Widowmaker (25 page)

“I should have known coming here was a stupid idea.”

“It was Clegg's idea, not mine.”

Pulsifer's ill temper seemed to be rising from its cobra basket again. “What is it about you that causes serious lapses in judgment? Is it some sort of contagious condition you carry around, infecting everyone you meet?”

“What's that supposed to mean?” I said.

“It means I'm ready to get out of here.” Pulsifer faced the room with his lip twisted in disgust. “I can't even stand breathing the same air as these scumbags. It makes my skin crawl, thinking about the shit they did to end up here. I wish someone would take a match to this place and burn it to the ground.”

Where had I heard that sentiment before?

“What a colossal waste of time this was,” said Pulsifer.

Speak for yourself, I thought.

 

24

Snow was falling from the high boughs of the evergreens as Pulsifer and I walked back down the road toward his truck. I could hear the clumps dropping in the woods around us. The crossbills were still up there in the treetops, chittering at one another and feeding on cones, although I could no longer see the birds.

Glancing through the barred shadows of the trunks, I saw the Ford Explorer Interceptor parked beside Pulsifer's Sierra. Officer Russo was down on one knee in the snow, examining something amid the litter of fallen needles. Instead of the uniform he had worn at Widowmaker, he was wearing a midnight-blue snowmobile suit, but he had pinned his badge to the front and had his gun belt strapped around his waist. The snowsuit made him look inflated, and he was already a large man.

He straightened up when he heard the crunching of our boots and wiped the snow from his gloves.

“Russo,” said Pulsifer.

“Hey, Gary.” The man's smile, like all of his other features, was so mild as to be unmemorable.

“What are you doing up here?”

“Saw you guys pass by before and thought I'd come up and see if you all needed help.”

In addition to being a security guard at the resort, Russo was a sheriff's deputy, so it was possible he had heard about Langstrom's truck and knew that Clegg was planning to pay Foss a visit this morning. The detective wouldn't necessarily have kept the plans secret. Still, I found his presence on the scene to be suspiciously coincidental.

“Do you remember Warden Bowditch?” Pulsifer asked.

“I am afraid Mike and I got off on the wrong foot. My apologies.” He said this without a hint of contrition in his voice.

“What were you looking at?” I asked.

“Just some animal tracks, trying to figure out what they are.”

Pulsifer stepped over and gave the ground a quick glance. “Those are from a mink.”

In fact, the prints had been left by an ermine—a long-tailed weasel—but I decided not to correct Pulsifer, knowing the foul mood he was in.

“So we saw you parked outside Logan Dyer's house before,” I said.

“I wanted to see how he was doing.”

The thing about Russo's face, I realized, was that it had the artificial softness of a sculpture, as if Madame Tussaud had tried and failed to fashion his likeness from wax.

“Is Dyer sick?” I asked.

“That's what I wanted to know. He's missed a lot of work lately, called in sick, but Elderoy doesn't want to terminate him without cause.”

“So you came out here to see if he was faking?” I said.

“You know how the job is,” he said, meaning police work. “You never know what the day will bring.”

My work had never involved checking up on employees who had claimed to be ill.

“So is he faking?”

“He says he's been getting migraines. That's hard to double-check. He told me he thinks he might have a brain tumor. He is certain he is dying.” The security guard shook his head in a robotic gesture that was supposed to suggest sadness. “I told him to see a doctor if he was so concerned. I tried to talk some sense into him, but there is a limit to Logan's ability to understand things.”

I remembered Pulsifer asserting that Dyer wasn't dumb but that his speech impediment made people assume he lacked intelligence. I thought he might jump in to defend Logan. Instead, Pulsifer changed the subject. “How did you do in Florida? I never heard.”

“Fifth place,” said Russo. “I had an off day. I should have finished in the top three.”

“World Speed Shooting Championships,” explained Pulsifer. He waggled his thumb at me in typical mocking fashion. “Bowditch is always the slowest draw on the course.”

Russo turned his doll-like eyes on me. “You need to stop thinking before you shoot.”

I had heard that advice before—in many contexts.

“Your brain is your enemy in competition,” Russo continued. “You need to make every move automatic.”

“Thanks for the tips.”

The security guard pointed into the woods, in the direction of the dining hall. “How's it going up there? Clegg getting anything useful?”

“Foss kicked us out,” said Pulsifer. “He's only allowing Clegg and Hawken to interview his workers. You'd better not let Foss see your vehicle, or he'll go full volcano.”

“Too bad,” said Russo. “I'd love to poke around this place. I've never been past the gate.”

“No?” said Pulsifer with a perplexed expression. “What about when that Lovejoy guy got crushed?”

“That's right,” said Russo, “but that was in the woods. I never got a tour of the compound.”

“Maybe someday,” I said.

“How long are you sticking around?” Russo asked me.

“Undecided.”

“Enjoy your stay.”

No one could be this banal unintentionally, I thought.

*   *   *

Pulsifer waited for Russo to leave first; he didn't explain why. Then we started back down the slippery slope.

Logan Dyer was in his open garage, tinkering with his snowmobile as we drove by. I was surprised to see him outside, since Russo had claimed he'd called in sick.

Pulsifer slowed to a stop and rolled down his window.

Dyer dropped whatever tool he'd been using and ambled out to meet us. His sleek Plotts, which must have been sleeping inside the garage, ventured out into the plowed drive, baying like hellhounds before their master silenced them with a command.

Dyer hadn't changed out of the clothes he had been wearing the day before, I noticed. His unshaven cheeks looked even scruffier and his eyes seemed even more deeply set into his skull.

“Morning, Logan,” Pulsifer said.

“Hey, Warden.” Dyer leaned on the side mirror. The gesture struck me as presumptuous and disrespectful. If it had been me, I would have told him to get his grimy hands off my truck.

“I understand you've met Warden Bowditch.”

“Came by with Mink last night,” he said thickly. “Never met a hero before.”

From anyone else, I might have interpreted his constant references to me as a hero as a sarcastic insult. But Dyer was hard to figure.

“Hello again,” I said.

“So what's with the cop convention this morning?” Dyer tilted his chin toward the hilltop. “Did one of those perverts ass-fuck another without permission?”

Pulsifer barked out a laugh. “A cop convention! See, Mike, I told you Logan was a clever guy.”

“Sounds like my ears should've been burning,” said Dyer. “But I guess it's too cold for that.”

“We ran into Russo just now and he said he came out to check up on you. He said you've been having migraines.”

“Feels like there's a golf ball between my eyes.”

I leaned forward. “Maybe that's why you didn't recognize that picture I showed you of Adam Langstrom.”

A muscle twitched in Dyer's hairy neck. “I remembered who he was later. Used to see him around the mountain before he went to prison. My memory needs to be jogged sometimes.”

Pulsifer tugged on one of his earlobes; it was red from the cold. “Have you gotten any coyotes yet this season?”

“Some,” he said. “I got one last week. A thirty-pounder.”

Evidently, his migraines hadn't slowed down his hunting. I looked past him at the two Plott hounds lying in the driveway, focused entirely on their owner. They were big, streamlined animals with fierce eyes and muscles that rippled beneath their brindle coats.

“With the dogs or over bait?” Pulsifer asked.

“With the dogs.”

“What did you use to get him?”

“Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Whisper.” Dyer turned his attention from Pulsifer to me. He ran a dirty hand through his filthy hair. “Russo said they found that missing guy's truck. Said there was blood all over it.”

“That's right,” I said. “Don't be surprised if a detective named Clegg knocks on your door later.”

“Me? What for?”

“He's handling the criminal investigation into Langstrom's disappearance and will want to get a statement from you.”

“Me? I didn't see nothing.” His speech became harder to understand the more agitated he became.

“You might have,” I said. “You might not have realized it at the time. Everyone going in and out of Foss's drives by your front windows. And you said your memory needs to be jogged from time to time.”

Dyer took a step back from the window, his shoulders tightening. “Those perverts shouldn't even be running around loose. Who cares if they kill each other?”

“Not me,” said Pulsifer, reaching for the shift. “You take it easy, Logan.”

We drove in silence for fifty yards, until Dyer's house had disappeared behind the trees. Then Pulsifer swung his head around to look at me through his mirrored glasses.

“What the hell was that about?” he said.

“What?”

“Don't give me that bullshit. You were trying to rattle Logan. What was up with that?”

“There's just something about him that seems off to me.”

“Because he hates child molesters? So what does that make me? Jesus, Bowditch. All those years of standing up for you in front of disciplinary committees, hearing about you sticking your nose where it doesn't belong—I never thought I'd get to see it up close and personal. But you really are a piece of work.”

Pulsifer had been in a rotten mood all morning, and I knew anything I might say in defense of my actions would only irritate him more. When we arrived at Route 16, he turned in the direction of Bigelow and Flagstaff and hit the gas hard. He wasn't making any pretense of wanting to get me back to my Scout and out of his district as soon as possible.

The day was shaping up to be a beauty. The snow was sparkling, brighter than crushed diamonds, where the sun hit it. We passed the dead tree where the owl had been roosting, but it had flown away along with the birders.

*   *   *

Visiting the logging camp with Pulsifer had brought back a memory I had done my best to repress. It was the memory of a drive I had taken with Warden Tommy Volk a year and a half earlier, when I was new in the Sebago region. Volk had wanted me to know where the worst dirtbags lived because I would be policing his district on his days off.

Pulsifer might have dismissed southern Maine as a suburban la-la land. But on that day, Volk and I had visited fenced compounds where barking pit bulls announced our approach, trailer parks where men pimped out their teenage girlfriends for heroin, and former farmsteads where the only crops still being grown were sold in Baggies for three hundred dollars an ounce.

But the memory that had lingered longest was our last stop of the day.

Toward dark, we had pulled up in his patrol truck to an anonymous split-level house: the kind of exurban home I wouldn't have looked at twice under normal circumstances. A single light shined from a second-story window, but all of the others were dark.

“I've saved the worst for last,” Volk had said. “The guy who lives here is pure evil. Do you want to meet him?”

“Who is he?”

“No one you'd ever notice.”

Volk chewed tobacco constantly, not even removing it while he ate. He spat a stream of brown saliva into a stained coffee cup. We sat outside the nondescript house, staring up at the lighted window and listening to the engine idle.

“What did he do?” I asked finally.

Instead of answering, Volk did something that made my heart seize up. He hit his pursuit lights and sirens, bathing the dead-end street in blue hellfire.

The outside light came on, the door opened, and a man appeared on the front step. I couldn't see him well from that distance, but he seemed to be middle-aged, with a fat face and square glasses. His dress shirt was untucked on one side, as if he'd come directly from the bathroom, and his athletic socks were so phosphorescent white, they seemed to glow in the dark.

Volk switched off his blues, but the siren echoed in my head.

“Hope I didn't wake you, Pete,” Volk whispered, more to himself than to me.

The man stared sleepily at our truck while he tucked his shirt into his pants. Then, without turning his back to our vehicle, he stepped back inside the house and closed the door.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Peter Hamlin.”

“Who?”

“You never heard of the Pied Piper?” Volk stuffed a fresh wad of tobacco between his cheek and gums. “He used to be the music teacher at Pondicherry High School—married, kids, the whole nine yards. Then a girl in the school band slit her wrists. In the hospital she told a nurse that Hamlin had been having sex with her—all three holes. When the state cops raided his house, they found pictures of him with three other girls. One of them was a niece of my first wife.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Hamlin ‘tried' to kill himself when he was out on bail, hanged himself in a motel room, but I guess he wasn't able to go through with it, the fucking coward. I don't know who his lawyer was, but he must have been the best that ever was. The asshole did only ten years in the Maine State Prison. Can you believe that? Ten years? His wife divorced him, changed her name, moved out of state with the kids, but somehow that dirtbag kept the house. I think it's technically his mother's, and she lets him live there.”