Bates had disappeared.
“I told them to leave, or else I’d call the police,” Ruth explained.
“Thanks,” I said, and paid my bill.
Outside, I scanned the parked cars to see whether my two stalkers were lying in wait, but they seemed to have vanished. I approached my patrol truck, coffee and doughnuts in hand, but did a double take as I drew near. There in the bed was Ozzie Bell’s box of top secret files.
Kathy Frost, lived in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the rolling hills of Appleton, at the northern edge of my district. Blueberry barrens, which turned crimson in the fall, cascaded down from her doorstep. The undulating fields were crisscrossed with stone walls and strewn with scorched boulders. In the summer, after the last berries had been raked, immigrant workers would set fire to the fields, blackening the barrens so that the bushes would blossom with greater fruitfulness in seasons to come.
I rarely had cause to visit Kathy at home. My sergeant didn’t go out of her way to encourage visitors. At Division B, she had the reputation of being an odd breed of hermit: a funny, sociable, and utterly uninhibited person who nevertheless kept her private life private. She’d been married a long time ago to some dude named Frost, but the marriage hadn’t stuck, for one reason or another. It occurred to me that I knew very little about Kathy’s social life despite having spent countless hours in cold, cramped circumstances with her on search parties, night patrols, and stakeouts. Our relationship was a strange mixture of intimacy (I knew how she smelled without deodorant) and aloof professionalism.
As I drove up to the house, a dog began baying inside. That was Pluto, Kathy’s grizzled coonhound. I took a moment before I turned off the engine, trying to get the lay of the land. She had a nice spread. There were stately old elms here that had survived a century of blight, along with some big maples fit for sugaring. Kathy’s GMC patrol truck was parked in the dooryard. I also spotted a muddy all-terrain vehicle behind the house-exactly what I’d been looking for.
The doorbell was broken, so I rapped against the glass. Pluto came loping down the foyer, barking all the way. I tried to talk soothingly to him through the glass, but he just kept yowling, as if we were strangers.
After a moment, Kathy appeared, tanned and grinning, and jerked the door open.
Kathy Frost was in her forties, although whether she was in her mid- or late forties, I could never have told you. She was six feet tall, with long, strong limbs. Her bobbed haircut didn’t flatter her, but she had fetching hazel eyes. She wore blue jeans, muddy work boots, and a flannel shirt that had survived a thousand trips through the washing machine. Her trip to Florida had left her with a remarkable tan, as if she’d been dipped head to toe in bronze.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
I presented her with the coffee and doughnuts. “Don’t start, Kathy. I’ve had a shitty morning.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I followed her into the depths of the old house-the chilly air had a vaguely doggish scent-and into the kitchen. Pluto trailed us slowly down the hall and then collapsed with a wheeze on a hand-hooked rug beside the oven. As one of her duties, Kathy oversaw the Warden Service’s K-9 units, training officers and their dogs to assist in search and rescue operations. Pluto looked like an unassuming old pooch-thick of body and grizzled of snout-but he was a retired celebrity in law-enforcement circles. Over his working lifetime, he had located dozens of lost people, alive and dead.
We sat down at an antique table, which tilted when you set your elbows on it, and opened the box of doughnuts.
“First, I want to hear about Key West,” I said.
“It was hot and crowded. I caught a tarpon.”
“That’s it?”
“The daiquiris were overpriced. Also, I bought you a souvenir.”
She handed me a paperback book from the counter. It was Men Without Women, by Ernest Hemingway. “I saw the title and thought of you.”
“I don’t think that’s a compliment, Kath.”
She shrugged her broad shoulders. “So tell me about this dead girl of yours. I’ve got to hand it you, Grasshopper. You don’t waste any time. I go away for a week and suddenly you’re up to your crotch again in a murder investigation. And somehow you found a way to involve Charley Stevens in this, I hear. That old geezer must consider you his personal ace of spades.” She sipped from her cold coffee. “Malcomb gave me the rundown last night, but he left out the juicy stuff. Clue me in.”
“I don’t see the point. Menario already informed me that my role in the investigation is finished-until this thing goes to trial, if it ever does.”
“Menario?”
“He got transferred to the coast to run the investigation.”
She waved a cruller at me. “Come on, tell me the inside dope on what’s going on here. I’m your sergeant, and I command you to share all your gossip on this case with me.”
I titled back in my creaky chair with a grin. “You can’t order me to do that.”
“Are you sure of that? What does the policy manual say?”
“I have no idea.”
“It’s on page seventy-seven: ‘Wardens are required to tell their supervisors about all the interesting shit that happened while they were on vacation.’”
In truth, I was relieved to go over it again. Telling the story to Kathy Frost from the beginning gave me a chance to reexamine the details, and I was glad to have another interested person to help me make sense of the mystery, especially now that Charley had decamped. I started my story with my arrival at Hank Varnum’s house three nights earlier and went on from there, trying to include every halfway relevant detail in my account. Kathy could be a wiseass, but she had a well-trained mind. If there was a hole in my reasoning, she’d find it, and if I was deluding myself in any way, she’d let me know that, too. Kathy listened seriously, rocking back in her chair with arms folded as I told my tale.
“Can you believe those freaks left that box of files in my truck?” I said by way of conclusion. “I’m the last person anyone should want defending an accused man’s innocence.”
“You’ve become the Saint Jude of hopeless criminal prosecutions.”
Pluto, meanwhile, had fallen asleep and was in the midst of a vivid dream that caused him to growl and twitch. We both looked at him with eyebrows raised in amusement.
“You know Pluto and I were the ones who found Nikki Donnatelli,” Kathy said, licking doughnut grease off her fingers.
“I wanted to ask you about that.”
“All of our K-9s are extensively trained for SAR. But Pluto is primarily a cadaver dog, meaning that he’s good at sniffing out dead people. We only take him into the woods these days when we’re pretty sure we’re dealing with human remains instead of a living, breathing person. Some animals are just better suited to one or the other- recovery versus rescue. Pluto has a nose for death.”
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like me. I think I must carry the smell of it or something.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. He also eats his own shit. Still, he’s got one hell of a morbid gift.”
We both glanced at him again, but the dog’s dream had passed and he was snoring peaceably again.
“What was it like coming across her body?” I asked.
She switched to her stern sergeant’s voice. “Promise me you’re not going to get involved with this Erland Jefferts conspiracy. The guy’s guilty. There might be some copycat thing going on here, but another girl getting tied up with tape doesn’t mean pretty-boy Jefferts is innocent.”
“I just want to hear what happened.”
“Let me make more coffee.” She turned on the tap, filled the teakettle, and set it on a burner. When the flame ignited, an acrid smell wafted through the room. Kathy was an infamously bad cook. From the odor, I deduced that she had burned some cheese-related dish and never cleaned it up.
We reused the Styrofoam cups for our instant coffee and sat down again at the antique table, and then Kathy told me her version of Maine’s most infamous murder case.
“I’m assuming you know the general outline of the story. How the Donnatelli girl disappeared on her way
