The Precipice (16 page)

The woman glanced at me, eyes twinkling above her reading glasses. “Did you get your man?”

“Not yet. I have another question for you, though.” I rested my right hand on the grip of my service weapon, as if my hand were tired. “I don’t mean to hold these gentlemen up.”

“It’s no trouble,” said one of the fishermen.

“You go right ahead, Warden,” said another.

“Would you gentlemen mind waiting outside for just a minute?”

“Not at all!”

I closed the door behind the last of the fishermen. I noticed the
MISSING
poster tacked to the bulletin board on the wall, next to warnings about setting unauthorized fires and fee information for use of the campsites maintained by the North Maine Woods association. The more I saw of that last photograph of Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery, the heavier the weight in my stomach became. It was beginning to feel like I’d swallowed a musket ball.

“You mentioned before that you wouldn’t have a record of the man I’m looking for—Chad McDonough—if he came past here as a passenger in a car or truck.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you have records of every vehicle that left the area this morning?”

“The ones who checked out, I do,” she said. “But the logging trucks and some of the other commercial vehicles just sound their horns. They’d never get any work done if they had to stop here. The timber companies don’t pay us to slow down their operations.”

“This might sound like a funny question,” I said. “But can you think of any loggers who are in the habit of giving rides to hitchhikers?”

The woman’s eyes flew open, and she put a wrinkled hand over her mouth.

“Is that a yes?” I asked.

She nodded so hard, the reading glasses bounced up and down against her bosom. “Troy Dow always has someone with him! And he came by this morning. I know because he always gives me three blasts on his way past the gate. He works on the road crew for Wendigo Timber, carrying gravel out of the woods to the yard in Greenville.”

I tried to pretend that the man’s last name hadn’t meant anything to me. “Do you have his phone number?”

“I have the number for the yard.” She opened a drawer and began pushing papers and pens around. She copied the contact information on a slip of paper, then hesitated before handing it to me. “I hope this doesn’t get Troy in trouble with his supervisor. I don’t think the company approves of his picking up hitchhikers.”

“So he does it a lot?”

Two red sunbursts appeared on her cheeks. “Mostly females. Troy’s a bit of a ladies’ man. But I don’t think he’d refuse a ride to anyone with his thumb out, man or woman. I’d hate it if I caused him trouble. There are some bad apples in his family tree, but Troy is a peach.”

“I’ll be discreet,” I promised her.

Troy Dow was almost certainly related to Trevor Dow, the bearded roughneck Charley had wrestled to the ground outside the general store. I opened the door for the fishermen to come back inside and finish their registration, but one of the anglers stopped me as I tried to slip past.

“We were just talking about those missing girls,” he said. “Have you found them yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Just call the state police if you see or hear anything. It’s the eight hundred number on the poster inside.”

“I have two daughters in college myself,” the man said, choking up. “I don’t know what I’d do if they disappeared.”

He coughed to cover his embarrassment at having such an emotional response.

Stacey was seated with her shoulder belt unfastened and her knees drawn up against the dash, as she often did. She’d pushed her sunglasses up so that they rested on top of her head and was studying one of the many
MISSING
posters I was carrying in the truck. Her forehead was creased with parallel lines.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s something about them—I can’t put my finger on it.”

We started forward.

*   *   *

On our way out of the forest, we passed the airport again. I glanced past Stacey’s head and saw the Learjet parked near the hangars at the far end of the runway. Maybe it was unfair of me to judge the Reverend Mott based on his appearance and mannerisms, but I suspected he was proving to be a complication. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Lieutenant DeFord’s office, I thought.

At the stop sign in Greenville, I hesitated for a moment, feeling myself torn about whether to turn right, toward the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife headquarters on Village Street, or left, in the direction of the yard where I hoped to find Troy Dow.

“I wish we could talk with the parents,” Stacey said, staring off to the right.

“It wouldn’t help us find McDonut.”

“There’s something I’d like to ask Missy’s mom,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Probably nothing. But didn’t you notice how horrible she looked? Something is eating her up inside.”

“Well, her daughter is missing.”

“It’s more than that.”

I drove slowly through the village, knowing how careless tourists can be when crossing roads, too busy talking on their phones or balancing ice-cream cones. I needn’t have worried. The summer tourism season had ended like the tolling of a bell on Labor Day, and the swarms of leaf peepers hadn’t yet arrived to take snapshots of Maine’s fall foliage. I wished Stacey and I were just out for a drive on such a lovely day. The sky was dotted with cotton balls. The lake looked like someone had drained all the water and refilled the basin with blue ink.

The yard was located in the industrial park on the western edge of town. We turned away from the lake and the old railroad depot. The cracked pavement was littered with shreds of bark and chips of wood from the logging trucks driving in and out. I spotted a sign with a familiar silver-and-black logo up ahead.

Wendigo was a Canadian timber company that had bought up miles of the Maine North Woods and proceeded to evict hundreds of people—including Charley and Ora Stevens—from cabins they had leased for decades. The company planned to sell the waterfront land to housing developers. More recently, Wendigo had been in the news when one of its logging crews was caught cutting down protected cedar groves where white-tailed deer gathered during the winter to escape blizzards and coyotes. The state had ordered the company to pay a twenty-thousand-dollar fine for knowingly breaking the law. But the value of the wood they’d harvested had been many times that amount. And the deer were already gone.

I stopped in front of the office, and we both got out. The air smelled of pine pitch and pulverized rock. A flock of five rusty blackbirds, more brown than black, pecked at the dead lawn. They made a liquidy noise as they took to the air.

Wendigo didn’t employ a receptionist, but a man arose from behind a desk and came to greet us as we walked in the door. He wore a black shirt with the company’s silver logo. His hair was so blond that it was almost white, and he had one of those all-over tans people get who spend a lot of time boating.

“Something I can do for you, Warden?”

“I’m looking for Troy Dow, if he’s around.”

The man scowled. “What’s he done now?”

Remembering the kind lady at the gatehouse, I said, “Nothing. We’re searching the Hundred Mile Wilderness for a couple of missing hikers.”

He interjected, “Yeah, we’ve been following it on the scanner. You find them yet?”

“Not yet.”

He lowered his voice so as not to be heard. We were the only ones in the room. “You think Dow might know something about what happened to those girls?”

“What makes you say that?” Stacey asked.

He ran his tongue along his flaking upper lip. “I shouldn’t say anything more unless you tell me why you’re looking for him.”

“We’re just talking to everyone who’s gone back and forth along the KI Road in the past ten days,” I said. “Is Troy here?”

He squinted through a window that badly needed washing. Vehicles were lined up in a row beyond a pile of unpeeled logs. “His truck is still here. It’s the red Silverado with those stupid pirate flags on the top. Troy’s probably out back, shooting the shit and distracting the other guys from their jobs.”

“Can you show us where he is?”

The man motioned with his finger for us to follow him. We passed through the office and down a hall with a kitchenette and a bathroom that gave off the scent of Pine-Sol cleaner. There was some sort of heavy security door in front of us. It made a groaning noise when our guide pushed it open.

We entered a garage bay. The cavernous space was draped in shadows except at the end, where the doors were rolled up and sunlight came flooding in. The air smelled of motor oil and cigarette smoke. Two man-shaped silhouettes stood in the open air.

Our guide’s voice echoed off the cinder-block walls. “Who’s been smoking in here?”

“Dow,” said one of the shadowy men.

“Where is he?”

“Just left.”

Somewhere outside, a pickup engine roared to life. I rushed to the open end of the garage in time to see the red Silverado cornering out of the parking lot with both of its pirate flags flapping.

The man beside me let out a laugh. “When Troy saw your warden’s truck pull in, he took off like a bat out of hell.”

18

Troy Dow had taken off down a dirt track, headed into the thick woods below Moosehead Lake. My GPS gave the name as the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad Road. I’d never traveled the route before, but the map showed only a handful of turnoffs before it hit pavement again, twenty miles to the south in the flyspeck village of Shirley Mills.

I gunned the engine, but Dow had a sizable head start, and he must have souped up the V-8 under the Silverado’s hood. The September sun had spent all morning baking the mud into dust, and a brown cloud hung between our vehicles. Unable to see more than fifty feet ahead of the truck, I found myself gripping the wheel tightly, afraid I’d plow into some hapless four-wheeler cruising along in the opposite direction.

“I guess he doesn’t want to talk with us,” I said.

“Well, you should put your blues on and see if it makes him more sociable.”

I glanced at the speedometer—sixty miles per hour—and hit the switch for the light bar and sirens. Before, I’d had no probable cause to stop Troy Dow, but now I could pull him over for speeding.

Stacey must have accompanied Charley on a few high-speed chases over the years, because she gave me the hand mike without my needing to ask for it. A huge smile made her face all the prettier: my sweet adrenaline junkie.

“Piscataquis? Twenty-one twenty-six,” I said. “I’ve got a ten-thirty-three southbound on the B&A Railroad Road in Greenville. Vehicle is a red Chevrolet Silverado. Can’t read the plates. Driver’s name is Troy Dow. Residence may be Monson. Do you copy?”

The radio gave an electronic burp as the dispatcher responded. “Copy, Twenty-one twenty-six. Do you need assistance?”

“Negative. But I’ll let you know.”

“Roger, Twenty-one twenty-six.”

Stacey’s head whipped around. “He just threw something out the window!”

I didn’t want to look away from the road, even for a second. “Did you see what it was?”

“Stop the truck.”

I stepped hard on the brake pedal, but the pickup kept sliding even as the automatic brake system engaged. The tires rolled along the pebbles as if floating atop ball bearings. ABS is great on paved roads; on dirt, not so much.

Stacey popped open her door and was out of the vehicle before we’d even stopped moving. “Keep going! I’ll find what he threw out.”

Looking in my side mirror, I saw her leap down into the weedy ditch. Then I took off again.

At the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, I’d taken a class on driving dynamics that had had me zigzagging around orange pylons and sliding all over a closed course. Aside from the days I’d gotten to spend at the gun range, it was the most fun I’d had in the eighteen weeks I’d spent at that brick castle on the Kennebec River. I’d graduated thinking I could outdrive Mario Andretti.

Then I’d gotten into my first real-world chase. I had been on patrol in Sennebec one night when I’d come across a Dodge Challenger that looked like it had just finished two hundred laps at Daytona. The driver blew through a stop sign to get my attention and then spent the better part of an hour tutoring me in remedial auto racing.

Four-plus years on the job had made me a better driver, but I was still no match for some of the backwoods hot-rodders I encountered. Something told me Troy Dow might fall into that category. At the very least, he was familiar with this road. He knew which curves to slow down for and on which straightaways to hit the gas. And he wasn’t driving half-blind in a cloud of dust. All I could do was stay on his tail—and hope.

Like most logging roads in Maine, this one had been graded after the snow had melted in the spring, and it had received a fresh coat of gravel. The surface had taken a pounding over the summer from the steady traffic of eighteen-wheelers, pickups, Jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles, and now it grabbed my tires like the grooves in a slot-car track. Pausing for even a few seconds for Stacey to get out had opened up a gap between Dow’s truck and mine that seemed to be getting wider with every mile. No longer was I traveling in a glittering brown haze. I glanced at the map on the GPS display and saw an intersection up ahead with a road branching off toward Route 15. If I couldn’t keep pace, I wouldn’t know if he’d continued straight or taken the fork.

The road entered a wet meadow with a winding brown stream cutting through the sedge. There was a beaver lodge in back with fresh leafy saplings heaped on top. The greenery told me that a family of beavers was still in residence and would be until one of the local trappers set up his Conibears this winter.

Looking across the vast clearing, I saw no trace of Troy Dow’s pickup. I despaired of catching him at this point. I could always track him down later at his home—assuming he didn’t decide to take an impromptu vacation—but there was a reason why Troy Dow had fled when he’d seen my truck, and I needed to know what it was.