Chief Plourde had trouble rising from the table—his stomach was in the way. “When are we going muskie fishing, Warden Lamontaine? You keep promising to take me, but you never do. Meanwhile, in Collins’s store, I see the photos of the trophies people have been catching. There was one fish last week weighing forty pounds!”
“When things settle down, maybe.”
The chief, grinning, held out his arms to their full wingspan. “You promised me a fish like this.”
But Chasse had turned his attention back to Kellam. “What’s this I hear about Charley Stevens being in town?”
“Ask Mike.”
“Maybe he came here to catch one of your fabled muskellunges,” I said.
Kellam broke in. “Shouldn’t you be on patrol, Chasse?”
“You’re not my lieutenant anymore, Stan,” said Chasse.
“True, but I’ve got your sergeant’s number on speed dial.”
“Ha!”
The server arrived with our lunches (and Kellam’s second beer), and the Lamontaines used that as an excuse to leave. The son gave us a scowl on the way out.
None of us spoke until the server had left our booth.
“What’s the deal with Chasse’s son?” I said, then took a bite into one of the best tuna sandwiches I’d ever eaten. “What’s with the attitude?”
“C. J. wanted to be a game warden,” said Kellam. “He applied for a job with the service last year. Chasse asked me to put in a word for the kid.”
“Did you?”
“Actually I put in five words: Don’t fucking hire the cocksucker.”
Chief Plourde counted off the words on his stubby fingers. “That’s six.”
“Cocksucker is one word,” said Kellam with a leering grin. “You of all people should know that, Chief.”
“Dégage.”
I was unfamiliar with the word but could guess the meaning.
The redheaded woman whom I had come to think of as Tomato cleared her throat. She had overheard the profanities and scowled at the three of us.
“Désolé,” said the chief.
But Tomato was having none of his apology. “Pffft!” she said again and returned to her salad.
38
As I made my way along the sidewalk, I thought about the brands on the arms of Roland and Zacherie Michaud. The burns were not identical—hadn’t been made by an instrument forged to leave an identifying mark. It was more like the brothers had been jabbed with sizzling blacksmith’s tongs.
I had no doubt Egan bore a similar scar. He would have been photographed during his intake to the county jail and later the Maine State Prison. Finding a picture of his upper arm would take me all of fifteen minutes’ worth of phone calls.
Maybe the mark was just a rite of initiation: the necessary act before you were admitted into Pierre Michaud’s confidence. The fact that the poacher king himself hadn’t had the same raised scar strongly suggested he’d been the one who’d inflicted it. The man had hot irons aplenty at his smithy.
I was torn about what to do next.
I couldn’t get past the guilt of not being at Dani’s side. The fact that Kathy said her temperature had stabilized seemed like yet another rationalization. Her fever could always worsen again.
And yet I could hear Charley’s cryptic message as clearly now as when he’d said it. “They’re not going to stop now—not after what just happened. All we need is another day. We’re so close to the truth, and they’re getting sloppy.”
Should I find a hardware store where I could buy supplies to patch up my truck? Maybe book a room for the night at the motel across the street from the border checkpoint?
I could begin asking around town who might own a monster truck customized for mudding expeditions. In a few hours, I should easily be able to narrow the list to fifty individuals—not counting the “jeep abusers” across the border.
In the end, I did none of these things because when I returned to my Scout, I found a note on my seat.
MEET ME AT 7 AT THE FORT
The note had been written on a brown paper towel of the kind you find in gas station restrooms. The writing was done in block letters. The ink was blue and didn’t bleed into the paper. So probably a cheap ballpoint pen.
My first thought was that Charley had left it for me, but there was something about the note’s terse anonymity that made me discard that possibility.
Who, then?
There was no lack of candidates.
It could have been Chasse Lamontaine or any of the law enforcement officers I’d dealt with that day (excepting Plourde, who, likewise, hadn’t left the restaurant). It could have been Nick Francis, who seemed to be assisting Charley in this madcap investigation. It could have been Roland Michaud, for that matter, as he’d seen my vehicle outside Angie’s house. Or maybe Egan had changed his mind about talking to me (had he seen me drive off in the Scout?). Last but not least, it could have been the son of a bitch who’d tried to run me off the road. Just because a trap is poorly set doesn’t mean it’s not a trap.
At least I didn’t have to guess at the indicated location.
Fort Kent is named for a still-standing blockhouse made of rough-hewn timbers at the edge of the river. The structure commemorates the only bloodless war in American history.
Mere months after the Battle of Yorktown, Great Britain and the United States had begun quarreling over where to draw the new nation’s northern border. The argument escalated over the decades to what became known as the Aroostook War of 1838–1839, when Congress authorized fifty thousand troops to march north, led by General Winfield Scott, later hero of the Mexican-American War.
For a year, American and British soldiers built fortifications and aimed cannons at each other across the St. John, but no shots were ever fired. The combatants chose negotiation over combat, and the international boundary between Maine and Canada was forever fixed by that agreement between Queen Victoria’s canny emissary Lord Ashburton and the bedeviled Daniel Webster.
For a historic monument, the blockhouse couldn’t have been more strangely situated. It was tucked behind a lumberyard at
