“Will you just stop asking us questions and call for some fucking backup here? There’s a dead woman inside who’s been raped and mutilated.”
There was a heavy pause. “I’m going to go take a look.”
“We already disturbed the crime scene,” said Charley. “Please take our word for it, Troop. The evidence-recovery techs need to cordon off this entire building.”
“I’m going to go take a look.” He breezed right past us, moving purposefully up the walkway.
“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m calling Dispatch.”
Lori was working again. As briefly as I could, I told her where we were and what we’d found. “You need to get some detectives down here ASAP,” I said. “And the state police CID, too.”
“You said it’s the same woman who hit the deer last night?” asked Lori.
“I think so.”
“And there was a word carved in the body?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God,” the dispatcher said mysteriously. “Not again.”
After I’d hung up, Charley brought out his own phone. “We need to tell the women we’re going to be late.”
I listened as Charley fibbed to my girlfriend. “Oh, he’s fine, Sarah. But we’ve stumbled onto a pretty bad scene here, and the police are going to need our statements. I don’t know how long this process is going to take.”
He then moved out of earshot to converse privately with his wife.
“You should have been a diplomat,” I said when he returned.
“I was-every time I met a man with a loaded gun.” He gestured toward my arm. “It looks like you cut yourself back there.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You should have an EMT look at it all the same.”
My head was spinning in circles. I closed my eyes and tried to make it stop. I visualized a roulette wheel slowing. The wheel landed on a red number.
“Westergaard,” I said.
Charley understood. “There was no sign of him, unless he was hiding in a closet.”
I dialed information and asked for the hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A minute later, I had my answer.
“There’s a conference going on all right,” I told Charley, “but Westergaard isn’t at it. He canceled his reservation two days ago.”
“That makes the professor the prime suspect, I’d say.”
“But why carve that word into her?”
The old pilot glanced up at the lighted windows. “I’ve been on this earth nearly seven decades, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand the abominations men commit against women.”
Hutchins came down the walk slowly, with his wide-brimmed hat in his hands and his face empty of meaning. Looking at him, I felt an upwelling of anger at this arrogant, incompetent man. He tried to slide past us, but I blocked his way.
“Good work, Trooper. Nice job finding that missing driver.”
“Shut up, Bowditch.”
“‘She was probably shit-faced and called a friend before the cops showed’? That’s what you told me. Maybe if you had actually looked for her, she’d still be alive.”
He looked down at me, eyes flat, jaw tight. “You smell like booze.”
“Boys,” warned Charley. He knew where this was headed.
For an instant, I thought Hutchins might punch me. Instead, he turned one of those wide shoulders into my chest and flicked me aside like a bull tossing a picador. I practically fell over into the snowbank as he stormed back to his cruiser. We could overhear him on his police radio, although his exact words were lost to us.
“I’m not sure that was called for,” said Charley.
“He just pisses me off.”
The wind shifted direction and swept in suddenly off the sea. Charley’s teeth began chattering like castanets. “I’m guessing we’re going to be out here awhile.”
“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”
“I’m not sure who dragged who into what,” said my friend with a humorless smile. “But I’m thinking I’d better buy myself a rabbit’s foot, quick. My luck’s definitely taken a left-hand turn since I made your acquaintance, Warden Bowditch.”
It was Charley’s idea to meet the detectives at the top of the driveway. “They’re going to want to spray wax on the tire tracks,” he told me. “And we don’t need any more cars coming down this hill.”
We left Hutchins standing like a statue beside his cruiser and pushed our way uphill through the broken-branched trees, taking a circuitous route and checking the thinning snowpack with our flashlights every few feet to be certain that no one else had recently come this way. It had begun to dawn on me how thoroughly I had contaminated the crime scene by breaking into the house.
The first responder to arrive was a Knox County deputy. Another soon followed. The police lights made revolving blue shapes in the spruces, turning all our faces blue.
The county sheriff himself was the next to show up. He was a short man with two chins and smoothly shaven cheeks. He had recently won election to the job after working at a desk in the Maine State Prison. Somehow, back in November, he had managed to convince a majority of voters that his background in corrections qualified as sufficient law-enforcement experience. Most of the jail guards I’d met didn’t have a clue about the niceties of community policing. I wasn’t optimistic Dudley Baker would be the exception to the rule.
“Tell me what happened,” he said, peering out at us from behind photochromatic eyeglasses.
“The house belongs to a Professor Hans Westergaard of Cambridge, Massachusetts,” I stated. “There’s a dead woman named Ashley Kim inside, but no sign of the professor. We think they were lovers. If I were you, I’d put an APB out on Westergaard immediately.”
He was wearing a fur-lined parka with the hood up. The effect of which made him look like an Eskimo. “You’re Bowditch, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re Charley Stevens.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
He glanced back and forth between us, frowning. “You need to explain this to me. What the heck are you guys doing here? Why did you break into this house?”
“Maybe we should wait for the state police before we get into all the gory details,” Charley said in an amiable voice. “There’s no point in us telling our story twice.” In Maine, with the exception of the largest cities, all homicides are investigated by the state police’s Criminal Investigation Division. The sheriff’s department would merely assist in the case.
Baker sniffed and thrust his hands into his pockets. “Fine,” he said. Then he went off to speak with his underlings.
“You need to put an APB out on Westergaard!” I called after him.
It took another half hour for a state police detective to arrive. As he climbed out of his sedan, my stomach did a flip-flop. Even in the swirling light of the police cars, I recognized the spark-plug physique and do-it-yourself crew cut. Detective Antonio Menario recognized me, too. “Bowditch,” he muttered, not bothering to hide his contempt.
“Detective.”
He glared at Charley with coal black eyes. “You’re a long way from home, Stevens.”
“I’d say the same for you,” said the old pilot.
Maine state police detectives are assigned to designated regions, and it was my understanding that Menario worked out of the western foothills and mountains, given the role he had played in investigating my father’s case. The detective had never wavered from his theory that my dad had killed those men, and he had treated me with disdain when I’d argued for the possibility of other suspects.
“What are you doing on the coast, Menario?” I asked.
“I’m on temporary assignment so Pomerleau can have another kid. Explain to me what you two are doing here.”
“We found the body.”
Menario tilted back his head and breathed out steam. “Of course you did.”
Sheriff Baker returned and launched into a situation report for the detective. “We’ve put up a perimeter. Your man Hutchins is down at the house, but no one besides these two wardens has gone down the driveway or otherwise disturbed the crime scene. The medical examiner is on his way. My DA is down in Portland, so I’m not sure when we’ll see him tonight. I put in a call to Assistant Attorney General Marshall.”