The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries)

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For my brother Roger

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Author’s Note

Also by Paul Doiron

About the Author

Copyright

Let him lose all companions, and return under strange sail to bitter days at home.

—HOMER,
the
Odyssey

MAINE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY

BUREAU OF CONSOLIDATED EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS TRANSCRIPT

REGIONAL COMMUNICATIONS CENTER: KNOX COUNTY

*** NOTICE ***

THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN PREPARED TO CORRESPOND AS ACCURATELY AS POSSIBLE TO THE AUDIO RECORDING TO WHICH THE TRANSCRIPT RELATES. CERTAIN INFORMATION MAY HAVE BEEN EXCLUDED OR REDACTED FROM THIS TRANSCRIPT IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE LAW. SEE 25 MRSA § 2929.

1

When I think of Jimmy Gammon now, I remember the way he was before the war: a redheaded, freckled-faced kid with a body like a greyhound, all arms and legs, with a jutting rib cage he’d gotten running up and down the hills of midcoast Maine.

Jimmy had just graduated from Dartmouth, the alma mater of his father, James Sr., and, like his father, he was planning to make a career in the law and politics. The elder Gammon had been decorated for bravery as an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam and belonged to a generation that believed military service was a necessary prerequisite to holding higher office. Maybe it still was. In a state with the highest percentage of Afghanistan war veterans in the nation, having worn a uniform overseas carried an undeniable political advantage.

On his father’s advice, Jimmy had joined the Maine Army National Guard. He chose the 488th Military Police Company, which I find odd, considering what I came to know about his gentle temperament. I was the new game warden in the district, less than six months on the job, and I met the father and son one autumn day in the field. The Gammons were hunting for grouse and woodcock in a pocket of woods outside their estate and both had bagged their limits when I came upon them. We spent a few minutes comparing notes. I marveled at their handmade European shotguns and the sleek springer spaniel that James Sr. had brought over from the UK: honestly the best-trained hunting dog I’d ever seen.

Their estate occupied something like a hundred acres of rolling fields and broadleaf forests in the Camden Hills. There were birch groves and fast-flowing streams, apple orchards and hard granite ridges like the fossilized spines of dinosaurs protruding through the turf. From the hilltop above the Gammons’ palatial farmhouse, you could watch the sun rise over the ink blue waters of Penobscot Bay.

To his credit, Jimmy knew how wealthy his family was. You might even say he possessed an overdeveloped sense of noblesse oblige, or he never would have volunteered to go to Afghanistan as an E4 enlisted man. He could have avoided the conflict entirely, the way most men of my generation had. As I myself had done.

In college, I had decided that the best way for me to serve my country, given my own interests and abilities, was by becoming a cop. More precisely, I chose to become a game warden, which in the state of Maine is pretty much the same thing.

Game wardens here are full law-enforcement officers, with all the powers of state troopers. They are the “off-road police,” in the language the service uses to market itself to new recruits. This special status comes as news to many urban and suburban people who mistakenly equate the job with that of a forest or park ranger. While wardens are charged primarily with enforcing hunting and fishing laws, the rural nature of the state means that a warden is often the nearest officer to any given crime scene. Call a cop in Maine, and you just might get a game warden.

It was just as well that I’d steered clear of the military. In the years since I’d joined the Warden Service I’d learned a number of uncomfortable truths about myself, the first of which was that I am a malcontent by nature. I was certain I would have been a troublemaker as a soldier, even more than I was as a warden, and it was unlikely I would have had as forgiving a field training officer as Sgt. Kathy Frost to save me from the stockade.

I admired Jimmy Gammon for his readiness to put himself at risk for the good of the country, though.

My last memory of him was shortly before he shipped out for six months of basic and police corps training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. The Gammons had invited me to the private pheasant club they’d helped create on some scrubland over near Sebago Lake. Consisting of twenty acres of trails and coverts, it was a place designed to hold birds whose sole purpose in life was to be spooked into the sky and shot with twenty-gauge shotgun pellets.

On the hunt, Jimmy let me borrow his over-and-under. He told me that a British gun maker had handcrafted it out of walnut and steel. I had never handled such an exquisite firearm. I was hesitant to hold the gun after Jimmy told me the price his father had paid for it—more than three times my yearly salary—but when the springer flushed a pheasant out of the alders, instinct took over. I brought the butt up to my shoulder, squeezed the first trigger, and watched as the bird fell, limp and lifeless, from the air.

“Great shot!” said Jimmy in a high voice that would intimidate none of the Taliban or al-Qaeda prisoners being held at the Bagram prison.

As a prospective military policeman, he viewed me as a colleague of sorts, a fellow officer only a little older than himself—and potentially a friend. It was a time in my life when I wasn’t making friends, and so I was willing to put in the effort, although I had my doubts about the Gammons.

“You should join our pheasant club, Mike,” he said.

The idea was ridiculous. As a rookie warden, I was hard-pressed to pay my college loans and the rent on the ramshackle house I was sharing with my girlfriend at the time. “It’s a little rich for me.”

“What if I told you we have a special rate for law-enforcement officers, Warden Bowditch?” said his father, studying me through yellow shooting glasses.

I found James Sr. to be an imposing presence. He was a lobbyist now but had served in two Republican administrations in mysterious positions that seemed to come with basement offices in the Pentagon. He had the bushiest red eyebrows I had ever seen and a foxlike grin that suggested he could read my thoughts at will.