She spent the night with a girlfriend, and only when she heard about the shooting of a state trooper on one of the news shows did she begin to suspect a connection between this incident and Caldicott’s new arrivals. But it still took her a further twelve hours to contact police, her reluctance to do so not unrelated to Caldicott’s narcotics business, of which she might not have been entirely unaware, her personal tastes extending to a little coke, she said, but only on weekends.
Even with her suspicions, Ouellette made efforts to reach Caldicott before approaching the police. She did this, she first told detectives, because she ‘wanted to be sure about everything before she got him in any trouble,’ although she later admitted that she had been prepared to forgive Caldicott for their earlier misunderstanding involving assault and the threat of rape, because he had never hit her before and was pretty generous with the coke. Unfortunately, when she returned to their shared abode Caldicott was gone, along with his two buddies, the stash of coke, and $383 that Ouellette kept in an empty Humpty Dumpty potato chip bag taped under her bedside table. It was this final betrayal that caused Ouellette definitively to abandon all hopes of reconciliation with Heb Caldicott, and instead hang him out to dry for whatever he might or might not have done, along with his shitweasel buddies, their families, their children born and yet unborn, and their dogs.
It hadn’t taken long for the police to connect Heb Caldicott to one Dale Putnam and his buddy, Gary Newhouse. Soon law enforcement agencies across New England, along with their Canadian colleagues over the border, would be scouring the territories for them, and their pictures would be peering out from newspapers and TV screens throughout the northeast.
Which left only a succession of disgruntled Piscataquis County sheriff’s deputies to guard the burial site and complain about being left out of the action.
44
Guarding an empty hole in the ground was not, Deputy Renee Kellett had to admit, the most onerous of tasks, but it was among the dullest. Mostly she listened to music on her cell phone, and studied her coursework. Kellett had completed an associate’s degree in criminal justice, and was now progressing toward a bachelor’s in public safety administration. She enjoyed working for the sheriff’s department, but her ambition was to move to a federal agency, and she had no hope of achieving this without a degree.
So on one hand she was earning some much-needed overtime by sitting in her car and moving along the occasional hunter or looky-loo who strayed too close to the dig site, while also effectively being paid to study. On the other hand, the kind of manhunt currently taking place for Putnam, Newhouse, and their buddy Caldicott was rare in this state, and brought with it a buzz of purpose and excitement that was noticeably absent at this particular patch of woodland.
This was Kellett’s second shift on grave patrol, and she was hoping it might be the last; there was only so much reading and listening in solitude that a person could undertake before her mind began to wander – and in Kellett’s experience, it never wandered anywhere good under such conditions as these. Maybe an artist or a writer could find inspiration in them, but she was neither, so instead of picturing great paintings, or planning prizewinning books, she fretted about how her mom was starting to misremember stuff, or forget things entirely; how, with her dad gone, she’d be left to take care of her mom unaided because her older brother wasn’t worth a nickel on the dollar when it came to helping anyone other than himself; how that might impact on her plans to progress to Homeland Security or – yeah, dream on – the FBI; and why, although she was an attractive woman without any complexes or peculiarities beyond the norm, she was experiencing a dustbowl level of drought in her sex life.
Still, she performed with diligence her duties at the gravesite. At least once every hour, if only to stretch her legs, she walked the trail to make sure the canopy remained secure, because a wind had come down from the north that was strong enough to rock her car on its suspension, and if it could do that, it could also pick up a sheet of canvas and blast it toward Florida. It wasn’t raining, though, which was some small consolation. This place was gloomy enough as it was, with or without a grave.
Kellett had been one of the first on the scene when the body was initially discovered. She’d never seen remains in that state before. Like all police, she’d looked on her share of the dead, but she had not previously encountered a body buried in the ground for so long yet still in a state of some preservation. The sight should have reminded her of old horror movies, creeping her out, but instead she felt only a crushing sadness that she had not yet been able to shake off entirely, although spending long hours alone by a burial pit probably wasn’t helping any.
Neither was the possibility that an infant child might also be interred in the vicinity, although Kellett was beginning to believe this wasn’t very likely, and she got the sense that those in command were thinking the same way. The wardens had almost concluded their search of the area, with no result. If the baby had died along with, or soon after, the mother, it stood to reason that it would have been buried with her. Kellett could have told them that to begin with.
The wind picked up, and a noise intruded on her musings: the flapping of a tarp. It sounded like the big one over the grave. She’d already been forced to deal with it once, but she’d never claimed to be an expert on knots, and it looked as though this deficiency was coming back to haunt her. At least it was still light the first time she’d tackled the rope, but dusk had descended since then, and now she’d be forced to deal with it by flashlight.
She climbed from the car, and the first drop of rain hit her on the crown of the head with the force of a thrown coin.
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’
It wasn’t even supposed to rain. Stupid meteorologists – and how many of them were actual meteorologists anyway? Most of them were just weathermen, for Pete’s sake. If they had any qualification at all, it lay in being Well Turned Out Before Breakfast.
Kellett grabbed her hat and secured it under her chin, shrugged on her raincoat, and headed into the woods. The trees offered some shelter, but the ferocity of the downpour meant that branches could only do so much. Within a minute the trail, treacherous even when dry, had turned positively lethal. Kellett tried to watch her step, but vigilance could only take a woman so far: she slipped as the tarp came in sight, and went down hard on her right knee. The fall didn’t hurt, but it left her trouser leg filthy and soaked. She tested it for any tears and found none, which was a relief; it was too early in the year to begin eating into her uniform allowance.
Kellett looked to her right. Even without the aid of her flashlight, she could see the tarp waving in the wind. She didn’t rush to get to it, fearful of slipping again. After all, it wasn’t as though any evidence remained to be retrieved from the hole. The decision to keep it covered arose as much from a residual respect for the body it had once contained as it did from a desire to do everything by the book.
She reached the site. The knot she had tied earlier had come undone. She grabbed the guy rope, but the wind yanked it from her hand and the end lashed her cheek. Kellett rarely swore – she regarded it as a sign of poor breeding – but she came pretty close to uttering the first syllable of the f-bomb when the rope caught her.
‘Give me a break, huh?’ She wasn’t sure whom she was addressing: God maybe, assuming He wasn’t too busy trying to separate folk intent upon beheading one another in His name. Then again, God seemed to have enough free time on His hands to help football players score touchdowns, and hillbillies win the lottery, so why not allocate a few of those spare seconds to not making her life any harder than it was? God, Kellett sometimes thought, needed to get His priorities straight.