The mention of the district attorney caught his attention. “Threatening, how?”
“He took responsibility for putting the skunk in my trailer. He said he’d been watching me and that I was headed for a bad end. He sent the message from one of those anonymous e-mail addresses, but he signed it ‘George Magoon.’ I know it was Brogan.”
“He did what?”
“He signed it ‘George Magoon.’ That means he was also responsible for nailing that coyote pelt to my door. The note establishes a pattern. I think there might be enough for a stalking or criminal-threatening charge.”
Rivard rubbed his face with his gloved hand. “Jesus Christ. Why can’t you just give it a rest?”
“Give what a rest?”
“ I’m George Magoon, not Brogan.”
“What?”
“I found that coyote skin in an abandoned trapper’s cabin and nailed it to your door as a joke. You’re so paranoid. I knew it would drive you crazy trying to figure out who put it there.”
“Why would you do that?”
“You were so gung ho to bust Billy Cronk. I wanted to teach you a lesson about how wardens are viewed Down East before some poacher shot you in the head.”
“What about the skunk?” I asked, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks.
“That wasn’t me.”
“Who was it, then?”
“Brogan, probably. The fucking idiot. I keep meaning to knock some sense into him. But right now, we’ve got something more important to do.”
Charley had cautioned me against connecting the two pranks; he’d observed that with the skunk, there had been no note left with Magoon’s signature. But if Rivard had been behind the coyote skin, and Brogan had let the skunk loose, then who had sent the threatening e-mail?
“You’re an asshole, Rivard.”
“And you’re an arrogant fuckup who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the Warden Service. So, do you want to stand here and trade insults all day, or do you want to help us find Prester Sewall before he floats off to Nova Scotia?”
“Warden Bowditch!”
Roberta Rhine slammed the door of her Crown Victoria and started up the steep road in our direction. She wore a black Gore-Tex parka and black chinos tucked into rubber-bottomed boots. She had arranged her long braid so that it protruded through the hole in the back of her sheriff’s baseball cap. Her lips were thin, red, and unsmiling.
“Sheriff Rhine,” Rivard said.
“Am I interrupting something?” she asked.
My sergeant dropped his voice a couple of octaves. “I was just telling Warden Bowditch that we have a search and recovery operation to begin.”
“Indeed you do.” She smiled at me without any warmth. Her lipstick had left a crimson smear on one of her front teeth. “But first I need to speak with Warden Bowditch. I got the e-mail he sent me last night. I’m not sure what you hoped to accomplish by sending it.”
“I assumed Lieutenant Zanadakis might want to interview Mitch Munro about his whereabouts at the time of Randall Cates’s death.”
“That’s very conscientious of you. It’s not often that a warden offers his assistance to a homicide investigator in such a determined fashion. Your efforts to absolve Prester Sewall of responsibility are quite heroic. You’d think it was because you had a personal interest in this case. Did you ever see your girlfriend last night, by the way?”
“No, ma’am.”
“So you didn’t confer with her about the new ‘evidence’ you unearthed at the home of her ex-husband?”
I couldn’t guess what garden path Rhine was trying to lead me along; there was clearly some ulterior motive behind this line of questioning. “I haven’t talked with Jamie Sewall since you and I left her house last night.”
“And you don’t know how she spent the rest of the evening?”
“Come off it, Sheriff.” I said. “What’s going on? Did something happened to Jamie?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
A lump in my throat made it hard to speak. “Is she OK?”
“That depends on your definition,” Rhine said. “Your girlfriend had quite a night after she kicked us out of her house. I just came from seeing her. She’s my guest in the fishbowl over at the jail.”
31
“Trooper Belanger picked her up around three A.M.,” the sheriff explained. “She was driving back to Whitney from somewhere in Machias. Her van was weaving across the center line. When he pulled her over, he detected a strong smell of alcohol on her breath. She refused to take a field sobriety test. He found a vial of Adderall in her pocket. We’re holding her at the jail on drunk-driving and drug-possession charges.”
The sensation was of all the blood in my body draining down out of my head and heart and pooling down around my ankles. I was devastated by what she’d done to herself. Depending upon the quantity of the drugs in her possession, she might be facing mandatory jail time. If Jamie went to prison now, who would care for Tammi? Who would look after Lucas?
I felt heartsick and culpable, but the sheriff used another adjective to describe my bloodless expression.
“You look shell-shocked,” she said.
“Disappointed is more like it,” I said. “Her brother just committed suicide, and I was worried she was going to fall off the wagon.”
“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.