the Poacher's Son (2010) (8 page)

Screw it, I thought, rising to my feet. Let them bust me for insubordination.

Heat was curling off the car tops when I crossed the parking lot, and the inside of my truck was like a Dutch oven. I started the engine, glanced in the rearview mirror, and my heart just about stopped. Lieutenant Malcomb was striding toward me across the asphalt. I rolled down my window.

"What's going on, Bowditch?"

I knew bullshitting was useless at this point. "I was on my way to the incident scene."

"My instructions were for you to wait here." As always, he sounded like he had gravel in his voice box.

"I know that. I'm sorry."

"I don't want an apology, Warden."

"I couldn't just sit here, Lieutenant--not knowing what's going on up there."

"The state has rules. They exist for a reason. You can't be involved in this investigation, and you know it."

"I'm already involved," I said. "Please, Lieutenant. It's my father they're looking for. I've got to be part of this. If something happens--maybe I can talk to him, get him to surrender. He'll listen to me."

He was wearing mirrored sunglasses that made reading his expression just about impossible, and he was already one of the stoniest-faced guys I'd ever met, like a walking granite statue in a green uniform. But when he spoke again I got the sense of something softening in him. "This isn't a situation you can control, Bowditch."

"I know."

"He's the one making all the bad choices."

"I understand that."

"He'll be given every opportunity, but it's up to him what happens next."

"Sir, all I'm asking is a chance to be present. I want to be able to tell my mother that I did everything I could."

After a moment of silence, he said, "Get out of the truck, Bowditch."

My heart sank, but I did as I was told. The lieutenant waited for me to lock the door and then he started off across the lot. At first, I thought we were headed back into the sheriff's office, but he kept walking toward the street, and that was when I saw his truck parked around the corner.

"Lieutenant?"

"You're right. It's better that you're there. But only as an observer."

Maybe it was because my father was accused of killing a cop, and he wanted me there as a warning to all the other cops that revenge was not an option. Or maybe he was bringing me along as a witness who could testify that every attempt at a peaceful resolution was made and the use of deadly force was warranted. Maybe he
just understood a son's anguish. I didn't know why Lieutenant Malcomb brought me along with him, but the truth was, I didn't care, either.

On the road we didn't speak for the longest time, both of us listening intently to the police radio. Troopers, deputies, and wardens called in their locations. K-9 units were en route. The Northern Maine Violent Crimes Task Force had taken over a local fish hatchery as its command post. There hadn't been a manhunt like this in Maine in years.

Lieutenant Malcomb scarcely acknowledged me as we drove. He smelled strongly of cigarettes. Kathy Frost had told me he'd started smoking again after his wife died last fall.

"I got a phone call this morning you should know about," he said. "A man says you harassed him and his son this morning on Indian Pond."

"Anthony DeSalle," I said.

"Tell me what happened."

I straightened up in my seat. "He was putting in a boat at the public landing with his son. I checked his license and registration. I cited him for not having adequate PFDs. He didn't appreciate being cited. That's about it."

"He claims you were verbally threatening."

"Excuse me, Lieutenant, but that's bullshit." I tried unsuccessfully to keep the resentment out of my voice. "I think I displayed considerable restraint with Mr. DeSalle. He swore at me repeatedly in front of his little boy. I thought he might take a swing at me at one point. It doesn't surprise me he made a complaint. I think Mr. DeSalle has problems with anger management."

I waited for the lieutenant to speak.

"That's my assessment, too," he said at last. "The guy's choice of language didn't win any points with me, either. Maybe that kind of talk works down in Massachusetts."

"So what happens now?"

"I'm not inclined to do anything for the moment, but if this DeSalle makes a complaint in writing, we'll have to do some sort of investigation. The colonel wants us to make internal affairs a priority these days. We can't appear to be covering anything up."

The day was increasingly become surreal. In the context of what was going on, this thing with DeSalle was almost comical--almost. Unfounded or not, a citizen complaint could dog me for months. I didn't need any more distractions.

"Do you know anything about Deputy Twombley's condition?" I asked.

"Just some cuts and bruises," he said.

"The sheriff didn't tell me what happened."

"A trooper found the cruiser off the road. It had gone off into a pretty deep ditch. That fool Twombley was handcuffed with his arms around a tree. He said your father attacked him, forced them off the road."

"Wasn't my dad handcuffed? How did he get loose?"

"Good question."

"He can't have gone far on foot," I said.

"The trooper who found the crash saw a blood trail. Twombley says your dad was injured. He says your dad stole his shotgun and sidearm."

So my father was armed, bleeding, and on the run. Was there an outcome to this situation that wasn't bad?

The lieutenant's cell phone rang. The person on the other end was the colonel of the Maine Warden Service--that much I could figure out. But the lieutenant was so monosyllabic, I couldn't follow the rest of the conversation at all. Not until my name came up. "I've got Mike Bowditch with me," he said There was a long pause. "Yes, sir. I will."

Will what? I thought. Will take responsibility for him? Will keep him out of trouble?

After he finished with the colonel, the lieutenant checked in with
the state police and Division B. I watched our speed increase with each new conversation. But we were still too far away from the scene--a solid half hour, at least--for blue lights and sirens.

"They're calling in the reinforcements," he said at last. "I guess they've got Charley Stevens up there in his plane already. You know Charley?"

"Yes, sir," I said uneasily.

Charley Stevens was the retired warden pilot who showed up at the Dead River Inn on the night of my father's arrest two years earlier. He was something of a legendary character in the history of the Maine Warden Service--one of those people who is always smaller in person than you expect, given the size of his reputation. I knew he'd retired up around Flagstaff Pond and still helped out the department with his Super Cub, searching for missing hikers, doing overflight moose surveys, that sort of thing. So it was no surprise he was assisting with the manhunt.

What I didn't tell the lieutenant was the Charley Stevens and my dad had a long history together, or that the retired pilot, more than anyone, was probably responsible for my joining the Warden Service. It was a long story and a bad memory, especially under the circumstances.

Lieutenant Malcomb reached into his breast pocket for a piece of gum but didn't offer me any. I watched him pop it out of its foil packet and stuff it in his cheek.

My mouth was very dry. "You don't have an extra stick of that, do you?"

He smiled at me, the first time that day. "It's nicotine."

"I don't care," I said.

T
he State of Maine is the largest in New England, roughly as big as all the others combined. From Portland, on the coast, you can drive to New York City in five hours, but it takes more than six to reach the town of Madawaska, where Aroostook County juts up into Canada. These distances can make it hard for newcomers to get their bearings--everything seems farther away than it should be. As a result, most people never travel beyond the lower third of the state. They cling to the coast, with its lighthouses and beaches and picture-postcard fishing harbors. Relatively few travelers venture into the state's northwestern mountains, but that was where Lieutenant Malcomb and I were now headed.

It was a familiar road. As a child I had once lived along Route 144 before my mother stole me away to southern Maine. The two-lane forest road forks off the busier Carrabassett highway and curves roughly northwest, through the backwoods townships of Dead River Plantation and Flagstaff, before reconnecting with the highway again near the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. It is the gateway to one of western Maine's last remote regions, a wedge-shaped section of forested mountains and moose bogs between the Kennebec River and eastern Quebec. Deep in the heart of that wild land, accessible only by logging road or floatplane, is Rum Pond.

We weren't going that far, thankfully. The search zone, according to Lieutenant Malcomb, was concentrated between the highway
and the Dead River, a circle twenty miles in diameter. Even so, it was a forsaken stretch of woods. There were some newer split-level homes and spiffed-up old farmhouses back near the Carrabassett River, but as we traveled north, farmhouses gave way to mobile homes, which in turn gave way to cabins with yards full of junk cars and barking dogs chained to posts. The sight of these shacks filled me with a sort of gut-sick nostalgia. I'd spent the first part of my life holed up in identical white trash mansions--just my mother and father and me. It was a childhood straight out of the Brothers Grimm, and I hated anything that reminded me of it. Which was just about everything at the moment.

This was my father's country. He used to brag that you could drop him, blindfolded, anywhere in the woods between Rangeley and Jackman and in five minutes he'd deduce his location. It wasn't an idle boast. He'd hiked hundreds of miles through these mountains with a rifle slung over his shoulder, needing no compass to guide him home. Maybe a man couldn't actually disappear here anymore, not in this age of heat-sensing helicopters and GPS trackers. There were too many roads, too many people. But if anyone could vanish into these North Woods, it was my dad. I wondered if the searchers knew what they were chasing.

We ran into the first roadblock in a barely settled area of industrial timber south of the Dead River and east of the Bigelow Mountains. Two state police cruisers had angled themselves across both lanes, blocking traffic. There were a handful of cars and campers and pickup trucks pulled off to the side of the road, waiting to be let through the outer perimeter.

A state trooper approached Malcomb's window. "The command post is set up at the Otter Brook hatchery," he told us.

"Who's the OIC?" asked Lieutenant Malcomb.

"The sheriff, sir. But Major Carter is en route." In other words,
the sheriff was temporarily the officer in charge until the state police tactical team arrived.

"Are the K-9 units here?"

"Not yet, sir."

Which meant the grid search, as such, hadn't begun. I checked my watch. By my crude reckoning, my father had already been on the run for close to two hours.

There was another roadblock set up at the ditch where Deputy Twombley had careened off the road. Half a dozen police officers, most in body armor and carrying semiautomatic weapons or shotguns, were clustered around their vehicles, waiting for something to happen. I'd never participated in a hunt for an armed fugitive, but I'd taken part in grid searches for an Alzheimer's patient, missing hunters, and a couple of lost children. Hurry-up-and-wait was the way these operations usually worked.

Yellow police tape marked the spot where the cruiser had crashed off the road. The car had plunged twenty or so feet down, ripping off alder branches and evergreen boughs before landing sideways in a couple of feet of marshy muck. This was the manhunt's inner perimeter, the zone where searchers would concentrate their efforts and expand out.

I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Earlier this morning, Pete Twombley drove out alone to Rum Pond on his own authority, but to do what? Accuse my dad of murder? Twombley should have called for backup after things turned ugly, but instead he'd proceeded with my father toward the jail in Skowhegan. From Rum Pond, traveling along logging roads, it would have taken them at least an hour to reach this spot, at which point the cruiser went off the road. And Twombley was incapacitated long enough for my dad to take his weapons. Or so the deputy claimed.

My father had been arrested before; he knew when a bogus charge
wouldn't stick. Did he think he was being set up? Again I came back to the question: If he was innocent, why had he fled?

As the nearest government building with working phone lines, the Otter Brook Fish Hatchery was the logical site for a command post. It occupied a cluster of white clapboard buildings arranged around a long row of roofed spillways and tanks. The compound stank like a chicken farm from the meal pellets they fed the trout.

In front of the old office loomed the State Police Mobile Crime Unit, an enormous white-and-blue motor coach nearly the size of the building itself. An ambulance, state police cruisers, patrol cars from Somerset and Franklin counties, warden trucks, and unmarked Dodge Chargers were gathered in the gravel lot.