“You know Dani?”
“She brings her cat here, Puddin.”
As the vet escorted me to the waiting room, she asked, “Any luck tracking down the other wolf?”
“I may have found a few leads.”
“Do you know yet whether she’s alive?”
“No.”
Dr. Holman clutched the crucifix around her neck. I wished it were that easy for me to find comfort.
As I was returning to my vehicle, I remembered what Gary Pulsifer had told me about the father of Kent Mears. The old man, he’d said, resided in Pennacook, and from what Pulsifer had implied, I figured him for a recovering alcoholic.
I texted Dani:
What do you know about the Mears family? The guard who was killed grew up in Pennacook and I wondered if you knew him. He would have been ten years older than you. His name was Kent Mears.
I waited ten minutes for a reply, but Dani must have been asleep. I proceeded to Plan B.
Older people are reluctant to part with their landlines. On a whim I checked the telephone directory. Only one Mears was listed. First name also Kent. He lived up the street and just around the corner.
Rather than call first, I decided to get some exercise and fresh air. As a warden investigator I spent far too much time indoors. When I wasn’t cooped up in my office, I was loitering for hours inside courthouses, waiting to testify in cases that required me to be on the stand for fifteen minutes tops. I spent even more time behind the wheel of my Jeep.
God, how I missed the woods.
The address I’d found was a triple-decker tenement. During the heyday of the mill, these apartment buildings had been alive with children, running up and down the external staircases, with lines of laundry stretching across alleyways from one block to the next. There had been kitchen gardens and sandboxes and men sitting around card tables, playing gin rummy and busting each other’s balls.
Those days had died long ago. The firetrap that remained was peeling paint. The gravel lot between it and its neighbor sparkled with bits of broken beer bottles. Indeterminate pieces of litter tumbled about on the wind.
Mears lived on the first floor. I pressed the button beside a speaker.
There was no answer.
I pressed again.
“Knock it off!” came a voice.
“Mr. Mears?”
Again there was no answer.
Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw movement in a window. A blind peeled away from the frame.
I pressed the button again.
“What do you want?”
“My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m a game warden investigator. I knew your son.”
One lie out of three seemed an acceptable ratio.
“He’s dead! Haven’t you heard?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why I am here. Would you mind if I came in for a few minutes?”
“What for?”
“To talk about your son.”
I thought I’d lost him with that, but after a minute, the reinforced outer door opened, and one of the largest human beings I had ever seen filled the threshold. He had a mostly bald head and cauliflower ears and a nose that had been broken and reset so many times it was almost beautiful in its grotesqueness. His chest and stomach were one. He clenched a smoldering cigarette between fingers the size of breakfast sausages. He smelled strongly of beer.
“How’d you know my boy?”
“From the prison.”
He clearly had no intention of letting me inside. Nor did I want to be trapped in a room with the still-muscular old giant.
“So what’s this, a condolence visit?”
“I would have brought flowers, but I didn’t know what kind you liked.”
The utter ballsiness of my response caught him off guard and he came near to smiling. “I can tell from looking at you that you wasn’t his friend.”
“What did his friends look like?”
“They had big tits and fat asses.”
“That doesn’t describe Dawn Richie. Wasn’t she his friend?”
He flicked his cigarette away. “Show me your badge.”
I produced the shield for him, and he studied it closely, although I doubt his aged eyes could read the embossed words without the help of glasses.
“I wanted to make sure you wasn’t a reporter. I’ve gotten calls from a few of them. Fucking vultures. So you want to know about Richie, huh? Well, I can tell you this much. She got my son killed.”
“My understanding is Kent was stabbed by a man named Darius Chapman.”
“But it was Richie who got him involved in whatever scam she was running. I don’t have to guess how she lured him in either. Kent was a walking hard-on. I always figured he’d knock up one of the female inmates or get hauled into court on a rape charge. But getting stabbed in the neck, protecting some conniving bitch who never gave two shits for him? Pathetic.”
“Did your son ever tell you what Richie had him doing?”
Mears took a step onto the concrete stoop. He was wearing Indian-style moccasins that had probably been manufactured in the country of India. He scanned the ground as if searching for something he’d just dropped. After half a minute, he located it. He pointed at the dirt where a used syringe waited for some child to pick it up and stick himself.
“Drugs?”
“I doubt she had him preaching the Good News of the Kingdom of God.”
“Can you confirm that she had him dealing?”
“Not directly.”
“Then why do you assume the two of them were smuggling in narcotics?”
“When Kent told me he applied to work in the prison, I told him he was a sap. ‘You’re going to be poor all your life,’ I said. ‘Why not come to work in the mill and be useful and make something of yourself.’ When he mouthed off, I boxed his ears. Six months later I got my pink slip. I guess we were both saps.”
He seemed to realize that he had wandered off track.
“I got an email from him a couple of months ago with photos attached. He wanted me to know he’d
