Trespasser Read online

  Wherever you look, a mottled, melting landscape. Snowbanks rotting along the roadsides and meltwater streams the color of urine. Everything that was hidden is now exposed. Beer cans, trash bags, emptied ashtrays. Fur and feathers from creatures unidentifiable, things long dead.

  Winter’s aftermath. The dirtiest season.

  * * *

  March used to be a slow month for Maine game wardens. That was before all-terrain vehicles became popular. In the past, all you had to deal with were the last gasps of the winter yahoos: the foolhardy smelt fishermen venturing onto paper-thin river ice, the alcohol-fueled Evel Knievels trying, unsuccessfully, to turn their snowmobiles into Jet Skis crossing half-frozen ponds. Maybe a rabbit hunter would get lost in the woods, or you’d have to shoot a moose sick with brain worm. But traditionally, late March was a time for wardens to testify in court, catch up on paperwork, and take long overdue vacations.

  Even now my sergeant, Kathy Frost, was trying her hand at tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys. A few days earlier, she’d sent me a postcard from the Hemingway house. I pictured her at Sloppy Joe’s, daiquiri in hand, drinking all the barflies under the table: a Maine warden, on her March vacation, showing all those warm-weather conchs how it’s done.

  Those of us stuck in Maine had no such respite, not with ATVs tearing up the woods. As sales of four-wheelers skyrocketed, wardens were getting angry calls from people like Hank Varnum: landowners outraged by the damage done to their property by all-terrain vandals. This was only my second year on the job, but even I was noticing an uptick in complaints as the snow melted. What was worse, most of the local riders hadn’t started gassing up their machines yet.

  So I awoke at dawn, resolved to track down Hank Varnum’s harassers. I showered, put on a uniform that would be filthy within five minutes of stepping outside, and left Sarah curled up beneath the covers. She’d had a restless night, tossing and turning, as if trying to wriggle free of a straitjacket.

  Outside, the fog had lifted. The temperature had dipped before sunrise, and all the puddles were frozen solid. Winter wasn’t done with us yet. Some of the worst snowstorms in the state’s history were early-spring sucker punches. In Maine, you were a fool if you put away your snow shovel before Mother’s Day.

  My plan was to stop at the Square Deal Diner for a coffee and doughnut and then return to Varnum’s property to have a look at the carnage by the light of day. After that, I figured I’d visit some of Hank’s neighbors and see what information I could shake loose. At the very least, the word would get out that I was searching for the vandals. Fear of being caught might temper their bad behavior—or it might have the opposite effect of inspiring them to greater acts of mayhem. You could never tell with these situations.

  But as I drove into Sennebec Village, I discovered that I couldn’t get the name Ashley Kim out of my head. It was like a pestering fly that wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Outside the diner, I saw the usual lineup of commercial vehicles. Reading the names painted on the sides of these trucks was like taking a survey of midcoast Maine’s winter economy. HATCHET MOUNTAIN BUILDERS. CASH & SON PLUMBERS. SNOW BUSINESS: PLOWING AND COTTAGE CARETAKING. It often struck me that most of the people in my district depended for their livelihoods on a small number of very wealthy individuals, many of whom spent only a few weeks a year in Maine.

  At the counter, Ruth Libby poured me a cup of coffee. “’Morning, Mike.”

  “Hi, Ruth. Where’s your mom today?”

  “Portland. She’s got a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Nothing bad, I hope.”

  “She wouldn’t tell me if it was.” Like her mother, Ruth was apple-cheeked and round of body. As the only waitress, she didn’t have time for small talk. She grabbed a molasses doughnut from the glass case and set it down on a little plate in front of me. But when she wandered back to refill my cup, I made a point of quietly asking her a question: “Does Curt Hutchins ever come in here? He’s the new trooper at Troop D.”

  “No, Curt doesn’t come in here. But I know who he is. He was in my brother Bill’s class. All the girls had a crush on him.”

  I sipped my coffee. “What else do you remember about him?”

  She set down the coffeepot and gave me a sly look. “You keep asking questions like that, and people are going to start talking.”

  I smiled and tried to study the room nonchalantly. It’s the cop’s lot in life that whenever you enter a restaurant in uniform, you give some people the creeps. I noticed one prematurely bald dude wincing at me over his newspaper, as if I’d carried the smell of dog shit into the diner with me.

  I felt someone looming over me. “I want to apologize for last night,” Hank Varnum said, but his craggy expression was anything but apologetic. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you for what those punks did. I know you don’t have time to stake out every ATV trail in Knox County.”

  He held out his hand for me to shake. It was all very theatrical.

  “It’s understandable you were upset, Hank,” I said. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m planning to talk with your neighbors this morning and see what I can find out.”

  “Talk to that bastard Barter first. You tell him I’m ready to prosecute whoever cut those trees to the fullest extent of the law.”

  “I will.”

  The bell above the door clang-clanged as he went out. Ruth Libby had been eavesdropping the whole time. “ATVers are tearing up his land?”

  “Yep.”

  She shook her head with genuine sadness. “Damned kids,” she said.

  She was, at best, nineteen years old.

  * * *

  I sat in my truck in the parking lot and switched on my laptop computer. Up came the half-finished accident report I’d started filling out on Ashley Kim’s deer/car collision. I considered calling her home number in Cambridge, but it was ungodly early, and I didn’t want to step on Hutchins’s toes. Instead, I looked up the addresses and phone numbers for the various law-enforcement entities in Knox and Lincoln counties. As it happened, Hutchins lived nearby, not exactly on the way to Varnum’s farmhouse, but close enough to be a plausible detour. I decided to pay the trooper a visit.

  It was one of the modular homes that had gone up over the winter on the Catawunkeg Road. The builders must have finished their work after the first frost, when it was too late to plant grass. Instead, they’d dropped some maple saplings into holes and left the yard a muddy mess.

  Hutchins’s cruiser was parked in the drive beside a shiny blue Ford F150 pickup. Like game wardens, Maine state troopers work out of their homes, reporting in to their district outposts—called barracks—only on an as-needed basis. Another vehicle, a bronze Dodge Durango, was idling in the open garage.

  As I approached the door, a young woman in a business suit came hurrying out of the house toward the waiting SUV. She caught sight of me and froze. She was a short, shapely brunette with long hair pinned back behind her ears.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hello?” she said in the same wary tone one might use to greet a door-to-door salesman.

  “Is Curt home?”

  Instead of answering me directly, she turned and vanished inside the house. Half a minute or so later, she returned wearing a pair of sunglasses. “He’ll be right out,” she said, opening the door of the SUV. I watched her climb behind the wheel and back out—too quickly, in my opinion—down the drive.

  Hutchins, wearing gray sweatpants and a New England Patriots T-shirt, opened the door. His long eyelashes were crusty. “Let me guess—you just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “Something like that.”

  He yawned. “You want coffee?”

  “If you’re having some.”

  I followed him inside. A black Labrador retriever sprawled on a pillow in the mudroom gave me a warning growl but didn’t bother to rise. Hutchins paid the dog no attention. The house didn’t feel lived in yet—there was an emptiness to the rooms that spoke of boxes somewh
ere yet to be unpacked—and our voices seemed to echo unnaturally. He motioned for me to take a seat at the kitchen table.

  “I think I startled your wife,” I said.

  “Katie? She’s afraid of her own shadow.” He poured a cup of black coffee and handed it to me without asking if I wanted milk or sugar. “So I know why you’re here.”

  “You do?” This guy doesn’t lack for confidence, I thought.

  “You want to tell me I was out of line last night. I hate to break it to you, Bowditch, but you’re kind of an infamous personality. There are a lot of officers who are going to have problems working with you after what your old man did. I’m not one of them. But you’re never going to win any popularity contests up in Somerset County.”

  “Actually,” I said. “I just wanted to follow up on the deer/car collision.”

  “You’re not still worked up about that?” When he smiled, the stubble of his beard made the cleft in his chin more pronounced. “I wrote her up for leaving the scene of a collision. She’ll be surprised when she learns she committed a Class E misdemeanor.”

  “So you never tracked her down?”

  “I tried her home number in Massachusetts. Got a machine.”

  “You mind if I give her a call?”

  He didn’t bother disguising his suspicion. One of the afflictions that besets many law-enforcement officers is an inability to take any statement at face value. You’re always watching for the “tell” that hints at a perp’s hidden intention. Then one morning you wake up and realize you’re looking at your girlfriend like she’s trying to put something over on you, too.

  “What’s your fascination with this? When I was working the turnpike, we got half a dozen abandoned vehicles a night.”

  “I’d like to talk with her about what happened.”

  He studied me closely. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I might take that as an insult. Like you’re implying I didn’t do my job.”

  “I’m not implying anything,” I said. “Maybe she knows what happened to the deer.”

  “The deer?” He laughed so loudly, the dog barked in the other room. “I thought you were worried about the girl. I should have guessed it was the other way around. You frigging game wardens.”

  There were some troopers who looked down their noses at wardens. We might have trained together at the academy, but they still didn’t consider us real law officers in some essential way. Hutchins was obviously one of the elitists. I’d sensed it last night. I wanted to rip his head off, but somehow I managed to keep a bland smile on my face.

  “Go ahead, give her a call,” he said. “If you talk with her, though, let her know that she had some people worried about her.” He grinned boyishly. “Then you can tell her about that summons.”

  “How’s your cruiser this morning?”

  I’d never heard of a trooper having engine trouble in the middle of his shift before—usually the state police kept those vehicles in tip-top condition—and that strange occurrence was yet another thing bugging me from the night before.

  Hutchins seemed to sense my wariness; I saw a muscle flex along his jaw. But his voice gave nothing away. “The new spark plugs are all firing, if that’s what you mean. I must have gotten some duds when I replaced them last week.”

  I stood up to leave. “Well, I better get on the road myself.”

  “Yeah, I’m supposed to meet my brother this morning in Brunswick.” A bronze light came into his eyes. “That reminds me what I’d wanted to ask you. You see a lot of four-wheelers in the woods, right? You got any recommendations for a kick-ass ATV? I’m looking to do some serious off-roading this spring.”

  5

  The rental company had provided Hutchins with Ashley Kim’s home phone number in Cambridge. I drove half a mile down the road to a shuttered farm stand and dug my cell phone out of my Gore-Tex parka. After eight rings, one of those automated voices came on, instructing me to leave a message after the beep.

  “This is Michael Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service, and I’m trying to reach Ashley Kim. I’m calling in regard to a car crash last night—that’s March fifteenth—on the Parker Point Road in Seal Cove, Maine. It’s imperative that I speak with Ms. Kim immediately. This is a law-enforcement investigation, and she is required by Maine law to provide a statement.” I left my cell number, feeling doubtful she’d return my call.

  By all rights, Hank Varnum’s ATV vandals should have topped my to-do list. But instead, I found myself driving in the direction of Parker Point. It was a blustery, overcast day, and the wind was blowing a chop in the coves. Overhead, the tops of the spruces swayed in unison like churchgoers at an old-time tent revival.

  The deer blood in the road had darkened overnight, turning a rusty red. The tire tracks from Ashley Kim’s wrecked Focus were sculpted into the frozen mud. I buttoned up my parka as I roamed through the huddled evergreens and wondered again why this incident was biting so persistently at the back of my brain. What exactly had happened here after all? There was no evidence to be found amid the trees. I closed my eyes and tried to envision the sequence of events.

  Sometime around dusk, a woman had been driving too fast in a thick fog on the road to Parker Point. Suddenly, a deer sprang out of the trees and smashed into her hood. The deer died on impact, the air bags inflated, but the woman emerged from the collision uninjured. She had the presence of mind to call a tow company, which sent Stump Murphy to retrieve the wrecked car.

  What happened next? She told Stump’s dispatcher that she already had a lift. Did she hitch a ride or call her friend on Parker Point to pick her up? How about a taxi? The nearest cab company was in Rockland, half an hour away, so probably not. Maybe she just decided to walk to whichever house she was headed.

  Meanwhile, an anonymous driver arrived on the scene to offer assistance, but she refused his help. Our Good Samaritan did, however, stop at Smitty’s Garage, two miles down the road, to call the Knox County dispatcher. He reported the accident and told the sheriff’s department to send an officer. Unfortunately, the state trooper on duty (Hutchins) had inopportune car trouble. As a result, there was an hour delay before the responding officer (me) arrived on the scene. Sometime during the interim, an unknown person stole the dead deer. Or maybe the Good Samaritan was the game thief. Was Ashley Kim still present when the deer got snatched? Or had she already left by that time?

  The logical conclusion was the one Hutchins had suggested: Ashley Kim had been drinking, she was worried about her blood-alcohol content, and so she skedaddled before the cops showed. She was probably sleeping it off in one of the swank cottages along the point. There were more than fifty properties out there. I could poke down every private drive, looking for a lighted window. That was assuming she was actually staying somewhere on the point.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “Hello?”

  I’d been hoping it was Ashley Kim, but it was Sarah. “I wanted to remind you that we’re having dinner with Charley and Ora tonight,” she said. “Make sure you’re home by six, OK? I don’t want you showing up late, smelling like roadkill.”

  “Will do.”

  She paused awhile on her end of the phone. “I’m sorry about being cranky last night.”

  “I thought I was the cranky one.”

  “I’ve just got cabin fever. This weather is driving me nuts.”

  “Spring is on the way.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said. “You know I love you, Mike.”

  “I love you, too,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Don’t be late!”

  I was genuinely looking forward to our dinner with the Stevenses. The retired warden pilot and his wife were visiting the midcoast area for a gathering of Vietnam War veterans. The last time we’d spoken, he said his knee was still in a brace but his physical therapy was proceeding well for “an old geezer.” Over the phone, his spirits sounded sky-high, as usual: “Ora thinks I’m one hundred percent cured bu
t just faking it to get rubdowns from the pretty young therapist.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “At my age, son, your circulatory system needs all the aid and assistance it can get.”

  Sarah had taken it upon herself to arrange a dinner with the Stevenses at our house. After my talking about Charley and Ora so much over the winter, she wanted to meet them in person. I felt certain they’d enjoy one another’s company. So why was I anxious?

  I crouched down on the salt-frosted asphalt and plucked a tuft of deer hair from the frozen blood. I rubbed the coarse, hollow fibers between my fingers and let them blow free in the wind. Knowing my district the way I did, I probably had a better chance of locating my missing deer than I did Ashley Kim.

  The first place I’d start looking was at the home of Calvin Barter, a man I knew only by his nasty reputation. My predecessor in the district had told me that Barter was a petty drug dealer and notorious game thief who never passed up fresh roadkill. I’d heard that he had an uncanny way of appearing mere minutes after a police officer radioed in a deer/car collision—ready, willing, and able to carry away the meat. Coincidentally, he was also one of the men Hank Varnum had identified as a suspected ATV vandal. So I’d be killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.

  * * *

  Despite all the fancy summer houses along its coast, Maine is a desperately poor state. My sergeant, Kathy Frost—who’s not known for being politically correct—calls it “the fist of Appalachia shoved up the ass of Maritime Canada.” I could travel just a few miles inland and see poverty everywhere: run-down mobile homes swarming with toddlers or Typar-sided shacks with junked autos rusting in their dooryards. Down every dirt road loomed a falling-down farmhouse plastered with KEEP OUT signs, as if there was anything inside worth stealing. Some of those same buildings, however, contained well-guarded meth labs and vast indoor nurseries of marijuana plants, in which case those warnings were well heeded.