reflection of my woeful inability to see clearly into the heart of another human being.
I decided to e-mail the photos of Munro’s Arctic Cat to Detective Lieutenant Zanadakis and Sheriff Rhine and leave it to them to follow up with me. Under most circumstances, the word of a game warden testifying that he recognized a vehicle was good enough for investigators to pursue, but my history of making imaginative leaps-as the sheriff might say-combined with my ill-considered sexual involvement with Jamie Sewall was likely to weigh against my credibility.
Some days-most days-I wondered whether I was really cut out for my job.
I suspected my superiors thought the same thing.
The wet snow had whitewashed all the fixtures in my dooryard: my ATV beneath its tarp, my Ski-Doo on its trailer, my overturned canoe, my rusting Jeep. I made a quick sweep around the property, looking for new tire tracks or footprints. There were none.
A sour smell greeted me as I opened the door. The odor was definitely fainter than it had been, and masked somewhat by the chemical freshness of the industrial cleaners I had used on the carpets and walls, but the place still reeked to high heaven. I dragged my duffel bag inside and flung it on the floor. I would just need to resign myself to smelling like roadkill for the indefinite future. It seemed to be a message from the universe that I was truly meant to live alone.
I microwaved three burritos and sat down at the table. The mushy beans scalded my tongue on the first bite, and I rushed to fill a coffee mug with cold water. I remembered the can of beer in my refrigerator and figured that, after last night, I might as well drink it now. The beer made me think of Jamie. How much time needed to pass before I could safely call her?
After I’d finished eating, I plugged my camera into my laptop computer and downloaded the pictures of Munro’s snowmobile. The phosphorescent paint job was unmistakable. It puzzled me that Doc hadn’t made the identification instantly. I tried to conjure up the look he’d given me when I showed him the photos. In my mind’s eye, I saw his mouth widen and the side of his face jerk with an uncontrollable tic.
Doc Larrabee had been lying when he’d said he didn’t recognize the sled. I was 100 percent certain of it now. But why? What reason would the veterinarian have had to cover for Mitch Munro, of all people?
I composed an e-mail, recounting the tip I’d gotten from Mack MacQuarrie and my subsequent visit to Munro’s residence. I reaffirmed my eagerness to speak with the state police, the sheriff’s office, or Maine Drug Enforcement agents should they find this information of interest. I attached the pictures as JPEG files, CC’d Sergeant Rivard, and sent off my message in a virtual bottle.
Then I went to take a long, hot shower.
After I got out of the bathroom, I made myself a cup of coffee and checked my mailbox for new e-mail. Zanadakis hadn’t responded, but there was a new message from an address that got my heart pumping: georgemagoon@anonemail. com.
At first I marveled at how he’d tracked me down. Then I remembered that all Maine government e-mail addresses follow the same formatting, based upon the state employee’s full name, followed by @maine. gov. My own address was also printed at the bottom of the business card I handed out all the time.
The message was short and to the point:
Good evening, Warden. You need to keep a closer eye on your prisoners! You shouldn’t let them wander off into rivers. Did you like the sweet-smelling present I left for you? I’ve enjoyed playing with you, but I’m beginning to get bored. My crystal ball says you’re headed for a bad end sooner than you think. Will it happen tomorrow? I wonder. Wait and see.
Sincerely, Your Friend George
30
That night I slept like the proverbial dead. The next morning, I printed out Magoon’s e-mail. On its surface, nothing in the message seemed to rise to the level of criminal threatening, but that decision belonged to the district attorney.
Rivard called while I was wolfing down a bowl of Cheerios. He was all business, in a hurry. He said the Division C airboat and dive teams would lead the recovery effort for Prester Sewall’s body. Teams of searchers from local law enforcement, fire, and rescue, members of the Coast Guard station in Jonesport, and community volunteers would scour both banks of the Machias downstream of the point where Prester had gone into the water. I would help coordinate the search along the shore. Rivard didn’t mention the e-mailed photos I’d sent to the sheriff, and I didn’t bring up the subject, knowing that his mind was appropriately elsewhere.
There were no messages from Rhine or Zanadakis, either. They, too, had more pressing subjects on which to focus than Mitch Munro’s snowmobile.
The sky was blue-black, almost indigo, and there was again the feeling of imminent snow in the air. Some early chickadees were whistling in the pines across the right-of-way as I backed out of the drive and headed toward Machias. Rivard had told me to meet him at the little park on the eastern side of Bad Little Falls.
By the time I arrived, a cluster of patrol trucks was already jammed into the tiny lot. A woman in a bathrobe was standing on the doorstep of a clapboard house across the street, smoking a cigarette and watching the show. I spotted Sergeant Rivard, Cody Devoe, and Mack McQuarrie out on the pedestrian bridge that stretches across the waterfall. I made a beeline for my colleagues.
The bridge is normally barred in the wintertime, but Rivard had arranged for the gate to be opened. He was pointing at a deep-looking plunge pool beneath one of the falls. “See that eddy there?” His voice was loud above the roar of the river. “We need to drop a sonar head into that pocket.”
“Probably full of dead trees,” said McQuarrie.
Devoe nodded. “And God knows what else. Dead deer, dead moose.”
They raised their eyes from the water as I stepped onto the icy bridge. “Gentleman,” I said, touching the brim of my cap.
“Good morning, sunshine!” McQuarrie turned his head and spit a brown stream of tobacco juice over the railing. He was barrel-chested, with a shock of white hair you could see from a distance, like the tail of a deer. “How nice of you to join us.”
“I take it Prester didn’t wash up overnight,” I said.
“No such luck,” said Devoe. He had probably shaved an hour ago, but already there was a blue shadow along his caveman’s jaw.
“So what’s the plan?”
“This one is going to be a bitch,” Rivard said. “There’s a chance he got stuck upriver-snagged in a tree or wedged behind a boulder-but the current’s pretty powerful, so I figure no. That would be a good thing. We can’t put divers in above the falls, and we can’t put them into those pools because of the hydraulics and debris. Let’s hope he made it all the way down to the bottom. With any luck, we’ll find him stuck in the mud down there.”
I cast my gaze downriver and breathed in the fetid smell of the tidal flats. Dawn was breaking above the humped eastern shoreline, and I saw gulls bobbing in the dirty foam line of the river, where the freshwater met the salt.
“I just got off the horn with Petey,” said McQuarrie. “He said the airboat’s on the way.”
“That’ll wake up the neighborhood,” said Rivard with a laugh.
I pointed at the woman in her bathrobe across the street. “The neighborhood’s already awake.”
The prop-powered airboats we used were identical to the ones that skim along the Everglades. They made such an ungodly racket, you needed to wear protective headphones in order to have a conversation on board. Hearing loss is an occupational hazard in the Maine Warden Service. Hours of exposure to airplane engines, outboard motors, snowmobile and ATV four-strokes, and the occasional shotgun or pistol blast do a number on the eardrums.
“Let’s go find the dead guy,” Rivard said.
McQuarrie clapped me hard on the shoulders. “Ain’t this the greatest job in the world?”
I followed Mack to his patrol truck. The snow in the park was already dirty and beaten down with boot prints.
