Paskagankee Page 11

  “How are you doing?” Mike asked Sharon as they leaned against a tree to catch their breath.

  “I’d be doing a lot better if we actually made some progress,” she answered, smiling wanly up at him.

  “Well, if you think about it, we’re looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack,” he replied. “Although this forest is so vast, it’s more like searching for a needle in a hay field. We’ll find something eventually, though, I’m sure of it. There’s got to be blood evidence if nothing else. If we’re lucky, whoever did this trailed some of that blood behind when they took off after tossing that poor guy’s head into a tree. If we can determine which way he went, it will at least give us something to work with.”

  Sharon scuffed her hiking boot on the glazed and dirty ground. “I’m sorry about this morning,” she said, looking off into the trees.

  “Really,” Mike answered. “Which part are you sorry for, the part with the mind-blowingly great sex or the part where we totally enjoyed each other’s company? Or was I imagining things, and that enjoyment was only on my side of the equation?”

  “No, no, it was on my side too. I’m pretty sure you could tell. I’m talking about after we got here, when those idiots played their stupid little junior high school games. You know they were talking about us, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Mike said with a shrug. “So what? I don’t live my life to please everyone else, do you?”

  “Of course not,” answered Sharon with a flip of her head. “But some of these yokels could cause a lot of grief for you if they decide to. Dating a subordinate is a no-no, remember?”

  Mike grinned. “So we’re officially dating then? Awesome.”

  Sharon shook her head in frustration but couldn’t help smiling too. “You’re hopeless. They haven’t decided what they think of you yet so they’re giving you the benefit of the doubt, but that could change at any moment. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about; I’ve known most of these dopes my whole life. Some of them aren’t a whole lot brighter than the people we have to arrest, you know.”

  “Well then,” Mike told her. “I’ll just have to do a damned fine job of running this department so I don’t give anybody any ammunition.” He paused a beat. “No pun intended.”

  “I’m just saying you need to be careful, that’s all.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate the thought,” Mike said, winking at her. “I’m pretty sure I can handle these guys. Now, I think break time is over. Let’s go catch a killer.”

  19

  FOUR LONG HOURS LATER, the search had turned up nothing but a badly rusted beer can. How the can had gotten so far out in the woods and how long it had been there was open to question, but it was definitely not anything the police could use as evidence, and Mike had discarded it in disgust after a careful examination. Everyone was frustrated and tired, and the small group of officers was in the middle of a late lunch break when dispatcher Gordie Rheaume’s voice crackled out on Mike’s radio.

  Mike had stayed in touch with the station all day and was relieved to hear that most of Paskagankee’s citizenry still had not taken to the roads yet, probably due to the dark clouds hanging low and ominous in the sky. The freezing rain still had not resumed, but the temperature hovered just under thirty-two degrees, and it looked as though the skies might open up again at any moment.

  Mike keyed the transmit button. “Go ahead, Gordie.”

  The dispatcher responded immediately, his voice tight with tension. “Harley is on the outskirts of town on Route 17, not far from the Ridge Runner. He says you need to get out there right now.”

  “Dammit, Gordie, now what’s going on?” Mike asked. “He knows we’re kind of busy here, right?” Harley Tanguay was the only member of the force that Mike had left in town on routine patrol, and Mike had already reached the conclusion Harley was not a particularly sharp specimen. Mike suspected Harley might be one of the people Sharon had told him to watch out for a few hours ago.

  “Yes, he knows,” the dispatcher said, his voice on the radio’s little speaker distorted by static. “But he says there’s been another murder.”

  20

  MIKE AND SHARON NAVIGATED the icy roads as rapidly as possible, the blue light bar atop the Explorer flashing an urgent warning to other motorists, not that there were many around. Mike had expected the road conditions to have improved somewhat, but with the temperatures hovering around freezing and the fact that the sun hadn’t even made a token appearance, little melting had occurred.

  He left Officer Pete Kendall in charge back at the crime scene and took only Sharon with him when he hiked back out to Route 24. Until he knew exactly the situation out on Route 17, there was no reason to bring everyone out of the forest when there were still a few hours of daylight left in which to continue the search.

  This time, when he selected Sharon Dupont to return to Paskagankee, there was none of the snickering or the barely-disguised looks of amusement the officers had displayed this morning. This time there was actual grumbling, louder and more direct. No one quite went as far as to say anything to Mike’s face—or to Sharon’s either, for that matter—but it was clear the officers were unhappy with the rookie’s favored status, and it would not be long before a confrontation boiled over.

  Mike made a mental note to deal with the situation head-on when he had a chance, which, if Harley Tanguay was to be believed when he said there had been another murder, would not be any time soon. He didn’t care what the other officers thought—although he understood their anger, having been a patrolman himself for many years in Revere—but right now he needed someone by his side that he felt he could trust, and Officer Sharon Dupont was that person. It didn’t matter that she was the lowest ranking member of the Paskagankee Police Department in terms of seniority, she was sharp and intuitive and he needed her help.

  Plus, he wasn’t sleeping with anyone else on the force.

  “What exactly did Harley say?” Sharon asked. She had been off in the woods peeing—“Sometimes it’s a drag to be a girl,” she said upon her return—when the call came in on Mike’s radio and hadn’t heard any of the conversation.

  “It was all pretty vague,” Mike answered. “He told Gordie there had been another murder out on Route 17 near the Ridge Runner at the scene of a car accident. I didn’t ask for any more specifics because anyone can listen in on the police band, and I don’t want to incite a panic, especially since I don’t necessarily trust Harley’s version of things. I’d like to see for myself what’s going on before I reach any conclusions.”

  Flashing blue strobes lit the mist around a corner in the distance, and Mike knew they were almost there. He called dispatch and advised Gordie to have the public works department close off this portion of Route 17 so they could examine the scene without being forced to dodge passing cars; although from the looks of things, traffic was mostly a non-issue. They had only passed two other vehicles on the drive over, both sanding trucks, frantically working overtime while the weather held.

  Mike rolled the Explorer to a stop behind a Paskagankee Police cruiser slewed across the middle of the road. It was parked at an angle in front of a dark blue Ford Focus with a crumpled front end and right front side. The Focus had been pulled nearly, but not entirely, onto the right shoulder. Mike looked for Harley Tanguay as he stepped out of the SUV onto the slick pavement but didn’t see him anywhere.

  Walking around the damaged car, Mike thought he could imagine what had happened. He looked at a sharp curve beyond the far side of the tree and envisioned the Focus coming around the corner at a rate of speed too fast for the conditions and being unable to stop in time when confronted with the mammoth downed tree, smashing right into it. The driver had then apparently managed to squeeze his damaged car past the tree, but for some reason had stopped on the other side. Had he been too injured to continue, or was the damage to the car too severe?

  The driver’s side door stood open and partially frozen water soaked the front seat a
nd dashboard of the vehicle. It was pooled on the floor under the accelerator and brake pedal, a testament to just how heavily the freezing rain had been falling when the driver stopped and exited his car.

  But that was the question. Why had the driver of the Focus extricated his vehicle from the mess on the far side of the tree, driven around the branches to the other side successfully, then stopped his car and gotten out?

  And where was this supposed murder victim? For that matter, where was Officer Harley Tanguay? Mike had left specific instructions for Tanguay to remain at the scene until he arrived, and the man was now nowhere to be seen. Mike turned to Sharon to ask for her insight into Tanguay’s reliability and saw her staring intently into the woods on the far side of the road.

  “What is it?” he asked her. She responded simply by pointing to the area just beyond the shoulder on the far side of the two-lane county road where Officer Harley Tanguay crouched on his hands and knees, retching into the scrub brush.

  Mike trotted over to the policeman as Harley wiped a string of gooey yellow saliva off the corner of his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, which he had taken off and was holding in his hands. He was sweating profusely and all the color had drained out of his face.

  Mike suddenly understood the expression, “white as a ghost.”

  “Harley, what’s the matter, are you sick?” Mike asked as he put a hand on the officer’s shoulder. Tanguay shook his head mutely and spit another gob of yellowish-green gunk onto the ground as he swayed, bent at the waist with his hands on his knees, then rose slowly and shakily to his full height and turned to face them. His face looked pinched, like he had just eaten some bad fish.

  Harley pointed to the forest floor about ten feet from where the three of them stood. “Go take a look,” he croaked and stumbled over to his cruiser, collapsing into the driver’s seat and resting his head on the steering wheel. Mike almost reminded him not to leave the scene, then decided there was no way Harley Tanguay would be going anywhere for a while. He looked too ill to drive.

  Mike and Shari glanced at each other apprehensively. By now Mike had a pretty good idea what they would find when they stepped into the scrub brush, and it was obvious, by the look on Sharon’s face, that she did too. They were about to find the driver of the wrecked car, and when they did it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “Why don’t you stay here,” he said, taking a step in the direction Harley had indicated. Sharon said nothing, shaking her head with a look of grim determination on her face and following Mike. Her lips were set in a thin line, and Mike decided there was a lot more to this young lady than he had first realized.

  They ventured a few steps farther into the woods and then stopped in their tracks when they saw what had made Officer Tanguay sick to his stomach. Scattered on the frozen ground over a diameter of twelve to fifteen feet, torn limb from limb, was the body of a middle-aged male, presumably the unknown motorist who had abandoned his car on the side of Route 17.

  Blood was everywhere. It was scattered and splattered over trees, brush and the icy ground. It pooled under the thick part of an upper arm which had been ripped off the man’s torso and tossed like a stick. It lay frozen on leaves and twigs littering the ground. It appeared to be far too much to have come out of just one man, although Mike knew blood evidence could be deceiving. The devastation was astonishing; it looked as though a bomb had blown up the victim from the inside.

  Sharon turned and puked onto the ground from a standing position, and Mike felt the contents of his own stomach rising into his gullet. He forced himself to choke it down and get a grip. He had seen a lot in his fifteen years of police work, especially in the hardscrabble city of Revere, Massachusetts, but this was worse than any of it. The brutality, the sheer viciousness of the attack was stunning and unsettling.

  The scene looked like Mike imagined a bear mauling would look—the worst bear mauling imaginable—but of course it wasn’t a bear mauling. Even the most cursory examination of the scene and the horribly rent body showed no bite or claw marks, of which there would have been plenty had a bear ripped this man apart. This would be another case for Dr. Affeldt, who probably had not seen two days like these in his entire career as medical examiner.

  Sharon apologized. “I didn’t expect anything like this,” she said. “I’m so sorry, that was unprofessional as hell, I just couldn’t help it; I threw up almost before I even realized it was coming.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mike told her, his voice strained and soft. “I was about two seconds from joining you in a little puke party. Besides,” he said in an attempt to lighten the mood, “Harley’s got you beat for sure. He looked like he was barfing the whole time we were on our way over.”

  The officers retraced their steps to Route 17 and stood on the edge of the road, breathing deeply. Harley walked over from his cruiser and joined them. He appeared to have rallied a bit; although his face was still chalk-white and his features were drawn. “Pleasant little scene in there, isn’t it?”

  “How did you find him?” Mike asked.

  Harley said, “I took a call from Gordie about an abandoned car that looked as though it had been involved in an accident. We’ve had a few of them this morning, just like you said we probably would. Well, when I arrived on the scene the car was sitting with its door open and all that water inside. It was obvious to me this wasn’t any typical fender-bender; that car door must have been open for hours to let that much water in.”

  Mike nodded. “Good job.”

  “Thanks,” Harley replied. “Anyway, I decided to take a walk around the area to see if maybe the guy had gotten injured and disoriented in the accident and somehow stumbled into the woods and collapsed, and that’s when I found him.” He looked like his stomach might be mulling over the pros and cons of another round of projectile vomiting, and Mike took what he hoped was an inconspicuous step backward.

  Harley smiled weakly and said, “Don’t worry, boss, I’ve got nothing left inside to come out at you.”

  “Listen,” Mike told his officer. “I was close to losing it myself when I saw the mess back there, so don’t feel bad.”

  “What do we do now?” Harley asked.

  “It’s almost dark so there’s not much point in continuing the search at the Crosker scene. I’m going to pull everyone back and send them home until tomorrow. The whole crew has been working hard tramping all over the forest, and they are probably about ready to fall over from exhaustion. In the meantime I’m going to call Dr. Affeldt and get him out here.

  “If you don’t mind, Harley, you can go to the station and bring back some of the portable spotlight units so I can examine this car, inside and out. I need to figure out what happened here.”

  21

  ARTIFICIAL LIGHT, BRIGHT AND reassuring, blazed from automobile headlamps mounted on metal stands. They were identical to the ones used last night at the Crosker scene—adjustable, both by height and by direction as well as by angle of attack. Right now the light was being directed at the damaged blue Ford Focus. The wind was picking up again and the temperature steadily dropping as darkness descended on the tiny town of Paskagankee, Maine.

  Mike turned up the collar of his parka although doing so seemed pointless—he was chilled to the bone from something much more than the temperature. He had seen a lot in the blue collar city of Revere, Massachusetts, but even the worst crimes, ones that haunted his dreams, paled in comparison to the gruesome murder spree taking place right before his eyes in this isolated community.

  He stamped his feet in a fruitless attempt to ward off a little of the chill that threatened to numb his extremities to the point where he lost all feeling. The last two days were beginning to seem endless and more than a little unreal. Mike almost felt sorry for himself—he left Revere for this?—and then a wave of disgust washed over him. Two people were dead, killed in the most gruesome manner he had ever seen, and he was worrying about how it affected him?

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?�
� he muttered to himself. He had sent Sharon out in the Explorer for two large coffees and told Harley Tanguay to go on home after he had returned with the portable lighting units, so for the moment, Mike was alone with his thoughts. After Sharon departed, Mike trudged reluctantly back into the forest to the mangled body, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and carefully removed the victim’s wallet from the back pocket of his ripped and soiled dress slacks.

  The driver of the car was a man named Frank Cheslo. He was forty-one years old and, according to the business card in his wallet, had been employed as a salesman for a company called Computer Solutions of New England. Mike could find nothing in the man’s wallet or in any of his other pockets indicating a next of kin or even a close friend the Paskagankee Police could call to inform of his tragic death. Mike knew that meant he would have to call Computer Solutions of New England, but considering the time of night and Mike’s more pressing priorities, he decided that telephone call could wait until tomorrow morning.

  Mike examined the scene as closely as he could with just his flashlight. Although the devastation was worse here than at the Harvey Crosker scene—more blood, more body parts—the two crime scenes were similar in that the attacker had left behind no obvious evidence indicating why the attack had taken place or who (what?) might have committed it. He dropped Frank Cheslo’s business card into his jacket pocket and wandered back to the man’s disabled car.

  He stood beside the trunk, chin cupped in his left hand, thinking about how unlucky the man had been. He had indeed struck the fallen tree after rounding the corner and being unable to stop thanks to the poor driving conditions. He was able to work his damaged vehicle out of the tree, managing to blast through the smaller branches, only to die a horrific death on the other side.