diner that morning. Sometime later in the afternoon, he had returned to the cottage to rape Ashley Kim one last time before he smothered her to death. He’d then driven Westergaard’s Range Rover to that isolated road in the woods, where he’d cut the man’s throat with a kitchen knife. He removed whatever bonds he’d used to immobilize his captive and then hiked out of the forest. By the time I found the Rover, the ice storm had erased whatever footprints he might have left. Snow figured that if fiber evidence placed him inside the vehicle, he could always claim that the professor let him use the SUV from time to time.