I finally got a cell signal down past the farm where I had seen the kids chasing each other on their snow machines. I dialed the state police dispatcher and gave him the rundown. He told me there were units in the area.
The snow, which had been falling steadily all day, had finally begun to lighten up. There were a few intermittent flakes, but whereas the night sky had been a uniform gray dome before, now I could make out the backlit outlines of clouds moving southeast across the valley. A cold front was pushing down from Canada.
I removed my glove and ran my fingers up my sleeve and over the stitches on my arm. The threads had ripped, and there was some sort of fluid oozing from the wound. Yet another scar to remind me of yet another moment of carelessness.
Funny, though: That night outside Carrie Michaud’s seemed an age ago now. For reasons I could not explain, the firefight with Dyer—an even closer brush with death—had unchained me from the mortal dread I had been dragging around for the past week. I felt fully alive again in body and soul.
36
My conservative estimate was that a dozen officers responded to my call. The road up to Mink’s place looked like rush hour with all the emergency vehicles lined up one after the other. With so many people bustling around the scene, asking me questions, offering thanks, I found it hard to focus.
Dyer was unlocked from the birch and taken to the back of Clegg’s cruiser and left there until the detective could finish his work.
I walked Clegg and a couple of state police detectives around the cabin, giving them the minute-by-minute replay. Another trooper escorted Mink inside to get an independent statement from him on what had happened. Even though I was receiving congratulations from deputies and EMTs whom I had never met—the hero of the hour—I knew that our accounts would be compared and contrasted, and that I might be called upon to explain any inconsistencies in our stories.
A deputy found my shotgun buried in the snow and returned it to me.
Shadow had disappeared into the woods. I kept looking for him at the edges of the trees, but he was gone.
Maybe, in the future, he would be glimpsed by backcountry skiers up on Widowmaker or caught in the headlights of sledders racing at night along one of the trails to Quebec. I could imagine the department getting occasional calls from people who were insistent that they had seen a wolf—not a coyote or a dog, but a wolf. Wardens and wildlife biologists would politely take the statements of these eyewitnesses, and then they would write off the reports as cases of mistaken identity. Wolves were not secretly returning to Maine to reclaim their ancient hunting grounds. That was just a myth.
With all the vehicles lined up along the road, I didn’t notice the midnight-blue Ford Explorer Interceptor at first. I looked around for Russo but didn’t see him in any of the clusters of cops. Eventually, my gaze drifted to Clegg’s cruiser.
There was Russo, standing beside the open back door, talking privately with Dyer. No one else was within twenty feet of them. I glanced around, looking for Clegg, but the detective must have gone up to Mink’s cabin.
I was seized by a sudden panic. I had the image in my head of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the gut. As quickly as I could on my injured leg, I limped over to the cruiser.
“Russo!”
“Bowditch,” he said, his face as blank as usual. “Congratulations.”
“Get away from him.”
“What? Why?”
“Did Clegg give you permission to talk to him alone? You shouldn’t be talking to him before the detective does.”
Russo nonchalantly closed the cruiser door. “I think you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion, buddy.”
“Where did you go before?”
“Where did I go when?”
“You dropped this bombshell about Dyer having a rifle that fired the same-caliber bullets as those found at Foss’s, and then when the time comes to break down his door, you’re nowhere to be found.”
“I had a call back at the mountain,” he said mildly.
“That can be checked, you know. Whether you actually received a call.”
I stepped forward until we were nearly chest-to-chest. The man’s body gave off no smell or heat.
“Are you all right, Warden?” he said. “You seem confused. You might want to have an EMT check you out for a concussion.”
“So what were you saying to Dyer just now? What were you telling him?”
Russo paused. His expression was as unreadable as always, but I thought I saw a flicker of amusement behind his eyes.
“I told him that he was fired,” he said. “What else would I be telling him?”
And then he stepped past me and returned to his vehicle. His headlights came on. I watched him do a perfect three-point turn and then drive away.
When I looked in on Dyer myself, he gave me a smile that showed off his discolored teeth.