Bad Little Falls (24 page)

“How are these game ranches legal?” she asked. “Why come to Maine to kill an elk? Why not just go to Wyoming?”

“Novelty, I guess.”

“People will pay to kill anything,” said Charley. “The money is part of the turn-on.”

We followed the road at an altitude of three hundred feet to avoid the blinking cell-phone towers that jutted periodically from the low hilltops. Traffic crawled along the highway beneath us, headed west to Bangor or east to St. Stephen. I couldn’t see the speedometer, but I could mark our velocity by how quickly we outpaced the logging trucks below.

After fifteen minutes, I caught sight of the Call of the Wild sign, and I knew that all of the property to the north of the highway was fenced with barbed wire. I indicated for Stacey to take us down so that I could get a better look. Away from the truck route, the timberland was webbed with access roads to bring hunters into the backcountry. Brogan had logged portions of the ranch heavily. Most big herbivores dislike mature forests; they prefer clearings that have been heavily cut, where alders and striped maple are growing back in low bushes. I guess this forage appealed as much to Sitka elk as it did to Maine moose.

“There goes a pig,” said Charley.

Down one white road, a wild boar was jogging. It looked brown and shaggy and fairly well fed. As a creature of northern European forests, it didn’t seem to find the temperature oppressively cold, nor did it spook when Stacey descended for a closer look. It glanced at us over one hairy shoulder and then set its head down and charged off into a line of spruces without breaking stride.

Stacey turned the plane back toward Brogan’s office and brought it about in a tight circle until we were spiraling over the building at an alarmingly low altitude. After a few minutes, a door swung open and a man stepped out, looking skyward. I saw a blond beard and ponytail.

“That’s Billy Cronk,” I said. “He’s the one I was telling you about.”

“The one with the skunk?” asked Charley.

“What skunk?” asked Stacey.

“That feller down there let a skunk loose in Mike’s abode.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He’s mad because I pinched him for discharging a firearm too close to a house, so he’s been pulling pranks on me,” I said. “He calls himself George Magoon, after a famous poacher who liked to torment game wardens.”

“What kind of pranks?”

“First, he nailed a coyote pelt to my door, and then he broke into my trailer and released a skunk, which sprayed all over the place. I’ve been sleeping in a motel the past two nights.”

Other men emerged from the cabins to join Cronk. They watched us with generally perplexed expressions, their heads back.

“Are you sure it was the same person both times?” Charley asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

“You don’t want to leap to the wrong conclusion.”

It never occurred to me that the incidents might have been unrelated. Now that I thought about it, I realized the skunk had not been accompanied by a note from Magoon. Charley had always warned me against making assumptions in my investigations.

“Can you pass me a bottle of water from the cooler?” asked Stacey.

The tight spirals were making me nauseous. A drink sounded like a good idea, but there was only a single Poland Spring in the little Igloo Cooler. I wiped the moisture off with my sleeve and handed it to Stacey. She untwisted the cap, took a swig, and set it between her thighs. Then, very quickly, she lifted the window. A blast of arctic air tore through the cockpit.

“Stacey,” warned her father.

Before I could ask what was going on, she hurled the nearly full bottle straight into the cluster of men beneath us. Cronk leapt nimbly backward, but one of the others, a tubby brown-bearded character, fell flat on his ass in the snow. The plastic bottle struck a patch of rock and exploded like a liquid bomb among them.

“Assholes!” Stacey called out the window before she latched it shut again.

“You could have beaned one of those guides.” Charley did his best to suppress a chuckle.

“That was the idea.”

“I appreciate the gesture,” I said.

“I didn’t do it for you. I have no problem with hunting if the animal is taken fairly and doesn’t suffer, but turning the Maine woods into a private shooting gallery for lazy jerks who just want to fire their guns and pose with a trophy steams me.”

Her feelings were almost exactly my own, although my job prohibited me from saying so too loudly, let alone dropping water bombs on the heads of hunting guides.

“You’re going to get Mike in trouble with his superiors,” Charley said.

“He’s a big boy,” she said. “And it’s not like it will be the first time, according to Mom.”

I wondered what stories Ora had told her daughter about me. I knew that Charley’s wife cared deeply for me, but I also suspected she worried that I brought out her husband’s daredevil side. Ora didn’t blame me for the violence I had brought into their life, but the same couldn’t necessarily be said for Stacey.

My cell phone rang on my belt. I barely heard the ringtone over the engine. The number on the display belonged to Sergeant Rivard. I removed the headset.

“Yeah?” I said, holding the phone to one ear and covering the other with my hand. The noise inside the plane was deafening.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“In a plane.”

“What?”

“In a plane with Charley Stevens and his daughter. We’re flying over Narraguagus.”

“Can you head over to Machias? Prester Sewall just escaped from the hospital.”

“What?”

“A school bus hit a snowplow. He escaped during the Code 66.”

Code 66 is hospital jargon for an all-hands-on-deck emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school-yard shooting. In other words, it means any event requiring every staff member to drop what they are doing, even if they are off duty, and assist with triage. A bus loaded with kids striking a plow definitely qualified. I thought of Jamie’s son, Lucas, and felt a surge of worry.

“Can Stevens help with the search?” Rivard shouted.

I held the phone against my leg and rearranged the headset to explain to Charley and Stacey what had happened.

Before I could finish asking for help, Stacey had turned the nose of the Cessna in the direction of the coast and reached for the throttle. The plane banked to the right until we caught sight of the Narraguagus River itself, and then we turned southeast across a no-man’s-land of peat bogs and frozen beaver flowages without a house to be seen.

Prester Sewall and Randall Cates had sought out one of these heaths for their drug deal. They’d wanted isolation and had found it in spades. Now Cates was dead, and Sewall was on the run. An escape attempt would be interpreted by the court as an admission of guilt. It surprised me that Prester had been capable of flight in his condition. Unless he’d found a ride—a difficult task to accomplish when you had a mug like that of the walking dead—he wouldn’t get far.

Snow streaked by the windows, and Charley scraped off frozen condensation from the windshield with the heel of his hand.

“So much for counting moose today,” he said.

“I should have figured something like this would happen,” said Stacey.

I raised my binoculars at an angle to the window. Peering through the scud, I could make out hills forested with leafless trees that made me think of thinning hair on a balding man. Every once in a while, a black rooftop would pop into view along a gray line of asphalt.

Stacey picked up the half-frozen Machias River and followed it downstream through the impoverished little village of Whitneyville, where Route 1 crossed over the new bridge. I saw the conjoined roofs of the hospital, steam rushing up out of stacks from the power plant inside. The parking lot looked like pandemonium: cars everywhere, police cruisers arranged at checkpoints, blue lights flashing in the snowy morning.

I called Rivard back and had another shouted conversation with him above the Cessna’s engine. He wanted us to scout across the road, in the wooded area between Sylvan Park and the riverbank. There was an oval harness-racing track there, long abandoned, bordered by evergreens that bore a resemblance, from above, to a thick shag carpet. A man could hide from view handily in all that greenery.

“Cody Devoe is here with Tomahawk,” Rivard said. “He’s trying to find the scent.”

“What should we do?”

“Look for tracks.”

There were plenty of those, crisscrossing the snow-covered fields. The high school was just down the road, and kids no doubt sneaked into the woods to smoke pot and make out on a daily basis, no matter how cold it got. A deceptive coating of ice covered the slow water above the park; from the air, you could see how wafer-thin it was and how the crust broke apart as the river approached the rapids. Eventually, you came to a place where there was no ice at all. There were white streaks in the tea-stained water where the current tumbled over submerged boulders and dropped down hidden cascades before it picked up serious speed above Bad Little Falls.

I wondered if anyone had contacted Jamie. The panic I knew she’d feel when she heard the news was like a punch to the heart.

The phone rang again. “He’s headed for the river!” Rivard said. “Bowditch, do you see him?”

Not on my side of the plane. I unstrapped myself and leaned across the cabin. In the open fields to the north, searchers were converging and moving en masse toward the water’s edge. With my binoculars, I scanned the ragged tree line, trying to draw a bead.

“There!” said Stacey.

Prester Sewall staggered out from beneath the cover of the evergreens. He lurched through the snow like a wounded soldier. Another man—this one in uniform—was thirty yards behind and closing fast. The pursuer had Prester trapped against the frozen river, with nowhere left to run.

The other man must have called something to him, causing Prester to pause for a moment along the stony riverbank. They seemed to be having a shouted conversation across the space between them. The police officer raised his hands in a gesture of peacefulness. Prester swayed uncertainly, hugging himself against the biting wind.

And then, as we watched helplessly from above, he turned and took a tentative step onto the ice.

26

During the Code 66, when doctors, nurses, and techs had been scrambling to meet the bus carrying the injured children, and the deputy who was guarding the ward had slipped away to help, Prester Sewall had pulled the IV from his arm and stumbled on wounded feet out of the med-surg unit. How exactly he had escaped detection, no one could say. With his bandaged nose and wine-colored cheeks, he was hardly inconspicuous. Someone suggested he might have found a stray coat to pull on over his pajamas.

Given that it was snowing at a rate of half an inch an hour and the temperature was in the low twenties, Sergeant Rivard calculated that Prester couldn’t have gotten far. To Rivard, who had conducted a fair share of searches for escaped prisoners in his time, this line of thought led irresistibly across Route 1A into the locked and abandoned grounds of the old Sylvan Park racetrack.

The hospital staff had provided Warden Devoe’s K-9 assistant, Tomahawk, with a hearty whiff of Prester’s bedclothes, and sure enough, it took only a few minutes of patrolling along the roadside snowbank before the dog indicated. She nearly pulled her handler over as she took off into the woods.

The searchers found a trail staggering off into the trees. Rivard said the prints were unmistakably those of a man wearing small-size hospital slippers. All available units—wardens, troopers, and deputies—converged on the overgrown park.

Prester had cut across the windy field where horses had once raced, making a beeline for the birch and pine forest to the south. The falling snow hadn’t yet obscured his footprints, and the dog was hard on the scent. Excitement built as the wardens and police closed in on the fugitive. Devoe and Rivard heard the Machias River before they saw it. The tracks made straight for the ice-clotted riverbank and then veered east, paralleling the channel as it rushed downstream into town.

The searchers were amazed at Prester’s endurance, having forgotten the tremendous survival instinct he had shown the night of the blizzard. The wardens radioed for police cruisers to cordon off Water Street, blocking Prester’s escape into the small riverfront neighborhood above Bad Little Falls. Rivard said that you could read his mounting desperation in the meandering tracks. He was in a panic and didn’t know where to go.

A call went out over the air: Corbett had cut him off at the river. Moving independently of the other searchers, the chief deputy had found his man by taking a different vector on the Machias, closing off any escape. According to Corbett’s written report on the matter, which I later read, he had shouted at Prester to stop. The fugitive had paused at the riverbank and responded inaudibly.

“Suspect seemed to be on the verge of giving up,” the chief deputy had written.

Which is why we were all caught off guard when the escaped prisoner decided instead to step to his death.

*   *   *

It happened so slowly, like a movie playing at half speed. When Prester first set foot on the ice, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. From aloft, you could see how thin the ice was. Even at ground level, he must have recognized that the crust was nothing but a lie.

Then he took a second step.

“What’s he doing?” Stacey asked over the intercom. “Is he nuts?”

Three more steps, and Prester broke through. It reminded me of a horror movie in which an actor is crossing a cemetery and skeletal arms reach up from the ground to pull him down into the grave. He disappeared just like that. His head jerked back, and his bandaged arms went flying skyward—for a moment he seemed to be looking right at us—and then he was gone. A hole in the ice, brown with churning water, was all that was left of him.

My first thought was of Jamie.

Instinctively, Stacey turned the plane downriver. We hoped to see his head pop up in the open water below Sylvan Park, thought we might spot his green pajamas bobbing along. But we never did.