The outsider of the group was Jon Egan. He, too, was a felon. Under the influence, he’d exposed himself to a troop of Girl Scouts cleaning up litter along the St. John River.
The one man whom Pellerin had failed to ingratiate himself with was the primary target, Pierre Michaud. From the start, the ringleader seemed intent on keeping his distance. During his first visit to St. Ignace, the undercover officer didn’t have so much as a conversation with the poacher king.
When Pellerin returned to town two weeks later, he came bearing gifts. One was a massive cooler stuffed with striped bass on ice. The other was a case of Aguardente de Medronho, a high-octane fruit brandy of Portuguese extraction, popular among commercial fishermen. The choice of the colorless alcohol was smart; it allowed the warden investigator to travel with his own bottle containing water instead of eighty-proof liquor. And it was obscure enough to defuse suspicions. What Maine game warden would show up with six bottles of hard-to-obtain, harder-to-pronounce alcohol from Portugal?
The first night the Michaud boys tried the Aguardente, they got roaringly drunk—and revealed to Pellerin the full extent of their criminal activities.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Michaud gang had broken half the fish and game laws in the state, but those infractions were only the beginning. They also maintained acres of cultivated marijuana in the forests west of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and smuggled pounds of it across the St. John River—along with moose and deer meat—into Canada. From the other shore, they brought back prescription narcotics, principally Oxycodone burgled from the homes of cancer patients by their frères criminels across the border.
The day after the drinking party, Pellerin received a visit from the poacher king himself. He returned to his motel from gassing up his truck to find Pierre Michaud waiting in his room. A Desert Eagle handgun lay on the table within easy reach. He was drinking from a mug of King Cole Orange Pekoe. The elder Michaud never drank alcohol in Pellerin’s presence.
In French, he told Paradis to have a seat on the bed. He then began with a series of personal questions about Pellerin’s life, starting with his childhood and leading to the moment when he’d first appeared in St. Ignace.
He was a mountain of a man, larger even than his sons. His most noteworthy features were the severe burns on his hands. Pierre had been trained as a blacksmith and kept a smithy behind his house. At some distant time in his past, he had thrust his hands into a fire (or had them thrust in by some other man). The skin had melted like beef tallow.
“I want to try out this fancy rifle of yours,” Michaud said in the nasal French of the St. John Valley. “We will take your truck.”
The thought occurred to Pellerin that he was headed to his own execution.
Before they could leave the Valley View, however, they were interrupted by the arrival at the motel of the local game warden.
Deputy Warden Chasse Lamontaine had been summoned by Emmeline Bouchard to deal with a (fictional) rabid raccoon. Pellerin realized Pierre Michaud’s stratagem. Deputy Chasse had a reputation as the worst poker player at every table: a man incapable of bluffing. If “Scott Paradis” was an undercover warden, as Pierre suspected, Chasse would be unable to conceal his knowledge of the stranger’s identity.
To the surprise of both Pellerin and Michaud, Chasse didn’t so much as blink when he was “introduced” to Scott Paradis. His handsome, guileless face revealed nothing except an eagerness to get on with locating the rabid raccoon.
Reading between the lines, I could sense Pellerin’s disbelief at what had happened:
How did he not recognize me?
Granted, the two wardens barely knew each other. Chasse Lamontaine was still just a deputy, back when that position was close to a civilian job: a helper to a district warden who needed another set of hands and eyes. Being a warden’s assistant had paid peanuts and rarely led to a career in law enforcement. Plus, Pellerin was based out of Division A in the southern part of the state. He had also grown out his hair and beard for the assignment.
By some miracle, Pellerin managed to avoid the first pitfall Pierre Michaud had dug for him. But there proved to be more traps set in his path.
Next, Pierre had challenged him to shoot that jacklighted doe Kellam had mentioned. Even then, though, Scott had had the presence of mind to allow himself to be hit in the face by the butt of the rifle as the recoil drove it backward. Pellerin ended up with a bruise on his cheek—and a little more of the Michauds’ trust.
Reading the investigator’s account of his actions made me like him even more. He was quick-witted, confident, and gifted with natural situational awareness. No wonder Charley had loved him like a son.
In his report, there were occasional mentions of Emmeline Bouchard, often in the company of Pierre Michaud, and while Pellerin documented crimes committed by the Michaud boys and Jon Egan, he seemed never to have witnessed the motel owner breaking any law worse than possession of a controlled substance.
Once again, I began to wonder if Emmeline Bouchard had been the one who’d discovered Pellerin’s secret and revealed his true identity to Pierre. Maybe the poacher king had used his girlfriend as bait to gather information from the stranger who had been so quick to ingratiate himself with his sons and so persistent with his questions.
Pellerin’s report remained unfinished.
When I reached the final page—the place where a warden would have included his summary of the investigation—there was only this:
Friday, September 27, ____, Phone Call from Unknown Cell Phone
At approximately 2100 hours I received a call
