“No sign of Prester?” the captain said.
“Not yet.”
“First the brother, now the sister.” He gave me that familiar world-weary expression that all law-enforcement officers eventually adopt. “Quite the family, them Sewalls.”
“Quite the family,” I agreed.
A lock clicked loudly, and the door opened on the visitors’ side of the barrier. A stout blond woman in a khaki uniform led Jamie into the room. She was wearing a jumpsuit the color of a moldering tangerine. The guard guided her, not ungently, into a chair facing me through the glass.
Jamie’s eyes were threaded with veins, her skin looked bleached, and her hair was a rat’s nest.
I recalled the seductive woman who had shown up at my motel door, the one with the soft curves who had curled against me in bed and confessed her desire to escape her depressing life for some tropical paradise. She was nearly unrecognizable as the suffering person seated across from me, and I was left to wonder what, if anything, had been real between us.
“Fancy meeting you here.” Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with sand.
“You look like you’ve had a hard night.”
“Gee. Do you think?”
“If you’d needed a ride, you should have called me rather than driving drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“The trooper who arrested you says you were.”
“I was buzzed.”
Her hands were trembling-either from nervousness or withdrawal from substances unknown. I realized I could smell the alcohol on her breath through the holes in the glass.
“What about the Adderall the trooper found in your purse?” I asked. “Did that get in there by accident?”
“Those were Tammi’s. She has a prescription. I picked them up for her at Rite Aid.” She lifted her cleft chin and showed her teeth to the assembled deputies. “Can we have some privacy here?”
I nodded to give my consent, and the men filed out.
I motioned to the wall-mounted camera above my head. “They can still see us, you know.”
“Just as long as I don’t have to look into their stupid faces.” She pushed a strand of greasy hair back over her ear. “You don’t have to be such an asshole, you know? I didn’t do anything to hurt you. You shouldn’t treat me like I did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her voice quavered. “Have you found Prester yet?”
“We’re still looking.”
“Let me know when you do, please.”
I felt sorry for her in her intoxication and her grief and that pathetic jumpsuit, but I was still angry. “If you didn’t want to talk with me, couldn’t you have just gone to a meeting or called your sponsor last night?”
“Why? So she could talk me out of it? I wanted to get drunk. I wanted to get high. Is that so fucking hard to understand?”
I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin. “Jamie, you’re in serious trouble.”
She began to blink back tears. “Don’t you think I know that!”
“If you’re found guilty and sent to prison, the state is going to remove Tammi and Lucas from your house.”
“They can’t do that!” Her voice broke as she spoke the words.
“They can, and they will.” I needed to tell her that Lucas had run away, needed to find out where the boy might have gone, but one unanswered question kept pushing its way to the front of my brain. “If I’m going to help you,” I said, “I need to know the truth about something.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“I went to Wyman Hill last night, over in Township Nineteen. Do you remember how I told you I saw a snowmobile out on the Heath the night Randall was murdered? I know whose sled it was now.”
She brought her hands together in a praying motion but remained silent.
I leaned forward. “Mitch was the one Prester and Randall were meeting on the afternoon of the blizzard, wasn’t it? He was buying drugs from them.”
She looked up suddenly. “That’s not what happened.”
“So tell me the truth.”
“I can’t.”
“Do you want Prester to be remembered as a murderer? Is that what you want for your brother?”
“Mitch is Lucas’s father.”
“That won’t stop me from taking him down.”
“Mitch didn’t kill Randall. I swear to God he didn’t.” Tears streamed down her face. “This is all my fault. Everything that happened is all my fault.”
She had said these same words before, and I had assumed she meant it in the sense of bad karma plaguing her for past misdeeds. “What happened?”
She wasn’t so stoned that she didn’t give a glance at the wall-mounted camera. “Randall beat up Lucas. He knocked him to the ground and bruised the whole side of his face. I thought he might have broken his arm, too. I asked Prester to do something about it-be a man for once-but he wouldn’t because he was too afraid of Randall. So I said, ‘Couldn’t you just lure him somewhere where Mitch could kick the shit out of him?’ He knows karate, and if he took Randall by surprise… I just wanted Mitch to beat Randall up.”
The medical examiner said that Cates had suffered a cracked sternum in the hours before his death. The injury had rendered him immobile, which was why Prester had been the one to seek help after their car got stuck. But what if Munro had lied to Jamie? What if he had returned to the stranded Grand Am later to finish the job?
“Do you know where Mitch is now?” I asked her.
“He wasn’t at his house?”
“No.” A door slammed shut down the hall, and I remembered why the sheriff had called me in the first place. “Is it possible he could be with Lucas?”
“Lucas is at home with Tammi.”
“No, he isn’t. Lucas ran away, Jamie.”
“What are you saying?”
“The sheriff sent someone from DHHS to look in on Tammi and Lucas,” I said. “When the social worker showed up, Lucas locked himself in the basement.”
“He’s afraid of the basement. There’s something down there that scares him. He won’t tell me what it is.” She raised her fingers to her lips as if to chew on her nails but then stopped herself. “But you said he ran away. I don’t understand.”
“The sheriff decided to send one of her deputies over there, too, because she was concerned for everyone’s safety. The deputy found tracks leading from the bulkhead into the forest behind your house.”
“Deputy? Which deputy?”
“Chief Deputy Corbett”
“He’s the one Randall used to talk about!”
“Talk about how?”
“I don’t know-he just mentioned his name sometimes. Then he and Prester would laugh. Oh my God. Was he the guy who frisked me at the hospital? The blond guy with a red face?”
I didn’t answer, but suddenly the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency’s accusation that Rhine had a dirty cop in her department seemed less and less far-fetched. And to what lengths would a man like Corbett go to avoid exposure? Might he have killed Randall Cates and driven Prester Sewall to his death? Might he even harm Lucas if he suspected the boy knew the truth?
Jamie sat bolt upright in her chair. “You need to go over there, Mike! You need to make sure Lucas is safe!”
“I need to ask you some questions first.”
“What kinds of questions?”
“First, would Lucas have access to a firearm? He told me he did.”
“Prester had a twenty-two he used to shoot squirrels and woodchucks. It was my dad’s.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“In the basement.”
My heart sank. “Is it loaded? Does Lucas know how to fire it?”
“Prester took him out back to shoot cans one day when I was at work.”
I pictured Lucas fleeing into the snowy woods. Was he afraid of Corbett, and that’s why he fled? There was also the father to consider. I couldn’t even begin to guess how Mitch Munro might fit into this particular puzzle, if he even did. Maybe the boy had decided to cross the Heath to reach his father’s house.