Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(89)
“Christ,” said the trooper. “It’s a goddamned manifesto.”
“That’s why he left his dogs here,” I said. “He doesn’t plan on being taken alive.”
Clegg covered his face with one of his big hands. When he let go, there were red marks in the skin from the pressure of his fingers. “This day just gets worse and worse. I’ve got to call Major Carter.”
The detective stepped aside to place his call. The trooper and the deputy both remained fixated on the manifesto. I could tell they were itching to turn the page and read more but were reluctant to touch it, even wearing gloves.
“It doesn’t sound like him,” I said.
Both men looked at me.
“Dyer has a speech impediment, which makes people think he’s dumb. I don’t think he is, exactly. But these words don’t sound anything like him. The man shovels snow for a living.”
“Maybe he took courses online,” said the deputy. He hadn’t meant the comment to sound as stupid as it did.
It wasn’t my job to deconstruct Dyer’s prose style, in any case. I needed to find his wounded dog and either save its life or end its suffering. I repositioned the snowshoes under my arm and stepped back outside into the picture-perfect winter evening.
*
The two frostbitten deputies were still standing at the intersection, directing traffic, but they had been joined by half a dozen vans and SUVs painted with the logos of television stations from across Maine.
I didn’t want to roll down my window to ask which way the dog had gone. I knew one of the reporters would use the opportunity to stick a camera and microphone in my face. Fortunately, one of the deputies guessed what I was doing and pointed me in the right direction after he moved his cruiser aside for me to get out.
As soon as I was past the last parked vehicle, I hit the gas until I began to fishtail. In the bed of the truck, the dog carrier shifted and Shadow yelped; I hadn’t secured it as well as I should have. I let up on the pedal. That would be the last straw: careening off the road on live television and sending a caged wolf tumbling into space.
I shouldn’t drive too fast anyway, I thought. I didn’t want to miss a sign. The cold was probably crusting the blood on the dog’s pelt. But every once in a while, I caught sight of a print in my high beams. The wounded animal seemed not to want to leave the flat openness of the road for the deep snow. Only if it felt cornered would it seek cover in the trees. Or so I hoped.
After a mile, I happened to glance in my rearview and saw headlights approaching quickly from behind. They seemed low to the ground. The car behind me accelerated when it was twenty feet from my rear bumper. I tapped the brakes to put a scare into the driver. But he just swung out into the passing lane and gunned his engine.
It was a Mercedes coupe with a Thule ski box, a New York plate, and a Sugarloaf sticker. The idiot at the wheel probably hadn’t even realized I was a law-enforcement officer. The anger that had been simmering inside me for hours seemed to reach a sudden boil. I was just about to hit my blue lights and push the gas pedal to the floor when a voice in my head—Stacey’s voice—told me to take a breath.
Of all the things that had happened throughout the day, this was what had finally set me off? An entitled * from out of state driving too fast on a snowy road?
Rage could make a man so stupid.
I thought of Logan Dyer, sitting in his dark, damp living room, pointing a pretend gun at a flickering television screen, imagining that the creatures he was blasting into oblivion weren’t aliens or monsters, but, instead, the real men living a mile up the road. At a certain point, he had stopped seeing his neighbors as human beings at all. In his twisted imagination, they had become tumors to be cut from the flesh before the corruption festered.
If he was using the registry of sex offenders as his guide, then at least we might have a chance. We could be relatively certain the name of his next victim was on a list we already possessed. “Pick a pervert,” as Jeff White had said.
But who said Dyer was using the registry?
That had been the assumption we’d made after we’d gotten word about the other man, Ducharme. Because his name was on the list, we had leaped to the conclusion that the next person Dyer targeted would also be found online. It was the rationale Major Carter had used to deploy law-enforcement officers to the residences of every registered sex offender within a hundred-mile radius.
But what if it wasn’t so? What if Dyer was merely working off his own local knowledge of who was and wasn’t a “pervert”?
Pulsifer had said that Ducharme had been banned from businesses in the area as part of a coordinated campaign.
Nathan Minkowski had also been banned—at least while in drag—from the Bigelow General Store.
Except Mink wasn’t a sex offender. He was, to the best of my knowledge, a law-abiding person. He just happened to like dressing up in women’s clothes and parading around in public. In the eyes of a man like Logan Dyer, though, that made him a carrier of moral disease, a vector of contagion, a cancer to be excised. I remember the contempt in Dyer’s eyes when he saw Mink riding beside me in my Scout.
If Mink’s name wasn’t on the registry, it meant no one was protecting him.
The strange little man had no idea of the evil that might be headed his way.
*
The road up to Kennebago Settlement had a four-inch coating of snow unmarked by tire tracks. No one had been in or out for hours, at least by conventional motor vehicle. But a man on a snowmobile had other ways of gaining access to the isolated homesteads on the northern slopes of East Kennebago Mountain.