Why had she run back to her mother’s motel?
Who had she gone there to meet?
What had she told him?
Strangulation is one of the most intimate methods of murder. The perpetrator, except in cases where the victim is a child, is almost always male. Females constitute the overwhelming majority of victims. There is frequently a sexual component. Many rapists strangle their victims so as not to leave behind a witness.
Evidence or no, I was willing to go out on a limb and surmise that Angie hadn’t crossed paths with a stranger who also happened to be a sexual predator. She had known the man who’d killed her. Maybe she had even sought him out. She’d trusted her killer enough to let him get close.
In my memory, I saw Roland Michaud’s ursine eyes.
Did he kill her for selling the badge and jeopardizing the secrets he’d been keeping for the past fifteen years?
Lost in thought, I’d failed to notice that I was no longer following Chasse Lamontaine’s tire prints. He must have taken a detour. As a native of the county and a patrol warden, he would have known all the backwoods shortcuts.
I couldn’t afford to attempt a similar maneuver. The dotted squiggles on the map, leading to the St. John Valley, might be navigable roads in reality. They might also be abandoned skidder trails, overgrown with alders and popples, blocked by deadfalls, and impassable to all but the skinniest of deer. I stuck to the same route I had taken into the woods.
This time, there was an attendant at the Fish River Checkpoint. He was a burly man with a bulbous nose and a gauzy white strip tucked into the back of his Red Sox cap. It hung down his neck like the sun protectors on the hats worn by the French Foreign Legion.
He came around to my window with a clipboard.
A chemical odor emanated from him, like an industrial perfume. “Says here you were supposed to be out yesterday,” he told me in a booming voice. “You got lost, I expect.”
“Lost? No. I got turned around pretty good, though.”
“Ha! I ain’t gonna charge you for the extra night. Let me open this sucker up for you.”
“Do you mind my asking a question?”
“You’re wondering about these?” He flicked the gauze dangling from his baseball cap. “Dryer sheets! The bugs hate them. I got them stuffed all in my clothes. Tonight, I won’t have a single bite. Try them sometime. You’ll thank me for the tip.”
A moment later, I was headed back toward civilization. Blackflies that had flown in through the window assaulted me behind my ears like tiny heat-seeking missiles. I wondered if there was a Laundromat in Portage where I could purchase some dryer sheets.
Outside the village, my cell phone exploded with computer-generated musical notes. It was a symphony of buzzing voice mails, dinging texts, and trilling messages. Three of the most recent had come from Stacey.
“My mom told me about my dad,” she said in her voice mail. “And now she can’t reach you either. I’m coming up there as soon as I can get a flight. Don’t try to argue me out of this, Mike. You know you can’t stop me.”
31
My first call wasn’t to Stacey; it was to Dani. She hadn’t left me so much as a text message while I’d been in the woods. My hope was that she had slept the whole time. She surprised me by answering.
“Ugh,” she said. “What time is it?”
“Almost nine o’clock.”
“Ugh.”
“I wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“Like shit,” she said in the same loopy voice she had used the last time. “Hopefully, I’ll feel better this afternoon. I want to put in a half day.”
“You’re not planning on going to work?”
“Mike,” was all she said.
“Do you want to switch over to FaceTime?”
“So you can tell me how sick I look?” She actually managed a laugh. “No, thanks.”
Instead of harping on her, I said, “A lot’s happened since yesterday. The woman who sold that badge to John Smith was murdered last night. Her name was Angie Bouchard. I’d met with her only hours earlier. And I still have no idea where Charley is.”
She paused a long time before she spoke again. “How old was she?”
“Twenty-four, twenty-five.”
“Shit.”
I brought her up to speed as I turned onto the northbound lane of Route 11, headed for Fort Kent and the Canadian border. I deliberately avoided any mention of the message I’d gotten from Stacey, alerting me of her imminent return to Maine. Given Dani’s current state, it seemed a sticky subject. Once again, she listened with uncharacteristic silence.
Past Winterville, I swerved, unsuccessfully, to avoid a pool of still-tacky blood. An eighteen-wheeler must have hit a moose in the night. Afterward, my tires sounded different from the gore stuck to them.
“Dani?”
“Hmmm?”
“I was wondering if you were still there. So I’m headed to St. Ignace now and need to call the state police. I don’t know who’s caught the case yet, but I need to tell him what I know.”
“Maybe it was Shithead.”
“Who?”
“Shithead. Shit for Brains. Maybe he killed her.”
“John Smith is in jail, Dani. I arrested him for attempted murder. Remember?”
“Yeah, right.” She paused again, and I heard her take several breaths. “I’m going to get up and take some ibuprofen. Send me a text if something happens.”
“When was the last time you took your temperature?”
Her reaction caught me off guard. “Will you lay off me?”
“I’m worried is all. You said you were bitten by a tick?”
“It’s just the flu.”
“I’d feel better if someone looked in on you.”
What she did next almost made me veer into oncoming traffic.
She hung up.
I pulled into the overgrown lot of an auto repair shop that had closed about a hundred years ago and made another call. The Scout shuddered every time a big truck whipped past. The phone rang and rang.
Please don’t go to voice mail.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon,” said Kathy Frost. “I thought you’d still be ‘fishing.’ Did
