“I’d say she leapt off the wagon-with both feet. She wasn’t particularly coherent when Belanger brought her in. Still isn’t, in fact.”
I wanted to rush over to the jail anyway, wanted to see her myself. I figured that even if she was totally wasted, the enormity of the crime she’d committed and the implications about what it might mean for her family must already be sinking in. If the Department of Health and Human Service removed Lucas from the house, Jamie would destroy herself for sure.
“I’d like to see her,” I said.
“No dice,” said Rivard. “I need you here.”
“Prester will still be dead an hour from now.”
Rivard moved the tobacco wad around in his mouth, causing his cheek to bulge out as if he’d tucked a golf ball in there. “Bowditch, I’ve had it up to here with you. OK? We’ve got a bunch of people ready to search. We need to find the stiff before it starts snowing again. You have a job to do, and I expect you to do it.”
I stared across Bad Little Falls at the road that curved around the corner storefronts in Machias and climbed through a neighborhood of neat houses and yards to the courthouse and the jail. It was beyond my power to rescue Jamie from the fate she’d brought upon herself. But at least I could find her brother.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked Rivard.
Cody Devoe and Tomahawk took the northern bank of the river with one group of searchers while I led another team along the southern shore above the falls.
Devoe had brought along a cork lobster buoy. While we watched, he dropped it into the channel below the spot where Prester had fallen in, and we watched the buoy bob along in the current. It bounced off a couple of ice- crusted rocks and lingered amid foaming eddies. Eventually it found its way into the rapids and was swept quickly downstream, where it was lost from our view over the falls. A man’s body is significantly heavier than a lobster buoy, but Devoe’s science experiment gave us a better understanding of the river’s specific hydrodynamics. We made notes of the places where Prester’s cadaver might have gotten stuck beneath the surface.
Drowned corpses will usually sink before they rise. Once water has flooded the lungs and filled the gastrointestinal organs, a human body will submerge and drift down to the bottom of a lake or river. Eventually, if it stays there long enough, the decomposition process will begin, and methane and other gases will cause the cadaver to swell. In time, it will rise like a volleyball that you’ve held beneath the surface of the water with the palm of your hand. Watching your first bloated corpse ascend from the depths is a special moment in a young warden’s education.
I led a team of four firefighters who had been trained extensively in search and recovery techniques. They were a no-nonsense bunch of guys who made my job considerably easier by actually shutting up and paying attention. Some volunteers will leap into a search with real enthusiasm, but once the hours stretch on without the subject being located, their concentration flags. My guys seemed untroubled by the bitter temperature and overcast skies.
The circuitous path taken by the lobster buoy suggested that Prester should have fetched up on the north side of the river-since there was no chance that he had swum even ten strokes before the cold and current overpowered his best efforts-but there was a slim possibility he might have lodged against one of the boulders midstream, so we turned our binoculars on every square inch of the Machias, recording our findings on maps and GPS, watching our counterparts on the opposite shore do the same.
I kept expecting to hear Tomahawk begin barking, indicating she’d found our drowned fugitive, but the only sound was the constant rush of water and occasionally a shout when someone spotted some bright shard of plastic or a flesh-colored branch. After a time, and despite all my willpower, my own mind began to wander. I couldn’t keep out the distractions.
I tried to keep my mind off Jamie-the thought of her in jail was too damned heartbreaking-so instead my thoughts drifted toward George Magoon.
If Rivard had left the coyote skin and the note on my door, then who had sent me that threatening e-mail? To the best of my knowledge, Brogan was unaware that a prankster calling himself George Magoon was harassing me. Leaving that skunk in my trailer was an independent act of vandalism on his part. So who else knew about Magoon? I’d recounted the incident to Kathy Frost and Charley Stevens. I might have mentioned the name Magoon to Jamie at some point, but I didn’t think so. That left Doc Larrabee and Kendrick. But what reason would they have had to send me a harassing note? Doc had a definite alcohol problem, and Kendrick seemed like a merry prankster in the Earth First! sense. It was possible one of them had sent the message. I had a hollow feeling in my stomach that I was overlooking some detail that might prove significant.
The search dragged on until my team had studied every square foot of water and shoreline between Grove Street and the Route 1A bridges. A Forest Service helicopter appeared over the horizon at one point. It hovered low above the river, its rotors whipping cold water at those of us gathered along the banks, while, inside the chopper, our lieutenant directed a spotlight down at the channel. The lieutenant spent a long time inspecting the pile piers in the center of the stream, but eventually he gave up and the copter moved down below the falls.
As the afternoon progressed-or failed to progress-I found myself growing increasingly angry. I was mad at Prester for falling through the ice, mad at Corbett for chasing him there, mad at Munro for whatever the hell he was doing on the Heath, mad at Rhine and Zanadakis for not taking the matter seriously, mad at Jamie for getting busted, mad at Rivard for being a dick, mad at Brogan and Cronk and Kendrick and even that sourpuss Ben Sprague for making my life so damned difficult when all I’d wanted was to do my job quietly for once. Mostly I was mad at myself.
Rivard was right: I really was an arrogant fuckup who thought he was the smartest guy in the Warden Service. And look at all the good my attitude did me. This emotion no longer felt like self-pity, but, rather, an accurate assessment of my questionable fitness to do the job I’d been hired to do.
I’d just emerged from the Salvation Army trailer that had showed up to feed the assembled searchers, balancing a bowl of chili in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other, when my cell rang. For some reason, I knew it was the sheriff. Rhine had spent a couple of foot-stomping, hand-rubbing hours on the scene before she’d decided to seek warmth back at her office.
“How’s the search going?” she asked.
“We haven’t found him yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“There’s a line of snow squalls moving through Bangor. You probably have another hour before they get here.”
Even light snow would ground our chopper, meaning that unless the guys below the falls got lucky, we would be forced to suspend the search until conditions improved.
Rhine hadn’t called to give me the weather report. “What can I do for you, Sheriff? I’m kind of busy.”
“How well do you know Jamie Sewall’s son?”
“Not very well. He’s a weird little kid, as you saw for yourself.”
I watched searchers in reflective vests milling in the parking lot. Steam rose from their open mouths and white coffee cups.
“Well, it seems he’s run away,” said the sheriff. “The sister, Tammi, called us, saying she was scared because Jamie hadn’t come home. Given her brain injury, I asked DHHS to send a social worker to break the news about Jamie’s arrest and assess the situation. I know Tammi’s not competent to care for a child, so I figured DHHS might need to find temporary placement for them both.”
If possible, the Department of Health and Human Services was even more widely disliked in Down East Maine than the Maine Warden Service. My fears about Jamie potentially forfeiting custody of both her sister and her son acquired a new intensity. Losing Lucas, especially, would be her worst nightmare.
“So what happened?”
“The social worker-her name is Magda Mueller and I’ve worked with her before, a real pro-shows up and the boy immediately freaks out. He won’t listen to the aunt. Instead, he locks himself in the basement and won’t come out. The aunt says there might be a gun down there, so Mueller does the smart thing and gets them both out of the building. I send an officer out to have a look-”
“Not Dunbar?”
“No,” she said. “Corbett.”
If anything, that choice seemed worse to me, given my misgivings about the chief deputy.
