home from work and then the next morning they found Jefferts passed out in his truck in the woods? Well, the state police brought us in pretty quick. They have their own K-9 people, but they know we’re better at searches. One problem we had right away was that it began to rain like Mother Nature was taking a wicked piss. No dog can track well under those conditions. And it’s no picnic for the searchers, either.”
A sudden gust of wind shook the kitchen windows. The day seemed to be getting dimmer, although the clock hadn’t yet struck noon. Through the glass I watched snow showers blow past. The brown fields in the background looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.
“You’ve been on those searches,” Kathy continued. “You know the drill. We had about a hundred volunteers- personnel from the Brunswick Naval Air Station, the Rockland Coast Guard station. The National Guard sent a helicopter with a Forward Looking Infrared camera so they could search for Nikki’s body heat from treetop level.
“Malcomb was in charge of designing the search criteria, based on what we knew about Nikki and the rough time line the state police had established. One logical place to begin the search was where Jefferts had parked his pickup. And we needed to double-check the shore path. There are quarries all over that peninsula, too, and we didn’t know if she might be at the bottom of one of those disgusting pits. As always, the problem was, Where do you start looking?”
None of this came as news to me. I’d been trained extensively in the science of finding lost persons. But I wanted to hear the story, in light of how I’d discovered Ashley Kim.
Kathy was lost in her own memories now. “The setup of the search had to be defined, maps drawn up, assignments given. Every team needed to know its waypoints and specific instructions about ground to be covered, as well as the general details-like the spacing for the grid searches. Anyway, the overall situation that day was the usual controlled chaos, with the rain not helping. You always get lots of hits with the K-9s, but most are false alarms. Each time, though, you have to figure out if it’s a bust or not. There are just all sorts of bad smells and dead critters out there for the dogs to find.”
Kathy had spoken with me about becoming a dog handler-district wardens often acquire an area of specialization, in addition to their usual responsibilities-but I was leaning toward the dive team. Charley, meanwhile, wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become a warden pilot, but I found his several near-death aerial experiences less than inspiring.
“We gave Pluto a good whiff of Nikki’s clothes, but that didn’t do the trick,” she said. “In those circumstances, you try all kinds of things. Her shampoo, perfume, soap. Ultimately, it was the rigging tape that did it, the roll from Jefferts’s truck. I smelled the tape myself. It had a strong fishy odor, like it had come off a lobsterboat.
“That first day was just a blur. It seemed like her body should have been somewhere right there, along that dirt road, but it wasn’t. God, the weather was miserable, hot and rainy. The mosquitoes were plenty happy we were out there, though. Malcomb called us in after dark. Pluto and I could have kept searching-we wanted to-but that wasn’t our call. The Donnatellis were waiting at the command post with Deb Davies. I’ll never forget the look on the father’s face. It was as if someone had ripped his heart out of his chest and he hadn’t yet realized it.”
She excused herself to use the bathroom, leaving me in the drafty kitchen listening to the windows rattle in their casements. Retelling this story had robbed Kathy of her high spirits. I felt bad about that, knowing she’d just returned from a much-needed vacation.
After a few minutes, she returned and squatted down next to Pluto on his rug and began scratching his throat. “So the next day, we went back out again,” she said, “and it was still raining like Noah should have been building an ark somewhere. We were all exhausted by midafternoon. The adrenaline leaves your bloodstream, and all those hours in the field catch up with you. Well, suddenly we got a message over the radio. It turned out someone had made an error assigning the search areas. We’d missed this big swampy swatch of forest. They shifted my group south to have a look at it. Within half an hour, Pluto started running a track. He nearly pulled me off my feet. When he hit that hard, I knew it was Nikki.”
She paused and collected herself before continuing.
“She’d been tied with her arms around the tree, so he could get to her from behind, if you know what I mean. I remember seeing her white body through the rain and thinking she might be alive. She was on her feet and sort of looked like she was resting her shoulders against the trunk, but that was just the way he’d tied her. I told my search party to stay back. I wanted to preserve a single path to the crime scene and keep everyone from trampling over the evidence.”
Exactly what I had not done at the Westergaard house.
“Her jeans were pulled down around her ankles. The rest of her clothes had been cut away, none too gently. She had all sorts of bloody little wounds on her, and this red mark on her forehead where Jefferts must have clobbered her. They never did find her underwear. Her eyes were wide open, but the flies had already been at them. She’d died knowing she was suffocating, and she still had that look of terror and disbelief you see with so many corpses. Death is never real to some people until the moment they realize it’s happening to them.
“I called her name, but I knew there was no point.”
She took a breath, and I saw the toll it was taking on her to revisit this day, which had been one of the worst in her life. I wanted to ask her a question, but I felt inhibited by the grief I was witnessing, so I just sat there and waited for her to continue.
“My partner from the state police radioed in the Code Blue to the command post,” she said. “The next time I saw her, she was in a bag strapped to a stretcher.
“The trial was a circus, as you know. But fortunately, I wasn’t the focus of the defense’s attention. Jefferts’s lawyer-I forget his name-was a total doofus. On cross-examination, he tried to suggest that I might have fucked up the crime scene in some unspecific way. Time of death was what he was arguing-that it would have been impossible for Jefferts to commit the murder, since he was somewhere else when Nikki died, based on the ME’s own testimony. But Danica Marshall squashed that argument like a bug. I was surprised that the AG had assigned her to such a high-profile case, since she was just a kid at the time. But when I saw her in the courtroom, all my doubts went out the window. Jesus, that little cutie has bigger balls than you do.” She paused for comic effect. “No offense.”
“Offense taken,” I said.
The joke had loosened her mood again. She leaned her elbows on the old table, which caused it to creak in complaint. “It sounds like whoever killed this Kim woman took a few pages from Jefferts’s playbook, but I can tell you we nailed the right perp seven years ago. Erland’s exactly where he belongs-at the prison. If I were you, I’d drop that box of files they gave you in a Dumpster on your way home.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not joining the J-Team.” I cracked my knuckles while I considered whether I had the guts to ask her the question buzzing in my head. “What word did Nikki Donnatelli have written on her body?”
Kathy looked as if I’d just punched her in the solar plexus. “What?”
“Ashley Kim also had a profanity carved into her skin.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
I could see the color rising beneath her tanned cheeks and knew I’d struck pay dirt. “Just tell me the truth, Kathy. I promise you I’m not on another mission to prove anything.”
“It was slut. ” When she spoke again, it was in a tough voice she reserved for arrests. “That was the word on Ashley, right? So I’ve indulged your curiosity. Let’s talk about your job. What the hell have you been up to anyway?”
I stood up. “Well, I’ve got some ATV vandals harassing Hank Varnum.”
“So are you planning on catching them or what?”
“That’s why I came over here,” I said. “Can I borrow your four-wheeler?”
21
The snow was turning to sleet as I drove my overloaded truck along the sloping, slippery roads from Appleton to Sennebec. Kathy had helped me set up two boards to drive her ATV up into the bed of my pickup. The weight of the four-wheeler gave my truck excellent traction, but it made me feel a bit top-heavy whenever I rounded a curve,
