The Precipice (17 page)

I was weighing the possibility of turning around and retrieving Stacey, in the hope that she’d found whatever Troy Dow had thrown away, when, to my surprise, I came upon the man himself standing beside his parked Silverado. He had a spin-casting rod in one hand and was leaning over the truck bed as if rummaging around for a tackle box. As I slowed to a stop, he glanced up with a smile.

He resembled the Dow whom Charley and I had met that morning, the hay-faced brawler. He also was squat, barrel-chested, and thick-limbed, only Troy had a Yosemite Sam mustache instead of a Yukon Cornelius beard. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the Harley-Davidson insignia, duck pants stained brown at the knees, and the ubiquitous work boots every man who made his living in the woods seemed to own.

I radioed in my location to the Piscataquis County dispatcher and reported that I’d caught the man I was chasing. The whole time, Troy Dow maintained a bewildered expression, as if he couldn’t possibly imagine why I might be interested in his harmless, law-abiding person.

I pushed the door open and stood behind it, my right arm hanging along my side, my hand in reach of my SIG. The woods had gone silent at noon. I could feel the heat of the sunbaked road coming through the bottom of my boots.

“Hey, Warden.” His voice had the grating quality of a rasp moving along a block of wood. “You want to see my fishing license?”

With his free hand, he reached around his back. My own hand clamped down on the grip of my pistol.

“Stop! Keep your hands up!”

He complied with my command. “What did I do?”

“You didn’t notice me chasing you the past ten miles?”

“Chasing me? What for?”

I took five steps toward him and froze. “You took off in a hurry when you saw my truck back at the Wendigo office. Do you want to tell me why?”

“Gee, I don’t know. I guess I was in a hurry to get fishing. Honest to God, I never saw you behind me.”

“That’s because you were going sixty-five miles per hour.”

“Was I? I don’t think I was. Fifty, maybe. Are you sure about my speed? Were you using one of those radar guns, because I’m pretty sure I wasn’t speeding.”

Dow knew I might have trouble proving that he’d exceeded the limit along this unmarked stretch of forest road.

“What about littering?” I said. “You tossed something out of your truck about three miles back. What was it?”

“You’ve got me scratching my head here. I’m not one of those slobs who chuck their beer cans out the window.” His bushy eyebrows suddenly climbed a couple of inches on his forehead. “You know what? A partridge did fly up in front of me as I was driving. I bet that’s what you saw.”

Dow’s story was a complete fabrication, but I had to hand it to him: The man was a terrific actor.

“Luckily, there’s a way we can be sure,” I said. “My partner got out of the truck to see what it was you threw out. Why don’t we take a ride and see what she found?”

“I’m not under arrest, am I?”

“No,” I said.

“Then technically you can’t detain me. I’m thinking I should be on my way.”

“I thought you were going fishing,” I said.

“That was before you started accusing me of all these misdemeanors. I’m kind of feeling harassed.”

I put my hand up as if I’d just heard a noise. “Hold that thought.”

I returned to the cab of my pickup and grabbed the mike and held it to my mouth as if I’d just received a transmission that Dow hadn’t heard. I moved my lips soundlessly as I stared at him through the bug-splattered windshield. After half a minute, I returned the hand mike back to its hook.

“Well, it turns out my partner found something,” I said boldly to disguise my lie.

“What?”

“Let’s just say I understand why you didn’t want us to catch you with it.”

He twisted the end of his mustache. “I think you’re trying to trick me.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You come with me for ten minutes, back to see my partner, and I’ll give you a chance to prove the thing we found isn’t yours. If you can, I’ll let you return to your fishing and forget about the speeding citation, too. Otherwise I’m going to have to poke around your truck a little.”

“You can only search for stuff in plain sight.”

“That’s true—unless you give me permission.”

He let out a blast of air through his nose. “Sorry, Warden, but that ain’t going to happen.”

“How about this, then, Mr. Dow? If you come with me, I’ll tell you why I drove all the way over to the Wendigo office to have a word with you.”

“You know my name?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

“What for?”

“Take a ride with me, and I’ll tell you.”

What could I possibly have on him? The length of his silence told me there was a long list of offenses. If Troy Dow was the most law-abiding member of his clan—as the woman at the gatehouse had claimed—I could scarcely imagine where that left the rest of them.

“OK,” he said at last. “But only because I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He tossed the fishing rod into the back of his truck and walked, bowlegged, toward me. Up close, I could see his eyes twinkling from under those bushy brows. He smelled like he’d recently taken a long bath in turpentine. He squinted at the name tag stitched onto my ballistic vest.

“Warden Bowditch, is it?”

“That’s right.”

“Troy Dow. Pleased to meet you.”

I waited for him to climb up into the passenger seat of my Sierra before closing the door. He smiled at me through the window. I could tell that he wasn’t going to drop his affable mask for a second.

He waited for me to turn the truck around before asking, “So why were you looking for me?”

“I’ll tell you after we pick up my partner.”

We rattled along the washboard road. Eventually, we turned a corner, and I saw Stacey up ahead, standing with her arms behind her back and a big grin that brought out the resemblance to her father.

Troy Dow leaned forward. “
That’s
your partner? How do you get any work done riding with a babe like her?”

I treated the question as rhetorical. As we came to a stop, Stacey strolled toward my vehicle, keeping her hands hidden. She seemed to be holding something she didn’t want us to see.

I pushed the button to unroll the window. “I take it you found the item Mr. Dow threw into the woods during the chase.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Troy Dow didn’t seem overly concerned about his situation. “Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Do you have a sunburn, or are you always this hot?”

“Gee, that’s original,” she said.

“How about this one, then? Sex is a killer. Want to die happy?”

Stacey groaned and held up the limp gray body of a bird. It was the size of a small chicken, with a black throat and bright red eyebrows. The feathers were fluffed and spattered with blood from where the shotgun pellets had perforated its body.

I turned and looked hard at Troy Dow. “That’s a spruce grouse.”

“So it is!”

“They’re an endangered species.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “My uncle shot one of those fool hens once and got a thousand-dollar fine. I bet some poacher mistook it for a partridge and then realized what it was and left it in the woods.”

Stacey leaned closer so she could talk to him through the window. “Or he shot it on purpose and threw it out the window when he realized a game warden was chasing him.”

“You might have trouble proving that in front of a judge,” he said with a genial laugh.

“We saw you toss the bird out your window,” I said. “I’m guessing you shot it while you were driving your gravel truck this morning. I bet if we compared the shot inside that bird with the shells inside your truck, there would be a match. You do have a shotgun in your Silverado, don’t you?”

“It’s a twelve-gauge, and you know what a common load that is. It would be kind of a stretch to call that proof in a court of law. I’m not accusing you of trying to railroad me.”

“I have a thought,” Stacey said. “Why don’t you let me look inside your truck?”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “If I don’t find any spruce grouse feathers or blood, then I’ll let you go with an apology. Otherwise we’re taking a ride to the county jail in Dover-Foxcroft.”

His eyebrows descended over his eyes. He bit one end of his mustache into his mouth and began sucking on it. “Fuck it,” he said, holding his dirty hands out to be cuffed. “You got me.”

19

The sun was behind us, the shadows in front.

Stacey sat in the back of my pickup, having given her place to Troy Dow. We’d retrieved his Remington 870, along with an open box of twelve-gauge shells. I’d bagged up the spruce grouse as evidence. Stacey carried the dead bird on her lap with care, the way she might have held a live cat.

“I don’t like leaving my truck along the road for any of the local assholes to break into,” Dow said with a grumble.

The pickup swayed as I maneuvered it around potholes and avoided the deeper ruts. “If you make bail, you should be out in no time.”

“Why are you taking me to jail for a lousy hunting violation? It’s not like I gave you any trouble back there. I barely even lied.”

“Barely?” said Stacey.

Troy Dow rubbed the heels of his hands on the worn knees of his pants. “It was that kid who ratted me out, wasn’t it? The one in the sombrero? I knew I shouldn’t have given that fat fucker a ride.”

I tried not to show my surprise. I had been waiting to bring up Chad McDonough, unsure that my hunch had even been correct. Now here was Troy Dow admitting to having given McDonut a ride. I needed to be careful about what I said next.

“That’s what you get for picking up hitchhikers,” Stacey said, raising her voice to be heard from the backseat.

“I knew there was something wrong about that guy,” Dow said.

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“The way he kept jabbering the whole time. Some people get paranoid when they smoke pot.”

“What did he say that made you think he was high?” I said.

“He didn’t have to say anything. I could smell it on him. But he kept looking in the mirror like he thought someone was behind us, and then when I stopped for the grouse, he started getting all worked up. He said he was in a hurry. I told him he could always walk back into Greenville. That shut him up for a while.”

It had been fun to pretend that Stacey was my partner in solving a mystery and not the woman I was dating. But I was beginning to realize the pitfalls of involving her in an active investigation. She wasn’t a law-enforcement officer and had no training in how to deal with potential witnesses to a crime, let alone suspects. I glanced at her in the rearview mirror, trying to hint that she should leave the questioning to me, but she didn’t seem to get the message.

“Where did you drop him off?” Stacey asked.

“At the corner downtown. The asshole wouldn’t even give me a fucking joint to repay me for the ride.”

She leaned against the back of his seat. “Did he say where he was headed?”

“What do you mean?” Dow’s wide shoulders tensed. There was suspicion in his voice, but Stacey couldn’t hear it.

“Where did McDonough say he was going?” she asked.

As soon as she’d asked the question, I knew it was too late. She’d given us away.

“Wait a second.” Dow turned his head slowly toward me, his eyes narrowing. “Who are you looking for—me or him?”

I tried changing the subject to distract him. “So you must be related to Trevor Dow.”

“He’s my brother. You didn’t answer my question. Why are you so interested in that kid?”

Stacey had realized her error and tried to bluff. “We need to get a signed statement from him about you shooting that spruce grouse.”

Despite her many skills, she was a lousy liar. I had made a mistake by letting her pretend to be a game warden. Troy Dow was too experienced in the ways of cops to be taken in by such a transparent ploy.

“You’re looking for him, and you have no clue where he is.” His cheeks turned scarlet above his mustache. “It’s got to do with those missing girls, doesn’t it? You came looking for me because you knew I’d given him a ride. You didn’t even know about that grouse until I chucked it out the window. I knew I shouldn’t have taken off when I saw your truck!”

I removed my sunglasses and set them on the dashboard. I wanted him to see the resolve in my eyes. “Why don’t you just tell me what he said to you.”

His mustache twitched when he smiled. “Let me go, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

“No deal.”

“Fine, then,” he said. “Take me to jail.”

He settled back against the headrest and intertwined his fingers over his bulging chest. He closed his eyes, as if intending to take a nap. In the mirror I watched Stacey bow her head in regret. I wouldn’t have wanted to play poker with Troy Dow, I decided.

*   *   *

We passed the Wendigo yard again on our way into Greenville. I had lost my advantage with Dow and was desperate to get it back. I considered stopping at the office, in the hope that he wouldn’t want to jeopardize his job by having me parade him in front of his coworkers. But it was apparent that his boss already knew what a miscreant he was, and the thought of threatening the man—however obnoxious he might be—with the loss of his livelihood struck me as beyond the pale.

Moosehead Lake came into view, bluer than the sky and stretching off toward mountains aglow in the afternoon sun. A white sailboat tacked along in the distance, a reminder of summer. But the water looked cold.

As I approached the village crossroads, I had a decision to make. To the right was the road south. The highway traveled through Monson and Dexter before it came to the county seat in the picturesque town of Dover-Foxcroft, where all prisoners arrested in Greenville were taken to jail. It was a two-hour round-trip. By the time we’d have brought Troy Dow in for booking and returned to the search area, it was likely that Chad McDonough would be even farther away.

At the stop sign, I turned north instead.

Troy Dow sensed the change in direction and snapped his eyes open. “I thought you were taking me to jail.”

I reached for my sunglasses. “We have a stop to make first.”