The interview lasted two hours. Now that Zanadakis had learned I was prone to omitting relevant details from my reports, he wanted to cover all the bases again. He made me run through the events of my day from the moment I awoke until the discovery of Randall Cates’s body. From the encyclopedic scope of his questions, I couldn’t determine what theories the detective might be pursuing. He seemed interested in everything at once and in nothing in particular.
The more I heard myself talk, the more certain I became that the key to the whole mystery was the identity of the person, or persons, Randall and Prester had met in the Heath. If, as Jamie insisted, Prester would never have harmed his friend, then the next suspect had to be the man they’d sold drugs to that snowy day. My suspicion was reinforced by Corbett, who followed me out of the sheriff’s office and down the heavily salted front steps.
“Hey, Bowditch,” he called. “Hold up.”
I waited for him to descend the stairs behind me. A cold wind was howling down the street, and he hadn’t even bothered to grab a coat.
“I need to talk with you,” he said, already shivering. “You mentioned Barney Beal in there.”
“What about him?”
“I’m fixated on that snowmobiler you saw. Any chance it was Beal? I’m wondering if he was the one they were meeting.”
I remembered Corbett’s saying he lived up the road from the Spragues and that he had staked out the Heath a few times after they’d reported suspicious activity. Was his interest personal or professional?
“Rivard says he’s been busting into camps around Bog Pond to get money to buy drugs. Find out if his sled is green.”
Corbett wrapped his arm around his broad shoulders for warmth. The breeze was lifting the individual blond hairs from his head and making them dance. I hadn’t noticed before, but his neck was suffering from the worst case of razor burn I’d ever seen. “Whoever it was did a number on Cates,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you heard what the ME found during the autopsy? Randall’s sternum was cracked. That’s why he must have stayed behind when Prester went for help. The guy was probably in pain every time he took a breath. I’m surprised he made it even ten steps from his car.”
I watched the chief deputy ascend the steps to the sheriff’s office, wondering about the significance of that detail and why Corbett had chosen to share it with me. I was still wondering when my cell phone rang. The number that showed on the screen belonged to Rivard.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m back at your house.”
“My house?”
“Yeah, I was passing by and decided to stop in.”
That was unlike Rivard.
“You’d better get back here,” he said.
“What for?”
“Your place has been trashed.”
By mid-February, Maine’s back roads are as battered and bruised as an old boxer’s face. Potholes form yawning craters deep enough to swallow a tractor wheel. Frost heaves create sharp ridges in the asphalt, which, taken at speed, will launch a vehicle clear off the ground. Factor in patches of black ice-slick spots invisible in your headlights-and towering snowbanks that hide driveways from view, and you have the perfect formula for a wrecked car.
I drove home with the gas pedal pressed flat against the floor. The road bounced me up into the air until the shoulder belt drew tight across my chest, then pulled me hard against the seat. Later, I would discover a strap-shaped bruise on my shoulder, but at the time, I didn’t feel anything but mindless fury.
Rivard’s truck was pulled up in the dooryard beside my snow-covered Jeep. He had the engine running and the headlights blazing, and I saw his darkened profile behind the wheel as I drove up. From the outside, my trailer looked intact. No windows had been broken; no new animals had been crucified on my front door. So why did Rivard think the place had been vandalized?
I got my answer as soon as I opened the truck door. The night air was cold and crisp; in my lungs, it felt as thin as the atmosphere atop Mount Denali. Then the night breeze pushed a sour but unmistakable smell in my direction: skunk.
Sergeant Rivard climbed out of his vehicle. He was wearing a black baseball cap with the embroidered Maine Warden Service logo, a green pine tree with red letters, on it. Despite the hour and the darkness, he had his sunglasses propped atop the bill of the cap, as if he might require their protection from some sudden glare.
“There’s a skunk loose in your trailer,” he said.
“I can smell it!”
“How did it get inside?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t put it in there.”
My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I could see that Rivard was having a hard time containing his amusement; the corners of his mouth kept sneaking up.
“This isn’t funny,” I said. “Do you know how hard it is to get stunk spray out of things?”
“I own two dogs, remember? I reckon you’ll need about a thousand gallons of tomato juice to start.”
“Do you think it’s still in there?”
“Only one way to find out.”
I fetched my flashlight from the truck and approached the front door as quietly as I could, which wasn’t very quietly, considering how loud the crunching snow was beneath my boots.
Rivard leaned against the hood of his truck. “I’ll wait out here!”
I turned the key in the lock and eased the door open. In an instant, I was enveloped by a vomitous miasma. My eyes began to gush as if they’d been smeared with raw onions, and I had to press my tongue against my teeth to keep from gagging. I shined the light slowly around the living room, knowing that a skunk’s retinas are reflective.
The stench was overpowering; I could feel it seeping through my pores.
“Do you see it?”
I glared at Rivard for him to be quiet. Except for the nauseating odor, all my possessions looked exactly the way I’d left them a few hours earlier.
I shined the light under the coffee table and sofa. No green eyes flashed back at me. The room was stuffy from the electric baseboards, but when I straightened up, a draft brushed my face. It seemed to be coming from the kitchenette. I crept in that direction until I could get a good look at the countertops and appliances.
The window over the sink was broken. Someone had shattered the glass in order to undo the lock, then raised the window until the gap was large enough to let in a skunk. George Magoon had paid me another visit in the night. The skin along the back of my neck grew hot as I recalled my confrontation with Brogan and Cronk. I would make them pay for this.
First, I needed to find the skunk.
My next stop was the bathroom. Nothing there but mildew.
The bedroom door was ajar. Gently I pushed it open and swept the flashlight beam around the walls.
The skunk was curled up on my unmade bed. Its fluffy black tail was draped like a sleep mask across its eyes. I saw the fur ripple as it breathed.
What to do? If I shot it, I feared the worst-a total, dying release of stench.
I edged into the room, feeling my heart pause when the floor creaked, and slid the closet door open on its cheap plastic wheels. On the shelf was a gray wool blanket. I spread it open in my arms, extending my wingspan to the widest possible extent. It would be like throwing a minnow net.
A skunk typically won’t spray if it can’t see. I’d caught many of them over the years in box traps. The trick was to creep up on the trap from the direction of the steel door and then quickly cover the cage with a sheet or blanket. A skunk can still empty its anal scent glands even when it cannot raise its tail, but it is unlikely to do so if it is blind. I reminded myself of these facts as I stepped toward the bed.
I came within a yard of the animal before it opened its eyes. The skunk cocked its tail as if an electric charge had shot through the hair fibers, and it let out a sharp, almost reptilian hiss. I dropped the blanket on top of it. As fast as I could, I gathered the animal into a ball. With the skunk hissing in my arms, I rushed out the front door, nearly tripping over my welcome mat, and threw the bundle from the top of the steps into a snowbank.
“Fire in the hole!” Rivard called, and ducked comically behind his truck.
I stepped back over the threshold and watched the skunk claw its way loose. It emerged, shaken but seemingly uninjured from the blanket, stomping its feet and shaking its fluffy tail: aggrieved and looking for someone to punish. I slammed the door and waited a minute before peeking out again. My last glimpse of the skunk was of its black-and-white derriere as it waddled off into the balsams at the edge of the yard.
Rivard contorted his face muscles to keep from grinning as I went down to meet him.
“Nice work,” he said.
“Go to hell. Everything I own is ruined.”
“That’s really bad luck.”
“It has nothing to do with luck. It’s that George Magoon bastard fucking around with me again.”
Rivard narrowed his eyes. “What makes you say that?”
“Who else is going to set a skunk loose inside my trailer? It didn’t just wake up from hibernation and decide to invade my home. The kitchen window was broken.”
Rivard reached into his jacket for a tin of snuff and unscrewed the lid. He pinched some tobacco and jammed it down between his cheek and gums. “Was there another note?”
“No, but it had to be that son of a bitch Brogan again. He was just over here this afternoon with his Viking bodyguard.”
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my sergeant said.
“I want to hear him deny it himself.” I sniffed my forearm. I hadn’t touched the skunk. I hadn’t even spent five minutes inside the mobile home. But I smelled like a stink bomb had exploded in my face.
“You’re not going over there.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“That wasn’t a request, Warden.”
“You want me to just let this go?”
“No,” Rivard said, “I want you to wait here while I pay Brogan a visit. I’ll give you a call after he and I have a conversation. If he was behind this, I promise you that we’ll make him pay. Understood?”
I spat on the ground, trying to expel some of the bitter skunk taste from my mouth. “Understood.”
I watched his taillights disappear into the night, fighting the impulse to wait ten minutes and then follow. My head ached from frustration, pent-up rage, and lack of sleep. How do you de-scent an entire trailer? I’d have to rip out the carpeting and the drapes and probably jettison the furniture, too. In the meantime, I would have to get a motel room at fifty bucks a night, minimum.
Where had Brogan and Cronk found a skunk in mid-February? They must have known where one was hibernating.
A thought came to me.
I took the big Maglite I kept in my backseat and went exploring around my trailer. My feet punched holes in the deep snow as I made my way around to the backyard. I felt the cold snow being jammed up my pants legs against the bare skin.
Beneath the kitchen window, my flashlight showed tracks: a man’s snowshoes. They were traditional: trapper-style, oblong-shaped, fashioned of northern white ash in all likelihood. The man who owned them was a traditionalist. No modern aluminum and plastic Tubbs for George Magoon. There was good information in these tracks. Now I knew something about my prankster that I hadn’t known before.
I foundered in the snow, following the tracks through the balsam and white spruce. My ears began to tingle, and I thought of Prester Sewall wandering desperately in search of help the night before. The snowshoe trail looped around toward the main drag. Whoever had walked here hadn’t been heavy, I decided. The prints of a big man would have been deeper. That ruled out Billy Cronk.
Eventually the tracks emerged from the birch and beech saplings that made up the second-growth timber. They ascended the high snowbank the plow had muscled out of the road. Then they scrambled down the other side of the drift to the salt-white asphalt. I walked up and down the roadside, scanning for distinctive tire prints with my flashlight, but there were too many marks to distinguish anything useful. Something silver and red glittered up ahead. I reached down to pick it up. It was a round metal tin that had been flattened under the wheels of passing traffic. Someone who had passed by this way chewed Red Man tobacco.