Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(82)

“One guy with an AR-15 and a whole bunch of clips.”

That wasn’t much help. Black guns, as some people called them, were as common up here now as M1 rifles used to be in the Maine woods after World War II. Their omnipresence was why the service had equipped us with Windham Weaponry MPCs; we had been in serious danger of being outgunned at every firefight.

“He was a regular Audie Murphy, too,” the EMT said. “That’s what I’m hearing. The CSI guys are still mapping the scene up there. Maybe they’ll find it was two shooters. They’re leaving all the bodies where they fell until they can finish photographing everything. They said they’d call us again when they’re ready for us to cart them away. They’re going to need a caravan of ambulances for that job, let me tell you.” He scratched his woolly beard. “I didn’t think I could ever feel sorry for those men, after the things they did. I used to say that prison was too good for them, but now—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He just rolled up his window and drove away.

Adam had been a good shot. I’d seen the evidence in the deer mounts on his bedroom walls. But he had taken a Glock handgun from his mother’s apartment, not a semiautomatic rifle. Unless he had used the money he’d taken off Josh Davidson to buy a carbine.

Dyer had mentioned owning a black gun, too. A Smith & Wesson. I forgot which model.

But, really, the list of potential suspects was close to endless. All it would have taken was for one crackpot to have read Johnny Partridge’s inflammatory column about the pampered pedophiles of Kennebago. The worst-case scenario was some unaffiliated vigilante—just a random kook with a gun—who had traveled in to do the job and had now disappeared back wherever the hell he’d come from.

As I neared Foss’s gate, I came up on a cluster of wardens gathered around an unmarked patrol truck. They were all wearing headlamps and looking at a topographical map spread across the hood. Sooner or later, I would have to show Shadow to them, and I would need to explain what he was doing in my pickup, but I had sped all the way up here to find out what had happened. Show-and-tell could wait a few minutes.

I left the wolf in the truck and buttoned up my coat to join the others.

“Hey!” I said.

Pulsifer glanced up. With his headlamp, he looked like a coal miner. “What did I tell you guys? Bowditch can’t help himself.”

“You make me sound like a compulsive gambler.”

“Your words, not mine.”

“Good to see you, Mike,” said Bill Gordon. He was Pulsifer’s sergeant, despite being nearly a decade younger. Gordon was new to the division—he had worked up in Aroostook County for years—and had never met my father. Many of the other area wardens shared Pulsifer’s hatred for the late Jack Bowditch and still treated me as the son of a cop killer. Jeff White, the other warden present, fell into that category.

“You want to bring me up to speed?” I said.

“CID is controlling the death scene,” said Gordon. “They want as few people as possible disturbing it, which is why we’re down here. Word is it was a regular bloodbath.”

“More like a turkey shoot,” said White.

“And none alive to tell the tale,” added Pulsifer, as if quoting some famous novel I didn’t recognize.

“So most of them were shot in their bunks?” I asked.

“All of them except Wallace Bickford,” said Pulsifer. “He must have been out taking a leak, because when Clegg found his body, the old dude’s wang was hanging out of his union suit.”

Poor Wally, I thought. A pathetic ending to a pathetic life.

“What about Foss?” I asked.

“Clegg found him outside his trailer,” said Pulsifer. “Don must have heard the shots and screams, because he came out with a big old Ruger 500. Got a couple of pops off, too, before the shooter made Swiss cheese out of his face.”

“Any sign that the shooter was wounded in the exchange?” I asked.

“No,” said Gordon. “This guy knew what he was doing. He made sure to walk on the road and keep to the heavily traveled paths. It’s going to be wicked tough picking out his boot prints from all the others.”

“What about tire tracks?”

Pulsifer removed his glove and used his index finger to trace a wavy line on the snow-dotted map. “My guess is he took a snowmobile up here. There’s a spur trail a quarter mile away that goes across a bridge over the Dead River and up past Kennebago Settlement. It connects with Route Eighty-nine of the ITS on one end and the Black Fly Loop on the other. I can ride from my house here and cross only two paved roads.”

“Which means he could have gone anywhere,” said Gordon. “And he has a full day’s start on us, too.”

“What did he use for rounds, .223’s?” I asked.

“No, .300 Blackouts,” said Jeff White.

Now that was interesting. I hadn’t come across many hunters who used that particular cartridge. “Aren’t .300 Blackouts supposed to be a good fit for a gun with a suppressor?”

“Quieter than a vulture’s sneeze,” said Pulsifer.

“His choice of cartridges is distinctive,” I said. “Maybe the detectives can use that.”

Jeff White turned his head toward me, blinding me with his headlamp. He was a veteran officer who worked out of Kingfield and was one of the wardens my father had bested time and time again. “Maybe you should go up there and help them out.”