The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“MPs are cops,” he said. “They might not like what happened to their wounded friend, but they’d know your sergeant was just doing her duty in taking him down. When was the last time you heard about one cop shooting another out of revenge?”

I’d read of isolated instances, but most of those cases involved police officers who had been fired for misconduct.

“You should tell the detectives to stop barking up that tree,” Billy said.

“They’re not going to listen to me. You forget I’m no longer a warden.”

He curled his lip. “You should be out there asking questions yourself, then. Who else might have wanted your sergeant dead? Why are you wasting your time talking with me?”

He stood up, as if he saw no point in making further pleasantries.

I followed his lead. “It’s not a waste of time.”

“Come back after you’ve caught the guy. And forget about Donato.”

Easier said than done. “If you say so.”

“I’m serious, Mike.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” We both knew I was in no position to improve his situation.

“Don’t tell Aimee I am in the SMU,” he said. “She’s going to figure it out, but I don’t want her worrying in the meantime.”

After the guard had escorted Billy back to his cell, I realized he hadn’t asked me how his wife was doing or anything about his kids. We hadn’t made small talk about my guiding job or what it was like working for his old nemesis, Elizabeth Morse. I’d assumed that he would have been starved for information about the world he’d left behind. But Billy had avoided those delicate subjects. Thinking about life outside the prison walls was probably too painful for him to contemplate. I doubted he was the first inmate who had ever felt that way.





26



A guard stopped me as I was collecting my keys and other personal effects from the locker in the prison lobby. He was heavyset and had a crew cut, trimmed mustache, and a flush of color under his two chins that made me think he enjoyed tipping a bottle after his shift was done.

“Mr. Bowditch?”

“Yes.”

“Can you wait here, please?” He tended to huff out his words, as if each one required its own expulsion of breath.

“What for?”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d wait here for a few minutes.”

I shrugged and sat down on a bench, wondering what I had done now. Billy and I hadn’t shaken hands or otherwise broken the no-contact rule. I wasn’t smuggling contraband in any of my body cavities.

The fat guard stood over me, unsmiling, for a solid ten minutes, and then my phone made a buzzing sound.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

The guard frowned at me.

I rarely used the texting feature, so I was shocked to see that the message had come from Stacey. Bard told me your friend was the warden sergeant who was wounded. I hope she’s OK. I’m sorry about the way I acted that night at Weatherby’s. Sometimes I’m just a bitch.

I was grinning from ear to ear and trying to come up with a clever response when the locked door opened and a man appeared. He was wearing a navy suit specially tailored for muscular guys, a red tie with a tie clip, and polished cap-toe shoes. He also wore his hair short, but he was growing a goatee, which so far, consisted of little more than a brown shadow under his nose and around his mouth. I recognized Angelo Donato from his speech at the televised protest outside the Maine Warden Service headquarters.

“I heard you wanted to see me,” he said flatly.

It had to have been Billy, I thought. What trouble had my friend stirred up now?

“I think you’ve been misinformed, Sergeant.”

“Then maybe you can inform me. My office is through that door.”

He signaled to the admissions guard to buzz us through a locked door. I followed him down a hall to a windowless office devoid of personal items of any sort. He removed his coat and hung it from the back of his chair, revealing that his dress shirt had also been fitted to accommodate his weight lifter’s physique. He took a seat and indicated that I should do the same.

“I don’t know what Billy Cronk told you,” I said.

“He said you were a friend of Jim Gammon. You’re the game warden, right?”

“I used to be.”

“Jim told us about you.” His eyes had heavy dark lashes, as if he wore mascara, but they seemed to be natural features. They gave his face a feminine quality that was at odds with the rest of him. “He talked about the four of us going hunting sometime when we got home. Do you know what was funny about that?”

Obviously, there was nothing funny about it, but I let the former MP continue.

“The funny thing was that he kept talking about it,” Donato said. “When I used to visit him at Togus, he’d say things like ‘So when are you and Monster going hunting with me and Mike?’ His face had been blown off by an IED, along with part of his brain, but he still thought we were all going to shoot pheasants together. Every time Smith and I visited him, he would talk about it—as if the plans were already in motion. ‘The shooting party’ is what he called it.”

I could tell that Donato was going somewhere with the story and that he expected me to clear the tracks.

“Do you know when I realized he was losing it?” he said. “When he stopped talking about the shooting party.”

There was a round clock on the wall that made a ticking sound as each second went by. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a clock do that. High school maybe—the vice principal’s office.

“I have a question for you,” he said after a while.

“Go ahead.”

“Did you ever once visit him after he got home?”

“I never heard he’d been wounded,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was back in Maine.”

“You don’t read the papers?”

I wasn’t going to divulge my own troubles with a man who didn’t care to hear them. “All I can say is that I missed the news, and that I’m sorry. Jimmy was a great guy. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”

“You want to know how it happened?” he asked. “How he got injured?”

I assumed he was going to tell me in any case.

“There was this trash heap outside one of our battle positions.” He waved his hand as if he wanted to strike what he’d said and start again. “It was really more of a mountain of trash. The contractors would dump all of the shit from Sabalu there, and every day crowds of Afghans would descend all over it like a bunch of vultures. They’d take every piece of plastic. Something like this pen.” He held up a disposable ballpoint. “To them, it was like finding buried treasure, even if it was out of ink. Christ only knows what they used it for.”

He began twirling the pen between his fingers.

“One day,” he said, “there was a riot. These two guys started fighting over a bungee cord. The next thing we knew, everyone on the mountain was hitting someone. Through our scopes, we saw kids being trampled. So I decided we needed to break it up. I told Jim to drive us out there, and I ordered people to back off or we’d start shooting with our turret gun. Well, they didn’t, and I wasn’t going to open fire on a mob of women and children. The bottom line is, we broke the first rule and ended up getting out of the truck. Smith and I went one way, and Jim went another. It turned out the whole thing had been a set up by the terrorists. Jim was helping one of the kids who’d been trampled when the boy’s body exploded. They’d cut the kid open and planted an IED inside his stomach. Then they’d sewn him up again.”

He opened his desk drawer and found a roll of Life Savers and popped one in his mouth. He didn’t offer me one. I heard it crack between his teeth when he bit down on it.

“And that was how I gave the order that got Jim Gammon wounded,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that. I might even believe you if it wasn’t for the smear campaign.”

“What smear campaign?”

“The one against Jim,” he said. “It wasn’t enough that two of your people had to kill him in cold blood. You also had to ruin his reputation. The guy was a f*cking hero.”

I measured my words carefully. “So is Kathy Frost.”

He leaned across the desk, giving me a whiff of the peppermint on his breath. “And that’s another thing. Do you know how offensive it is to me as an MP to be accused of shooting a fellow officer? It’s beyond offensive. It’s f*cking vile is what it is. I fought for my country. How’d you like to have state police detectives show up at your house one night and start interrogating you—in front of your wife and kids—about your whereabouts on the night a game warden was shot? Are you people that desperate to close ranks?”

“I’m not even a warden anymore, Donato. I have nothing to do with Lieutenant Soctomah’s investigation.”

He laughed at what he took to be a pretty brazen lie. “So you were just here to visit your scumbag murdering friend? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like you came here to yank my chain.”

Billy could be such a well-meaning fool. He thought the detectives were making a mistake by questioning members of the 488th in the shooting of Kathy Frost. He believed that Donato was a brave and honorable man who didn’t deserve to have his own integrity called into question. And so, to prove his point to me, Billy had said something stupid to a guard, and that comment had led to a pointless confrontation. Who knew what grief my friend had caused himself by instigating this meeting?