When he glanced back at me, I pointed to the snowy ground outside the door. There were boot prints all over, as you would expect, but three distinct sets of fresh tracks led farther down the road. I set off in that direction while Gary hurried to catch up.
Pulsifer didn’t strike me as a poor woodsman, exactly. He just seemed to be wearing blinders all the time. He was so focused on the job at hand that he failed to notice disturbances in the landscape around him. The more time I spent with him in the field, the more I understood how my poacher father had managed to outwit him for so many years.
23
Up ahead was a complex of buildings: garages, a dining hall, a bunkhouse, and assorted sheds. The usual construction equipment, too: skidders, crew vans, pickups, a bulldozer, and a flatbed truck for hauling logs. In short, Pariahville resembled just about any other logging operation you might find in the forest.
Pulsifer and I approached the dining hall. A single voice was issuing from inside the building. Loud, resonant, and commanding—it belonged unmistakably to Don Foss. Pulsifer didn’t bother knocking.
When he opened the door, the room went quiet. Nine or ten men seated at picnic tables turned to see who had let in the sudden blast of arctic air. Beyond them, on a raised stage at the end of the hall, stood Don Foss, flanked on either side by Jim Clegg and Shaylene Hawken.
Foss was wearing an outfit that Paul Bunyan himself might have bought off the rack, and in the same size, too. The big man turned to Clegg. “What’s going on here? Who are these men?”
“The wardens are here at my request,” said the detective.
Clegg had on his brown-and-khaki uniform and was holding his drill sergeant’s hat at crotch level, as if to protect his privates from the imaginations of the assembled sex offenders.
Shaylene Hawken appeared strong enough to wrestle a moose calf to the ground. She had a hard red face that looked as if she scrubbed her skin with steel wool, and gray-brown hair that she had probably cut herself. She was dressed in civilian clothes appropriate for tromping around the woods but was wearing a ballistic vest with a badge pinned to the fabric. A semiautomatic pistol rested in a holster on her hip.
“Should we expect additional visitors?” asked Foss.
The men at the tables had contorted themselves to look at us. Most of them had faces that were young and bearded; they were the same age, more or less, as Adam. The older ones among them look prematurely aged by bad habits and more recent exposure to the elements. Almost without exception, they looked dead-tired.
“Please continue, Don,” said the detective.
Foss’s natural tone of voice seemed to be a bellow. “Detective Clegg and Officer Hawken will be speaking with each of you privately in the bunkhouse. I have their assurance your conversations will be confidential unless—” He turned and looked down again at the detective at his side. “I fail to see how this concerns the Warden Service.”
“The wardens are assisting our department in the search for Langstrom,” Clegg said patiently.
I counted ten men in all seated at the tables. So there had been eleven in the camp when Adam was here.
One pudgy, pink-cheeked guy raised his hand. “Why are we being interrogated if Langstrom was the one who skipped?”
“These are interviews, not interrogations,” said Detective Clegg. “We’re asking for your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Information—what do you think?” said Shaylene Hawken. She swayed from side to side, her hands clasped behind her.
“So we don’t have to talk?” asked another man.
“Fuck yeah, we do,” said a third. “You think they won’t violate your ass back to Bucks Harbor if you don’t say nothing?”
Foss raised his huge hands in a placating gesture. “The officers have given me their word this isn’t a pretext to violate anyone’s probation.”
“Sure, they say that now, but what happens when you ain’t there?” asked the suspicious one.
“I will be in the room for each interview,” said Foss.
I heard one man at the nearest table whisper to another, “He just wants to hear everything we say.”
Foss continued: “I’ve told the officers I’m prepared to end the interviews if there is any coercion.”
“Are they going to search our lockers, too?” asked the pink one.
“We’d prefer not to have to do that, Dudson,” said Hawken.
I could tell that the implied threat rubbed Foss the wrong way. “As all of you know, the officers have the right to inspect your belongings at any time. But given that the focus of these interviews is the whereabouts of Adam Langstrom, I see no need for a sweep of the bunkhouse. Isn’t that right, Detective Clegg?”
“All we’re asking is that you answer our questions truthfully—no bullshit, no evasion—and we’ll be on our way.”
“Yeah, right,” said one of the men at the tables
“This is bullshit.”