Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(65)
“Because he hates child molesters? So what does that make me? Jesus, Bowditch. All those years of standing up for you in front of disciplinary committees, hearing about you sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong—I never thought I’d get to see it up close and personal. But you really are a piece of work.”
Pulsifer had been in a rotten mood all morning, and I knew anything I might say in defense of my actions would only irritate him more. When we arrived at Route 16, he turned in the direction of Bigelow and Flagstaff and hit the gas hard. He wasn’t making any pretense of wanting to get me back to my Scout and out of his district as soon as possible.
The day was shaping up to be a beauty. The snow was sparkling, brighter than crushed diamonds, where the sun hit it. We passed the dead tree where the owl had been roosting, but it had flown away along with the birders.
*
Visiting the logging camp with Pulsifer had brought back a memory I had done my best to repress. It was the memory of a drive I had taken with Warden Tommy Volk a year and a half earlier, when I was new in the Sebago region. Volk had wanted me to know where the worst dirtbags lived because I would be policing his district on his days off.
Pulsifer might have dismissed southern Maine as a suburban la-la land. But on that day, Volk and I had visited fenced compounds where barking pit bulls announced our approach, trailer parks where men pimped out their teenage girlfriends for heroin, and former farmsteads where the only crops still being grown were sold in Baggies for three hundred dollars an ounce.
But the memory that had lingered longest was our last stop of the day.
Toward dark, we had pulled up in his patrol truck to an anonymous split-level house: the kind of exurban home I wouldn’t have looked at twice under normal circumstances. A single light shined from a second-story window, but all of the others were dark.
“I’ve saved the worst for last,” Volk had said. “The guy who lives here is pure evil. Do you want to meet him?”
“Who is he?”
“No one you’d ever notice.”
Volk chewed tobacco constantly, not even removing it while he ate. He spat a stream of brown saliva into a stained coffee cup. We sat outside the nondescript house, staring up at the lighted window and listening to the engine idle.
“What did he do?” I asked finally.
Instead of answering, Volk did something that made my heart seize up. He hit his pursuit lights and sirens, bathing the dead-end street in blue hellfire.
The outside light came on, the door opened, and a man appeared on the front step. I couldn’t see him well from that distance, but he seemed to be middle-aged, with a fat face and square glasses. His dress shirt was untucked on one side, as if he’d come directly from the bathroom, and his athletic socks were so phosphorescent white, they seemed to glow in the dark.
Volk switched off his blues, but the siren echoed in my head.
“Hope I didn’t wake you, Pete,” Volk whispered, more to himself than to me.
The man stared sleepily at our truck while he tucked his shirt into his pants. Then, without turning his back to our vehicle, he stepped back inside the house and closed the door.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Peter Hamlin.”
“Who?”
“You never heard of the Pied Piper?” Volk stuffed a fresh wad of tobacco between his cheek and gums. “He used to be the music teacher at Pondicherry High School—married, kids, the whole nine yards. Then a girl in the school band slit her wrists. In the hospital she told a nurse that Hamlin had been having sex with her—all three holes. When the state cops raided his house, they found pictures of him with three other girls. One of them was a niece of my first wife.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Hamlin ‘tried’ to kill himself when he was out on bail, hanged himself in a motel room, but I guess he wasn’t able to go through with it, the f*cking coward. I don’t know who his lawyer was, but he must have been the best that ever was. The * did only ten years in the Maine State Prison. Can you believe that? Ten years? His wife divorced him, changed her name, moved out of state with the kids, but somehow that dirtbag kept the house. I think it’s technically his mother’s, and she lets him live there.”
The state of Maine doesn’t have laws dictating how close a sex offender can live to a school, day-care center, or playground, but I knew that some towns had passed their own ordinances. Whatever statutes Pondicherry might have put into place wouldn’t have applied here anyway. Hamlin had no proximate neighbors.
“How long has he been out?” I asked.
“Five months,” Volk said, growing redder. “I have made him my personal project. I come over at all hours. Blast my siren. I want him to know he’s being watched. I want him to think I’m a crazy motherf*cker who doesn’t give a f*ck about the law. I want him to have a heart attack from fear.”
The inside of the truck smelled of Volk’s sickly wintergreen dip.
“So he’s called the Pied Piper because he was a music teacher?” I asked. “Or because of the Hamlin/Hamelin thing.”
Volk seemed confused; I don’t think he was familiar with the locale of the German folktale.
“Hamlin wanted those girls to play his skin flute,” he said simply. “That’s how the f*cker got his name.”
In my career as a law-enforcement officer, I had accompanied regular police on bail-compliance checks, and I’d seen firsthand the damage child molesters can inflict on the most helpless of victims. I had seen horrible things that had torched whatever faith I’d once had in the essential goodness of human beings. So, however much I disliked being made his unwitting accomplice, I wasn’t about to rat out Tommy Volk.