Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(83)

I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard the insult. “Has anyone spoken with Logan Dyer yet?”

“Can’t find him,” said Gordon.

“I heard his dogs baying inside his house.” I turned toward Pulsifer. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you? That he would leave them alone?”

Pulsifer adjusted the strap of his headlight. “Yeah, I’m sure we’re going to get word that he’s a person of interest. Adam Langstrom, too.”

“Langstrom?” asked Jeff White. “Isn’t he dead?”

“Someone with his blood type bled a lot in his truck,” I said.

“I heard he and Foss had a fight,” said Pulsifer. “Maybe he came back looking to even the score.”

“By massacring everyone?” The disbelief in my voice seemed strident in my own ears.

And where had Pulsifer heard that Adam had tussled with Foss? Gary hadn’t been in the room for my conversation with Wallace Bickford. And I had never mentioned the black eye to him.

“For all we know,” I said, “what happened to Langstrom could have been a dry run for what happened here last night.”

“You mean someone’s on a rampage, executing sex offenders?” said Pulsifer. He sounded more excited than horrified.

“Just once I wish things would happen like they do on TV,” said Jeff White. “You know, the killer leaves a partial thumbprint on the dead man’s eyeball.”

“Except Foss doesn’t have eyeballs anymore,” said Pulsifer.

“There is that,” said Gordon.





32

What was so surreal was that it had become a beautiful night: the snow drifting through the beams of the headlamps, the frosted boughs of the evergreens, the pools of violet shadows at the edge of the light. The dreamlike scene reminded me of a Japanese woodblock print I had seen at the Colby Museum when I was a student there. Those college days seemed so long ago now. I had traveled so far since then.

I had to remind myself of the horrible event that had brought us all here. Up the hill, out of sight, evidence technicians were snapping photographs. A K-9 and its handler were running tracks between the buildings, searching for something, anything. Some unlucky cops had been given the task of bagging the dead bodies. The senior officers were on their phones with state police headquarters and the FBI, planning next steps. Because of the darkness and the absence of leads, the manhunt hadn’t yet begun.

But down at the gate, the woods seemed eerily serene. There was not a hint of wind. Fat flakes of snow floated nearly straight down. We were all waiting for orders, and there was nothing to do until the instructions came down from on high.

Not everyone was as spellbound as I was.

Jeff White stamped his booted feet to drive blood into them. “This waiting around is bullshit. What if this maniac is on a killing spree? He could be headed to Sugarloaf or Widowmaker next.”

“This wasn’t random,” said Gordon. “Our guy has a hatred of sex offenders.”

“Who doesn’t?” said White. “You might as well add half the people in the county to the suspect list, including me.”

“Are you confessing, Jeff?” asked Pulsifer, giving White one of his grins.

“I won’t be crying in my pillow tonight,” White said. “I’ll admit that much.”

Jeff White reminded me of Tommy Volk and some of the other wardens I knew who believed in a code of rough justice they’d picked up from watching Westerns. I had been a history major, and I had read once that the Old West depicted on-screen bore no resemblance to the reality of that era, when men voluntarily surrendered their six-shooters before going into saloons and when bank heists were rare enough to count on two hands. Men like White and Volk preferred the myths, since they validated their own violent preconceptions.

“They didn’t deserve to be gunned down in their sleep, Jeff,” I said.

“Fuck you, Bowditch,” he said by way of a counterargument.

To clear my head, I decided to check on Shadow.

The wolf whined when he caught my scent in the air. I shined my flashlight inside the truck and saw a pool of urine on my passenger seat. I knew I should have let him out sooner.

“Is that him? Is that your wolf dog?” Pulsifer appeared at my shoulder as if from a puff of smoke.

“He’s not mine.”

“Then why are you driving around with him?”

“Because I am trying to find him a home,” I said. “I was in New Hampshire visiting a refuge for wolf hybrids. The people there would have taken him, and they seemed nice enough. I just didn’t like the vibe of the place.”

“You’re too softhearted for this job,” said Pulsifer.

“I’m getting kind of sick of hearing that.”

“I hate to tell you, but Jeff is right,” he said. “Lots of people are going to cheer when they hear a bunch of sexual predators got put down. Whoever did this will end up being a folk hero.”

What if it really had been Adam? Might he have seen executing the other sex offenders as some sort of act of redemption? Hadn’t he told his mother that Pariahville deserved to be burned to the ground?

Pulsifer seemed intrigued by Shadow. “What do you think would happen if you let him out?”

“I’m afraid he’d run off.”