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The detective pointed out that earlier in the interview, Jefferts had claimed never to have met Nikki Donnatelli.

The young man became angry. He said he was confused because he was tired and he wasn’t feeling well. He was having trouble remembering things. He felt the police were harassing him for no good reason and that he probably shouldn’t say anything more without a lawyer.

Winchenback responded that a girl was missing, and time was of the essence. “If you know something and don’t tell us,” he said, “it will haunt you forever. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?”

“No,” said the lobsterman.

Winchenback saw another opening and walked through it. “Do you remember what you did with Nikki?” he asked.

“What if I said yes?” replied Erland Jefferts.

Winchenback would later swear-and the prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall, would argue in court-that Jefferts’s words were tantamount to a confession of guilt.

Seven years ago, I never would have imagined my future connection to any of these people. Like the rest of Maine, I’d found myself caught up in the mystery of a photogenic girl gone missing and a model-handsome lobsterman under suspicion. But my fascination was rooted more in hatred than in prurience. I fantasized driving to Rockland and shooting Jefferts with a deer rifle as he was being taken in chains from the courthouse. If I were Nikki’s boyfriend, I wondered, would I have had the guts to seek revenge?

But of course I wasn’t her boyfriend. I was just a testosterone-crazed kid. And frustrated lust, of the kind Jefferts must have felt for Nikki Donnatelli, was an intimate sensation for me, even more than my teenaged self dared to admit.

13

Being a game warden is an old-fashioned job. As professions go, it seems to belong to some lost and legendary age, right along with blacksmithing, lamplighting, and the harpooning of sperm whales. The Sheriff of Nottingham is history’s most famous game warden. What does that tell you?

Even among my friends and family, the widely held belief was that my job was all about animals. And in certain moments I did see myself as the heroic protector of voiceless creatures. Without wardens in the woods, how many more deer would be slaughtered? How many more ducks would be killed? There was nobility in what we did, even if our salaries were paid for by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. So in our case, you could say that death subsidized life. Game wardens represented society’s recognition that humans need to be protected from their own predaciousness. That bloody desire to kill and keep killing. The inability to ever stop.

Ultimately, my job wasn’t about animals at all. It was about people-and the cruelties they will commit when no one is watching.

Ashley Kim had needed protecting. Tomorrow the newspapers would say the responsibility to safeguard her had belonged to Maine state trooper Curtis Hutchins. A young woman goes missing on a darkened road after an automobile accident and the investigating officer does nothing? In law enforcement, you pay as much for your sins of omission as you do for your sins of commission. Sometimes you pay more. Hutchins had either just reached the ceiling of his career or the floor had dropped out from beneath his scaffold. An internal investigation would determine which of these descriptions proved most apt.

At the moment, I was torn between pitying him and hating his guts.

But what about my own responsibility?

As I waited in the emergency room to have my forearm stitched, legs dangling from a steel table, I kept returning to the scene of the accident on Parker Point. When I shut my tired eyes, I saw Hutchins staring out from beneath the brim of his wet trooper’s hat, saying, “It’s a state police matter now.”

What was my response? “It’s all yours.”

And then I had driven home.

The ER doctor was a little guy in a big white coat and sneakers, with blond hair and a pearly-white smile. He didn’t look a whole lot older than me when he finally appeared to suture up my arm.

“And how are we doing tonight?” he asked brightly.

Sarah was in the waiting room when I came through the automatic doors. She had a Parenting magazine open on her lap and the television was broadcasting an infomercial, but she wasn’t paying attention to either. Her eyes were soft and unfocused, and I knew that she had gone someplace deep inside herself.

I had to call her name to get her attention.

Without a word, she threw her arms around my shoulders and pressed her face against my chest. When she looked up at me, my shirt was wet where her cheek had been. “I should have listened to you,” she said.

“Let’s go home.”

Driving back to Sennebec in her little Subaru, neither of us spoke. The blower pushed hot air into our faces. Behind us in the east, the sky had turned a plum color, a harbinger of the false dawn.

“I don’t want to know the details,” Sarah said at last. “I’ll find out eventually. Everyone will be talking about it. But right now, tonight, I don’t want to know what that maniac did to her. OK?”

“OK.”

I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but she went on. “I feel responsible somehow. You kept saying you were worried about her, and I just thought it was you working too much again. It made me mad.” She sniffed back a sob. “If I had listened to you, maybe you would have found her sooner.”

I reached for her hand. “The state police will catch whoever did this.”

“Will they?” she said, wiping back a tear. “Because they don’t always.”

How far could Westergaard run before someone spotted him, before he had to use his credit cards? “They will.”

“You shouldn’t promise things like that.”

She was right. Menario’s investigation was beyond my power to influence, and Maine had its share of unsolved mysteries. There were too many cases, most involving women, where the police knew beyond a shadow of a doubt which dirtbag had committed the crime but lacked the evidence to make a charge stick. In horrific cases like Ashley Kim’s, was it any wonder that cops might push the limits to get a conviction? When your responsibility is bringing a monster to justice, who’s to say that the ends don’t justify the means? Not me.

“Charley came by to get Ora,” Sarah said absently. “A deputy dropped him off as I was leaving.”

“How did he seem?”

“Like he’d just come from a murder scene.”

Sarah had left every light burning in our house. I could see it from a long ways away, glowing like a beacon through the pine trees. Inside, though, the untended woodstove had grown cold, the rooms were drafty, and the brightness seemed like just another false promise of comfort.

There was a message on the answering machine from Lieutenant Malcomb, asking me to give him a call in the morning. He said he had volunteered my assistance to the state police to help in any way possible. But with my direct supervisor, Kathy Frost, still on vacation, we would need to coordinate certain bureaucratic details, since I had my own duties to perform in the district, and the cash-strapped Warden Service needed to be prudent with its overtime allowances. Even a murder investigation ultimately came down to money.

I peeled off my jail jumpsuit and tossed it in the trash. “How was Ora?”

“Worried. I can’t imagine what their marriage has been like for her.”

I let that one drift by on the breeze.

“I think she’s having problems with one of her daughters,” continued Sarah.

“It’s probably Stacey.” Charley had led me to believe that his younger girl was something of a wild child. The last I’d heard, she’d become a part-time whitewater-rafting guide out west, after graduating with a degree in biology from the University of Maine.

Sarah removed her wristwatch and set it in a box where she kept her jewelry in the closet. “When I asked Ora about her children, she changed the subject.”