asking him to come help you deal with her. He needed to get rid of it. That’s why the police never found a BlackBerry in your truck.”
He settled back in his chair, composing himself. “That’s a nice story,” he said with a twitchy grin. “But I’m getting a new trial, Bowditch, and it’s all thanks to you. After Stanley killed those people, there’s no way they’ll be able to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Within six months, I’m going to be out of this shithole.”
I rested my good elbow on the table and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Do you want to hear a secret? When Snow was beating the crap out of me, he did something strange. I was too fucked-up to understand what he meant at the time, but he held up his cell phone and told me it was his ‘Get Out of Jail Free card.’ What do you think he meant by that?”
“Who the fuck knows?” he asked, but I could tell he did know.
“He kept your message, Erland, from the night you called him. It’s what he’s had hanging over you all these years, the reason you never gave him up to the cops. He told you that if you ever mentioned his name to anyone, he’d just play the message, and any hope you had of ever getting out of here would go up in smoke.”
Jefferts’s mouth went slack with disbelief. “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Stanley Snow dropped his BlackBerry inside my house, Erland. Whose message do you think was on it?”
Kathy Frost was waiting for me outside the prison. It was another dreary, misty day. A light rain had fallen near dawn, stopped for a while, and then started drizzling again. The extended forecast called for more of the same. It was mud season, after all.
My sergeant opened the door of her patrol truck for me and helped guide me inside. Then she went around to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“I think I scared him.”
She started the engine. “So you told him about Snow’s cell phone?”
“Yep.”
She pressed on the gas and turned the truck in the direction of the prison gate. “I don’t suppose you mentioned that there was no message on it from Erland Jefferts.”
“I didn’t say there was-not in so many words.”
“His defense will subpoena it. They’re going to find out you were lying to Jefferts.”
“By the time they do, Menario’s going to have found the actual phone with that message. Snow must have kept it somewhere safe. It was his ace in the hole in case Erland ever tried to strike a plea bargain.”
I could feel her looking at me out of her peripheral vision. “That’s high-stakes poker, Grasshopper.”
The windshield was fogging up. I reached down and hit the defroster. “It’s my ass on the line, not yours.”
She scratched her nose absently. “My question is why Snow stopped killing for seven years and then started again. He must have had other opportunities. I guess we’ll never know what really happened.”
I’d thought a lot about this question over the past forty-eight hours, trying to piece together the sequence of events that occurred the night Ashley Kim vanished. Snow had known that Hans Westergaard was secretly driving over from Bretton Woods to meet his mistress, and he must have plotted an ambush. My guess was that he’d already attacked and tied up the professor before Ashley hit her deer. Snow had probably answered the phone when she called Westergaard asking for a ride. She knew him from her visit to Maine the previous summer, knew he was her lover’s caretaker, and thought nothing of blithely getting in his pickup.
What Snow hadn’t counted on was that the Driskos would arrive at the crash scene while he was there. Dave and Donnie weren’t the sharpest tacks in the box, but even those morons could put two and two together. And so father and son embarked upon their ill-fated scheme to blackmail him.
The medical examiner had determined that Ashley Kim and Hans Westergaard died within hours of each other. Snow had evidently kept them imprisoned in the house overnight while he repeatedly violated the young woman. Had he made Westergaard watch? My gut told me he had.
The next day, Snow had left the unfortunate couple alive in the house so he could set about creating alibis for himself. I had seen him at the Square Deal Diner that morning. Sometime later in the afternoon, he had returned to the cottage to rape Ashley Kim one last time before he smothered her to death. He’d then driven Westergaard’s Range Rover to that isolated road in the woods, where he’d cut the man’s throat with a kitchen knife. He removed whatever bonds he’d used to immobilize his captive and then hiked out of the forest. By the time I found the Rover, the ice storm had erased whatever footprints he might have left. Snow figured that if fiber evidence placed him inside the vehicle, he could always claim that the professor let him use the SUV from time to time.
The unanswerable question was what had incited this killing spree. Snow had already gotten away with murder seven years earlier. There seemed to be something about sexually active young women-Nikki Donnatelli, Ashley Kim-that brought out the demon inside his shriveled little heart. Kathy was assuming that the only murders Snow had committed were the ones in Seal Cove, but who was to say that investigators wouldn’t link him to the slayings of luckless women elsewhere?
“Maybe Snow secretly wanted to be caught,” I said. I’d read that some serial killers crave the celebrity that comes from being caught; they secretly want to be as famous as John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy, and so they begin to sabotage themselves.
“Do you believe that?” Kathy asked.
“He was a lot more careless this time around.” I ran my fingers lightly across my bandaged skull and felt the bump on my head. “He knew he’d fucked up Westergaard’s fake suicide. He was boasting to me about his phony alibis and how dumb cops are. But he knew it was only a matter of time until Menario caught up with him. He was desperate, or he wouldn’t have come after Sarah and me.”
“What do you guess Westergaard’s wife’s role was in this?”
“Snow seems to have had a crush on her, but I don’t think she put him up to it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
We drove along without speaking, listening to the rhythmic back-and-forth swish of the windshield wipers. “How’s Sarah doing?” she asked.
“How do you think she’s doing? A madman broke into our house and tried to kill her.”
I didn’t mention the baby. Sarah had been sobbing uncontrollably for two days, and I couldn’t make her stop. Neither of us could bear to return to our house. Instead, Kathy and Sarah’s sister Amy had packed a week’s worth of clothes for us, and we’d moved into the motel behind the Square Deal. Eventually, Sarah and I would need to talk about our trauma, but neither of us had the heart to yet. I’d begun to wonder if we ever would. Maybe the Reverend Davies could help us. I had a counseling appointment with her to discuss the shooting.
“I heard the Barter boy came out of his coma,” Kathy said.
This was news to me. “What’s the prognosis?”
“He spoke to his mother.”
The St. George River came into view through the fog, a rushing wide brown expanse carrying tons of mud out to sea. I turned my head to face the window.
“Tomorrow’s the first day of open-water fishing season,” she said. “You’re welcome to ride along with me if you want.”
I felt a jolt of pain travel from my shoulder down to my fingers when I changed position. “Do you know what else tomorrow is?”
Kathy looked at me with her peripheral vision. “April Fool’s Day.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
EPILOGUE
The blackbirds were singing and the spring peepers were calling in the cattail marsh behind the Square Deal as I stepped out of my Jeep. I still hadn’t returned to active duty-the hard plaster cast on my right wrist had delayed that prospect indefinitely-but my bruises had begun to heal, and I could stand up in the morning without a
