Bad Little Falls Read online

  Turning my head slowly from side to side, I swept the beam of my headlamp around the inside of the vehicle. A thin layer of hoarfrost, like a dusting of baker’s flour, covered the interior. The car was a Pontiac; I saw the arrowhead logo on the steering wheel. Someone had used pieces of duct tape to stitch up a gash in the seat. There was the odor of old cigarettes badly masked by a pine-shaped air freshener suspended from the rearview mirror. There were empty Budweiser cans, some crushed, scattered across the backseat. There was a handful of twelve-gauge shotgun shells in the console. But no shotgun.

  I found the auto registration tucked above the driver’s sun visor. The car was a 2004 Grand Am, registered to one Randall Scott Cates.

  “Holy shit,” I said aloud.

  The image of a sneering, tattooed face hovered in front of my eyes. And suddenly I realized who the hypothermic, frostbitten man was back at the Sprague house and why his face had seemed vaguely familiar.

  “What’s the story in there?” Kendrick said over my shoulder.

  I braced myself against the steering wheel and climbed awkwardly out into the open air. A blast of icy wind nearly pushed me back. Several of the dogs were yowling.

  “I know the person who owns this car. It’s not a girl named Kate; it’s a man named Cates. Randall Scott Cates. I saw him this morning at the McDonald’s in Machias.”

  Kendrick didn’t speak. I couldn’t make out his expression through the blowing snow. “So where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t suppose any of your dogs can run a track.”

  Kendrick gave a scornful laugh. “They’re sled dogs.”

  If Randall Cates was wandering around in this blizzard, the odds were heavily stacked against our finding him before he froze to death. If he was already passed out inside a snowbank, we wouldn’t find his body until the April thaw.

  Almost a year earlier, I had found a deserted car on a darkened road. For a variety of lame-ass reasons, I hadn’t exerted myself to find the missing driver. A woman ended up dead. Maybe she would have died anyway, but I didn’t need another what-if question hanging over my pillow.

  I found my cell phone and tried to get a signal, but the screen showed only a single bar. I tried the GPS instead. Our location came up as a logging road that dead-ended at Bog Stream. I marked a waypoint and handed Kendrick the receiver.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Go back to the Spragues’ house and call the state police,” I said. “Tell them where I am and that I need assistance locating a lost person. Give them these coordinates. Make sure they notify Warden Marc Rivard. We need a search dog here.” I reached into my shirt pocket and found the auto registration. “The state police should also make sure Randall Cates isn’t asleep in his bed back in Machias.”

  The wind tore Kendrick’s breath from his open mouth when he laughed. “I don’t need GPS coordinates. I know exactly where we are.” He tucked the registration in his parka. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to look for him.”

  “No offense, Bowditch, but I guarantee you that I am better at it than you are. I know this bog like the back of my hand. Go back to the house. I’ll search the Heath.”

  “No offense, Kendrick, but this is my job.” I zipped up my parka and raised the hood over my ears. “See if you can find Ben Sprague while you’re at it. Tell him to clear the Bog Pond Road with his plow so the ambulance can get to his house.”

  Kendrick pulled his goggles down over his eyes. “Suit yourself.”

  I watched him check his team’s harnesses, his body illuminated in the shaky beam of my headlamp. The animals’ coats were matted with clumps of snow. They looked at their master with bright, enthusiastic eyes. The dogs were eager to run.

  Kendrick stepped onto the runners of his sled. Then he gave a single sharp whistle. The lead dogs barked and took off. There was a pause, and then the sled was yanked forward into the night. In no time at all, Kendrick had disappeared through gauzy curtains of snow.

  * * *

  After the last barks of the dogs had faded and all that was left was the howling of the wind in the tops of the cedars, I sat down on the seat of the snowmobile and strapped my snowshoes to the bottoms of my boots. My bare fingers smarted as I secured the buckles. Kendrick was right about the absurdity of my plan: I was alone, at night, in a blizzard in a pathless forest. I was trying to find a lost, perhaps already dead and buried man. And somehow I was going to accomplish this feat without succumbing to hypothermia myself. Where to even begin?

  With a spiral search, I decided.

  Starting at the driver’s door, I began walking in an expanding circle around the car.

  If Randall Cates was indeed dead, my best chance of finding him was somewhere near his encased vehicle. I could imagine the tattooed man lurching off into the dark in his panic or confusion and very quickly collapsing from the cold, especially if he had been dressed as inadequately as his companion was.

  Perhaps I was reading too much into his incoherent mutterings, but John Sewall had told us that his friend was “in the car,” which suggested that Cates had remained in the vehicle while his passenger went for help. Maybe the two men had gotten stuck and then tried to wait out the storm, until finally the subzero temperature drove them to take action.

  I could understand the desperation. Waves of powder washed like lines of surf along the frozen road. After fifteen minutes of tromping around, I paused in the shelter of a big hemlock until a sudden gust knocked an enormous clump of snow off the heavy boughs and down onto my head.

  I decided to expand my search. Back at the Spragues’ snowmobile, I struggled to remove my snowshoes. I could barely see through the ice-painted visor of my helmet. More and more, my fingers were feeling like they’d been carved from sticks of fatwood.

  Fortunately, the sled’s engine sprang to life with the first turn of the key. Half standing, with one knee resting on the seat, I rode for maybe a hundred yards into the swamp, calling for the lost man the entire time. The headlights showed no footprints or vehicle tracks. The snow was as pure as a newly washed sheet.

  After a while, I gave it up and reversed course. By the time I passed the Grand Am again, the storm had nearly filled the hole that Kendrick had shoveled. If Sewall and Cates had been stuck inside their car for hours, they might have run the engine to keep warm until the gas tank was empty. People who try this maneuver often forget to crack their windows and so expire from carbon monoxide poisoning. Or their tailpipe gets plugged with snow and they die that way from the odorless and colorless gas. Had Sewall gone for help after his friend lapsed into unconsciousness? I was convinced that Cates must have been incapacitated in some way when Sewall had set off on his snow-blind journey into the void. Why else stay behind?

  I was traveling through a landscape as sharp as a black-and-white photograph. The greens of the pines looked black. The shadows beyond my headlights were gray. The only brightness was the white of the blowing snow.

  I had entered a world of ghosts.

  Along that spectral road, I met no living thing.

  * * *

  Around 2:30 A.M., I decided to return to the car. It had been two hours, give or take, since I had sent Kendrick off on his mission; four hours since I had arrived at the Spragues’ house.

  With any luck, Ben Sprague had cleared a passage for the ambulance and John Sewall was en route to the hospital in Machias. With any luck, Sergeant Rivard was on his way to my location and searchers were assembling from across the snowbound county to help scour the woods. With any luck, Randall Cates was still alive.

  I wasn’t feeling all that lucky.

  My lungs hurt from shouting and breathing subzero air. My fingers had begun to throb and cramp. There was no sensation in the tip of my nose.

  Back in the glade, there was no sign of Randall Cates. No sign of help. I parked the Yamaha beside the car’s open door to block the wind and then crawled inside the vehicle. Once again, I snapped on my headlamp and ins
pected the inside of the four-wheeled igloo.

  If I could figure out what Cates and Sewall had been doing in this isolated place, I might have a better chance of finding my missing person. Under the seat, my stiff fingers encountered something that felt like a magazine but turned out to be a battered copy of The Maine Atlas, a staple-bound gazetteer that just about everyone I knew kept stashed in their cars or trucks. Maine was a big state, or at least a largely empty one with too many unmarked roads. It was easy to lose your way.

  On a hunch, I turned to the page that corresponded to my present location. The topographical map showed vast white expanses that indicated wetlands. Logging roads and jeep trails zigzagged through these empty places. I followed a curving line down from the Spragues’ house, about two miles away. A pencil scratch marked the spot where I was sitting. So Sewall and Cates had come to this specific place for a reason? Was it a drug deal? They’d done something here and then gotten stuck trying to drive out on the snowy road.

  I tried the glove compartment again, but it was locked.

  What about the trunk?

  I loosened the latch. Behind me came a click, but the lid was weighted down with snow. I slid out into the biting night and grabbed Kendrick’s shovel. It took me five minutes to clear off enough snow to get the trunk open.

  I found the shotgun inside. It was a Remington 870 pump. Someone had recently cleaned the barrel—the metal gleamed blue under my headlamp—and carefully rubbed linseed oil into the hardwood stock. The trunk also contained a spare tire, a jack, a few ice-fishing tip-ups, and a blue school gym bag emblazoned with the Whitney High mascot, a stern-faced and politically questionable Indian chief. I unzipped the bag. There must have been five thousand dollars in cash rolled up in rubber bands. Someone had thrown in a loaded Glock 9 for good measure.

  FEBRUARY 14

  There wasn’t another car on the road.

  The trees were all thrashing around like those evil trees that almost ate the Hobbits. The electric wires kept swinging like jump ropes. I thought maybe one of them would snap. You can’t get electrocuted in a car, on account of the rubber wheels, Mr. Mason told us.

  I kept expecting to see the White Owl around every corner, perched on a fence post.

  Ma had to lean over the steering wheel to see anything.

  What happened to Prester? I asked.

  The police say he showed up at somebody’s house in the middle of the storm.

  Whose house?

  I don’t know. Somebody who lives in Township Nineteen. Way out in the boondooks.

  Where does the word boondocks come from?

  I have no clue.

  Is there a real place called East Gish?

  Lucas, she said. Will you PLEASE stop asking questions! I’m trying to concentrate on the road.

  Where’s Randall, though? He and Prester said they was going coyote hunting, not last night but the night before.

  Lucas! I’m freaking out here!

  Before she started going to her Don’t Drink meetings, back when she was with Randle, she used to get all weird and dopey, but now she’s nervous or angry all the time.

  We drove over the causeway in the dark. Usually there are cars parked along it, people hanging out—but not during the Storm of the Century.

  We passed Helen’s and the Bluebird Ranch and they were both closed. Even the gas station was closed. It was like a NUCLEAR BOMB went off and killed everybody or maybe turned them into zombies.

  Now we’re in the hospital parking lot.

  I wonder how many people die at the hospital every year. Probably a lot.

  All hospitals must be haunted.

  10

  I was inside the Grand Am, shivering, my teeth clenched to keep from chattering. The gym bag lay open beside me on the seat. I was trying to reconstruct in my imagination the drug deal that had taken place in this frozen swamp when I heard a loud scraping sound. I clambered out of the car and stood knee-deep in the snow, watching as powerful lights tore through the storm.

  There were two vehicles: a hefty pickup outfitted with a V-shaped plow and a green warden’s truck following behind. I hoped the trucks hadn’t just flattened the buried body of Randall Cates in an attempt to reach me.

  Over the idling engines I heard truck doors bang open. Three silhouettes came toward me through the headlights.

  “Bowditch!” It was Rivard, wearing his green warden’s parka with the hood up.

  Behind him came a shorter, thicker man: the plow driver.

  And then another person with a dog.

  Kathy Frost? No, she was two hundred miles away tonight in Greenville. It was her protégé from the K-9 team, Cody Devoe. He had been the warden in my old district before being transferred to Washington County at his own request. Devoe is one of those natural woodsmen whose idea of heaven is being stationed in the wildest, least populated outposts imaginable, the kind of warden who spends his vacations fishing for arctic char in Labrador. He is a big bruiser with a perpetual five o’clock shadow even at five o’clock in the morning. His friends call him Fred Flintstone. His German shepherd is named Tomahawk.

  The plow driver—I assumed it was Ben Sprague—was a short but solid guy. He had a hooked, beaklike nose and small, rapidly blinking eyes set close together. He wore a blue snowmobile suit covered with iron-on patches from various clubs, and a New England Patriots cap with a fuzzy pom-pom on top.

  “So what’s going on?” Rivard asked.

  “We’ve got a lost man out here,” I said. “It’s Randall Cates.”

  “That’s what Kendrick told me. I didn’t believe it until I saw Prester Sewall lying in that bed.”

  “I thought his name was John.”

  “Everyone calls him Prester.”

  “I think Cates and Sewall were out here on a drug deal.”

  “Is that a hunch, or do you have more specific reasons for saying that?”

  I showed them the gym bag full of money, and the gun. I told them about the map inside the car with our location marked in pencil. My lips were so numb, I sounded like I had a speech impediment. “I think Cates is lost out here somewhere, wandering around in the dark or collapsed in a snowbank.”

  “I’m not sure how we’re going to find him in this storm,” Rivard said.

  “I’d like to try running a track.” Devoe squatted down beside his dog and adjusted the little orange vest she was wearing. “Tomahawk’s pretty good in the snow. We did some avalanche training last winter up at Baxter State Park.”

  “Christ, it’s cold out here.” Rivard rubbed his gloved hands together and stamped his feet, first one and then the other. The Grand Am had almost disappeared again inside the white mound of snow.

  “How’s Sewall doing?” I asked.

  “The paramedics were putting him in the ambulance when Devoe and I showed up,” said Rivard. “He looked pretty bad to me, but maybe he’ll pull through. They won’t be able to get him to Bangor in the storm, so they’re taking him to Machias to stabilize his condition.”

  “Where’s Kendrick?” I asked.

  “I left him at the house,” said Rivard. “I told him to direct assistance to our location, and I thought someone should stay with Mrs. Sprague.”

  Ben Sprague stared hard at me with a trembling lip and a knitted brow, as if I’d just insulted his mother. “My wife’s had a terrible shock!”

  What was up with this guy? Maybe he was just mad that his pleasant evening at home with the missus had been ruined by this freak occurrence. I couldn’t blame him—Doris Sprague had seemed genuinely upset.

  “What about Larrabee?” I asked.

  “Doc went to the hospital with the EMTs.”

  “So who else is coming?”

  “I wanted to scope things out before calling in the cavalry,” said Rivard. “I woke up Bill Day over in Aurora, but he’s going to be all night getting here. The Passamaquoddies are sending a dog handler from Princeton, along with one of their tribal wardens.” He stomped his feet again in that
same methodical manner he’d used before, first the right, then the left. “We might as well let Tomahawk give it a try, but who knows if that dirtbag Cates is even out here.”

  I understood Rivard’s skepticism. Pitch-dark, in the middle of a snowstorm, at a temperature where even the nose of the best-trained SAR dog in the world might as well have been wrapped in a burlap—these were hardly optimal conditions for a search. And yet I couldn’t help but feel that my sergeant’s lack of confidence was also personal. We hadn’t worked together long enough for him to appreciate my abilities, so all he had to go on was my reputation in the service: impulsive, hotheaded, too impressed with my own intelligence, book-smart rather than woods-smart, a discipline problem, not a team player. In other words, a very, very bad bet.

  Devoe found a dime-store bandanna in the Grand Am and let his dog have a good whiff of it. Then he let her begin pulling him around on a leash through the snow. Tomahawk made a circle around the car and began working her way outward in a fan-shaped pattern.

  Over the past two years, while on stakeouts and patrols, Kathy Frost had given me endless tutorials on the training and use of canines in search and rescue and human-remains recovery. I knew that Tomahawk was searching for a “pool” of human scent wafting through the snowpack. If she found one, she would begin to dig. And maybe, just maybe, she would discover the frozen-solid corpse of Randall Cates. I also knew that Rivard was right when he said the chances of her finding him in these conditions were slim to none.

  Rivard wanted to do his own search of the Grand Am.

  Ben Sprague said he was returning to his truck to warm up and wait. I decided to be neighborly and join Sprague.

  I opened the passenger door and peered up at him. “Do you mind if I get out of the cold for a few minutes?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I slammed the door behind me and instantly felt embraced in warmth. My night in the blizzard had frozen my bones to the marrow. “The snow seems to be letting up.”

  “Does it?”