He stood off to the side of the road and tried to re-create the scene in his mind.
Devine had performed a J-turn and was heading in the opposite direction. The Escalade had mimicked this maneuver and was speeding after him when the shots had struck the larger SUV.
He looked in front of him and then behind, trying to configure a rough trajectory of the third party’s shooting lanes in his head.
Devine walked along the side of the road about a hundred yards and stopped, then looked up and down the road. It was all open field except for this spot where a towering multilimbed evergreen sat.
He walked over to it and looked all around. A nice spot to do some decent sniping and not be seen, he concluded. But not a single shell casing could he find, so they had policed their brass, or maybe their polymer. But how had they gotten here? He’d seen or heard no other vehicle. And surely he would have under the darkened, isolated conditions. And they couldn’t have been simply waiting here, guns ready, for Devine and a chase car to just happen by.
There was clearly more here than met the eye. And then a thought occurred to him.
He called Campbell. “Is there a reason you didn’t mention you sent backup to cover my rear flank?”
“You had enough on your plate.”
“But I saw or heard nothing. And the only possible sniper position had no trace.”
“It wasn’t a person.”
“Come again?”
“It was an armed drone employing AI to fire a machine gun on a target, Devine.”
“Seriously?” said Devine.
“Yes.”
“Then real soldiers will be obsolete before long. Did you catch the guys, then?”
“Agents Saxon and Mann were close, but they found nothing.”
“Couldn’t the drone follow them, or shoot out the tires?”
“It would have, but it suffered a mechanical failure and had to be recalled. It might have been shot for all I know, and those things are not cheap, let me tell you. They’re examining it as we speak. We also checked the film footage from the drone’s camera, but there was nothing helpful. Nifty piece of driving on your part, by the way.”
“They might have flown into Bar Harbor airport. That’s the closest for jets.”
“We’re already checking the flight logs. Got anything new to report?”
Devine told him about Alex starting to remember details from that night. “It was a friend, someone she knew.”
“Think they’re still in town?”
“I believe Earl Palmer would say they are, if he could.”
“But again, we come back to how would someone leverage Palmer to pretend to find Jenny’s body? Does the man have skeletons in his closet?”
“By all accounts he’s a stand-up guy.”
“Everybody has some shit that stinks, Devine. Everybody. So find his, and maybe that leads you to where you need to go. Oh, and about saving your ass last night? You’re welcome. But don’t take that to mean you’re special or anything. I just don’t have time to train a new one.”
Campbell clicked off.
Chapter 56
Devine later drove to Putnam Harbor and looked around. The air was a little warmer today and the skies clear. The salt air smells filled his lungs as he watched men work on the few boats still docked here. And another man was taking a dinghy stacked with lobster traps out to one of the moored vessels.
He looked over when someone called out to him. It was the same man that Devine had falsely accused of being a government informant his first night here.
“Hey, dude, how’s it going?” said the man, walking over. “Name’s Phil Cooper, by the way, folks call me Coop.”
“Okay, Coop, I’m Travis. I saw you on a lobster boat leaving out of here a few mornings back.”
“You must’ve been up real early then,” said Cooper with a grin.
“I thought you would have been out to sea today,” noted Devine.
Cooper’s grin faded. “Damn motor on the boat burned out. I told the owner he needed to get the thing overhauled. He said that costs money. Well, so does having your boat sitting over there and not being able to catch lobster.”
“Can you get on with another boat while his is down?”
“Probably can, tomorrow at least. Thin crews these days. Not many guys want to take up the trade. Some captains go out by themselves now. Backbreaking work, and the money ain’t what it used to be.”
“Earl Palmer was telling me that, too.”
“Damn shame about Earl. Heard he hung himself. Shit. I mean, I know he was depressed about Bertie. But still, he had Annie. He had friends. Now I wish I had spent more time with him. Gone by to see him, shoot the shit about the old days. Drink some beers with him.”
“We all have regrets like that, Coop. Hey, got a question.”
“Okay, Travis, fire away.”
“That night outside the bar? Dak left before I did, and he passed you and your friends. I’d seen him give a high sign to an old guy to leave his stool so I could sit down. Did Dak by any chance give you boys the sign to come after me?”
This query wiped the smile right off Coop’s face. “Look, I don’t want to get in no trouble with a fed.”
“You won’t, because you just answered my question. Now I’ve got another one.”
“Okay,” said Cooper warily.
“What would a boat be doing out in the middle of the night with a smaller boat lowered off that, and heading to shore where it could beach and then offload something?”
“Where the hell did you see that?” asked a startled Cooper.
Devine told him the general location. The other man slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing to do with lobster fishing or oyster farming, I can tell you that. Maybe it was the government. Coast Guard?”
“I thought about that and looked it up. There’s a Coast Guard station at Boothbay Harbor, but they have a thousand-square-mile area of responsibility along the coast that ends far to the south of here.”
Cooper scratched his head. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“There’s another Coast Guard station in South Portland. It’s part of Sector Northern New England. It covers multiple states, works with Homeland Security, performs search and rescues, and helps keep the maritime lanes running smooth. My people can check in with them to see if they had an op in the area, but it really didn’t look like that to me.”
Cooper glanced out to the water. “You think somebody might be smuggling stuff in?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s possible.” Devine looked out at the water, too, and a question occurred to him. “What can you tell me about Wilbur Kingman’s boat going down?”
“Really tragic. Hell, come to think, Earl was on that boat when it sank. He and Wilbur worked together for decades.”
“I know. How exactly did it happen?”
Cooper sat down on a bench and said, “It was a real foggy morning. Couldn’t see a foot in front of you. Most boats didn’t even head out, but Wilbur knew these waters like nobody else. At least we thought he did.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“There are rocky outcrops everywhere along the coast here, and some are farther out than you would think, just a quirk of Maine’s oceanic topography.” He grinned. “Didn’t expect those high-falutin’ words to come out my mouth, did you? Anyway, we all have sonar and depth finders and whatnot on our boats, so we don’t run into stuff we shouldn’t, including other boats. Well, apparently somehow Wilbur’s boat hit one of those rocks out there, hard enough to cave in the hull. Most commercial lobster boats range from around twenty-two feet on up to over forty. Wilbur’s boat, The Kingman, was a thirty-foot closed stern Beal, a nice size, and it handled real well on the water. But it didn’t have a hydraulic hauler, so they brought the traps up the old-fashioned way, with muscle.”