Somehow a black fly had found its way inside the patrol truck. I could feel it creeping into the notch behind one of my ears. “You honestly thought that was me, Marc?”
“I had to ask.”
Like hell he did. “Did the girls give you a description of the guy?”
“Early twenties,” he said. “Tall like you. On the thin side. Hair buzzed down to the scalp. They said there was something funny about one of his eyes.”
“Funny how?”
“Just funny. What I’m telling you came secondhand through the father of the girl driving the car.”
“Did this imposter give a name? Or show some kind of identification?”
“They were just kids. Plus they’d been drinking wine coolers.”
“What about a license plate?”
“You don’t seem to be listening.”
I had been waiting for Rivard to get to the plan of action, but he seemed in no hurry. “So what do we do about this?”
“Put it out quietly among law enforcement to be on the lookout for some jackass pretending to be a game warden.”
“Shouldn’t we warn the public?”
“And give the crazies an excuse not to stop for blue lights?” He pitched his voice high with mockery. “‘But judge, I thought it was that police impersonator behind me. I was afraid he might kill me if I pulled over!’”
“What about the yellow car?” I asked.
“What about it?”
“Shouldn’t we try to locate the driver? Find out who he is and what he saw? How many yellow sports cars are speeding around Washington County?”
“Bowditch, do you realize how limited my resources are at the moment?”
“It seems like catching this phony warden should be a priority.”
“I am making it a priority.”
Two weeks passed without the warden impersonator making another appearance. Then came the home invasion.
I remember it being a particularly dark night, overcast, with a new moon afraid to show itself. I was working the smelt run on a skinny little brook that spilled out of the hills above Sixth Machias Lake. I had just issued a summons to a chucklehead who’d netted about ten gallons of smelt, the bag limit being one quart, and made him dump the shimmering fish back into the brook.
My phone rang as I was marching the smelt poacher to his truck. The dispatcher told me there was a man in the next township claiming he’d been terrorized at gunpoint by a game warden gone rogue. The location of the alleged “home invasion” was a trailer parked illegally at the mushy edge of a beaver bog.
By the time I arrived, half the law enforcement officers in the county seemed to be on the scene. Among them was Rivard.
My sergeant had black hair and what people, behind his back, called a “porn ’stache.” He had been married and divorced twice and fancied himself a debonair playboy. By the standards of backwoods Maine, he probably fit the definition.
He grinned wide enough to expose his bicuspids. “The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime!”
I was baffled by the joke, but it brought smiles to the faces of the assembled deputies and troopers.
“Is the victim still here?” I asked.
“The sheriff’s taking his statement. She told me to send you in.”
“Why me?”
“You’ll see.”
The camper was a suppository-shaped, silver Airstream. The inside smelled of weed. There were, no doubt, other odors, but they were entirely overridden by the marijuana smoke baked into the rugs and upholstery.
Every drawer had been pulled out and overturned, and every door was ajar. Clothing, canned goods, and assorted crap littered the room. From the damage, you might have thought an extremely localized tornado had passed through.
Sheriff Rhine, wearing her black polo with an embroidered star on the breast, chinos, and cowboy boots, sat at the kitchen table. Across from her was a gaunt, bearded man with strips of duct tape dangling from his body and a loose pile of discarded adhesive around his bare feet. He looked like he’d just escaped being mummified alive in shiny silver ribbons.
The sheriff raised her chin as I entered the room. “Is this the warden who tied you up, Alvin?”
The scrawny man spun around in his chair. He had greasy brown hair tucked behind ears that were almost elfin in their pointedness. His eyes were so heavy-lidded it seemed he might be dozing off.
“Who? Him?”
“Is this the game warden who tore up your home and held a gun to your head?”
“The warden who ripped me off was all bruised and shit—like he’d been stomped pretty good in a fight. And he had one of those crazy eyes.”
“You mean lazy eyes?”
“Crazy, lazy—what’s the difference?”
Rhine took a calming breath. “And what did you say this ‘warden’s’ name was, Alvin?”
“Bowditch,” he said fiddling with a strip of tape clinging stubbornly to his thigh.
“This is Warden Bowditch.”
“Are they related?”
“No,” I said.
“You need to find the other one and ask him what he did with my toilet.”
The sheriff rose to her feet. She was a tall woman. “Stay here, Alvin. I’ll send in Deputy Corbett to help you get the last of that tape off.”
Neither Rhine nor I spoke until we were clear of the trailer. Flashlights flickered between the trees as the deputies searched the property. The piping of spring peepers in the bog was so shrill it just about pierced my eardrums.
“The impersonator is using my name now?”
“Apparently so.”
“Why me?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe it’s because you’re new around here and not everyone knows what you look like. Or maybe you issued him a citation, and it’s his way of getting back at you.”
I was certain I would have remembered writing a ticket to a jittery young man with a crazy, lazy eye.
“What the hell happened here, Sheriff?”
The man inside the trailer was named Alvin Payne, Rhine said, and he was well known to the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, having been a guest in their hospitality suites on several occasions.
Earlier that evening, Mr. Payne was treating a herniated cervical disc with medical marijuana and listening to some Zeppelin when a man claiming to be a Maine game warden started pounding on the
