Massacre Pond Read online

  The dirt road entered a thicket of yellow birches and white pines that someone had logged fifty years ago and then allowed to grow back in anticipation of a future harvest that never came. Every now and then, I caught a reflection of the sun hitting the surface of a half-hidden pond through the trees: a brilliant sparkle that reminded me of light shining on shattered windshield glass. Eastern Maine is beautiful country—not particularly mountainous, but expansive and largely empty of people, with evergreen forests that stretch to the horizons and blue lakes so numerous as to almost defy counting. It was how I always pictured northern Minnesota, around Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. No wonder Queen Elizabeth wanted to protect this magnificent forest forever. Wasn’t it for the same reason I’d become a game warden—to guard places like this from reckless human intrusion?

  The road branched a couple of times, heading away from the lake into the wilder country of the Machias River watershed. After fifteen minutes of spine-jolting bumps, we came to another treeless meadow. This one was significantly larger and damper than the first. Despite the August-like temperatures, the vegetation was painted with the palette of autumn: sun-faded greens, tarnished golds, and burnt umbers. On one side of the meadow, a sluggish brown stream flowed out of a pond shaped like a kidney bean. Fallen leaves, red and yellow, drifted on the surface of the water.

  As Billy rolled to a stop, I saw two ravens lift up from the puckerbrush, big black birds that beat the air heavily with their wings. One of them called, making a distinctive quork sound, to express its displeasure at being interrupted in the middle of its meal. The ravens flapped across the clearing to the exact distance where they would be safe from a man with a shotgun—ravens somehow know these things—and settled together at the top of a tree to await our eventual departure.

  I followed Billy through the dying grass. Late damselflies flitted in the air, blue-bodied and faster than thoughts. I felt sweat ooze down my spine beneath the ballistic vest the Warden Service made us wear beneath our olive-drab uniforms.

  “The ravens were here when I found them,” Billy said quietly, speaking with the hushed tone one uses in a house of worship. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

  I swallowed hard to keep my breakfast from coming up in my throat.

  “Those beaks of theirs ain’t too sharp,” he said, “but they really did a job on the little calf’s face.”

  I took note of the location: seventeen yards from the road.

  “You ever seen anything like this before?” Billy whispered.

  I shook my head no.

  The cow moose had both sets of legs crossed, almost as if someone had posed her that way for a formal portrait, but I knew the big animal had fallen heavily, dropped by a single bullet to the head. The first calf, the baby, lay beside her, with its face torn open by the ravens and the bloody skin peeled away from its mouth. The birds had pecked away at her lips, giving her a perpetual smile that she would wear into eternity. The other calf—a yearling bull that had the gangling look of a teenager that hadn’t grown entirely into his body and now never would—was lying closer to the pond. It had been shot through the eye. The bullet had left a star-shaped hole that you could slide your index finger into all the way to the knuckle.

  I would need to dig the slug out of its brain for evidence, I realized. I would need to cut them all open with my knife to find the bullets. The entire family.

  I removed my black duty cap and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, but the perspiration just streamed back into my burning eyes. Billy was still speaking, but his words were unintelligible; it was as if I were lying at the bottom of a pool, my ears full of water, while things happened in the world above.

  In my imagination, I watched a vehicle creep slowly through the trees under the cover of darkness. I saw the small moose family turn curiously toward the sound of the engine, their eyes glowing green in the handheld spotlight. How long had they been blinded by the intense illumination? Thirty seconds? Less? Enough time for three bullets to be fired in rapid succession. The animals had died so quickly, they’d never even realized they should run.

  As Billy’s voice rose, I found I could understand his words again. “Whoever shot them didn’t even bother to take the meat! He just killed them for the fun of killing, and then he drove off down the lane to shoot another one, like it was a fucking video game. What the hell is this, Mike?”

  The sun seared the back of my neck. “It’s a serial killing, Billy. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

  3

  The ravens watched us from the edge of the clearing like nosy witnesses lingering at the scene of the crime.

  “What did you see?” I heard myself mutter.

  I’d recently picked up the alarming habit of thinking out loud. My job meant that I worked alone a lot, patrolling remote places without backup, and sometimes I felt the need to hear a human voice, even if it was only my own. Living in the woods does strange things to lonely men.

  I turned in a complete circle beneath the rising sun, trying to get my bearings. The air smelled of pine pitch and stagnant water. There were no hilltops or other landmarks visible, but my internal compass placed us four miles northwest of the gate we’d entered.

  “Are we still on Morse’s property?” I asked Billy.

  “This whole township belongs to Ms. Morse, from Sixth Machias west to Mopang.”

  “It’s all gated?”

  “Yep. I supervised the crew that put the gates in over the summer. Ms. Morse wanted someone from the staff on-site during the construction.”

  “So if this section of woods is blocked off, how was the shooter able to drive in here?”

  Billy blinked a couple of times and then lowered his head to look at my boots, his braid dangling down. “Maybe he walked in.”

  “That’s a long haul in the middle of the night. There wasn’t even much of a moon with those clouds.”

  “We might have missed one of them old Jeep trails when we were installing the gates,” he said. “There are so many logging roads to keep track of. Christ, I don’t know! Maybe the shooter came in on an ATV. What does it matter?”

  “I’m trying to reconstruct the sequence of events. How the killer got in here and his specific movements are important if I hope to solve this case.”

  “This whole thing pisses me off,” Billy said by way of apology.

  I pointed in the direction our vehicles had entered the clearing. “From the position of the bodies, I’m thinking it was a truck that came in the same way we did. And I don’t think it was just a single shooter who did this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because one of them had to hold the spotlight while the other took his shots.”

  “Couldn’t he have used his high beams?”

  I drew an imaginary arc in the air with my hand. “That’s what I thought at first, but the angle is wrong, based on the position of the road. Is it possible any of the gates were left unlocked?”

  Billy looked down at his boots again. “Nope. No way.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “That’s my job. Ms. Morse is real clear when it comes to rules, and keeping the gates locked is rule number one.” He reached back, grabbed his ponytail, and gave it a thoughtful tug. “So you think there were two guys?”

  “At least two.”

  “I guess that makes sense. Jeez, I’d like to get my hands on them sons of bitches.”

  I shuddered to imagine the punishment my friend would inflict. Over beers one night, he’d told me how he’d seriously injured a man in the pugil-stick-fighting ring at Fort Benning. He’d sent the recruit to the hospital with such a severe head injury, the man was discharged from the army with full medical benefits.

  I decided to give my brooding friend some space and walked slowly back toward the road, looking for human footprints in the jimsonweed but finding none but our own. The shooter hadn’t even bothered to venture out into
the field to review his marksmanship. He had just opened fire from his vehicle and then driven off.

  There were truck tracks in the road, but the conditions were too arid and the ground was too hard to grab any prints. I did come across a cigarette butt lying in a tuft of rabbit’s foot clover. The filter was white, not tan. A Salem, maybe? Or a Marlboro Light? It had rained two nights earlier, but this cigarette didn’t look like it had ever gotten soggy. I returned to my GMC to find an evidence bag.

  “Hey, Mike!”

  Billy was standing at the edge of the grass. He motioned me toward him emphatically, the way you do with a small child when you come across a frog in a pond. He knelt down to inspect the metal cylinders at his feet.

  “Don’t pick those up,” I said. “There might be fingerprints on them.”

  He dropped a brass casing onto the ground. “Sorry.”

  There were four shells, all from a .22 Magnum rifle.

  “That’s a small caliber to take down a moose,” said Billy. “I wouldn’t use my twenty-two on a varmint bigger than a woodchuck.”

  That was because Billy Cronk didn’t take reckless potshots at animals, hoping to get lucky. In his mind, it was a cardinal sin for a hunter to use too small a gun on a living creature. You might miss your kill shot and leave an animal mortally wounded. But I knew plenty of cruel and careless men who didn’t worry about the casualties they left behind.

  “My dad always used a twenty-two Mag when he was poaching,” I said. “He told me that a twenty-two was powerful but quiet. He said it was deadly in the right hands.”

  “Or the wrong ones,” said Billy.

  “Or the wrong ones,” I agreed.

  In addition to his many other sins, my father had been one of the most notorious poachers in the mountains of western Maine, a man who killed deer, moose, and grouse at will, daring ineffectual game wardens to catch him—which they never did. The idea that his only son had become a warden himself either amused or disgusted him. He kept his emotions in a hermetically sealed box that he refused to open in my presence. But even my poacher father had never committed an act this cold-blooded. To steal the life from another creature as if it had zero value, to kill for fun rather than food or self-defense or revenge—even Jack Bowditch would have been nauseated by this meaningless slaughter.

  When I surveyed the distant tree line again, I discovered that the ravens had vanished. They must have flown off while I focused on the moose. I remembered that in Norse mythology, the god Odin had two ravens—Thought and Memory—that he sent out each day to collect information. They were his personal spies. In the evening, the black-bearded birds would return to Asgard, perch on Odin’s shoulders, and whisper the world’s secrets into his ears. What would they tell the father of gods tonight? I stared at the empty tree where the birds had last perched and tried to make sense of an utterly senseless crime.

  Four dead moose, all seemingly killed by the same gun in the same night. What had started this killing spree? And what had ended it?

  The realization took hold in my mind.

  “There are others,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Whoever did this didn’t just stop at four. They were on a joyride, and they were having too much fun. If we keep looking, we’ll find more bodies. I’m sure of it.”

  The image in my head was of redneck punks at a carnival shooting gallery, plinking one target, then the next, until their time was up or they were out of quarters. How many moose could someone shoot in a single night? There was only one way for me to find out.

  “I want you to take me everywhere in the area you can remember seeing a moose,” I told Billy.

  * * *

  We found two more corpses before noon: a bull and a cow.

  The bull was a monster that had survived many hunting seasons in this pathless forest. For nearly a dozen years, judging from his tremendously humped back and the wear on his lower incisors, he had managed to elude hunters who had hoped to mount his head above a fireplace. And then one night, when all the orange-clad humans had departed the woods for another season, this majestic animal had walked face-first into a .22-caliber bullet. His killers hadn’t even bothered to take home their thousand-dollar trophy; instead, they’d left those magnificent antlers to be gnawed at by porcupines while the moose’s body rotted in the sun.

  The cow was just a delicate little thing that most hunters wouldn’t even have troubled with. Billy found it within a mile of Morse’s new mansion, sprawled at the edge of a grove of northern white cedars that the landscape architects had chopped back to make way for a scenic driveway with a view of the lake. I located two .22 long rifle cartridges and a Salem cigarette filter in the roadside needles.

  “That’s a different caliber,” Billy said. “The other shells were twenty-two Mags.”

  “Yeah, but there was a Salem with the first moose,” I said. “The manner of death is the same, too: an opportunistic shot taken at medium range, probably with the help of a jacklight to blind the animal. This could have been the second man using a different gun.”

  Billy glanced up the road in the direction of his employer’s residence. “The Morses should have heard the shot, this close to the house.”

  “Maybe they did hear it,” I suggested.

  “Ms. Morse didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Did you talk with her this morning?”

  “Not yet. But she would have called if she’d heard gunshots.”

  “Is she the only one who lives there? Does she have any family?”

  He gave me an embarrassed smile. “Yep.”

  “What does that shit-eating grin mean?”

  “Her daughter Briar’s been living there since she dropped out of college last May.”

  “Briar?”

  He shrugged as if to suggest the name made no sense to him, either. “Plus, there’s her assistant, Leaf,” said Billy, “and the housekeeper, Vera; the cook, Meagan; and sometimes Mr. Albee spends the night.”

  “Who’s he, her boyfriend?”

  “No, he’s helping her with this park thing.” A look of alarm widened his blue eyes. “Oh fuck. She’s going to blame me for this.”

  “Why? You didn’t shoot the moose.”

  “She’ll say it was my fault somehow for not watching things close enough. Oh fuck, Mike, I’m screwed. I just bought Aimee a new washer. I can’t afford to lose my job again!”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Billy,” I said. “We need to get a bunch of wardens out here pronto. Each one of the dead moose needs to have its location mapped. Cody Devoe’s dog can help us find any spent shell casings I missed, plus whatever other evidence we can scare up. Cigarettes, candy wrappers. And there might still be other animals out there. Basically, I need to call in the whole fucking cavalry.”

  He lifted his bristling blond eyebrows. “Is there any way you can do it … quietly?”

  “Billy, this is the worst wildlife crime I’ve ever heard about—and it’s taken place on Betty Morse’s property. You don’t think we can hide this from her?”

  “I guess not.”

  I patted one of his shoulders, but it was like trying to reassure a boulder. “Let me call my sergeant, and then you and I will go talk to Ms. Morse together.”

  I rummaged around behind the seat of my truck until I found the rolled-up U.S. Geographic Survey map that showed the quadrangle for Sixth Machias Lake. I tried to spread it open on the griddle-hot hood of my truck, but the edges kept curling back on themselves. The map was only four years old, but it was already terribly out of date, since it failed to show any of Elizabeth Morse’s new construction. With a pen, I marked the approximate locations of the six dead animals, but I detected no obvious pattern, except that whoever had murdered them was obviously familiar enough with the old tote roads to travel through a woodland maze without getting lost or discovered.

  I laid out the evidence bags with the shell casings and the cigarette butts in a row beside the map. My divisio
n supervisor, Lt. Marc Rivard, was one of those bosses who always tells you to bring them solutions, not problems. His latest bit of managerial wisdom, which he’d taken to quoting frequently in our monthly meetings, was, “Who needs a carrot when you’ve got a stick?” Rivard had been my warden sergeant until he was suddenly promoted over the summer, after our previous lieutenant was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My new sergeant, Mack McQuarrie, didn’t seem to care what I did as long as I didn’t rile up the powers in Augusta.

  Given Rivard’s love of the limelight and the sensational nature of this case—a mass slaughter of animals on the property of the richest and most despised businesswoman in Maine—the lieutenant was certain to take a renewed interest in me. If I didn’t handle this investigation by the book, I could expect him to break his proverbial stick across my nonproverbial back.

  Based on the initial evidence, I would tell the lieutenant that two guns had been used, suggesting two different shooters. They had left their brass behind, meaning they were unconcerned that their rifles would ever be connected to these crimes (perhaps they’d planned on tossing their guns into the lake). Either that or they were just careless. The relative scarcity of spent shell casings implied that the killers were extraordinary marksmen; they’d barely wasted a bullet bringing down the moose. As far as the cigarette butts went, all I could determine was that one of the guys, at least, smoked menthols, which provide more of a rush than other forms of tobacco, if you don’t mind ripping the lining of your lungs to shreds. So he had a reckless disregard for his own well-being in addition to that of God’s creatures.

  Christ, I thought, I’m going to need all the help I can get on this case.