The Precipice: A Novel Read online

  “No problem. Anything else?”

  “Make sure no one leaves. The detective wants to get boot prints from everyone who was in the woods here.”

  “You got it, man.”

  I kept picturing Caleb on the ledge above Gulf Hagas. He had lied to us about being the sobbing man the honeymooners had stumbled across on their hike. Had he simply been embarrassed to admit he’d had a breakdown?

  As I fashioned a flimsy plastic fence out of the caution tape, I thought of coyotes howling outside the Cloud Pond shelter and creeping up on the women at Chairback Gap. In my mind I saw black shadows darting through the trees, boots tripping over roots, and then a bloodred flash.

  “Hey, Bowditch!”

  Maxwell waved me over to a knot of people in vests that glowed faintly in the dusk. I ducked under the tape and walked across the carpet of sawdust that covered the clearing from end to end. The searchers stopped talking.

  “Nissen was the one who found them,” Caleb said.

  My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the failing light, but soon I would need to put on a headlamp. Even in the gloom, I could make out my former partner’s smug expression.

  “I just followed the ravens,” Nissen said.

  Once again I wanted to smack the man, but I refrained. “What did you see?”

  “Those girls have been dead awhile,” he said. “Nothing much left of them but skeletons, all torn apart. There are bones everywhere, some missing. The dogs, birds, and bugs picked everything clean. Most of the blood has been washed away by those storms. The rest—their clothes, backpacks—they’re just shredded.”

  Nissen’s voice had remained conversational as he described the carnage he’d stumbled across, but I couldn’t help detecting an undertone of satisfaction. I remembered what Caleb had told me about their time together on the Moosehead Search and Rescue team, how Nissen had always seemed more interested in being the first to find the missing person. He hadn’t cared if the person was alive or dead, just so long as he could claim to be the hero.

  “Jesus,” Caleb Maxwell said. “McDonut was right.”

  “We should wait for the medical examiner before jumping to conclusions,” I said.

  “My God, do you think those poor girls were eaten alive?” one of the volunteers asked.

  “I didn’t think coyotes attacked people like that,” said another.

  I lowered my voice. “Let’s stop with the speculation. We don’t know anything about what happened to Samantha and Missy.”

  But Nissen was unreachable. “Coyotes killed that girl up in Nova Scotia a few years back.”

  I poked my index finger against his sternum. “Knock it off, Nissen.”

  “Why?”

  “If you go around spreading rumors, you’re just going to hurt the parents.”

  “I can say whatever I want.”

  “And I can put you on the ground if you do.”

  His teeth were the color of a stained porcelain sink. “I’d like to see you try.”

  A light appeared, like a will-o’-the-wisp floating toward us through the trees. Somehow, I knew it was Stacey. As I stepped around Nissen, he called after me, but I didn’t register the words.

  Her face was a pale, almost bloodless oval beneath the headlamp. She kept her lips pressed together, as if to keep from vomiting. In my life, I had met few people with stronger stomachs than Stacey Stevens, but I couldn’t remember seeing her this stricken.

  I crossed the clearing in long strides, felt her bury her soft head in my chest. Every muscle in her body seemed to be clenched.

  “Oh, Mike,” she said. “It’s so fucking horrible.”

  22

  That evening, as darkness fell and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, I thought about a dead woman named Taylor Mitchell.

  On a late October afternoon in 2009, the nineteen-year-old folksinger was hiking alone on a trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia, Canada. She had come to the Maritimes to promote her new album and had decided to take time between performances to explore the forested plateau above the Cabot Trail scenic highway.

  The last people to see Mitchell before the attack were a man and woman who passed her as she was heading up the Skyline Trail. The young woman went a short ways into the forest, then doubled back on an access road to the parking lot, possibly with a coyote already in pursuit.

  Just seven minutes after they’d crossed paths with Mitchell, the couple encountered two coyotes on the park access road. The animals trotted toward them along the road, forcing them to step aside, but the hikers managed to take photographs. (A specialist in canine behavior who examined the pictures later testified that the coyotes had displayed an extraordinary lack of fear toward the humans.) These same coyotes are believed to have met the oncoming Mitchell several minutes later. When the couple heard what could have been either animal noises or screams in the distance, they rushed to a telephone to call for help.

  A group of four other hikers then arrived in the lot. The man and woman told them about having seen Mitchell earlier and mentioned possible screams they had heard. The group headed out along the access road and soon came across a set of keys and a small knife (possibly used by Mitchell in a futile attempt to defend herself as she was chased back onto the Skyline Trail). In the clearing at the head of the trail, the rescuers discovered shreds of bloodied clothing and pools of blood on the ground. A washroom in the clearing had bloody handprints smeared on the door.

  Half an hour after she had last been seen, Mitchell was spotted lying in the trees, with a coyote standing over her body. It took repeated charges by three of the young men to chase the coyote even a short distance away from the injured hiker. Mitchell was conscious and able to speak, but the coyote remained close by, growling. Eventually, a responding officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police appeared and fired a shotgun at the animal, and it took off. The rescuers found that Mitchell had been bitten over most of her body, with serious wounds to her leg and head, and she had lost a great deal of blood. She died just after midnight.

  That same day, while the trail was still closed to the public, a warden keeping watch at the washroom location shot and killed a female coyote that was acting aggressively. In the weeks that followed, three other animals were dispatched within a kilometer of the Skyline Trail. Scientists determined that three of the coyotes, including the first and last, were linked to the attack on Mitchell by her blood on their coats and other forensic evidence. One of them, a large male, was identified as the dominant lead coyote photographed by the couple. Its carcass also contained pellets from the shotgun of the responding Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, indicating it was the animal that had refused to move off Taylor Mitchell’s helpless body.

  The story whipped the Canadian media into a frenzy, with so-called wildlife experts speculating that the young singer might have provoked the coyotes by trying to feed them or by disturbing a den with pups. None of the other proposed explanations for the assault—that the coyotes were rabid, wolf-dog crosses, starving, immature, or protecting a kill—was substantiated by autopsies of the dead animals. In the end, no one could explain why a pack of coyotes had attacked and killed a healthy woman for the first time on record.

  I had heard the tragic story of Taylor Mitchell even before I entered the Maine Warden Service, but it was at the Advanced Warden Academy that I learned the details. Like many Maine deer hunters, my instructor at the academy had a visceral hatred for coyotes—which he called “brush wolves.” He said he’d seen deeryards in winter that were as red as battlefields from the predators massacring the helpless bucks and does, which were unable to escape through the thick snow. “The only good coyote is a dead coyote,” he’d said. And he’d fumed at the know-nothing flatlanders who failed to see the mounting danger these increasingly aggressive animals posed. To him, the sad story of Taylor Mitchell was merely the first chapter in what was destined to become a very long and bloody book.

  Listening to Stacey
describe the carnage she’d seen—the gnawed bones, still pink with bits of flesh, the hunks of bloody hair stuck to leaves, the clothing torn to ribbons—I remembered my instructor’s red-faced warnings. At the time they had seemed irrational. Now they seemed prescient.

  I had killed more than a few coyotes in the line of duty, either because they seemed to be rabid or because they were snatching chickens from henhouses. Once, I’d had to put down a hundred-pound Hampshire pig after a coyote leaped over a fence and took a baseball-size bite out of its haunch. I’d also killed a coyote for sport one night when a warden friend named Cody Devoe invited me to hide with him inside a freezing blind, watching a bait pile through a night-vision scope, until the animal came within range of my rifle. The experience hadn’t done much for me (the dead coyote, when seen up close, bore a disturbing resemblance to Rin Tin Tin), but I didn’t begrudge Cody his fun.

  Pinkham and DeFord kept most of the wardens who arrived away from the scene, except for a handful of veteran officers whom they trusted to secure the area. Standing in the clearing, with the construction lights stretching our shadows across the sawdust like pulled rubber, we engaged in the very activity for which I’d rebuked Nissen. We speculated wildly, and without evidence, about how Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery had died.

  “Hey, Bowditch,” said Warden Tommy Volk. “What’s this I heard about coyotes stalking the girls all the way from Cloud Pond to Chairback?”

  “I’m not sure that really happened,” I said. “It might have been two different family units.”

  “Family units! Listen to you.”

  “I knew this day was going to come,” said gray-haired veteran Garland Tibbetts, who was a good man in the woods but no one’s idea of an intellectual. “I wonder if they was menstruating.”

  “The girls or the coyotes?” asked Volk with a smirk.

  We all glared at him. It was too soon for jokes, let alone tasteless ones.

  “If you run from a canine, you trigger a DNA attack response,” said Pierre “Pete” Brochu, a warden sergeant who came from a long line of wardens and considered himself more knowledgeable about animals and their behavior than the department biologists. “The girls should have stood their ground. Same as with an ursine.”

  “An ursine?” said Volk.

  “A bear.”

  “I know what it means, professor.”

  “Chad McDonough told me they both had capsicum spray with them,” I said.

  “McDonough? Is he the one they’re calling McDonut?” asked Volk.

  “Does anyone know if he’s been located?” I asked. “I spent my day chasing him.”

  But no one was interested in my fugitive hiker now that the picked-over bones of the women had been found.

  “You see that escarp up there?” asked Warden Garland Tibbetts, jutting his chin at the darkness. “I bet them coyotes chased those poor girlies right off the edge and then fell upon their bodies down at the bottom. Jeezum, I hope those kids was already dead by the time they was eaten.”

  “Will you please shut up?” Stacey had been sitting quietly on an open truck gate, swinging her feet, not seeming to listen. I’d been trying to give her space since she’d returned from looking at the corpses. “For all we know, Samantha and Missy were murdered.”

  “I thought you said there were chew marks on the bones,” Garland Tibbetts said.

  “Their bodies could have been scavenged by the coyotes,” she said. “We won’t know for sure until the remains are autopsied. You all want to believe the coyotes did it because you already hate them.”

  The stares of the wardens turned toward the lone female among them.

  Pete Brochu said, “Stacey, you haven’t seen some of the depravities these animals have committed out in the woods.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. I’m a fucking wildlife biologist.”

  “Didn’t mean to offend.”

  She gave Brochu the finger and walked out of the light.

  The wardens flicked their eyes at one another. They all knew Stacey was my girlfriend—cops can be the worst gossips when the subject is sex or money—and so they refrained from commentary. But Tommy Volk couldn’t stop himself from cracking up. The man had impulse-control problems.

  When I caught up with her, she had her arms braced against the medical examiner’s Dodge camper van, as if she were trying to flip the vehicle onto its side. Her head was down, her arms tensed.

  “Somebody murdered them, Bowditch.” After briefly using my first name, she was back to her old ways. “It wasn’t coyotes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Coyotes don’t attack adult women.”

  “What about Taylor Mitchell, that singer in Canada?”

  She let go of the van and straightened up. Her face was hidden behind a veil of shadows. “Those were park coyotes. They were acclimated to people. Wild animals are shy of human beings. You know that.”

  In my imagination I saw again the bold animal sitting, unafraid, in my headlights.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I didn’t tell you this, but when Nissen and I were driving out of the wilderness last night, we came upon a coyote in the road. It wouldn’t move out of the way of my truck. It was like it was taunting me to shoot it.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “You know I’m right about someone murdering Samantha and Missy.”

  “Why don’t we wait until the medical examiner studies the remains before making up our minds.”

  “It could take days or weeks for him to finish his report.”

  “Pinkham isn’t going to shitcan his own criminal investigation,” I said. “He’s going to keep exploring leads that point to this as a homicide. He won’t just wait around for the forensic tests to come back.”

  “It’s still going to take time,” she countered. “And meanwhile, everyone in the state of Maine is going to start panicking about ‘killer coyotes’ on the loose. Even after the medical examiner releases his findings, you know it won’t stop the rumors.” She shook her head, as if she felt sorry for me. “Two attractive young Christian girls get stalked and eaten by wild dogs in Vacationland. That’s a story no one can resist. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. People want to believe in big bad wolves. But only humans can be truly evil.”

  23

  Shortly after nightfall, Lieutenant DeFord pulled most of his men out of the woods. It had gotten too dark to examine the death scene with portable lights, and the medical examiner was concerned evidence might be missed and the area would be further contaminated. DeFord arranged for a contingent of Division C wardens to keep everyone out of that part of the forest. The investigation of the woods at the base of the precipice would resume at first light.

  I was prepared to stick around. I traveled with a sleeping bag in my truck, and the thought of leaving Samantha and Missy (or what was left of them) felt like the worst sort of abandonment.

  But DeFord took me aside. He held two plastic bags in his hands containing swatches of red-stained fabric. “Where’s Stacey?”

  I pointed down the logging road to where my truck was parked, out of sight in the darkness. “On the radio with her father.”

  “I’m thinking you should take her home,” he said. “She seemed really shaken up. Pinkham shouldn’t have taken her in there, but he wanted to know if the condition of the remains is consistent with a canine attack or if it looked like the corpses had been scavenged.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Inconclusive.” He wiped his hand across his bristled chin. “She said they’ve been dead awhile, though. There are bones everywhere, and some have been gnawed by mice and porcupines.”

  “Rodents are always the last ones at the dinner table.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard me. “Right now we don’t have a clue how they died,” he said, as if to himself. “The coyotes might have killed them, or they might have fallen off that cliff, or we might find bullet holes when
we get a closer look at their skulls. And now I have to drive back to Greenville, wake up their parents, and ask them if they recognize a shredded sock and part of a bandana, because all that’s left of their daughters is a pile of bones.”

  “Lieutenant!”

  Stacey came running back into the lighted clearing, eyes wide with alarm. She’d removed the rubber band from her hair, which now swung loose on her shoulders.

  “What is it?” DeFord said.

  “Samantha’s and Missy’s parents are down at the turnoff. They’re trying to get past the troopers.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “It’s worse than that,” she said. “The Reverend Mott brought along a television crew.”

  The lieutenant thrust the plastic bags into my hand. “Give these to Pinkham. Then grab some men and meet me down at the road.”

  DeFord took off at a sprint down the hill. Stacey, as usual, was right on his heels. She always needed to be in the middle of things. I could only imagine the reverend’s rage when he saw her face again.

  I found Wes Pinkham conferring in quiet tones with a bald man with a neat white goatee and gold spectacles. He was dressed as if he’d come directly from the golf course: navy polo shirt and creased slacks. He was the state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge. Both men looked puzzled when I pushed the evidence bags on them.

  “What’s going on?” Pinkham asked.

  “The Reverend Mott has called a press conference at the bottom of the mountain,” I explained. “DeFord wants me to get some wardens down there.”

  I grabbed Brochu and Volk, and the three of us quickstepped down the road. The night was so dark I tripped on a stone and nearly went cartwheeling. Up ahead was a constellation of artificial lights: blue, white, and amber. As we drew near, the scene slowly resolved itself out of the blackness. Two state troopers had parked their cruisers to prevent a television van and the Escalade from driving into the clearing. Close to a dozen people—the families and reporters—pushed against the barricaded vehicles. The freaky illumination exaggerated their faces, making the people look like caricatures of themselves.