So how could I explain the deep foreboding that preceded my discovery of Ashley Kim?
When I arrived at Hans Westergaard’s house, I didn’t suspect the woman was dead or fear she was dead. I knew she was dead. The certainty had been with me for hours-like an animal lurking beyond the campfire light-but I hadn’t recognized the premonition for what it was. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself the meaning of the portent. I didn’t want to open the confessional door after so many years and find God present once again, but in a shape I no longer recognized.
With a grip like eagle talons, Charley pulled me from the Westergaards’ bedroom. He guided me back down the stairs, his voice soft in my ears, encouraging me to retrace my original footprints, until we were once again standing beside my truck in the driveway.
“It’s a crime scene now,” my friend said. “We don’t want to muck it up any more than we have.”
In the sharp, cold air, my senses returned. I found my cell phone in my jacket pocket. I started to key in the direct number for the Knox County dispatcher, when I heard a car coming down the drive behind us. Flashing blue lights made hallucinatory patterns in the trees. Then a blinding spotlight snapped on, pinning us both in place. An electronically amplified voice boomed out, “Don’t move.”
Charley and I exchanged befuddled looks. How had a cop gotten here so fast, before we’d even called in the homicide?
A car door slammed and I heard a familiar voice. “Bowditch?”
Trooper Curt Hutchins came striding toward us out of the light. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“There’s a dead woman inside,” I said, as if that were any explanation.
“What?”
“We came over here looking for a missing woman whose car struck a deer last night,” said Charley in an even tone. “We had reason to think she might be inside this home. We found her body upstairs. She seems to have been sexually assaulted before she was killed.”
“It’s Ashley Kim,” I said.
“You need to get an evidence team over here, sonny,” said Charley.
“Who are you?” Hutchins asked.
“Charley Stevens, Maine Warden Service, retired.”
The big state trooper had positioned himself so that we couldn’t see his expression; he was just a silhouette against a wall of light. “I know you-you’re that daredevil pilot.”
I squinted to see his expression. “How the hell did you get here so fast, Hutchins?”
“You triggered the silent alarm. What were you doing, breaking down the goddamned door?”
“I looked in the windows and saw signs of a struggle,” I replied. “I was justified. Blood was in plain view.”
“But what we’re you doing here in the first place?”
“Will you just stop asking us questions and call for some fucking backup here? There’s a dead woman inside who’s been raped and mutilated.”
There was a heavy pause. “I’m going to go take a look.”
“We already disturbed the crime scene,” said Charley. “Please take our word for it, Troop. The evidence- recovery techs need to cordon off this entire building.”
“I’m going to go take a look.” He breezed right past us, moving purposefully up the walkway.
“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m calling Dispatch.”
Lori was working again. As briefly as I could, I told her where we were and what we’d found. “You need to get some detectives down here ASAP,” I said. “And the state police CID, too.”
“You said it’s the same woman who hit the deer last night?” asked Lori.
“I think so.”
“And there was a word carved in the body?”
“Yes.”
“Oh God,” the dispatcher said mysteriously. “Not again.”
After I’d hung up, Charley brought out his own phone. “We need to tell the women we’re going to be late.”
I listened as Charley fibbed to my girlfriend. “Oh, he’s fine, Sarah. But we’ve stumbled onto a pretty bad scene here, and the police are going to need our statements. I don’t know how long this process is going to take.”
He then moved out of earshot to converse privately with his wife.
“You should have been a diplomat,” I said when he returned.
“I was-every time I met a man with a loaded gun.” He gestured toward my arm. “It looks like you cut yourself back there.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You should have an EMT look at it all the same.”
My head was spinning in circles. I closed my eyes and tried to make it stop. I visualized a roulette wheel slowing. The wheel landed on a red number.
“Westergaard,” I said.
Charley understood. “There was no sign of him, unless he was hiding in a closet.”
I dialed information and asked for the hotel at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A minute later, I had my answer.
“There’s a conference going on all right,” I told Charley, “but Westergaard isn’t at it. He canceled his reservation two days ago.”
“That makes the professor the prime suspect, I’d say.”
“But why carve that word into her?”
The old pilot glanced up at the lighted windows. “I’ve been on this earth nearly seven decades, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand the abominations men commit against women.”
Hutchins came down the walk slowly, with his wide-brimmed hat in his hands and his face empty of meaning. Looking at him, I felt an upwelling of anger at this arrogant, incompetent man. He tried to slide past us, but I blocked his way.
“Good work, Trooper. Nice job finding that missing driver.”
“Shut up, Bowditch.”
“‘She was probably shit-faced and called a friend before the cops showed’? That’s what you told me. Maybe if you had actually looked for her, she’d still be alive.”
He looked down at me, eyes flat, jaw tight. “You smell like booze.”
“Boys,” warned Charley. He knew where this was headed.
For an instant, I thought Hutchins might punch me. Instead, he turned one of those wide shoulders into my chest and flicked me aside like a bull tossing a picador. I practically fell over into the snowbank as he stormed back to his cruiser. We could overhear him on his police radio, although his exact words were lost to us.
“I’m not sure that was called for,” said Charley.
“He just pisses me off.”
The wind shifted direction and swept in suddenly off the sea. Charley’s teeth began chattering like castanets. “I’m guessing we’re going to be out here awhile.”
“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”
“I’m not sure who dragged who into what,” said my friend with a humorless smile. “But I’m thinking I’d better buy myself a rabbit’s foot, quick. My luck’s definitely taken a left-hand turn since I made your acquaintance, Warden Bowditch.”
It was Charley’s idea to meet the detectives at the top of the driveway. “They’re going to want to spray wax on the tire tracks,” he told me. “And we don’t need any more cars coming down this hill.”
We left Hutchins standing like a statue beside his cruiser and pushed our way uphill through the broken- branched trees, taking a circuitous route and checking the thinning snowpack with our flashlights every few feet to be certain that no one else had recently come this way. It had begun to dawn on me how thoroughly I had contaminated the crime scene by breaking into the house.
