Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

Rivard was wearing his sunglasses, as always, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed focused on Mack McQuarrie and the activity around the airboat.

I continued thinking out loud. “I still think it was dumb luck that they got stranded there in the storm. And I don’t think the Spragues recognized Prester when he showed up on their doorstep. His driver’s license says his name is John, and his face was disfigured. That was why they called Doc for help. It was only later, when they came upon Randall in the Heath, that they realized he was the man responsible for one girl’s death and for their own son’s turning himself into a vegetable. You’re a father, Marc. What would you have done in that situation? You could kill the bastard-and no one would ever know.”

I wasn’t sure if my sergeant had been listening until he turned his head. “What are you suggesting?”

“I think Ben Sprague was the one who really killed Randall Cates. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. Or maybe he and Kendrick did it together. I could see Kendrick goading him into doing it. He can be quite persuasive. If the two men were mutually involved, that would explain what happened back at the house.”

“What happened back at the house?”

“After Kendrick and Ben came back, they wanted to kill Prester, too. Or at least Kendrick did. He tried to persuade Doc that it would be for the greater good if he put a pillow over Prester’s face. But Doc wouldn’t do it. He’s a veterinarian, but he sees himself as a medical man, the Hippocratic oath and all that. It was only the fact that the EMTs showed up that stopped things from getting violent.”

Rivard spat a stream of tobacco juice on the crusted snow. “That’s quite a story.”

“It’s the only interpretation of events that makes sense.”

“Good luck convincing the attorney general.”

With Kendrick on the lam in Canada, suspicion had naturally fallen on the fugitive dogsled racer. He was the one who had told Doc to let Prester die. He was the one who had threatened me via e-mail and killed Doc’s dog as a warning to keep his mouth shut. He was the one who kidnapped Lucas Sewall and nearly sent us all to the bottom of Bog Pond. Just as the investigators had focused on Prester, to the exclusion of other suspects earlier, now they had shifted their attention to Kendrick.

“The state police need to keep leaning on the Spragues,” I said. “If they do, the truth will come out.”

“Not necessarily,” said my sergeant. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, Bowditch, some people are wicked good liars.”

There was a shout, and then the crowd groaned. Out on the airboat, Mack McQuarrie had managed to muscle Prester Sewall’s naked body loose. I saw him wrestle the pale, mud-streaked corpse on board. The bloodless color of the skin reminded me of the underbelly of a frog.

Instantly I found myself thinking of Lucas.

Some people are wicked good liars.

Rivard had been talking about the Spragues, but his remark seemed to be a broader statement about the untrustworthiness of human beings in general. I’d known from my first meeting with Lucas Sewall that he was prone to wild exaggerations. His own mother had called him a liar.

But even I hadn’t taken him for a killer.

The confession came in his notebook, which I discovered a few days later under the passenger seat of my truck as I was vacuuming it out. I had wanted to visit the boy in the hospital, but Rivard cautioned me against having any conversations with him until after the state police got a formal statement. It was enough to hear that he was going to make a full recovery.

I’d also heard from the sheriff that Jamie was out of jail. Mitch Munro had ponied up the bail money by selling his prize snowmobile. The karate champ was still denying he had been on the Heath during the blizzard, the sheriff told me, and so far, Jamie had refused to repeat the story she’d told me about how her ex-husband had waylaid Randall Cates. While it was almost certain that Jamie would be convicted of driving under the influence, the drug case against her was falling apart fast. The Adderall found in the van had indeed belonged to her sister, Tammi, as Jamie had stated all along. Even a mediocre defense lawyer could argue that the pills had fallen into her purse in the course of driving her invalid sister to physical therapy (or wherever). The marijuana Corbett had found in her brother’s room made it Prester’s property when Jamie produced a canceled check in the amount of one dollar for “rent.”

As for Jamie and her ex-husband’s rekindled relationship (if that was what it was), I realized it was none of my business. Word around town was that they were hitting the bars together again. She’d lost her job at McDonald’s. I couldn’t bring myself to drive past her house, lest I see Munro’s Tundra out front.

I did have a keen interest in knowing whether Mitch was indeed the man Randall and Prester had gone to meet in the Heath that snowy day, as seemed likely. But trying to factor Munro into a murderous equation that already included Kendrick and the Spragues was a leap even my own overly active imagination refused to make.

But it was an equation, of sorts, that revealed the truth about Trinity Raye. More like a code, actually. After I found Lucas’s notebook, I took it back inside my malodorous trailer and sat down at my kitchen table and began flipping through the pages.

I’d made myself a cup of instant coffee, but it tasted, like everything in the damned house, like skunk. Rivard had told me that Joe Brogan had fired Billy Cronk because he’d been gossiping too much about what his employer had done to my living quarters. Rivard thought I might be able to wangle a trade out of Cronk: testimony about how Brogan had released a live skunk into my trailer in exchange for my dropping the firearm charge against the gentle Viking.

It was a deal I would make, I decided.

Picking up Lucas’s notebook, I stopped on a jumbled series of letters that I had noticed before on the cover. I hadn’t given them any attention then, but after everything I had subsequently learned about Lucas’s big brain, I now found my curiosity engaged.

DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ

It took me a few minutes to realize that what looked like gibberish was actually a simple cipher of the kind that had fascinated me when I’d read the Hardy Boys books as a kid.

I turned on my computer with the familiar sense of anticipation that now greeted me every time the screen lit up. But there was no new message from George Magoon, and perhaps there would never be another one. I went looking for “secret codes” in the Google search menu.

I found the key quickly enough:

DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ

Reading the first letter of the top word, followed by the first letter of the bottom word, followed by the second letter of the top word, followed by the second letter of the bottom word, and so on in a zigzag pattern, I ended with this:

DCON RAT POISON ZZZ

I put down my pen and stared at the words. Then I began reading carefully through the pages, looking for an actual confession. But Lucas had been coy throughout.

He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither… and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons?

What had he done to the OxyContin pills? Sprayed them with some chemical? What had he done with the rat poison? I thought back to my search for the boy in the Sewall house. Down in the cellar, I remembered a rusted oil tank with an open box of d-Con rat poison on the dirt floor beside it.

Trinity Raye had died from snorting heroin cut with baking powder and brodifacoum. People called it an overdose, but in truth the girl had also suffered an esophageal hemorrhage, causing her to bleed out. The active ingredient in d-Con is brodifacoum.