During the Code 66, when doctors, nurses, and techs had been scrambling to meet the bus carrying the injured children, and the deputy who was guarding the ward had slipped away to help, Prester Sewall had pulled the IV from his arm and stumbled on wounded feet out of the med-surg unit. How exactly he had escaped detection, no one could say. With his bandaged nose and wine-colored cheeks, he was hardly inconspicuous. Someone suggested he might have found a stray coat to pull on over his pajamas.
Given that it was snowing at a rate of half an inch an hour and the temperature was in the low twenties, Sergeant Rivard calculated that Prester couldn’t have gotten far. To Rivard, who had conducted a fair share of searches for escaped prisoners in his time, this line of thought led irresistibly across Route 1A into the locked and abandoned grounds of the old Sylvan Park racetrack.
The hospital staff had provided Warden Devoe’s K-9 assistant, Tomahawk, with a hearty whiff of Prester’s bedclothes, and sure enough, it took only a few minutes of patrolling along the roadside snowbank before the dog indicated. She nearly pulled her handler over as she took off into the woods.
The searchers found a trail staggering off into the trees. Rivard said the prints were unmistakably those of a man wearing small-size hospital slippers. All available units-wardens, troopers, and deputies-converged on the overgrown park.
Prester had cut across the windy field where horses had once raced, making a beeline for the birch and pine forest to the south. The falling snow hadn’t yet obscured his footprints, and the dog was hard on the scent. Excitement built as the wardens and police closed in on the fugitive. Devoe and Rivard heard the Machias River before they saw it. The tracks made straight for the ice-clotted riverbank and then veered east, paralleling the channel as it rushed downstream into town.
The searchers were amazed at Prester’s endurance, having forgotten the tremendous survival instinct he had shown the night of the blizzard. The wardens radioed for police cruisers to cordon off Water Street, blocking Prester’s escape into the small riverfront neighborhood above Bad Little Falls. Rivard said that you could read his mounting desperation in the meandering tracks. He was in a panic and didn’t know where to go.
A call went out over the air: Corbett had cut him off at the river. Moving independently of the other searchers, the chief deputy had found his man by taking a different vector on the Machias, closing off any escape. According to Corbett’s written report on the matter, which I later read, he had shouted at Prester to stop. The fugitive had paused at the riverbank and responded inaudibly.
“Suspect seemed to be on the verge of giving up,” the chief deputy had written.
Which is why we were all caught off guard when the escaped prisoner decided instead to step to his death.
It happened so slowly, like a movie playing at half speed. When Prester first set foot on the ice, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. From aloft, you could see how thin the ice was. Even at ground level, he must have recognized that the crust was nothing but a lie.
Then he took a second step.
“What’s he doing?” Stacey asked over the intercom. “Is he nuts?”
Three more steps, and Prester broke through. It reminded me of a horror movie in which an actor is crossing a cemetery and skeletal arms reach up from the ground to pull him down into the grave. He disappeared just like that. His head jerked back, and his bandaged arms went flying skyward-for a moment he seemed to be looking right at us-and then he was gone. A hole in the ice, brown with churning water, was all that was left of him.
My first thought was of Jamie.
Instinctively, Stacey turned the plane downriver. We hoped to see his head pop up in the open water below Sylvan Park, thought we might spot his green pajamas bobbing along. But we never did.
Rivard returned to the line, asking me what I could see.
“Nothing” was my answer.
Nevertheless, we kept looking-and followed the river to Bad Little Falls. As it cascaded into the bay, the Machias was such a raging torrent-with so many plunging waterfalls and swirling eddies capable of sucking entire logs to the bottom without a trace-it seemed futile even to hope. Eventually, I stopped trying. I lowered my binoculars and buckled myself back into my seat.
“Do you think it was a suicide?” I asked Rivard. “Or did he have some crazy idea about getting across?”
“We’ll never know.”
After I hung up, I put on the headset and told Stacey to set me down near my truck at the Gardner Lake boat launch.
“You mean that’s it?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we keep looking?”
“If we haven’t seen him now, it means he’s probably stuck on something beneath the surface, or the hydrodynamics of the falls are keeping him submerged.”
“The wardens will recover the body,” said Charley. “You can’t send divers anywhere near those falls, though, so that’s going to complicate things. The river’s tidal below the waterfall. They might have to look all the way down the bay before they find him.”
At least I knew what I would be doing for the near future: scouting the river for a corpse.
“It seems anticlimactic,” said Stacey.
“Not everything has a neat ending,” I replied.
Where is Jamie at this moment? I wondered. Does she know? Has anyone told her? It felt very urgent and important for me to be the one to break the news.
Stacey brought the plane around for an approach on Gardner Lake. Once again, the ice fishermen all paused in their chitchatting to watch the Cessna drop down out of the white sky and skate across the frozen pond. The propeller roared as we slid to a stop just yards from the boat ramp.
Both Charley and Stacey got out of the plane to bid me good-bye.
Stacey, I discovered, was taller than her father, nearly six feet, and slender. Her legs were long and her shoulders were broad for a woman. Physically and, I suspected, in most other ways, she was the opposite of shapely little Jamie Sewall.
Charley clapped one hand on my shoulder and patted my chest with the other. “This was a sad day, so let’s make plans for a happier one. Ora will be heartbroken if you don’t join us for supper soon. We could go ice fishing for some of those big salmon we’ve got up at West Grand Lake.”
Stacey folded her arms above her breasts and studied us. She had propped her sunglasses atop her head. I finally had a good look at her face. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as Chinese jade. Those are the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, I thought with some discomfort.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said.
“Just let me know when you recover his body.”
“Your father will hear about it first,” I said. “Somehow he gets all the news before anyone else in the Warden Service.”
“That’s because he’s the biggest gossip in the North Woods.”
Charley lifted his chin and grunted. I don’t think he cherished his daughter’s relentless teasing.
In preparation for takeoff, she lowered her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the engagement ring on her finger. The diamond was the size of a pea.
I extended my right hand to Stacey. “Thanks for the plane ride.”
She had her father’s iron grip. “Good luck,” she said.
I saw my dopey reflection again in her mirrored sunglasses.
In my truck, I tried to decide what to do about Jamie. Should I call her on my cell? And tell her what? If she hadn’t yet heard, then I couldn’t very well inform her over the phone that her beloved brother was now dead. My sixth sense told me she had already rushed to the scene. Machias was such a small town. News of a dangerous prisoner escaping from the hospital was the sort of information that moved from person to person with the speed of electrical impulses flashing between neurons.
My phone rang, settling the question. It was Rivard, asking me to meet him where Sylvan Street dead-ended. It was a little riverside neighborhood, near the spot where Prester had disappeared.
As I drove into town, it dawned on me that, in all likelihood, Zanadakis would be closing his case now. Prester’s flight from the hospital seemed a self-incriminating act. Why run if he wasn’t guilty of killing Randall Cates? Then there was the manner of Prester’s death. Whether or not you could brand his actions as suicidal, at the very least they suggested the mind-set of a man who would prefer drowning over a lifetime spent behind bars.
The whole episode flew in the face of everything Jamie believed. She had been so vehement about her brother’s innocence. How would she process the information that he was, in fact, (a) a murderer and (b) dead? I was having trouble accepting these realities myself, and I barely knew the guy. The twin bombshells would blow Jamie to pieces.
By the time I arrived at the end of Sylvan Street, there were only a few police vehicles left: Rivard’s patrol truck, the sheriff’s Crown Vic, and two white cruisers with the Washington County star on the door. Deputy Dunbar stood in the street with his hands raised, indicating I should stop.
I rolled down my window. “Any news?”
“I’m looking for a new job,” he said. “Does that count?”
“Seriously?”
“How the hell was I supposed to know he was strong enough to run away? I was just trying to help the kids who got hurt in that school bus.”
I didn’t particularly like Dunbar, but I sympathized with his plight. In his shoes, with the hospital in such a state of chaos and everyone focused on the injured children, I probably would have left Prester unguarded, as well.
“Have you seen Jamie Sewall?”
He sneered at me. “I thought that was your department.”
I found my capacity for sympathy diminishing rapidly. “Just tell me, Dunbar.”
He made a hitchhiking motion over his shoulder. “Why don’t you ask the sheriff?”
Dunbar stepped away to avoid being clipped by the door of my truck. I brushed past him and headed down the unplowed street. I found Rivard, Sheriff Rhine, and Chief Deputy Corbett standing in a snow-covered yard fifty feet from the river. A few snowflakes drifted past on the breeze.
“Just the person we were talking about,” said the sheriff.
“Where’s Jamie?”
“She showed up at the hospital during the search,” Rhine said. “I had a deputy escort her home.”
Jamie didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would follow police orders, especially when they involved separating her from someone she loved. “How did you accomplish that feat?”
“We told her he might try to call home,” Corbett said.
Rhine fiddled with her turquoise ring. “I’m headed over to her house now.”
“And you want me to go with you,” I said.
“How’d you guess?”
Rivard moved a wad of tobacco around in his cheek. “You didn’t tell me you were dating the suspect’s sister, Bowditch.”
“I’m not dating her.” Technically, this was not a lie.
“Whatever you want to call it,” said the sheriff, “I’d like you to come with me to break the news.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for her. This kind of news is always better coming from someone you trust.”
Rivard tried to work some stiffness out of his neck by moving his head around. “When you’re done with the sheriff, give me a call, and we’ll talk about the recovery efforts. I need to talk with the dive team and airboat guys. I have no clue how they’re going to tackle this one.”
“Maybe they should just string a net at the base of the falls,” said the sheriff.
“Crazier ideas have been tried,” replied Rivard.
I stared past them at the frozen river. The opposite shore seemed deceptively close at this stretch, and the light was dull enough that you couldn’t see the treacherousness of the ice. Beneath its thin coating of windblown snow, it looked solid. Maybe Prester really had expected to get across. It was confusing that he could have shown such a determination to live when he was lost in that snowstorm and then have decided to end his life just days later.
“Throwing yourself into a waterfall is a hell of way to commit suicide,” I said. “I don’t think he intended to die.”
“You didn’t see the look on his face,” said Corbett. His own face was blazing red from the cold wind.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was the chief deputy who had pursued Prester out onto the ice. “From the plane, he looked like he was taking tentative steps,” I said. “He didn’t appear to be racing headlong to his death.”
Rivard started in on his sore neck with both palms. “Does it make any difference?”
It will to Jamie, I thought.
“It was a suicide,” Corbett said, his voice rising. “I don’t know why it’s such a difficult concept to accept. The guy was maimed for life. He was in agony from the detox. And he was headed to jail on a murder rap. Those are three good reasons to end it all, if you ask me.”
I remained unconvinced, but Rhine pursed her lips, as if she could see the logic.
Rivard just didn’t seem to give a shit.
The sheriff motioned me to follow her to our vehicles. “Come on, Bowditch. Let’s get this over with.”
I gave one last look at the river and dug my hands into my parka pockets. Rhine didn’t speak to Dunbar as she strode past, but she fixed him with a withering stare, which caused the woeful deputy to examine his boots.
I’d scarcely gotten behind the wheel before the sheriff took off at warp speed. It was fortunate Roberta Rhine was the chief law-enforcement officer, or she would have racked up more speeding tickets than anyone in Washington County. I started the engine and turned around in hot pursuit.