Under Title Twelve of the Maine Criminal Code, the section primarily enforced by game wardens, I was authorized to shoot any dog I found killing deer, although I had trouble imagining myself actually doing so without hesitation. In my mind, the owner was the one who deserved a backside of bird shot. Fines for letting a dog run free to attack deer and moose rarely exceeded a few hundred dollars. It seemed a pitifully small amount of money for such willful negligence.
Gail Evans bore some culpability here, too. By na?vely putting out food for deer, trying to help them survive, she had lured this young animal to its death. People never want to believe that their best intentions can lead to the worst outcomes.
I decided to leave the deer to the crows. Birds need to eat, too.
Then I followed my own trail back to the gingerbread house.
“Well?” asked Evans.
“It was a dog,” I said loudly, leaving no room for rebuttal.
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“I’ll ask around and see if I can find out whose it is. We’ll make sure it stops doing this.” I handed her my business card with a number to call in case she spotted the renegade dog again. “You really should stop feeding those deer, too. It’s hurting them more than it’s helping them.”
Gail Evans planted her feet and stared me in the eyes. “If it’s not against the law, you can’t stop me from doing it.”
“Don’t be surprised if the dog comes back, then.”
She made a loud sniffing noise, as if her nose had begun to drip. “A dog! Right!”
“There are no timber wolves running around your neighborhood, I can assure you.”
“I know what I saw,” said Gail Evans. “It was a wolf, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.”
5
The prospect of canvassing the area for a deer-chasing dog didn’t excite me. Knocking on doors is one of the fundamentals of police work; nothing yet has been invented to replace it. But that didn’t mean I was eager to make the rounds.
I dug my hand into my pants pocket for my truck keys, but when I pulled them out, something else came with them. My father’s dog tags. The willful chain had tangled itself around my finger.
I was certain that I’d hung them up back at the house. Hadn’t I?
Obviously not, because here they were.
“At least make some calls for the poor woman,” Stacey had told me. “Start with Gary Pulsifer. Ask him how he knows this Amber Langstrom. Then ask him what the hell he was thinking, sending her to look for you.”
I drove to the Pondicherry Pond boat launch. I counted three ice-fishing shacks, all with trucks parked beside them. None of the vehicles was familiar to me, but I didn’t patrol this district often enough to recognize all the local scofflaws by sight. The people in the shacks would see me driving toward them across the ice and have time and cover to dump any illegal fish they might have taken back through the holes they’d drilled. There was nothing I could do about them but check their licenses.
Besides, I was too preoccupied by the events of the night before. There was no point in denying it anymore.
I turned off the engine and keyed in Pulsifer’s number. I was embarrassed to admit that I knew it by heart.
*
Gary Pulsifer was a district warden, like me, but he was also the designated representative to the Maine State Law Enforcement Association, the union that collectively bargains for our compensation and benefits and that defends us if we are ever the subjects of disciplinary proceedings from the Internal Affairs division.
In my five-plus years as a game warden, I had faced four such tribunals. As such, I was intimately acquainted with Article 11 of the union’s bargaining agreement, the section titled “Complaints and Investigations.” I knew my rights going into a disciplinary hearing. And Pulsifer had been at my side for every one of them.
The accused are given the option of taking a lie-detector test.
Nobody is foolish enough to take one.
Except me, of course. In the months following the manhunt for my father, when rumors were flying that I had conspired to help him elude capture, I had submitted to a polygraph exam. An assistant attorney general was hell-bent on proving that I had been Jack Bowditch’s accomplice. I had seen no other choice but to surrender my fate to a machine widely known to be an imperfect determiner of guilt or innocence.
I’d spent five hours in that airless room, being asked question after question, rat-a-tat-tat, by a man who never displayed one recognizable human emotion. The examiner refused to make eye contact. He spent the entire time staring at his computer screen as if it were the true gateway to my soul.
“Is your first name Michael?”
“Is this the month of September?”
“Do you plan on telling me a single lie today?”
“Did you communicate with your father while he was a fugitive?”
“Did he admit to you that he killed Jonathan Shipman?”
“Did he admit to you that he killed Deputy William Brodeur?
“Did you love him?”
The examiner didn’t ask me that last question, but I kept waiting for it to come.
When I came out of the interrogation room, I found that every muscle in my body was as sore as if I had just scaled a cliff without a rope.
“That was brutal,” I told Pulsifer afterward.