I sat down on the bed and found the mattress unforgiving. Then I made the call.
“Hi,” Dani said.
“I expected to hear from you. How was your day on the shooting range?”
“I qualified, but just barely. I think it was the heat. My face was brick red, the guys said.”
Dani was a natural marksman. Some people have to train and train, but her skills were as close to God-given as I had seen. It was as if she’d been born with the muscle memory of having fired thousands of shots: Annie Oakley reincarnated.
“Maybe it was heat stroke.”
“I just had a bad day.”
“You might want to take a cool bath—not too cold.”
“I don’t have heat stroke,” she said. “To top it all off, I picked up a tick somewhere. I found it attached to my thigh, full of blood, like it had been there awhile.”
“Was it a deer tick or a dog tick?” The question mattered because the former carried Lyme disease while the latter did not.
“Deer tick.”
“You need to get that checked out.”
“I will if I see a bullseye rash.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to get your doctor to prescribe some antibiotics anyway. Lyme isn’t something you can blow off.”
“Mike, I told you I’ll keep an eye on it. How many ticks did you used to find on yourself when you were a patrol warden? No offense, but I’m tired of talking about my sucky day. Has Charley reappeared?”
“No, but I think I am beginning to understand what this is about.”
“Let’s hear it.”
She listened quietly to my monologue. That, too, was atypical. Usually, Dani interrupted me with questions or theories whenever I told her about a case I was working on. She had the mind of a detective and couldn’t help herself.
When I had finished, she said, “Be careful of Stan Kellam.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kathy never told you about him? Stan the Man was her lieutenant when she was a rookie.”
“Please don’t tell me he sexually harassed her,” I said, thinking of Tom Wheelwright.
“Worse. He tried to persuade her to quit after her husband died in that car crash. He badgered her about it for weeks after she came back from bereavement leave. Like, because she was a woman, she must be suffering so bad she couldn’t do the job. He put her on a desk until she forced him to let her return to patrol.”
“Kathy never told me any of this.”
“That’s because you’re a man,” Dani said. “She’s your friend and all, but this is the kind of thing women have trouble sharing except with other women. She never came as close to quitting as during that stretch of time.”
“I’ll ask her about him.”
“If she even wants to talk—sorry, I’m not being the best listener tonight. I’ve got a wicked headache. I’m glad that son of a bitch Smith didn’t shoot you.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I’ll hit you back in morning,” she said. “I just need to get some sleep.”
“If you’re still not feeling well—”
“Good night, Mike. Love you.”
“Good night.”
21
The next morning dawned as hot as sunrise in the Congo. I stepped outside with a cup of coffee I had brewed in the little machine atop the bureau. The rhythmic thumping of truck tires on the bridge over Route 1 carried across the parking lot: the sound of commerce. House sparrows were picking dead bugs out of the grilles of the semis in the parking lot.
Logan Cronk, up early, had sent along pictures of Shadow to assure me my captive canine was alive and well. The black wolf must have slept beneath an evergreen because his fur had become coated with saffron pollen. The big animal appeared nearly phosphorescent. My very own Hound of the Baskervilles.
I ate breakfast in the diner—scrambled eggs, bacon, and a molasses doughnut—and gassed up my truck, knowing the length of the drive ahead of me. In the County, it paid to fill your tank whenever you could since opportunities could be few and far between. I was eager to get started.
Presque Isle is what passes for a big city in Aroostook County. I do not mean that as a slight. Nine thousand residents is significant anywhere in a state as rural as Maine. Presque Isle is home to three institutions of higher learning. It has an actual airport with commercial flights—only two a day, but it’s something. The first successful transatlantic balloon launched from Presque Isle and landed safely outside Paris in 1978.
But if you ask anyone up north about the city, they’ll say its real claim to fame is potatoes.
Prized above all others for making french fries, the Kennebec variety are harvested by tons in the fall, processed by factories that perfume the air with a pleasantly starchy aroma, and then trucked and shipped around the world.
I approached the city through vast fields of potatoes. Being June, there wasn’t much to see—just endless furrows of dirt stretching to distant tree lines. In a few weeks, however, the plants would begin to blossom until the city of Presque Isle was adrift in a sea of flowers. On windy summer days, petals would tumble along the ground: purple, pink, and white.
The sun was showing through the clouds, a blurred disk, when I turned onto a street of ranch homes with mowed yards and gardens bright with peonies and hydrangeas. Not having an address, a name, or even a description of the young woman (beyond her shapely breasts), it made no sense to guess which house might be hers. I was looking instead for a certain type of person that you will find in any neat residential neighborhood.
The busybody.
I found her soon enough. Noting the slowness of my vehicle, she opened her curtains to have a better look at me. When I reached the end of the street and doubled back, moving even more slowly now, she emerged onto her front porch.
I stopped the Scout when I’d drawn even with her tidy house and rolled down the window
