“But he sent you here?”
“Not directly.”
“What does Charley Stevens have to do with Angie being murdered?” said Chasse. I’d been so distracted by the dog, I’d momentarily forgotten the warden was still in the room.
“Charley thinks I lied about what happened fifteen years ago,” said Kellam. “He thinks there might have been some sort of cover-up. So he sent Dr. Watson here to wheedle information out of me. Isn’t that right, Mike?”
“Stan?”
Vaneese stood in the hall between the kitchen and the rest of the house. She was dressed in a linen blouse and denim cutoffs that made her legs look a mile long. I didn’t know how long she’d been lurking within earshot, but my gut told she’d heard everything.
“Go upstairs, Vee,” said Kellam.
“I told you he would get out if you didn’t lock his door.”
For an instant, I didn’t realize she meant the dog.
“Go upstairs.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?”
“Mike is going to explain what game he’s been playing with us.”
“Or what, you’re going to sic Ferox on him? Mon dieu.” She dropped her voice. “Ferox, hier!”
The Cane Corso cast a glance back at Kellam, then clicked across the pine floor to Vaneese’s side.
“Platz,” she said.
The dog settled down beside her bare feet. He still looked like he wanted a chance to chew on my esophagus, but I was finally able to draw a breath.
“I owe you an explanation, Stan,” I said. “And you’ll get one. I promise. But right now, I have to go.”
“What do you think happened, Bowditch?” Chasse asked, but there was no menace in his tone. He seemed merely curious.
Before I could answer, Kellam said, “He knows Pellerin and I didn’t see eye to eye over how to handle the Michauds and wanted to go over my head. He thinks I might have ratted Scott out to Pierre.”
The most startling aspect of this confession was that I’d had no such suspicions.
“You think the lieutenant was the one who blew Pellerin’s cover?” Chasse asked, then added a disbelieving smile.
“No.”
But Kellam hadn’t heard me. He glowed with such heat now he looked like he might suffer a heart attack. “The thought that I sold out one of my wardens to the Michauds is obscene.”
“Stan, you need to take it down a notch,” I said.
“Don’t tell me how to behave in my own house!”
Ferox snapped again. Vaneese hissed at the animal: “Beruhigen.”
“So what else do you suspect me of doing?” said Kellam. “You think I drove up to St. Ignace last night, killed Emmeline’s daughter for no reason, and booked it back before dawn?”
“Nobody had a reason to kill her!” said Chasse Lamontaine with surprising passion. “She went to high school with my boys. Angie was an innocent girl.”
Could the man possibly be that naive?
“The state police need to hear what I have to say, Stan.”
“I should get back to the Valley, too,” said Chasse.
“So get the hell out of here then, the both of you,” said Kellam. “You have five minutes, Bowditch, or I swear to Christ, I’m putting the dog on you.”
Kellam disappeared as I went upstairs to pack my things. I wished I could have taken those two boxes of files with me, but I was already pushing my luck. And the clock was running.
Vaneese, having locked Ferox in what I hoped was a secure room, hung in the doorway. Perhaps her fiancé had told her to watch me in case I tried to steal any documents. The hardness in her eyes made me believe she, too, felt I had betrayed their trust.
“I’m sorry to leave so abruptly—”
“It gives you an excuse to leave without having to explain, no?”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Stan is not a criminal.”
I tried zipping my duffel, but the teeth caught on a shirt I’d stuffed inside. “Would you call him a good man, though?”
She straightened her neck as if I’d touched a nerve. “Better than you, I think.”
“That’s a low bar. Tell him I wasn’t lying when I said I would explain everything later.”
She folded her arms below her breasts. “And we should believe you why?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t—but it’s the truth.”
Then she escorted me through the house and outside into the humid morning. I crossed a spongy patch of stair-step moss that gave beneath my boots. Heard the burr of browsing bees. Breathed in the good smell of the lake.
Chasse had already left.
As I loaded my Scout, I looked back at the lodge and saw Kellam standing rigid behind the plate glass window. He had a Corona in his hand, and the Cane Corso was beside him.
I drove up the hill until the lake disappeared behind the maples and the spruces and the firs. No doubt Kellam would be on the phone with his old buddies in law enforcement, asking to be updated on the homicide in St. Ignace. He would spend the next hours swilling Coronas and wondering what treason Charley and I suspected he committed that had caused Scott Pellerin’s death.
When I reached the gate, I found Edouard—now somehow fully dressed—standing at attention beside the steel post like a guardsman. Deerflies buzzed about his sweating skull.
I rolled down my window. “Nice meeting you, Edouard.”
His mouth became a hard line. It was as if he’d overheard the argument in the kitchen and had chosen to side with his savior, Kellam. When he swung the massive gate shut behind me, the clang of metal on metal echoed inside my skull.
Chasse Lamontaine had a five-minute head start on me. I checked my cell, but now that I was out of sight of Kellam’s tower, I had no service.
I was praying that whichever state police detective had caught the Bouchard case was someone I knew personally. After my promotion, I’d done meet and greets with detectives around the state: anyone I might consult on future cases. But shaking hands with someone isn’t the same as working side by side to solve a crime. As it was, I was going to have a hard-enough time explaining the circumstances that had led me
