“No, Curt doesn’t come in here. But I know who he is. He was in my brother Bill’s class. All the girls had a crush on him.”
I sipped my coffee. “What else do you remember about him?”
She set down the coffeepot and gave me a sly look. “You keep asking questions like that, and people are going to start talking.”
I smiled and tried to study the room nonchalantly. It’s the cop’s lot in life that whenever you enter a restaurant in uniform, you give some people the creeps. I noticed one prematurely bald dude wincing at me over his newspaper, as if I’d carried the smell of dog shit into the diner with me.
I felt someone looming over me. “I want to apologize for last night,” Hank Varnum said, but his craggy expression was anything but apologetic. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you for what those punks did. I know you don’t have time to stake out every ATV trail in Knox County.”
He held out his hand for me to shake. It was all very theatrical.
“It’s understandable you were upset, Hank,” I said. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m planning to talk with your neighbors this morning and see what I can find out.”
“Talk to that bastard Barter first. You tell him I’m ready to prosecute whoever cut those trees to the fullest extent of the law.”
“I will.”
The bell above the door clang-clanged as he went out. Ruth Libby had been eavesdropping the whole time. “ATVers are tearing up his land?”
“Yep.”
She shook her head with genuine sadness. “Damned kids,” she said.
She was, at best, nineteen years old.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot and switched on my laptop computer. Up came the half-finished accident report I’d started filling out on Ashley Kim’s deer/car collision. I considered calling her home number in Cambridge, but it was ungodly early, and I didn’t want to step on Hutchins’s toes. Instead, I looked up the addresses and phone numbers for the various law-enforcement entities in Knox and Lincoln counties. As it happened, Hutchins lived nearby, not exactly on the way to Varnum’s farmhouse, but close enough to be a plausible detour. I decided to pay the trooper a visit.
It was one of the modular homes that had gone up over the winter on the Catawunkeg Road. The builders must have finished their work after the first frost, when it was too late to plant grass. Instead, they’d dropped some maple saplings into holes and left the yard a muddy mess.
Hutchins’s cruiser was parked in the drive beside a shiny blue Ford F150 pickup. Like game wardens, Maine state troopers work out of their homes, reporting in to their district outposts-called barracks-only on an as-needed basis. Another vehicle, a bronze Dodge Durango, was idling in the open garage.
As I approached the door, a young woman in a business suit came hurrying out of the house toward the waiting SUV. She caught sight of me and froze. She was a short, shapely brunette with long hair pinned back behind her ears.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hello?” she said in the same wary tone one might use to greet a door-to-door salesman.
“Is Curt home?”
Instead of answering me directly, she turned and vanished inside the house. Half a minute or so later, she returned wearing a pair of sunglasses. “He’ll be right out,” she said, opening the door of the SUV. I watched her climb behind the wheel and back out-too quickly, in my opinion-down the drive.
Hutchins, wearing gray sweatpants and a New England Patriots T-shirt, opened the door. His long eyelashes were crusty. “Let me guess-you just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
“Something like that.”
He yawned. “You want coffee?”
“If you’re having some.”
I followed him inside. A black Labrador retriever sprawled on a pillow in the mudroom gave me a warning growl but didn’t bother to rise. Hutchins paid the dog no attention. The house didn’t feel lived in yet-there was an emptiness to the rooms that spoke of boxes somewhere yet to be unpacked-and our voices seemed to echo unnaturally. He motioned for me to take a seat at the kitchen table.
“I think I startled your wife,” I said.
“Katie? She’s afraid of her own shadow.” He poured a cup of black coffee and handed it to me without asking if I wanted milk or sugar. “So I know why you’re here.”
“You do?” This guy doesn’t lack for confidence, I thought.
“You want to tell me I was out of line last night. I hate to break it to you, Bowditch, but you’re kind of an infamous personality. There are a lot of officers who are going to have problems working with you after what your old man did. I’m not one of them. But you’re never going to win any popularity contests up in Somerset County.”
“Actually,” I said. “I just wanted to follow up on the deer/car collision.”
“You’re not still worked up about that?” When he smiled, the stubble of his beard made the cleft in his chin more pronounced. “I wrote her up for leaving the scene of a collision. She’ll be surprised when she learns she committed a Class E misdemeanor.”
“So you never tracked her down?”
“I tried her home number in Massachusetts. Got a machine.”
“You mind if I give her a call?”
He didn’t bother disguising his suspicion. One of the afflictions that besets many law-enforcement officers is an inability to take any statement at face value. You’re always watching for the “tell” that hints at a perp’s hidden intention. Then one morning you wake up and realize you’re looking at your girlfriend like she’s trying to put something over on you, too.
“What’s your fascination with this? When I was working the turnpike, we got half a dozen abandoned vehicles a night.”
“I’d like to talk with her about what happened.”
He studied me closely. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I might take that as an insult. Like you’re implying I didn’t do my job.”
“I’m not implying anything,” I said. “Maybe she knows what happened to the deer.”
“The deer?” He laughed so loudly, the dog barked in the other room. “I thought you were worried about the girl. I should have guessed it was the other way around. You frigging game wardens.”
There were some troopers who looked down their noses at wardens. We might have trained together at the academy, but they still didn’t consider us real law officers in some essential way. Hutchins was obviously one of the elitists. I’d sensed it last night. I wanted to rip his head off, but somehow I managed to keep a bland smile on my face.
“Go ahead, give her a call,” he said. “If you talk with her, though, let her know that she had some people worried about her.” He grinned boyishly. “Then you can tell her about that summons.”
“How’s your cruiser this morning?”
I’d never heard of a trooper having engine trouble in the middle of his shift before-usually the state police kept those vehicles in tip-top condition-and that strange occurrence was yet another thing bugging me from the night before.
Hutchins seemed to sense my wariness; I saw a muscle flex along his jaw. But his voice gave nothing away. “The new spark plugs are all firing, if that’s what you mean. I must have gotten some duds when I replaced them last week.”
I stood up to leave. “Well, I better get on the road myself.”
“Yeah, I’m supposed to meet my brother this morning in Brunswick.” A bronze light came into his eyes. “That reminds me what I’d wanted to ask you. You see a lot of four-wheelers in the woods, right? You got any recommendations for a kick-ass ATV? I’m looking to do some serious off-roading this spring.”
