The Precipice Read online

  “Can you give me a receipt?” I asked Benton. The Warden Service reimbursed my gasoline purchases.

  “Printer’s broken,” he mumbled.

  “That figures.” I could have sworn I’d heard it spitting out tape earlier.

  After the refrigerated climate inside the store, the heat of the parking lot felt subtropical. As I reached for my keys, I spotted Toby Dow by the side of the building. He was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket on which someone had scrawled the words Mayor of Monson with a permanent marker, and he was pretending to talk on a cracked cell phone.

  I went over to him. “Who are you talking to?”

  He stared at me with eyes as shiny as new pennies. “Tom Brady.”

  “Say hello for me.”

  He pressed the oversized phone to his cheek again. “Yeah? OK? Uh-huh.”

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Toby. I didn’t mean to if I did.”

  He lowered the broken phone and held out his soft palm. “Pay the toll, please.”

  “What?”

  “Pay the toll, please.”

  I thrust my hand into my pants pockets and found a quarter. When I laid the coin in the boy’s hand, he shook his head. I got my wallet out and found a wrinkled dollar.

  “Always heard the taxes around here were steep,” Charley said after I’d climbed behind the wheel again. He put on the expensive sunglasses I had given him.

  * * *

  The parking lot behind the fire station was so packed with cars and trucks that we had to leave my pickup on the street.

  I’d been afraid that we were going to miss some sort of public address by the lieutenant, but people were still milling about in groups. The game wardens in green, the state troopers in blue, the sheriff’s deputies in brown. The volunteers were a motley crew—men and women of all ages—dressed in hiking gear. A few wore blaze orange or reflective yellow vests. The decals and bumper stickers on their vehicles announced their affiliations: Moosehead Search and Rescue, Wilderness Rescue Team, Maine Search and Rescue Dogs. There was even a horse trailer from the Maine Mounted Search and Rescue unit parked at the far end, where the horses wouldn’t be spooked by the constant opening and shutting of metal doors.

  It all made for a clubby atmosphere, as if we were all gathered for a friendly sporting event instead of a desperate mission to find two lost women. I saw Kathy Frost kneeling down beside a German shepherd, scratching its nape while she spoke with a smile to the dog’s warden handler.

  In the light of day, my former sergeant didn’t look much healthier than she had the night before. Her skin was sallow, almost waxy-looking, but her hair didn’t seem so limp. And I still found it strange to see her dressed in hiking clothes at a search instead of in her sergeant’s uniform.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did you oversleep?”

  “Charley got into a fistfight outside the gas station.”

  “A what?”

  “Tell her, Charley.”

  Somehow, I’d already managed to lose my friend. As I scanned the crowd, I saw Nissen talking with Dani Tate.

  “I don’t know where he disappeared to,” I said.

  “I need to get moving anyway,” said Kathy. “We’re sending a K-9 team up to Chairback Gap to see if we can pick up Samantha’s and Missy’s ground scent. Another is going to cross the Pleasant River and go through the Hermitage. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She took a hesitant step toward an idling patrol truck. “Oh, yeah. DeFord is looking for you.”

  “He is?”

  “It’s about your friend McDonut.”

  Whatever it was couldn’t be good. Suddenly, the pancakes I’d eaten for breakfast felt very heavy in my stomach.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turning, I found myself face-to-face with a grinning Charley Stevens. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

  “Surprise,” said Stacey.

  I couldn’t see her eyes behind her oversized iridescent sunglasses, but her mischievous smile made me cough out a laugh. She had tied her long hair in a ponytail, and she was wearing a gray T-shirt with the insignia of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, olive drab cargo pants, and hiking boots. A camouflage backpack hung from her shoulders.

  I wrapped my arms around her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you needed volunteers.”

  Stacey had participated in other search-and-rescue missions. She was a pilot and a wilderness first responder. I shouldn’t have been startled to see her. I pressed my face to her ear and got a loose strand of hair in my mouth. Her body felt warm from standing in the sun.

  “I was worried when you didn’t answer my e-mail,” I said.

  “You were worried about me? You’re the most accident-prone person I’ve ever met, Bowditch. Tell me again how many bones you have broken?”

  “I lost count after ten.” I tightened my grip around her waist. “I’m just glad to see you.”

  She patted my back to let me know that I needed to release her. I blushed when I saw Kathy’s and Charley’s amused expressions.

  “You two go right ahead,” Kathy said. “Just pretend we’re not here.”

  She shook Charley’s and Stacey’s hands before she left. She moved with an unmistakable gingerness. It took me a moment to focus my thoughts again.

  “Lieutenant DeFord is looking for me,” I said. “Can you wait here?”

  “That depends on whether my old man is going to let me fly his plane today.”

  Charley’s hair was white and bristly in the sunshine. “Sounds like too many pilots in the cockpit to me.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I wove my way through the crowd, heading for the mobile command post. As I passed a row of warden trucks, I heard a woman call my name. It was Danielle Tate. The young warden had eluded Nissen and his awkward advances. Her black boots were shining as if she’d gotten up early to polish them, and she was as full of energy and enthusiasm as ever. She wore mirrored sunglasses, which showed me a haggard face I didn’t want to believe was mine.

  “What’s this I’m hearing about coyotes?” Like just about every employee of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, she pronounced the word in the western fashion: ki-yotes. “Nonstop Nissen told me the girls were being stalked by them.”

  And I’d thought he couldn’t do anything more to piss me off. “They wrote in their last diary entry that they’d heard coyotes outside the lean-to. They never said anything about being stalked.”

  “Nissen said the coyotes followed them from Cloud Pond to Chairback Gap.” Dani Tate tended to speak in an artificially gruff voice, probably as a way to project authority that wouldn’t be afforded an officer of her gender and height.

  “That’s just hearsay, based on what a hiker told us at Hudson’s Lodge.”

  “So you don’t think there’s anything to it?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  “Crazy rumors always fly around during times like this,” Tate said, as if she were a seasoned veteran and not a twenty-four-year-old rookie. “The other one is that there’s a serial killer on the AT and the feds have been covering it up.”

  In my mind I saw the stony face of the FBI agent who had watched DeFord debrief me inside the mobile command post the night before.

  “Covering it up how?”

  “Saying the deaths were accidents instead of homicides. Not admitting there’s a pattern. What do you think about that?”

  “I think that serial killers are what we have today instead of wolves,” I said. “Monsters lurking in the woods.”

  “That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  “Have you seen DeFord? I’ve heard he’s been looking for me.”

  “He’s inside the RV. Some of us are headed up to Baxter State Park to coordinate with the rangers and interview thru-hikers. But it doesn’t sound like you’re going with us.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Back to Hudson’s, I heard.” S
he shifted her weight from side to side and pursed her lips. “So, I saw that Stacey Stevens is here.”

  “That’s right.”

  I waited for her to say more, but she walked away.

  So the lieutenant wanted to bring in Chad McDonough after all. But why send me back to the lodge? Why not send a state trooper? It wasn’t as if I had established a great rapport with this McDonut.

  I knocked on the metal door of the mobile command post and waited, my stomach turning flip-flops. Lieutenant DeFord himself opened the door. He stepped down, forcing me backward.

  “There you are, Bowditch. I’m on my way home. I need to take a shower before I meet the plane with the girls’ parents in Greenville. Come walk with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We started toward his unmarked patrol truck.

  DeFord’s chin was stubbled, and there were bags under his eyes that hadn’t been there last night. I wondered if he’d slept at all. “How was your room?” he asked.

  “I was tired enough, it didn’t matter where I slept.”

  “That’s good.” His mind seemed to be elsewhere.

  “I ran into Danielle Tate. She mentioned that you wanted me to go back to Hudson’s.”

  The lieutenant stopped to avoid a state police cruiser passing through the lot. “I need you to track down Chad McDonough.”

  “He’s not at the lodge?”

  “Caleb Maxwell said he took off before dawn. He almost slipped out of there without being seen, but he ran into a woman coming back from the showers. McDonough told her he was getting an early start because he wanted to see Gulf Hagas before he hit the trail again. Maxwell didn’t realize he’d left until breakfast. McDonough must have known that leaving in the dark would seem suspicious.”

  I thought back to my conversation with the pudgy section hiker. “I’m not sure he has that level of self-awareness.”

  “You said he was complaining about his sprained knee still hurting?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, he left his splint under his bed, so it must have healed overnight.”

  I knew I should have pressed the kid harder. He’d struck me as a harmless fabulist—those outlandish stories about Jekyll Island and his junior year in Paris—but I should have been more skeptical. I realized now why DeFord was assigning me the task of hunting McDonough down. He wanted the experience to be a lesson to me.

  We’d reached the lieutenant’s truck. “He’s driving a Kia Soul with Mass vanity plates. MDONUT, of course. Ross says he didn’t leave the car at the rooming house, and the state police didn’t find it at the trailhead outside town. He didn’t tell you where he parked it, I suppose?”

  Unlike Samantha and Missy, who had been been hiking since March, Chad McDonough was doing a single leg of the Appalachian Trail, meaning he had to coordinate transportation getting to and from the Hundred Mile Wilderness. “I assumed he’d left his car in Monson,” I said. “Maybe he parked it at Abol Bridge, then had a shuttle pick him up and drop him off at the trailhead.”

  “I’ll have Fitzpatrick send a trooper across the Golden Road to take a look,” DeFord said.

  “What should I do when I find him?” I asked.

  “Bring him over to the Greenville HQ so Pinkham can interrogate him.”

  “What if McDonough doesn’t want to come willingly?”

  DeFord used both hands to pull himself up into the pickup. “I think he will.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He kept the door open as he turned the key in the ignition. “An hour ago, we got a call from the Appalachian Mountain Club. A couple camping along the river found something downstream of Gulf Hagas. They turned it in to the AMC ranger at the ford. It was a red tent. Or the remains of one, I should say.”

  13

  After DeFord had driven off, I got myself a cup of coffee from the Salvation Army wagon and mulled over my assignment.

  All along I had thought Chad McDonough was fabricating the story about the man in the red tent. Cops are so used to being lied to every day. I knew law-enforcement officers who were incapable of believing anyone was ever telling the whole truth. I had personally fallen into this trap on occasion and had to remind myself what a pathological and dangerous way it was of looking at the world. The possibility that McDonut’s story might actually be true hit me like a bucket of ice water dumped over my head.

  The crowd had begun to disperse as different teams got their orders for the day. I looked for Nissen, hoping to confront him. The task of finding Samantha and Missy was daunting enough without rumors going around of four-legged phantoms. But the man was nowhere to be found.

  From a distance I saw Stacey rubbing sunscreen on her forehead. She smiled as I approached, and wiped her greasy fingers on her pants. I felt bubble-headed at the thought of her having driven all these miles to join me in the search.

  “Where’s Charley?” I asked.

  “He caught a ride to his plane with Chris Anson. The two of them were going to talk search patterns.”

  Anson was one of the Warden Service’s three active-duty pilots, a former Marine who had served in Iraq and idolized Charley Stevens. Sometimes I forgot that my friend was a mentor to more young men than just myself.

  “So you’re not flying with him?”

  “I was hoping to find some handsome warden who’d be willing to drive me around all day.”

  I pretended to survey the crowd. “Too bad there are none here.”

  “That’s just what I was thinking,” she said with a smile.

  As we walked up the hill to my truck, I told her about the assignment DeFord had given me to track down the fugitive section hiker. It was a serious conversation, but I couldn’t stop myself from grinning like a teenager whenever we made eye contact.

  She climbed into the pickup, sat beside me, and dropped her backpack behind the seat. She sniffed the air loudly. “Did something die in here?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I’d been sprayed by a skunk a few years earlier, and the embarrassment of seeing people hold their nose everywhere I went was coming back to me.

  “You might consider getting one of those little pine tree thingies to hang from your mirror,” she said.

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Always glad to help, Bowditch.”

  She put on her sunglasses again. They had emerald frames and enormous lenses that had a greenish purple tint, depending upon the angle of the light. “Those glasses make you look like a bug,” I said.

  “Don’t disrespect my shades!” She brought her knee up and pressed it against the glove compartment. “So DeFord suspects McDonut took off when he realized he might be a suspect?”

  “He definitely left in a hurry,” I said. “When I talked to him, he made it sound like he was going to stick around the lodge. He claimed that his sprained leg hurt too much to hike.”

  “It sounds like something spooked him.”

  “Maybe it was me showing up there in the middle of the night.”

  “Tell me about this guy, Nissen,” she said. “You said McDonut knew him.”

  “Everyone seems to know him. He’s famous—or notorious—among the thru-hikers. We met a couple on top of Chairback, and the woman recognized him, as well.” I leaned forward to look in my side mirror before pulling into traffic. “The one thing I know is that the guy is a world-class asshole. Dani Tate told me Nissen was going around this morning telling everyone that Samantha and Missy were being stalked by a pack of coyotes.”

  Stacey snapped her head around in alarm. “What?”

  “McDonut said they heard coyotes howling at Cloud Pond. The girls’ last log entry at Chairback also mentioned coyotes.”

  “Wonderful,” she said through her teeth. “It’s bad enough that the hunters already have people freaked out about coyotes being ‘coy wolves.’”

  “I thought eastern coyotes had wolf DNA.”

  “Their skulls and jaws are more wolflike, but it’s not like they
’re out in the woods looking for Red Riding Hood.”

  In my time as a warden, I had checked the licenses of many coyote hunters and trappers and seen more than a few pelts hanging from hooks. “Some of them are pretty big.”

  “Bigger than western coyotes, but we’re still talking about forty-pound animals.” Her voice was getting louder the longer we talked. “I just hate to see any species vilified.”

  Most of the outdoorsmen I knew in Maine hated coyotes with a passion. Whenever I visited a rod and gun club, I heard horror stories about coyotes chasing deer onto slippery ice or herding them into snowbanks where they could be eaten alive. The reasons for this disdain were primarily selfish, I’d assumed, because the predators competed with human hunters for deer. Truth be told, they were far from my favorite animals, since I myself had seen their bloody work in many frozen cedar swamps.

  Stacey was the only wildlife biologist I knew who stuck up for them. She despised the snaring program the department had implemented to control their populations, calling it a waste of money, since scientific research showed that coyotes reacted to such drastic measures by having more pups. If nothing else, the animals were survivors.

  I knew that a pack of coyotes had attacked and killed a young woman in Nova Scotia some years ago, but I didn’t want to make Stacey any madder by bringing up the incident. “How would you feel about hiking the Rim Trail at Gulf Hagas? McDonut told a woman at Hudson’s that he was headed over there.”

  “Don’t you think he was lying?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

  Outside of Monson, we passed the place where the Appalachian Trail crosses Route 15 and entered the Hundred Mile Wilderness. There were two Warden Service trucks parked in the lot and a hodgepodge of other vehicles—belonging to volunteers in all likelihood—alongside the road.

  “Stop!” said Stacey.

  I hit the brakes harder than I’d intended. The impact jolted us both forward against our seat belts.

  “What is it?”

  “I want to see something.”

  The engine was still idling when Stacey got out and began jogging back toward the trailhead. I grabbed my keys from the ignition and hurried to catch up with her.