Widowmaker (23 page)

“That's not funny, Gary,” Lauren said.

He hadn't yet made eye contact with me. “When I started, no one ever knew where I was or what I was doing. As long as I kept my picture out of the paper and wrote my quota of tickets, the colonel didn't care.”

“It's a brand-new day,” I said.

“And a cold one, too,” said Lauren. “Thermometer read five below this morning, and the wind's out of the northwest. It must be one of those Alberta clippers the weathermen always go on about.”

I hadn't yet decided what I was going to do. On my way south, I could stop at the Franklin County Sheriff's Department and see how the examination of Adam's truck was coming along. Maybe I'd run into Clegg there, and I could tell him about the handgun the missing felon had taken from his mother's apartment.

“I should probably get on the road,” I told my hosts.

Pulsifer put an apple in his pocket for later. “I'll show you around the farm before you go.”

“I just need to grab my duffel.”

The dogs followed me into the chilly guest room and then decided it was too cold for them, leaving me alone to strip the bed. I piled the sheets, blanket, and quilt at the bottom of the bed and sat down on the bare mattress.

I suspected that Pulsifer's “tour of the farm” would be an excuse to talk about the previous evening. I dreaded the conversation on all sorts of levels. Would he be contrite, or would he make excuses? Did he blame me for leading him into temptation, or had he decided I was going to be his secret new drinking buddy?

I braced myself for the possibilities and started for the door.

Pulsifer was waiting for me in the mudroom with a displeased expression that confirmed my forebodings.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“I just got off the phone with Jim Clegg.”

“Did they find any new evidence in the truck?”

“Too soon for that. Clegg and Shaylene Hawken are headed out to Pariahville this morning. In light of recent events, they want to have a chat with Foss and his flock of deviants. Clegg also reminded me that he still has a shitload of questions for you. I made the mistake of saying you were here. My head's a little fuzzy this morning.”

“Should I follow you?”

“We'll take my truck. You and I need to talk.”

 

22

In the mountains, in the winter, dawn comes late and dusk comes early. The sun hadn't yet made its way above the Bigelow Range, but the sky had turned the color of rose gold: a promise of light and warmth to come.

Pulsifer didn't speak as we brushed the snow off the hood and windows of his patrol truck with our gloved hands. When we were finished, I pried open the passenger door of my Scout. I unlocked the glove compartment, removed my Walther .380, and tucked the weapon inside the waistband of my jeans. An image of Carrie Michaud wielding a knife flashed through my mind. I dropped a couple of extra magazines in my pockets.

Pulsifer was behind the wheel with the engine running by the time I returned. He had turned up the police radio, as if to forestall our inevitable conversation. I had no intention of being the first to speak.

The plows had done expert work clearing the road into Bigelow, not that the locals were ever slowed down by a little snow. Just about everyone in the mountains seemed to own a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Those who didn't soon discovered how long the wait could be for AAA to come and pull you out of a ditch.

“I want to show you something,” Pulsifer said suddenly.

I had expected he meant that he wanted to take me somewhere nearby.

Instead, he reached into his pocket and removed what looked like a foreign coin. He held it flat on his palm for me to look at. It seemed to be made out of bronze and was stamped with a triangle with the Roman numeral III at the center. There was a different word on each side of the triangle—Unity, Service, and Recovery—and around the perimeter there was a motto: To Thine Own Self Be True.

“Three years, four months, and twenty-seven days sober,” he said. “Before last night.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize. You're not to blame. It's all on me.”

From the tone of his voice, it certainly sounded like he was blaming me.

“Gary, I had no idea.”

“That's why they call it Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, well.” He pushed the window button on the door so that it went all the way down. Then he threw the coin out onto the icy road. “Just a piece of metal.”

I wasn't sure what response would be appropriate under the circumstances.

Eventually, we emerged from beneath the shadow of Bigelow Mountain. We passed a snow-covered field edged by white birches and red pines, in the center of which stood the burned-out remains of a mobile home. I almost exclaimed aloud for Pulsifer to stop but managed to catch myself in time.

My vagabond family had lived in that trailer briefly when I was a child, before my father lost whatever job he'd had at the time. He'd come in half-drunk or mouthed off to the boss or slugged some coworker whose face he didn't like. Maybe all three. Suffice it to say, Jack Bowditch had never been the employee of the month at any place he'd ever worked. It was no wonder I had grown up in those early years eating day-old bread from the food pantry and venison burgers from deer my dad has secretly shot out of season.

I hadn't noticed the torched building on my drive in, but now I found myself overwhelmed by nostalgia. Most of my memories of my early childhood were bittersweet at best, chilling at worst. But what I was feeling now, I realized, was sadness and loss. Someone had burned down my old house.

Pulsifer didn't notice that I'd bolted upright in my seat. He was probably thinking about what he was going to tell his AA sponsor.

As we turned onto Moose Alley, he leaned over the wheel, peering at the road ahead. “What's going on up there?”

Four or five vehicles were parked in a line along one side of Route 16. A group of men and women were gathered together atop the snowbank. They were all bundled up against the cold and staring through binoculars at a dead tree.

“Birders,” I said.

Pulsifer hit his blues and swung in behind the last car. He jumped out of the truck before I could ask him what he was doing.

“Folks, you can't park here!” I heard him say.

A man in a hat with earflaps said excitedly, “We're looking at a Great Gray Owl.”

I squinted up at the snag and saw an enormous bird, as big as an eagle, perched on the twisted topmost branch. Its feathers were the same color as the bark of the leafless spruce. It was the first Great Gray I had ever seen. I reached for the binoculars on Pulsifer's dash to get a better look at the massive owl.

“I don't care what you're looking at,” said Pulsifer. “You can't be blocking the road.”

“You don't understand,” the man in the hat said. “This is an extremely rare bird.”

“We're not blocking the road,” someone else said.

“People can still get by.”

Pulsifer stood with his hands on his hips. “You need to move, folks. It's not open for discussion.”

The birders mumbled at one another. Steam from their open mouths created a single cloud among them in the early-morning air. For their sake, I hoped they wouldn't put up a fight, but they must have agreed that discretion was the better part of valor when dealing with a pissed-off law-enforcement officer. One by one, the Priuses and Outbacks pulled away from the snowbank and started off toward Rangeley.

Pulsifer remained standing like a statue until the last one had driven off. I don't think he so much as glanced at the owl.

“Some people don't have a fucking clue,” he said as he climbed back inside in the truck.

“Great Gray Owls are pretty rare sightings,” I said. “They don't usually show up in Maine. I'm sure this one was reported on some bird Listserv. Birders are going to be coming from all over to see it.”

“As if I don't have enough to do but play meter maid to a bunch of bird-watchers.” He sneered in the direction of the dead tree. “I'm tempted to scare that bird off.”

I was torn between keeping quiet and speaking my piece. Being me, I inevitably chose the latter. “It's not exactly rush hour out here. You didn't have to be such a hard-ass.”

“Don't tell me how to do my job, Mike. I'm not the one with the folder full of reprimands.”

I stared straight ahead. “Fine.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor bringing you along. But if you don't appreciate it—”

I put on my sunglasses because I didn't want him to see the annoyance in my eyes.

When it became obvious that I wasn't going to continue the argument, he put the transmission back into drive and we lurched forward again. We went a full mile before he remembered to turn off his pursuit lights.

*   *   *

Now that the sun had risen above the mountaintops, the world had become too bright to look at. The new snow, piled high along the roadsides and clinging like cotton to every tree, didn't just reflect the light; it intensified it a hundredfold. Soon Pulsifer was also reaching for his shades.

We didn't speak again until we had turned off Route 16 onto the camp road that led up to Foss's gate. Tire marks in the snow indicated that the detective—I assumed it must be the detective—had arrived ahead of us.

Smoke from Logan Dyer's chimney was visible even before we saw his house. It drifted straight up above the treetops, a perfect tight spiral. As we approached his property, I could smell and taste the wood burning in the stove.

Dyer must have parked his truck inside the garage, but there was a Ford Explorer in the driveway. The SUV was the Interceptor model, issued exclusively to law enforcement and other first responders, but it was painted in the same black and silver tones as the Widowmaker company vehicles I had seen on the mountain. It was equipped with pursuit lights, too.

“Do you know who that is?” I asked.

“Widowmaker security.”

“Russo?”

“Maybe,” Pulsifer said. “The mountain has a half dozen guys who work security. A couple of them are deputized by the sheriff in case shit breaks out requiring a real police presence. Don't tell me you met Rob Russo, too?”

“What's he doing there?”

“I don't know. Having breakfast?”

“Ease up, Pulsifer.”

“Maybe Clegg asked someone from Widowmaker to talk to Logan about what he's seen recently. The guy does have a bird's-eye view of the only road in and out of Pariahville.”

The newly fallen snow gave the house and yard a cheerier aspect, although it couldn't help the flaking clapboards, and the dark, wet shingles showed how much heat was escaping through the underinsulated attic.

“Poor Logan,” said Pulsifer. “He's never going to find a sucker willing to buy his house. I told you he's even unluckier than you.”

As we passed by, Dyer's hounds began to bay inside: a loud and mournful noise that was nearly a kind of howl. The Plotts must have heard our vehicle with their supersensitive ears. If nothing else, they were effective watchdogs.

The road up the hill was slick, but the studs in Pulsifer's tires bit through the surface ice. When we got to the steel gate, we found it standing open. Two sets of tire tracks led in, but none led out.

“Have you ever been up in here before?” I asked.

“Not since before Foss started running his home for wayward creeps.”

We were driving now through a majestic stand of old-growth pines. Very often the old lumber camps were surrounded by groves of massive trees like these. The loggers kept the big evergreens standing for scenery around their bunkhouses and kitchens, while they cut the surrounding forest down to the nub.

“How does Foss even make money?” I asked.

“The man cuts a shitload of wood.”

“How? I couldn't even find a phone number for him.”

“He doesn't need to advertise his services. The big developers know how to get ahold of him. Foss always comes in as the low bidder when a developer needs land cleared to build ski condos or whatever. It's one of the advantages to having ex-con employees who can't get a job anywhere. He can pay them pennies on the dollar and then turn right around and get his money back charging them room and board.”

“It sounds like a sweet deal if you don't mind treating your workers like plantation slaves.”

“Maybe in his mind he's helping them,” Pulsifer said.

“What do you think?”

He raised an eyebrow to tell me how stupid my question was. “I think the guy's a genius.”

Snow was dropping in clumps from the evergreens where the sun was shining, but it clung tightly to the trees that remained in shadow.

After a few minutes, we came to the first building. It was a generator station in a clearing, with a big solar panel on the roof and wires leading off through the tree limbs. I could feel the vibration of the machine in my fillings.

The next structure was a trailer, no different from those used at construction sites, with a satellite dish mounted on the roof. Two state vehicles, a Franklin County Sheriff's Department cruiser and a late-model Chevy sedan with state-government plates, were parked out front. I recognized the former as the car Clegg had been driving the night before. I figured the latter must belong to Adam's probation officer.

Pulsifer unfastened his seat belt. “Have you ever met Shaylene Hawken?”

“Not in person, but we had a pleasant chat on the phone the other day.”

“Isn't she a charmer?”

As I stepped out of the vehicle, I heard a fast-paced chittering overhead and saw a mixed flock of birds swoop and settle into the cone-laden branches of a pine. They were Red and White-winged Crossbills. Those bird-watchers Pulsifer had chased out of the road would have paid money to get such a good look at those elusive winter finches.