Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

A sharp turn in the road loomed ahead. When I braked, I nearly lost control of the vehicle. Without meaning to, I had been pushing harder and harder on the gas pedal. Someday I was going to kill myself doing that.

My cell phone rang on the way home to my trailer. My heart did a little leap in my chest until I saw that the number wasn’t Jamie’s.

“Bowditch? It’s Mack McQuarrie.”

He was the warden in an adjoining district, the one that included the border city of Calais and the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. McQuarrie was a big, bluff veteran who’d worked for three decades in the woods and didn’t much cotton to the changes that had swept through the Warden Service since he’d earned his red jacket-all those female wardens and high-tech gadgets. He was always teasing me about my effete Colby College education. In McQuarrie’s mind, the only school a Maine warden should have graduated from was the school of hard knocks.

“Hey, Mack. What’s up?”

“Heard about your swimmer.” His voice was raspy from a lifetime of chewing tobacco and sipping scotch. “If he went into the river above the falls, he’s probably halfway out to sea by now. One of those scallop draggers will probably pull him up in its nets.”

My windshield wipers smeared snowmelt across the glass. “You never know.”

“I just got off the phone with Charley Stevens,” McQuarrie said, dispensing with the small talk. “He told me you were looking for a sledder you saw out on the Heath the night of that big blizzard. Guy on a green sled, dressed all in green.”

Leave it to Charley to stick that Roman nose of his into my business again.

“That sledder nearly ran me down on the Bog Road.”

“Well, I busted a guy for playing chicken with other sledders last month over by Meddybemps Lake. He was this little asshole with a great big mouth. A real pint-size piece of shit.”

“Did he have a green sled?”

“Yep. Green Arctic Cat ProCross turbo.” McQuarrie coughed away from the receiver. “Anyway, after I finished gabbing with Charley-Jay-sus, that old bird likes to talk-I checked my laptop for his name and address. You want it?”

“What do you think?”

“Name’s Mitchell Munro. He lives over on Wyman Hill in Township Nineteen.”

It’s a wonder I didn’t careen off the road into a telephone pole. Jamie’s ex-husband, Lucas’s father, had been the man we’d seen the night Randall Cates was murdered. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

“Do you have his street address?” I asked.

“You’re welcome. Happy to help.”

I took the hint. “Thanks, Mack.”

McQuarrie couldn’t resist giving me the pickle one last time before we got off the phone. “Didn’t they teach you manners in that fancy finishing school where you matriculated?”

I couldn’t help but smile. If McQuarrie knew the word matriculate, he wasn’t quite the proud Neanderthal he made himself out to be.

I stopped my truck at the nearest safe spot and hit my hazard lights. I turned on my computer and read the information that Mack had e-mailed me about Munro. It took a while for his criminal record to come up. He had two convictions for driving to endanger, three for simple assault, one for soliciting a prostitute, and an aggravated drunk-driving conviction. He had been found guilty of misdemeanor drug possession, harassment, criminal trespass, and public intoxication. In short, he was a choirboy.

Had Prester and Randall gone to the Heath to sell drugs to Mitch Munro? I had trouble picturing Jamie’s ex-husband doing business with her ex-boyfriend, but stranger things happened in the woods of Washington County. And it wouldn’t have taken much for such a truce to be broken. Munro was a violent little man, and he had a reason to resent the thug sleeping with his former wife. What if Jamie’s ex-husband had killed Cates? It would explain Prester’s reluctance to name the man they’d met in the Heath, if it meant fingering Lucas’s father.

I didn’t even want to contemplate the possibility that Jamie might have known all along.

I considered telephoning Zanadakis, but would he even care at this point about the identity of my asshole snowmobiler? Prester was dead. For all I knew, the state police considered the case closed. Besides, all I had to back up my theory was McQuarrie’s report about Munro’s owning a green sled. Until I saw the snowmobile myself, I felt reluctant to open my mouth.

My better judgment, such as it was, cautioned me against any further involvement in the investigation. At the same time, the memory of that runt insulting Jamie in front of their little boy brought my blood to a simmer. If Munro had let Prester take the rap for him, he deserved punishment beyond anything I could inflict with my own fists. Besides, what else do I have to do? I thought. Rivard would wait until first light to begin the recovery efforts for Prester Sewall’s remains.

The snow had begun to let up, but the roads felt slick beneath my tires. The digital thermometer on the dashboard told me that the temperature had climbed since morning, rising into the mid-twenties. By the standards of mid-February in Down East Maine, that was close to balmy, especially after the extended stretch of subzero days we’d just endured. I passed a reflective yellow-and-red sign that showed the outline of a leaping deer. CAUTION. HIGH HIT RATE.

After I crossed the line into Township Nineteen, I fiddled with the GPS to bring up the map of local streets and goat paths. The screen of the DeLorme showed Wyman Hill Road branching off from the north side of Route 277. It didn’t look like much of a thoroughfare.

Nor was it, in fact. The road was poorly marked and hadn’t received a visit from a plow truck in days. My pickup climbed a steep hill through ankle-deep snow. Halfway up, my headlights illuminated a snowshoe hare, as white as the wintertime, bounding from one row of pines to the other.

The road emerged from dense evergreens into a pale landscape of rock walls and snow-covered fields. The top of the hill had been razed for blueberries. I passed one lighted farmhouse and then another before I began to descend again into a copse of paper birches. A low-slung ranch house sat back in the trees. It had tattered gray clapboards and a gray shingled roof that seemed to sag under the weight of the accumulated snow. The GPS told me that I’d reached my destination.

I surveyed the house. The dark windows reminded me of the eye sockets of a skull.

From the road, I saw no vehicles, no cars or trucks, no green snowmobiles. I parked at the end of the drive and waited for a light to come on in a window or outside the front door. None did. The question was whether someone was watching me through the curtains with a loaded shotgun. In my line of work, you always approach a house after dark with extreme caution. Just because a property isn’t posted doesn’t mean the owner won’t unload a burst of buckshot in your face. You have to put yourself in the place of the paranoid home owner. In a stretch of wild country plagued by poverty and infested with drug addicts, home invasions are all too frequent occurrences.

I reached down to touch the grip of my. 357 SIG. The holster came equipped with a self-locking hood that required me to release a special catch in order to draw my weapon. The gadget was designed to prevent someone from overpowering me, pulling my sidearm loose, and shooting me through the heart with it. An assailant might eventually succeed in getting my pistol away from me in a wrestling match, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Gray clouds billowed over the hilltop as the line of snow showers passed away into the Bay of Fundy. I blew out my breath and watched the vapor dissolve in the cold air. The paper birches rustled in the darkness. I started up the drive.