I could see Pellerin grinning as he had typed these words. He had referred to the local warden, Chasse Lamontaine, as “DEP(UTY) WDN”: a playful jab at the status of the latter. “Under the direct order of LT. STANLEY GALE KELLAM” was a commentary on Kellam’s authoritarian style and an excuse to use his full name in print. Everyone knew how much Kellam hated his middle name.
For the first time, I began to see Scott Pellerin as a kindred spirit rather than as a ghostly rival for Charley’s fatherly affections.
But there was more in these two paragraphs than the investigator’s private jokes, starting with the inclusion of Angie Bouchard’s mother in the official synopsis. Pellerin had named her as an accessory to the crimes he was charged with investigating. I had begun to theorize—admittedly without evidence—that Angie had found Duke Dupree’s badge in her deceased mother’s personal effects. Suddenly, Emmeline Bouchard’s possession of an item that had belonged to the dead investigator went from curious to noteworthy.
Two other individuals were named in the synopsis. The first was Pierre’s other son, Zacherie, who had killed himself in jail. The other notable person mentioned was this Jon Egan, whom Kellam had described as a “red squirrel.” He was older than the others, more likely a friend of Pierre’s than of his sons. Everything I’d heard about Egan so far made me envision him as the archetypal sidekick. Gangsters of all kinds have a predilection for yes-men.
As I settled down to read, I had a notion of sneaking downstairs to brew myself a cup of coffee. Then I heard the click, click, click of sharp claws outside my door, and I reconsidered.
28
Even before he’d disappeared without a trace in the wilds of the Allagash, Pellerin had one hell of a story to tell.
As Rhode Island fisherman and insurance fraudster Scott Paradis, he had taken a room at the Valley View Motel. Emmeline Bouchard’s establishment in St. Ignace consisted of six separate cabins, each no bigger than a shipping cargo container. It overlooked a broad, braided expanse of the St. John River and the hardscrabble hills of New Brunswick beyond.
Pellerin’s official report didn’t include photographs, but he had sent Kellam a bunch of candids for his case file. I was struck by Emmeline’s appearance. She was as curvy and coal-eyed as her daughter, but her hair was tinted magenta and chopped short. There was a hardness to the woman that came through in pictures: the constant presence of a cigarette in her sensuous lips, the tattooed tiger that sometimes peeked above her open-throated blouse, the almost masculine way she stood: booted feet apart.
There was something about the photo—taken with the subject’s consent—that made me believe Pellerin had found Emmeline sexually desirable. She had certainly been flirting with the man behind the camera.
Was that how the investigator had given himself away? By letting his guard down in her bed? It would explain why the keepsake badge had fallen into Emmeline’s possession. What it didn’t explain was why she’d retained the incriminating item for all these years, knowing that its reappearance might precipitate a felony murder charge against her.
The fact that Emmeline was dating (or at least sleeping with) Pierre Michaud, a man old enough to be her father, must have complicated Pellerin’s sexual aspirations.
Evidently, her daughter shared the same taste in older men.
Once, I would have found the idea of mother and daughter sleeping with father and son shocking, but it wasn’t the first instance of pseudo-incestuous behavior I’d come across in my career in the Maine woods—nor even the most extreme. Remote places attract people with forbidden desires.
And few places were more remote than St. Ignace.
Pellerin had affected his entrée into the circle of the Michauds with one of the oldest plays in the investigator’s book. He sabotaged his own truck. He then had it towed to the repair shop father and son ran as one of their several businesses. He struck up a conversation with Roland while the latter labored to diagnose the electrical problem.
He’d come to St. Ignace, Scott told the Michauds, in the hopes of shooting a “monster bear,” but he hadn’t realized the legal window for killing one over bait (the most effective method) had almost swung shut. Roland Michaud held a commercial hunting guide’s license. He offered to take the Rhode Island rube out for the last days of the season.
The next morning, before dawn, Roland swung by the motel to pick up his client. Pellerin appeared with a rifle that must have given the poacher an erection. The investigator had brought with him a brand-new GA Precision Gladius chambered for .308 Winchester cartridges. This scoped, camo-colored rifle retailed for more than $8,000. Pellerin claimed he’d bought it after reading the autobiography of famed “American Sniper” Chris Kyle.
Pellerin and Kellam had obtained the weapon knowing it would prove irresistible to the Michauds and their associates—that they would fall over each other to use it—and that was indeed what happened.
(It must have been agony for them not to steal it when they’d killed Scott, but they’d rightly realized the risks were too great. Kellam had found the Gladius at the Valley View awaiting the return of its missing “owner.”)
By the end of his initial stay in St. Ignace, Pellerin hadn’t shot a bear, but he was regularly riding the gated roads with Roland and Zach Michaud with the sniper’s gun and a case of beer, shooting whatever could be shot. One afternoon, Roland used the scoped rifle to pulverize a ruffed grouse at a distance of one hundred yards. The bird, Pellerin wrote, “exploded into a puff of feathers.”
His characterizations of the three poachers were highly detailed: Both Roland and Zach Michaud were clones of their father. Dark, handsome, bearish men. All the Michauds had extensive rap sheets: misdemeanor assaults, vehicular offenses, multiple violations of Maine’s
