Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(62)

While I waited for Pulsifer to return, I took the opportunity to poke around. A fetid odor hung in the air: a combination of grease, wood ashes, burned coffee, and Murphy oil soap. The room had all the charm of a cash-strapped summer camp for troubled boys.

I made eye contact with an old man sitting by himself at a corner table. He had crazy hair that stood up in every direction like a cartoon character who’d just been struck by lightning. It took me a few seconds to realize that I recognized him.

“Wallace Bickford?” I said.

“Yeah?” He was missing assorted teeth.

“It’s Mike Bowditch.”

Not a flicker of recognition showed in his eyes. He just kept smiling his jack-o’-lantern smile.

“Jack’s son,” I said.

He seemed to suck in his stomach. “Jack’s dead.”

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “I was with the police that night they raided your cabin looking for him.”

Wally Bickford had been one of my father’s several sidekicks, a former logger who had received a traumatic head injury in the woods and had made his living thereafter as a trapper and collector of roadside cans and bottles. The last time I’d seen him had been during the manhunt. Search dogs had tracked my dad to the squalid shack where Bickford was then squatting. The brain-damaged man had been wounded during the ensuing police assault on his cabin, but my father had already managed to slip through the closing net.

I remembered hearing that the district attorney had drawn up accessory charges against Bickford for aiding my dad in his escape but that a judge had ruled Wallace wasn’t mentally capable of understanding his crime. So how had he ended up in Pariahville?

“What are you doing here, Wally?”

“I work for Don.”

“Did you come here from jail?”

“I got probated out of Windham last year.” He twisted his little finger inside his ear to remove some wax.

“Why were you incarcerated?”

“For looking at pictures.”

“Pictures of kids?”

“They looked old enough. Those photos don’t come with ages on them.” He began to rise from his chair. “I need to take a piss.”

The judge who had sent him to jail on a child pornography rap must not have had the same qualms about his limited mental capacity. I pressed my hand on his bony shoulder and pushed him back onto the bench. For years, I had felt sorry for Bickford, but I was having trouble summoning sympathy for a collector of child porn, brain-damaged or not.

“Tell me about Adam Langstrom,” I said.

“He ran away.”

“What else?”

“He called Don names. They fought.”

“You mean physically? With fists?”

He ran his fuzzy tongue over his lips.

“Foss gave Adam a black eye,” I said, assuming he’d correct me if I was wrong. “Did Adam have any other enemies here? People he was afraid of?”

“I mind my own business.” He began to push against my hand. “Don said I didn’t have to answer questions.”

I tried smiling. “You and my dad were friends.”

He had rheumy eyes. They blinked very slowly. “Used to be. He took my ATV and never gave it back.”

“Foss is lucky to have someone with your logging experience working for him.”

His broken smile made a reappearance. “Some of these guys—they don’t know—they don’t know shit about what they’re doing.”

“There must be accidents all the time.”

“Some.”

“Like what happened to Lovejoy.” Dudson had referred to a man by that name having been crushed by a falling tree. “Was Adam Langstrom here when Lovejoy was killed?”

Bickford closed one eye but kept the other open. The nature of his mental disability made it hard to figure him out. He usually seemed slow-witted, but I felt I might be seeing a glimmer of some residual intelligence.

“I need to take a piss,” he said again.

After I released my hand from his shoulder, he just about ran to the bathroom.

Year after year, logging appeared on the list of most dangerous professions in the nation, second only to commercial fishing—and far ahead of law enforcement. By all rights, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should have done an investigation of any deaths that occurred at this company. But Pulsifer had suggested that Foss ran his operation off the books with the complicity of POs like Shaylene Hawken and other government employees whose hands he might have greased.

I had no proof that the dead man was connected in any way to Adam or his decision to run off. Had he and Foss fought over the safety conditions of the workers in the woods? Had he threatened to go public? It would explain why Adam went looking for his Glock at his mother’s house.

I found myself yearning to imagine my brother in something other than an ignoble light.

When Pulsifer finally returned, I could see that he was steamed. He motioned me toward a quiet corner.

“Foss won’t let us talk to any of his guys,” he said.

“Won’t Clegg go to bat for us?”

“He tried,” Pulsifer said. “But this is Foss’s property. He doesn’t have to allow any of us here without a warrant.”

“But I need to tell Clegg about the gun Adam got from his mom’s place,” I said.