The Bone Orchard: A Novel

He kept his eyes closed and a faint smile spread across his ugly face, as if he were asleep and enjoying a pleasant dream. He had no plans of saying a word to me. I could only keep goading him and hope for a slip.

“So what’s the story? You wanted vengeance for your old man. The same guy who used to beat your mom with a belt. I’m betting he beat you, too. But you forgot all about the whippings after the nasty game warden put a hole in him. Poor Jason. It must have made you so angry to think about all those women who deserved to be punished—your mother, the warden, your wife. I bet you had all sorts of dark fantasies. You thought about what you’d do if you ever had a chance to get back at that bitch warden.”

He yawned.

My ankle throbbed from where I’d knocked it against the side of the all-terrain vehicle. “And then one day, you hear on the news that she’s shot another guy. And you think to yourself, My chance has come. Because the police are going to assume her death was an act of revenge over the soldier she’d just killed. They won’t look back twenty-five years—”

“Twenty-eight years,” he said.

“What?”

“My dad was murdered twenty-eight years ago.”

I sat up on the padded ATV seat. “You blamed your mom for what happened to him, didn’t you? That’s why you killed her.”

“My dad was tough on us, but so what? That’s what fathers are supposed to be. And that stupid old bitch took him away from me. If she hadn’t called the cops—” Decoster seemed to catch himself. “My mother was an old woman. She fell down the stairs.”

It wasn’t the full confession I needed. “We’ll see if your wife tells the same story.”

The threat amused him. “She can’t testify against me.”

“What’s her name, by the way?” I asked. “Your wife, I mean.”

“Trisha.”

“How many kids do you have?”

“Three.”

“The Supermax doesn’t allow contact visits, even from family members, so don’t plan on holding them for a while. You’re never going to f*ck another woman again, by the way. Why don’t you lie there in the mud and let those facts sink in.”

“When are the real cops getting here?”

I’d thought that because he had anger issues, it wouldn’t take much to work him into a violent rage. But Jason Decoster reserved his fury for the people in his life who had hurt him personally. I was nobody to him, just a voice in the dark.

“I was there that night, you know? I was the guy who drove up in the Bronco, the one who shot at you.”

He opened his eyes.

“If it wasn’t for me, you would’ve finished the job. But I scared you off and saved Kathy Frost’s life. You’ll see her when she testifies at your trial. I’ll be there, too. It’ll be a grand reunion  .”

He rolled over, lifted himself onto his shoulder, and squinted back into the headlights. “Go f*ck yourself.”

Blue lights were twirling up on the road. The state police had finally decided to show up.

* * *

I gave my statement to a trooper named O’Keefe. He said he was a sergeant at the Houlton barracks. We stood in the potato field, talking, while other officers appeared on the scene. We watched two deputies lead Decoster in handcuffs to a waiting cruiser. Another local cop escorted Trisha out the front door with her hands behind her back. The woman screamed back at the house, words directed at the children inside, who would soon be in the custody of social workers from the Department of Human Services.

“I love you!”

I doubted the kids even heard her.

Sergeant O’Keefe asked me where I’d first seen the headlights of the ATV, and I pointed at the line of trees across the field.

“I think he was trying to dig up the body and move it off the property,” I said. “My call from his mother’s house had rattled him. I haven’t been down there yet.”

He looked like most of the troopers I’d met: tall, wide-shouldered, hair barbered down to bare skin. “I heard you used to be a warden.”

“Until two months ago.”

He motioned for me to accompany him.

It was a beautiful evening. Overhead, chip notes sounded in the sky at random intervals—a flight of warblers was migrating on the southwest breeze. I almost forgot about my sprained ankle.

We followed the tire tracks down to the tree line. A tumbled old wall of stones ran away from us into the darkness. It reminded me of the rock walls on Kathy’s land. The two farms had a similar feel to them.

“I shouldn’t be letting you down here,” he said, making sure I understood the courtesy he was extending me.

“I appreciate it.”

On the far side of the newly green oaks an oblong hole had been dug into the ground. Nearby, a shovel stood upright in a mound of damp soil. The trooper shined his flashlight into the shallow grave. Decoster had worked fast. He had gotten all the way down to the black trash bags in which he had wrapped Kurt Eklund’s corpse.

“You think that’s him?” O’Keefe asked.

“I don’t know who else it would be.”

“We have to wait for the evidence techs to open it up.”

I wasn’t particularly certain my stomach could stand seeing Kurt’s one-eyed face again.

Another trooper came across the field, holding a flashlight in one hand and a BlackBerry in the other.

“It’s for you,” he said.

I took the phone. “Hello?”

“Bowditch? It’s Soctomah.”

“I thought you might have gone on vacation or something.”

“I was at Maine Med.”

I held my breath, realizing he had news.

“She’s awake,” he said.

“And?”

“She’s having a little trouble speaking, but the neurologist says it could just be a side effect of the coma. They need to do some testing. She doesn’t remember much of anything about that night.”

“What have you told her?”

“As little as possible. I heard you found a body. Is it definitely Eklund?”

“We’re waiting for the forensic guys to unwrap the trash bags. But yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

“How the hell did he know about Jason Decoster?”

“I don’t think he did,” I said. “He drove out to Marta Jepson’s house because Kathy had said something to him about her death sounding suspicious. He called a phone number on a sign, hoping it might lead him somewhere. He was a bright guy, but he was drunk and not thinking rationally. It was easy for Jason and Trisha to lure him down to Presque Isle and then ambush him. Tell me something: Was Jason Decoster even on your list of suspects?”

“We were looking into Kathy’s entire history.”

In other words, no. “That’s what I thought.”

“I’ll be there soon—I’m flying up in an hour—and you can pick apart our investigation to your heart’s delight.”

I wasn’t pissed off at the lieutenant so much as angry and sad about the entire sequence of events. “So who’s going to break the news to the Eklunds about their son?”

“Once we have a positive ID on the body, Malcomb will do it.”

“Did he tell Kathy about her dog yet?”

“She was asking about him. I think she sensed something.”

I didn’t need to ask how that scene had gone. “What do you want me to do until you get here?”

“There’s a room booked for you at the Northeastland in Presque Isle. Go get some sleep. You and I can talk in the morning.”

By Aroostook standards, the hotel was an expensive place to spend the night. “Who paid for my room?”

“The wardens chipped in on it when they heard you’d caught the son of a bitch.”





40



The next morning, Soctomah met me in the breakfast room at the Northeastland Hotel. He put a tape recorder on the plate beside my eggs and asked me to go through the series of decisions that had led me to Aroostook County. He’d been up all night, flying under the stars to the Northern Maine Regional Airport, then watched quietly while his forensics team removed Kurt Eklund’s plastic-wrapped body from the grave. The techs had scanned the corpse’s fingers and pulled the prints off the database to make a positive ID. Kurt had been arrested on multiple occasions for drunk driving and public intoxication. His biometric data was just a click away in the system.

“How do you feel about flying back to Augusta in the same plane with the body?” Soctomah asked. He looked weary.

“As long as I get the window seat.”

What was there left for me to do but joke about it?

He stared at me over the rim of his coffee mug. “What do you think we should have done that we didn’t do?”

I pushed my scrambled eggs aside. “Nothing. Kurt Eklund had a death wish.”

“It sounds like he wanted one last chance to be a hero.”

“I’m not going to begrudge him that.” I took a sip of my own coffee and found it had grown cold. “Has Malcomb told his parents yet?”

“Yes.”

“What about Kathy?”

“They asked to break the news to her.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “You’d better finish eating. You have a plane to catch.”

“What are you going to do?”