was slick with perspiration. He kept glancing at his truck as if it might reveal some falsehood in his story and incriminate him.
The deputy decided to radio the dispatcher to find out if Nikki Donnatelli had returned home. It was then that he discovered that Angela had telephoned Nikki’s employer, Mark Folsom, and that the bar owner had reported the earlier run-in with Erland Jefferts as cause for concern.
Guffey asked the dispatcher to send backup.
The first officer to respond was a veteran Knox County detective, Joe Winchenback, whose testimony would be the linchpin of the case against Jefferts. It was Winchenback who took the young lobsterman aside and asked him if he knew Nikki Donnatelli.
No was the answer.
“She’s a waitress at the Harpoon Bar,” the detective informed him gently. Wasn’t it true that he’d been drinking there earlier that very evening?
No.
There were many witnesses who said that he had, in fact, been present at the bar, explained Winchenback.
Maybe he was there, Jefferts admitted.
Wasn’t it true that he had touched Nikki in an inappropriate way?
Absolutely not.
Would he at least admit that Mark Folsom had thrown him out of the bar because of something Nikki claimed he did.
Folsom was an asshole and a liar, responded Jefferts.
The detective changed his approach and asked the lobsterman if he had seen Nikki after he left the Harpoon Bar.
He couldn’t remember.
Did he know what time Nikki usually left the bar?
One a.m. That was when the bar closed.
Did he happen to know where she lived?
Yes, because she had told him once.
With Jefferts having changed his story several times, Winchenback made a decision to inform Jefferts of his Miranda rights. The process was just a technicality, he said, but he didn’t want to get into trouble with the sheriff for not going by the book. Jefferts asked what crime he was being accused of, and the detective said suspicion of operating a motor vehicle under the influence of intoxicating liquor.
Was a breath test really necessary?
Maybe not, said the detective. If Jefferts could be helpful in finding Nikki Donnatelli, it would improve his situation. Nikki hadn’t come home, and her parents were very worried. They just wanted her back safe and sound, so if Jefferts had any information about where she might be found, the police would be in a better position to help him on the drunk-driving matter.
Jefferts lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if I know where she is?”
These were the words the detective was waiting for. “Do you?” he asked.
Maybe he had seen her at the party, Jefferts admitted.
What would happen if they were to search his pickup truck? Winchenback asked. Would they find evidence of Nikki’s having been in it?
He had given her a ride home one night, so yes.
The detective pointed out that earlier in the interview, Jefferts had claimed never to have met Nikki Donnatelli.
The young man became angry. He said he was confused because he was tired and he wasn’t feeling well. He was having trouble remembering things. He felt the police were harassing him for no good reason and that he probably shouldn’t say anything more without a lawyer.
Winchenback responded that a girl was missing, and time was of the essence. “If you know something and don’t tell us,” he said, “it will haunt you forever. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?”
“No,” said the lobsterman.
Winchenback saw another opening and walked through it. “Do you remember what you did with Nikki?” he asked.
“What if I said yes?” replied Erland Jefferts.
Winchenback would later swear-and the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall, would argue in court-that Jefferts’s words were tantamount to a confession of guilt.
Seven years ago, I never would have imagined my future connection to any of these people. Like the rest of Maine, I’d found myself caught up in the mystery of a photogenic girl gone missing and a model-handsome lobsterman under suspicion. But my fascination was rooted more in hatred than in prurience. I fantasized driving to Rockland and shooting Jefferts with a deer rifle as he was being taken in chains from the courthouse. If I were Nikki’s boyfriend, I wondered, would I have had the guts to seek revenge?
But of course I wasn’t her boyfriend. I was just a testosterone-crazed kid. And frustrated lust, of the kind Jefferts must have felt for Nikki Donnatelli, was an intimate sensation for me, even more than my teenaged self dared to admit.
13
Being a game warden is an old-fashioned job. As professions go, it seems to belong to some lost and legendary age, right along with blacksmithing, lamplighting, and the harpooning of sperm whales. The Sheriff of Nottingham is history’s most famous game warden. What does that tell you?
Even among my friends and family, the widely held belief was that my job was all about animals. And in certain moments I did see myself as the heroic protector of voiceless creatures. Without wardens in the woods, how many more deer would be slaughtered? How many more ducks would be killed? There was nobility in what we did, even if our salaries were paid for by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. So in our case, you could say that death subsidized life. Game wardens represented society’s recognition that humans need to be protected from their own predaciousness. That bloody desire to kill and keep killing. The inability to ever stop.
Ultimately, my job wasn’t about animals at all. It was about people-and the cruelties they will commit when no one is watching.
Ashley Kim had needed protecting. Tomorrow the newspapers would say the responsibility to safeguard her had belonged to Maine state trooper Curtis Hutchins. A young woman goes missing on a darkened road after an automobile accident and the investigating officer does nothing? In law enforcement, you pay as much for your sins of omission as you do for your sins of commission. Sometimes you pay more. Hutchins had either just reached the ceiling of his career or the floor had dropped out from beneath his scaffold. An internal investigation would determine which of these descriptions proved most apt.
At the moment, I was torn between pitying him and hating his guts.
But what about my own responsibility?
As I waited in the emergency room to have my forearm stitched, legs dangling from a steel table, I kept returning to the scene of the accident on Parker Point. When I shut my tired eyes, I saw Hutchins staring out from beneath the brim of his wet trooper’s hat, saying, “It’s a state police matter now.”
What was my response? “It’s all yours.”
And then I had driven home.
The ER doctor was a little guy in a big white coat and sneakers, with blond hair and a pearly-white smile. He didn’t look a whole lot older than me when he finally appeared to suture up my arm.
“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked brightly.
