The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Few cops will ever admit that they consider the life of a fellow officer to be more valuable than anyone else’s. But when you watch a spectacle like the one I was witnessing—officers elbowing one another aside to be litter bearers—it becomes hard not to draw that conclusion. And why not? If you put your life on the line for strangers each day, wouldn’t you hope that someone would honor your sacrifice?

After they’d secured the stretcher inside, the men backed away and the chopper lifted off with surprising suddenness. Its rear end tilted up first and then the whole enormous contraption came off the ground. The whirling blades sent loose leaves flying. A few of the guys standing closer to the landing site actually threw their bodies flat on the ground.

I watched the loud, blinking machine shoot south across the sky until it was smaller than a meteor.

Malcomb was kneeling beside the sprawled corpse of Pluto.

I walked unsteadily toward him. “Major?”

He had approached the dead dog as close as he deemed wise, given that this was an active crime scene. The animal that had been his colleague on so many missing-person investigations was gone. Now there was just a dog-shaped piece of evidence that was not to be touched.

He looked up at me from the ground, his face hard again.

“I need to get down to Maine Med,” he said. “Lieutenant Soctomah wants you to walk him around the scene while your memory is fresh. Maybe someone can drive you to the hospital after the detective is done with you. You’ll want to get those cuts looked at. I expect you’ll survive a few more hours.”

“Yes, sir,” I said to the man who was no longer my commanding officer. “I’ll survive.”





15



The state police detective who had taken charge of the investigation was a lieutenant named Wayne Soctomah, whom I’d first met when my father was a fugitive in the North Woods. My dad had been accused of having ambushed and killed two men with a high-powered rifle. There were certain similarities to the present case.

Soctomah was a member of the Passamaquoddy Nation, having grown up near my current home outside Grand Lake Stream, in the Indian village on Peter Dana Point. He had become a Maine state trooper during a time when Native Americans were not automatically welcomed into the state police’s ranks. Later, he took night classes to get a master’s in criminal justice from Boston University and had risen quickly through the ranks to a senior position as a detective in the Major Crimes Unit. He was a muscular man with a thick silver crew cut and closely set eyes that reminded me of those of a bird of prey.

I must have looked to Soctomah like one of the intoxicated rednecks Maine game wardens routinely arrest: bearded, shirtless, with blood of indefinite origin smeared all over my torso.

“We need to get a bandage on your head” were the first words he spoke to me.

“I wouldn’t mind a jacket, either.”

“I’ve got one in the cruiser.” He had a faint accent I’d heard on the Passamaquoddy rez. I wondered if he’d worked his whole life to rid himself of that singsong cadence.

The navy blue polyester jacket he gave me had POLICE stenciled on the back. The fabric felt slippery on my bare skin, and my wrists poked out of the too-short arms. I felt like an impostor wearing it.

Soctomah had called over one of the EMTs to tape a fresh bandage to my bleeding skull. It was the size of a sponge you might use to wash a car.

“Better?” he asked.

I still felt like my knees might buckle. “Yeah.”

“Good, because I need to know what happened here. Give me as much detail as you can.”

Despite the ringing in my skull, I did my best to recount the entire sequence of events. Soctomah took notes the whole time. I told him about my earlier visit to the house, the argument I’d had with Kathy, and then her call to apologize. I told him how Pluto had begun barking and how we’d ended our conversation abruptly. I demonstrated where I’d stopped the Bronco when I’d first seen the dead dog, then pointed out the route I’d taken to seek cover behind the stone wall, showing him exactly where I’d pressed my body into the weeds. After that, we walked toward the house—avoiding the evidence techs at work—and I showed him how I’d entered the hall.

“It seems like you might have surprised the shooter before he could finish the job.” Soctomah glanced at my pockmarked Bronco. “How long do you think you kept him occupied?”

“Long enough for the ambulance to get here.”

“It’s lucky the station is just down the hill in union  ,” he said.

I felt the mist beginning to shift to something with a heavier, downward trajectory. I wondered if the helicopter could beat the rain to Portland.

“Will they call you if Kathy dies en route to the hospital?” I asked him.

He laid a hand on my shoulder in a friendly way. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“It’s not ‘power,’” he said. “It’s ‘courage.’ Why don’t we focus on what we can change here? I’ve got evidence techs searching the blueberry fields for spent shells. The major has loaned me a K-9 team to backtrack up the hill to those trees. Is that where you saw the headlights when you were leaving?”

“There’s a parking lot on the far side of those pines. It’s the entrance to an old apple orchard. Kids sometimes park there to smoke pot and fool around.”

“Does it seem like the vehicle was parked there?”

“I think so.” I tried to retrieve the memory, but it was eluding me. “The headlights seemed high off the ground, so I would say it was a pickup or a Jeep, maybe even with a raised suspension. Like a truck someone had altered to go mudding.”

He jotted something in his notebook. “She didn’t say anything else before she hung up on you—something specific?”

My head and face still felt like fire ants were crawling around under the cotton batting, but my leg muscles had regained some of their sturdiness. I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t have circulatory shock.

“She was getting death threats. I’m sure you’ll find them on her computer. Hopefully, the guy who did this e-mailed her first, because then you’ll have an electronic trail to follow. But I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Why?”

“This all feels too deliberate and careful. Whoever shot Kathy had been scouting her house awhile. He’s going to be hard to catch.”

The detective wasn’t about to divulge any of his suspicions, least of all to me. “I’m going to need to borrow your Walther. I’ll give it back to you after we do a ballistics test.”

I reached around to the back of my jeans, where I’d tucked the pistol. Then I cleared a round out of the action and ejected the magazine. I handed him the gun in pieces.

A state trooper wearing a long, dark raincoat and hat with the plastic wrap they use to cover their brimmed headgear strode up toward us. He was holding a Baggie with a single crimped shotgun shell in it. The plastic was burnt-orange and as long as my finger: HEVI-Shot Magnum Blend.

“What kind of sniper uses a turkey gun?” I asked.

“I have a red-dot scope on my boy’s Ithaca at home,” the trooper said. “He doesn’t miss a bird with it.”

“If our guy is a turkey hunter, he’d be on the list of people who tagged one,” I said.

The detective nodded. “That’s a pretty long list.”

The drizzle was falling more heavily now, hard enough that I could see individual drops bounce off the trooper’s hat.

“Has anyone called Danielle Tate and told her what happened to Kathy?” I asked.

“Major Malcomb did, I believe.”

“Because whoever shot Kathy might be going for a twofer tonight.”

Soctomah’s head snapped around toward the trooper, and without either of them saying a word, the tall policeman waded through the weeds toward his cruiser. He would be paying Warden Tate a visit.

“I can’t think of anything I haven’t told you,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go see Kathy now.”

“We can take him!”

It was the female EMT. I hadn’t realized she’d been eavesdropping on our conversation. She’d changed out of her own blood-soaked clothes and was sipping what looked like hot coffee from the lid of a thermos. The ambulance could have left after the LifeFlight helicopter had taken off, but the paramedics had spent nearly half an hour fighting to keep Kathy alive. They probably even knew her, given that their lines of work often intersected. After a night like this one had been, it’s not so easy to pack up your gear and go home.

I walked halfway toward the waiting ambulance; then I remembered I was still wearing Soctomah’s jacket. I pulled my arms loose and was preparing to hurl it back to him, but the detective held up his hand.

“Hang on to it,” he said. “I don’t want you to freeze to death.”

I put the jacket back on over my naked shoulders and snapped the buttons to keep some of the damp out.

Portland was more than an hour south of Appleton. It was a long detour for the paramedics to make for the sole purpose of giving me a taxi ride.