The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (22 page)

“You make it sound like this is a nightclub.”

“A nightclub?” the lobby officer said with a chuckle. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

He told me to leave my keys and whatever else I had in my pockets in the coin-operated lockers across the room. I waited a few minutes on a bench, and then another guard—the visit officer—appeared. He unlocked a door and led me down a cinder-block hallway equipped with two metal detectors. The second machine had a problem with my belt buckle. The guard, a barrel-shaped man with a lazy eye, asked if he could frisk me.

“What happens if I say no?”

“Exit’s back that way.”

After he patted me down, he escorted me to a cubicle with a table and chairs bolted to the floor. The fluorescent lights were too bright, and a stinging chemical smell hung in the air, which made me wonder if an inmate had ever attempted suicide by guzzling the disinfectants they poured over everything inside the prison.

I waited close to twenty minutes for the guard to return with Billy. I found myself growing nervous as the minutes ticked by, afraid my brawny friend would appear diminished by his months behind bars. Eventually, the lock clicked and he came through the door, looking very much like the man I remembered. At six-four, Billy loomed over the guard assigned to restrain him. His woodsman’s tan had faded, and his long blond hair had been chopped as short as Sampson’s, but the guards had allowed him to keep most of his beard, which looked like it had been spun from gold and copper wire.

He was wearing a light blue shirt, darker denim pants, and the sort of sneakers you see on old people who gather at shopping malls to walk for exercise.

“Now, who could this stranger be?” he asked, cracking a broad smile I hadn’t expected.

I extended my hand, but the guard intervened. “This is a no-contact visit.”

Billy gave him a deadpan expression. “I guess a tug job is out of the question, then.”

“Just sit the fuck down, Cronk.”

We settled down across the table from each other. Now that I had a better look at his face, I could see that there were gray shadows under his eyes.

“How are you holding up in here?” I asked.

“Finestkind.” The word was Down East slang for “first-rate,” except when used ironically, which was most of the time. Billy spoke with one of the thicker Maine accents I’d heard among men my own age. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“It’s a long story. First I want to hear why you got transferred to the Supermax. Aimee thinks you’re in the Medium Custody Unit.”

At the mention of his wife’s name, he hung his handsome head. When he glanced up again, his pale eyes had filled with mist. “I’ve been meaning to say something, but I don’t want her to worry.”

“What happened, Billy?”

He leaned back, but the stiff chair didn’t give. It was odd seeing him without his customary blond braid. “There was a new guy who came into the prison—some bookkeeper who embezzled from a church—and I guess he was scared silly of being raped, so some wiseass told him he should find the biggest, scariest person on the block and sucker punch him, just to show the other cons to leave him alone. Guess who the biggest, scariest person was.”

I had seen firsthand Billy’s capacity for violence, watched him brutally kill two men in a gravel pit. To me, it had looked like self-defense, but the prosecutors claimed it was manslaughter, and the jury had unanimously agreed. At the time, I was still trying to talk Billy into appealing the verdict, if only for his family’s sake, but I had discovered that when a man believes he deserves to be punished, it is nearly impossible to persuade him otherwise.

“Jesus, Billy. What did you do to the guy?”

“He’s having trouble remembering things now. His name, for instance.”

“How long are you in the SMU for?”

“There’s going to be a trial in superior court. I could get a few more years tacked on to my sentence, I suppose.”

I wanted to curse his stupidity, but what was the point? He already felt bad enough. “Can’t you claim self-defense?”

“I seem to recall you offered the same advice last year.” He was referring to the manslaughter trial, in which I’d been called to testify against him as a hostile witness, but the faint smile told me he wasn’t harboring ill feelings. “About time you came for a visit. Thought I was going to see you here yesterday.”

“Do you remember me mentioning my field training officer, Kathy Frost?”

“Course I do.”

“Last week, she and another warden killed a guy. It was a case of suicide by cop. He was drunk and high and pulled a shotgun on them. He was a veteran, Billy.”

“Vietnam vet or one of the younger guys?”

“Afghanistan. He was an MP at Sabalu-Harrison.”

“I met a few MPs when I was at Bagram. What was this one’s name?”

“Jimmy Gammon.”

He shook his head to indicate he was unfamiliar with the man. “So if your sergeant shot this guy, why are you the one who looks like you walked through a plate-glass window?”

“Two nights ago, I was at Kathy’s house when someone shot her with a turkey gun, killed her dog, and took a few shots at me. Blew out the windshield on my Bronco.”

“What happened to your sergeant?”

“She’s in a coma.”

He stroked his beard. “They get the son of a bitch who done it?”

“Not yet.”

“I guess I can excuse you for missing our appointment.” His voice became even deeper, which didn’t seem possible. “So tell me about this dead MP.”

“He was with the Four eight-eight and he was pretty badly wounded. I saw a picture of him after he came back from Afghanistan. He looked like a reject from a wax museum. He was in and out of Togus, living with his parents most recently. One night, they called for help because he was intoxicated, and when Kathy and her trainee arrived, he pulled a shotgun.”

“The cops think there’s a connection between the two shootings?”

“It’s one of their theories.”

“Like maybe one of his buddies from the Four eighty-eighth decided to get revenge on your sergeant for what she did?”

“I take it you have an opinion,” I said.

Billy Cronk had one of the coldest stares on the planet. “Revenge can be a powerful motivator. In Iraq, a PV-nothing in my company got fragged for stealing another guy’s iPod. The MPs could never prove it, but everyone knew what went down.”

“There’s a guard at the prison who was with the Four eighty-eighth,” I said.

He leaned back against the plastic chair. “So that’s why you’re here.”

“I also made Aimee a promise I’d come visit you.”

Billy seemed unpersuaded. “What’s the name of this guard?”

“Donato,” I said.

“Yeah, I know him. He’s a supervisor. Tough, but fair. He’s not your guy, though.”

“How can you be sure?”

“MPs are cops,” he said. “They might not like what happened to their wounded friend, but they’d know your sergeant was just doing her duty in taking him down. When was the last time you heard about one cop shooting another out of revenge?”

I’d read of isolated instances, but most of those cases involved police officers who had been fired for misconduct.

“You should tell the detectives to stop barking up that tree,” Billy said.

“They’re not going to listen to me. You forget I’m no longer a warden.”

He curled his lip. “You should be out there asking questions yourself, then. Who else might have wanted your sergeant dead? Why are you wasting your time talking with me?”

He stood up, as if he saw no point in making further pleasantries.

I followed his lead. “It’s not a waste of time.”

“Come back after you’ve caught the guy. And forget about Donato.”

Easier said than done. “If you say so.”

“I’m serious, Mike.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” We both knew I was in no position to improve his situation.

“Don’t tell Aimee I am in the SMU,” he said. “She’s going to figure it out, but I don’t want her worrying in the meantime.”

After the guard had escorted Billy back to his cell, I realized he hadn’t asked me how his wife was doing or anything about his kids. We hadn’t made small talk about my guiding job or what it was like working for his old nemesis, Elizabeth Morse. I’d assumed that he would have been starved for information about the world he’d left behind. But Billy had avoided those delicate subjects. Thinking about life outside the prison walls was probably too painful for him to contemplate. I doubted he was the first inmate who had ever felt that way.

26

A guard stopped me as I was collecting my keys and other personal effects from the locker in the prison lobby. He was heavyset and had a crew cut, trimmed mustache, and a flush of color under his two chins that made me think he enjoyed tipping a bottle after his shift was done.

“Mr. Bowditch?”

“Yes.”

“Can you wait here, please?” He tended to huff out his words, as if each one required its own expulsion of breath.

“What for?”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d wait here for a few minutes.”

I shrugged and sat down on a bench, wondering what I had done now. Billy and I hadn’t shaken hands or otherwise broken the no-contact rule. I wasn’t smuggling contraband in any of my body cavities.

The fat guard stood over me, unsmiling, for a solid ten minutes, and then my phone made a buzzing sound.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

The guard frowned at me.

I rarely used the texting feature, so I was shocked to see that the message had come from Stacey.
Bard told me your friend was the warden sergeant who was wounded. I hope she’s OK. I’m sorry about the way I acted that night at Weatherby’s. Sometimes I’m just a bitch.

I was grinning from ear to ear and trying to come up with a clever response when the locked door opened and a man appeared. He was wearing a navy suit specially tailored for muscular guys, a red tie with a tie clip, and polished cap-toe shoes. He also wore his hair short, but he was growing a goatee, which so far, consisted of little more than a brown shadow under his nose and around his mouth. I recognized Angelo Donato from his speech at the televised protest outside the Maine Warden Service headquarters.

“I heard you wanted to see me,” he said flatly.

It had to have been Billy, I thought. What trouble had my friend stirred up now?

“I think you’ve been misinformed, Sergeant.”

“Then maybe you can inform me. My office is through that door.”

He signaled to the admissions guard to buzz us through a locked door. I followed him down a hall to a windowless office devoid of personal items of any sort. He removed his coat and hung it from the back of his chair, revealing that his dress shirt had also been fitted to accommodate his weight lifter’s physique. He took a seat and indicated that I should do the same.

“I don’t know what Billy Cronk told you,” I said.

“He said you were a friend of Jim Gammon. You’re the game warden, right?”

“I used to be.”

“Jim told us about you.” His eyes had heavy dark lashes, as if he wore mascara, but they seemed to be natural features. They gave his face a feminine quality that was at odds with the rest of him. “He talked about the four of us going hunting sometime when we got home. Do you know what was funny about that?”

Obviously, there was nothing funny about it, but I let the former MP continue.

“The funny thing was that he kept talking about it,” Donato said. “When I used to visit him at Togus, he’d say things like ‘So when are you and Monster going hunting with me and Mike?’ His face had been blown off by an IED, along with part of his brain, but he still thought we were all going to shoot pheasants together. Every time Smith and I visited him, he would talk about it—as if the plans were already in motion. ‘The shooting party’ is what he called it.”

I could tell that Donato was going somewhere with the story and that he expected me to clear the tracks.

“Do you know when I realized he was losing it?” he said. “When he stopped talking about the shooting party.”

There was a round clock on the wall that made a ticking sound as each second went by. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a clock do that. High school maybe—the vice principal’s office.

“I have a question for you,” he said after a while.

“Go ahead.”

“Did you ever once visit him after he got home?”

“I never heard he’d been wounded,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was back in Maine.”

“You don’t read the papers?”

I wasn’t going to divulge my own troubles with a man who didn’t care to hear them. “All I can say is that I missed the news, and that I’m sorry. Jimmy was a great guy. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”

“You want to know how it happened?” he asked. “How he got injured?”

I assumed he was going to tell me in any case.

“There was this trash heap outside one of our battle positions.” He waved his hand as if he wanted to strike what he’d said and start again. “It was really more of a mountain of trash. The contractors would dump all of the shit from Sabalu there, and every day crowds of Afghans would descend all over it like a bunch of vultures. They’d take every piece of plastic. Something like this pen.” He held up a disposable ballpoint. “To them, it was like finding buried treasure, even if it was out of ink. Christ only knows what they used it for.”

He began twirling the pen between his fingers.

“One day,” he said, “there was a riot. These two guys started fighting over a bungee cord. The next thing we knew, everyone on the mountain was hitting someone. Through our scopes, we saw kids being trampled. So I decided we needed to break it up. I told Jim to drive us out there, and I ordered people to back off or we’d start shooting with our turret gun. Well, they didn’t, and I wasn’t going to open fire on a mob of women and children. The bottom line is, we broke the first rule and ended up getting out of the truck. Smith and I went one way, and Jim went another. It turned out the whole thing had been a set up by the terrorists. Jim was helping one of the kids who’d been trampled when the boy’s body exploded. They’d cut the kid open and planted an IED inside his stomach. Then they’d sewn him up again.”