I was never cut out to be a comedian. I know only one Maine joke, and it happens to be tasteless. “What does a Maine girl say during sex? ‘Ease up, Dad. You’re crushing my smokes.’”
There were too many houses I visited where the truth behind that punch line lurked in creepy silhouettes behind drawn window shades. Wanda Barter’s farm was one. Two days ago, I had found the woman and her redheaded band of offspring vaguely amusing. Now the thought of Barter and his brood gave me a major case of the willies.
I needed to nab this asshole. Most game wardens were assigned all-terrain vehicles, but budget cuts and the geographical peculiarities of my district-all those rocky peninsulas and marshy rivers-had precluded me from getting one. Maybe I could borrow Kathy’s, I thought. I relished the possibility of meeting Calvin Barter alone on a darkened trail.
Whatever the expression on my face was as I entered the Square Deal Diner, it caused Ruth Libby to blanch. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Could I get a dozen doughnuts to go? And two large coffees?”
“We’re calling them ‘grande’ coffees now.”
“You are?”
“Heck no.” She winked, trying to lighten my mood.
I appreciated her intent, but I wasn’t especially eager to let go of my rage. Like the men on my father’s side of the family, I seemed to enjoy getting angry-the heat of the blood pulsing through my temples affected me like a dangerous intoxicant.
Out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of a couple watching me from a corner booth, the very same booth Charley and I had occupied the previous day. They were an older, mismatched couple. The man had a shock of white hair and glasses with thick black rims. He wore a black blazer over a black polo shirt that hugged his heavy paunch. The woman was whip-thin, with close-cropped gray curls, a long nose, and deeply set eyes that put me in mind of a stalking heron. As I waited for Ruth to fill my order, the man and women consulted each other in whispers and then rose ceremoniously to their feet. I saw that the man was lugging a file box that looked stuffed to overflowing with documents.
“Oh shit,” whispered Ruth. “Those are the ones who were asking about you.”
“Warden Bowditch,” said the woman in a thick Down East accent I instantly recognized. “My name is Lou Bates. I spoke with you on the telephone. This is my associate, Mr. Oswald Bell.”
“Call me Ozzie.” His voice was parched and raspy, probably from a lifetime’s worth of cigarettes. His own accent said Rockaway, New York, rather than Rockport, Maine.
“We’re here on behalf of my nephew, Erland Jefferts,” explained Lou Bates.
I noticed they were both sporting white buttons on their lapels with the words FREE ERLAND JEFFERTS. I tried to muster a modicum of politeness. “As I told you yesterday, I can’t talk with you, Mrs. Bates.”
“Five minutes of your time,” said Bell. “You can give us five minutes, right?”
“No, Mr. Bell, I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Make it three minutes, then. You’ve got that. While they ring up your order.”
“This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “How did you know to find me here?”
“Our sources told us that you frequent this establishment on a daily basis,” said Lou Bates.
“Your sources?”
“My nephew is being wrongfully incarcerated in the Maine State Prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“Basically, we consider Mr. Jefferts a political prisoner,” declared Bell.
Lou Bates continued: “It is our belief that you have evidence that can help exonerate him and secure his full pardon and release.”
Bell raised the heavy cardboard box in my direction, as if he expected me to accept it as a gift. “If you’ll just look at these files, you’ll see Erland has gotten royally shafted. There are state secrets in this box-information the prosecution refuses to make public.”
“I told you that I can’t talk with you.” The entire diner had fallen silent. A voice in the back of my head told me to cool down fast, before the consequences spiraled out of control. “I need to use the rest room.”
All eyes followed me into the bathroom. Inside, I leaned both arms against the sink and stared into my own burning reflection. Did these J-Team nuts really think that I was some sort of crusader for the unfairly accused? I started the tap water running and splashed my face. Get a grip, Bowditch. Pay for your doughnuts and hit the road.
When I opened the bathroom door, I found everyone in the restaurant gawking at me. But Ozzie Bell and Lou Bates had disappeared.
“I told them to leave, or else I’d call the police,” Ruth explained.
“Thanks,” I said, and paid my bill.
Outside, I scanned the parked cars to see whether my two stalkers were lying in wait, but they seemed to have vanished. I approached my patrol truck, coffee and doughnuts in hand, but did a double take as I drew near. There in the bed was Ozzie Bell’s box of top secret files.
Kathy Frost, lived in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the rolling hills of Appleton, at the northern edge of my district. Blueberry barrens, which turned crimson in the fall, cascaded down from her doorstep. The undulating fields were crisscrossed with stone walls and strewn with scorched boulders. In the summer, after the last berries had been raked, immigrant workers would set fire to the fields, blackening the barrens so that the bushes would blossom with greater fruitfulness in seasons to come.
I rarely had cause to visit Kathy at home. My sergeant didn’t go out of her way to encourage visitors. At Division B, she had the reputation of being an odd breed of hermit: a funny, sociable, and utterly uninhibited person who nevertheless kept her private life private. She’d been married a long time ago to some dude named Frost, but the marriage hadn’t stuck, for one reason or another. It occurred to me that I knew very little about Kathy’s social life despite having spent countless hours in cold, cramped circumstances with her on search parties, night patrols, and stakeouts. Our relationship was a strange mixture of intimacy (I knew how she smelled without deodorant) and aloof professionalism.
As I drove up to the house, a dog began baying inside. That was Pluto, Kathy’s grizzled coonhound. I took a moment before I turned off the engine, trying to get the lay of the land. She had a nice spread. There were stately old elms here that had survived a century of blight, along with some big maples fit for sugaring. Kathy’s GMC patrol truck was parked in the dooryard. I also spotted a muddy all-terrain vehicle behind the house-exactly what I’d been looking for.
The doorbell was broken, so I rapped against the glass. Pluto came loping down the foyer, barking all the way. I tried to talk soothingly to him through the glass, but he just kept yowling, as if we were strangers.
After a moment, Kathy appeared, tanned and grinning, and jerked the door open.
Kathy Frost was in her forties, although whether she was in her mid- or late forties, I could never have told you. She was six feet tall, with long, strong limbs. Her bobbed haircut didn’t flatter her, but she had fetching hazel eyes. She wore blue jeans, muddy work boots, and a flannel shirt that had survived a thousand trips through the washing machine. Her trip to Florida had left her with a remarkable tan, as if she’d been dipped head to toe in bronze.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
I presented her with the coffee and doughnuts. “Don’t start, Kathy. I’ve had a shitty morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I followed her into the depths of the old house-the chilly air had a vaguely doggish scent-and into the kitchen. Pluto trailed us slowly down the hall and then collapsed with a wheeze on a hand-hooked rug beside the oven. As one of her duties, Kathy oversaw the Warden Service’s K-9 units, training officers and their dogs to assist in search and rescue operations. Pluto looked like an unassuming old pooch-thick of body and grizzled of snout-but he was a retired celebrity in law-enforcement circles. Over his working lifetime, he had located dozens of lost people, alive and dead.
We sat down at an antique table, which tilted when you set your elbows on it, and opened the box of doughnuts.
“First, I want to hear about Key West,” I said.
“It was hot and crowded. I caught a tarpon.”
“That’s it?”
“The daiquiris were overpriced. Also, I bought you a souvenir.”
She handed me a paperback book from the counter. It was Men Without Women, by Ernest Hemingway. “I saw the title and thought of you.”
“I don’t think that’s a compliment, Kath.”
She shrugged her broad shoulders. “So tell me about this dead girl of yours. I’ve got to hand it you, Grasshopper. You don’t waste any time. I go away for a week and suddenly you’re up to your crotch again in a murder investigation. And somehow you found a way to involve Charley Stevens in this, I hear. That old geezer must consider you his personal ace of spades.” She sipped from her cold coffee. “Malcomb gave me the rundown last night, but he left out the juicy stuff. Clue me in.”
“I don’t see the point. Menario already informed me that my role in the investigation is finished-until this thing goes to trial, if it ever does.”
“Menario?”
“He got transferred to the coast to run the investigation.”
She waved a cruller at me. “Come on, tell me the inside dope on what’s going on here. I’m your sergeant, and I command you to share all your gossip on this case with me.”
I titled back in my creaky chair with a grin. “You can’t order me to do that.”
“Are you sure of that? What does the policy manual say?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s on page seventy-seven: ‘Wardens are required to tell their supervisors about all the interesting shit that happened while they were on vacation.’”
In truth, I was relieved to go over it again. Telling the story to Kathy Frost from the beginning gave me a chance to reexamine the details, and I was glad to have another interested person to help me make sense of the mystery, especially now that Charley had decamped. I started my story with my arrival at Hank Varnum’s house three nights earlier and went on from there, trying to include every halfway relevant detail in my account. Kathy could be a wiseass, but she had a well-trained mind. If there was a hole in my reasoning, she’d find it, and if I was deluding myself in any way, she’d let me know that, too. Kathy listened seriously, rocking back in her chair with arms folded as I told my tale.
“Can you believe those freaks left that box of files in my truck?” I said by way of conclusion. “I’m the last person anyone should want defending an accused man’s innocence.”
“You’ve become the Saint Jude of hopeless criminal prosecutions.”
Pluto, meanwhile, had fallen asleep and was in the midst of a vivid dream that caused him to growl and twitch. We both looked at him with eyebrows raised in amusement.
“You know Pluto and I were the ones who found Nikki Donnatelli,” Kathy said, licking doughnut grease off her fingers.
“I wanted to ask you about that.”
“All of our K-9s are extensively trained for SAR. But Pluto is primarily a cadaver dog, meaning that he’s good at sniffing out dead people. We only take him into the woods these days when we’re pretty sure we’re dealing with human remains instead of a living, breathing person. Some animals are just better suited to one or the other-recovery versus rescue. Pluto has a nose for death.”
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like me. I think I must carry the smell of it or something.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. He also eats his own shit. Still, he’s got one hell of a morbid gift.”
We both glanced at him again, but the dog’s dream had passed and he was snoring peaceably again.
“What was it like coming across her body?” I asked.
She switched to her stern sergeant’s voice. “Promise me you’re not going to get involved with this Erland Jefferts conspiracy. The guy’s guilty. There might be some copycat thing going on here, but another girl getting tied up with tape doesn’t mean pretty-boy Jefferts is innocent.”
“I just want to hear what happened.”
“Let me make more coffee.” She turned on the tap, filled the teakettle, and set it on a burner. When the flame ignited, an acrid smell wafted through the room. Kathy was an infamously bad cook. From the odor, I deduced that she had burned some cheese-related dish and never cleaned it up.
We reused the Styrofoam cups for our instant coffee and sat down again at the antique table, and then Kathy told me her version of Maine’s most infamous murder case.
“I’m assuming you know the general outline of the story. How the Donnatelli girl disappeared on her way home from work and then the next morning they found Jefferts passed out in his truck in the woods? Well, the state police brought us in pretty quick. They have their own K-9 people, but they know we’re better at searches. One problem we had right away was that it began to rain like Mother Nature was taking a wicked piss. No dog can track well under those conditions. And it’s no picnic for the searchers, either.”
A sudden gust of wind shook the kitchen windows. The day seemed to be getting dimmer, although the clock hadn’t yet struck noon. Through the glass I watched snow showers blow past. The brown fields in the background looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
“You’ve been on those searches,” Kathy continued. “You know the drill. We had about a hundred volunteers-personnel from the Brunswick Naval Air Station, the Rockland Coast Guard station. The National Guard sent a helicopter with a Forward Looking Infrared camera so they could search for Nikki’s body heat from treetop level.
“Malcomb was in charge of designing the search criteria, based on what we knew about Nikki and the rough time line the state police had established. One logical place to begin the search was where Jefferts had parked his pickup. And we needed to double-check the shore path. There are quarries all over that peninsula, too, and we didn’t know if she might be at the bottom of one of those disgusting pits. As always, the problem was, Where do you start looking?”
None of this came as news to me. I’d been trained extensively in the science of finding lost persons. But I wanted to hear the story, in light of how I’d discovered Ashley Kim.
Kathy was lost in her own memories now. “The setup of the search had to be defined, maps drawn up, assignments given. Every team needed to know its waypoints and specific instructions about ground to be covered, as well as the general details-like the spacing for the grid searches. Anyway, the overall situation that day was the usual controlled chaos, with the rain not helping. You always get lots of hits with the K-9s, but most are false alarms. Each time, though, you have to figure out if it’s a bust or not. There are just all sorts of bad smells and dead critters out there for the dogs to find.”
Kathy had spoken with me about becoming a dog handler-district wardens often acquire an area of specialization, in addition to their usual responsibilities-but I was leaning toward the dive team. Charley, meanwhile, wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a warden pilot, but I found his several near-death aerial experiences less than inspiring.
“We gave Pluto a good whiff of Nikki’s clothes, but that didn’t do the trick,” she said. “In those circumstances, you try all kinds of things. Her shampoo, perfume, soap. Ultimately, it was the rigging tape that did it, the roll from Jefferts’s truck. I smelled the tape myself. It had a strong fishy odor, like it had come off a lobsterboat.
“That first day was just a blur. It seemed like her body should have been somewhere right there, along that dirt road, but it wasn’t. God, the weather was miserable, hot and rainy. The mosquitoes were plenty happy we were out there, though. Malcomb called us in after dark. Pluto and I could have kept searching-we wanted to-but that wasn’t our call. The Donnatellis were waiting at the command post with Deb Davies. I’ll never forget the look on the father’s face. It was as if someone had ripped his heart out of his chest and he hadn’t yet realized it.”
She excused herself to use the bathroom, leaving me in the drafty kitchen listening to the windows rattle in their casements. Retelling this story had robbed Kathy of her high spirits. I felt bad about that, knowing she’d just returned from a much-needed vacation.
After a few minutes, she returned and squatted down next to Pluto on his rug and began scratching his throat. “So the next day, we went back out again,” she said, “and it was still raining like Noah should have been building an ark somewhere. We were all exhausted by midafternoon. The adrenaline leaves your bloodstream, and all those hours in the field catch up with you. Well, suddenly we got a message over the radio. It turned out someone had made an error assigning the search areas. We’d missed this big swampy swatch of forest. They shifted my group south to have a look at it. Within half an hour, Pluto started running a track. He nearly pulled me off my feet. When he hit that hard, I knew it was Nikki.”
She paused and collected herself before continuing.
“She’d been tied with her arms around the tree, so he could get to her from behind, if you know what I mean. I remember seeing her white body through the rain and thinking she might be alive. She was on her feet and sort of looked like she was resting her shoulders against the trunk, but that was just the way he’d tied her. I told my search party to stay back. I wanted to preserve a single path to the crime scene and keep everyone from trampling over the evidence.”
Exactly what I had not done at the Westergaard house.
“Her jeans were pulled down around her ankles. The rest of her clothes had been cut away, none too gently. She had all sorts of bloody little wounds on her, and this red mark on her forehead where Jefferts must have clobbered her. They never did find her underwear. Her eyes were wide open, but the flies had already been at them. She’d died knowing she was suffocating, and she still had that look of terror and disbelief you see with so many corpses. Death is never real to some people until the moment they realize it’s happening to them.
“I called her name, but I knew there was no point.”
She took a breath, and I saw the toll it was taking on her to revisit this day, which had been one of the worst in her life. I wanted to ask her a question, but I felt inhibited by the grief I was witnessing, so I just sat there and waited for her to continue.
“My partner from the state police radioed in the Code Blue to the command post,” she said. “The next time I saw her, she was in a bag strapped to a stretcher.
“The trial was a circus, as you know. But fortunately, I wasn’t the focus of the defense’s attention. Jefferts’s lawyer-I forget his name-was a total doofus. On cross-examination, he tried to suggest that I might have fucked up the crime scene in some unspecific way. Time of death was what he was arguing-that it would have been impossible for Jefferts to commit the murder, since he was somewhere else when Nikki died, based on the ME’s own testimony. But Danica Marshall squashed that argument like a bug. I was surprised that the AG had assigned her to such a high-profile case, since she was just a kid at the time. But when I saw her in the courtroom, all my doubts went out the window. Jesus, that little cutie has bigger balls than you do.” She paused for comic effect. “No offense.”
“Offense taken,” I said.
The joke had loosened her mood again. She leaned her elbows on the old table, which caused it to creak in complaint. “It sounds like whoever killed this Kim woman took a few pages from Jefferts’s playbook, but I can tell you we nailed the right perp seven years ago. Erland’s exactly where he belongs-at the prison. If I were you, I’d drop that box of files they gave you in a Dumpster on your way home.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not joining the J-Team.” I cracked my knuckles while I considered whether I had the guts to ask her the question buzzing in my head. “What word did Nikki Donnatelli have written on her body?”
Kathy looked as if I’d just punched her in the solar plexus. “What?”
“Ashley Kim also had a profanity carved into her skin.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
I could see the color rising beneath her tanned cheeks and knew I’d struck pay dirt. “Just tell me the truth, Kathy. I promise you I’m not on another mission to prove anything.”
“It was slut. ” When she spoke again, it was in a tough voice she reserved for arrests. “That was the word on Ashley, right? So I’ve indulged your curiosity. Let’s talk about your job. What the hell have you been up to anyway?”
I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some ATV vandals harassing Hank Varnum.”
“So are you planning on catching them or what?”
“That’s why I came over here,” I said. “Can I borrow your four-wheeler?”