Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(97)

“I heard it was hit by a car,” he told me.

I had hoped the injured animal might still survive. I certainly didn’t blame it for the actions of its vile owner.

Pulsifer and I walked to the bridge.

On too many occasions I had watched the Warden Service dive team retrieve bodies from the water: swimmers who underestimated the currents in a river, snowmobilers who overestimated the thickness of lake ice. Most of the corpses I had seen brought up from the depths had belonged to young people. Younger than thirty. Younger than me. The young and the reckless.

Adam had been only twenty-one.

The river wasn’t particularly deep, and the dark water, when the divers opened a hole, didn’t seem to be moving particularly fast, but I knew that diving is always dangerous, especially under ice.

Mist rose from the moving water—it was so much warmer than the air. It almost seemed as if we were staring into hot springs.

I had expected a long wait, but the divers found Adam on their first descent. He was exactly where Logan Dyer’s manifesto had said he would be. Everything Dyer had told the detectives turned out to be true.

And for reasons I couldn’t explain, it made me all the more certain that he hadn’t acted alone. But what could I do about it? I hadn’t even been able to convince Clegg. I would have to be content in knowing that the man who had pulled the trigger twelve times would spend the rest of his life—however long it was—behind bars. Not all of the wicked are punished in this life; many bad men die peacefully in their sleep. The injustices of this world are why we so desperately dream of a better one yet to come.

The divers laid the corpse on a black tarp that they could zip up to form a bag. Then they began changing hurriedly out of their wet suits. The hole they had made in the ice was already refreezing.

The lifeless thing that they brought up resembled none of the pictures of Adam I had seen. Not the cocksure kid in the photo Amber had left me; not the angry defendant scowling at the camera at his trial; not the damaged ex-con from the sex offender registry. His skin was white, with some blue-and-purple mottling. His hair looked like black kelp except where the bullet had torn away part of his skull. If I hadn’t been told who this sodden, crooked-limbed creature was, I never would have recognized him.

“I believe my testicles have fully retracted,” said Puslifer through chattering teeth. “How about we get going?”

I was about to reply, when I heard shouting start up in the road behind us. The deputy was trying to block a woman from getting past him and rushing to the bridge. I recognized the lipstick red Jeep parked beyond the police cruiser.

Had her friend in the Rangeley police department told her where to go? The woman had a special gift for getting secrets out of men. Without a word to Pulsifer, I started back along the ice-hard road. My bruised knee was as stiff as if it were encased in a metal brace.

“Let me through!” Amber screamed. “He’s my son! He’s my son!”

“You can’t, Amber,” said the deputy.

He was strong, but she drove her boot, hard, into the top of his foot. The man went down, cursing, as if hit by a maul.

I moved to intercept Amber as she surged forward.

She tried to dodge me, but I had played cornerback in high school and knew how to guess which way a running person will turn by watching their hips. I got my arms around her before she could take another step. She tried the same stomp move on me, but I was ready for it.

“Stop, Amber,” I said in her ear. Her hair smelled of marijuana.

“I want to see him.”

“You will.”

From a distance, it must have looked like we were dancing.

“I know you lied to me,” I said. “I know Adam isn’t my brother.”

She ceased to struggle. She turned her anguished face to mine. She hadn’t removed her makeup in a long time, and it was streaked and smeared from her tears. “What?”

“Adam couldn’t have been my dad’s son.”

“But he is.”

I could feel the cold metal of my father’s dog tags against my chest. “My dad had O-negative blood. That’s the same blood type I have. But Adam’s records say he was AB-positive.”

“But I’m AB-positive.”

“A man with an O-negative blood type can’t have a child who is AB. It doesn’t matter what the mother’s blood type is.”

She stared up at me with eyes redder than any I had ever seen. “It’s not true. Adam was Jack’s boy. He was.”

“I don’t know how long you’ve known the truth,” I said. “But you knew you were lying the night you came to me for help. You were desperate and out of options, so you tried the same lie on me that you used on my dad a long time ago. Did he ever believe you?”

Her body grew heavy in my arms. “No. He knew Adam wasn’t his.”

“Then how did you get his dog tags?”

“He left them in my house. They fell between the wall and the bed. We heard A.J. drive up and—”

“Whose son is Adam?” I asked.

She shook her head so that her dirty hair hid her face.

“No one’s,” she said. “Not anymore.” And she began to sob.





37

Two weeks later, on my twenty-ninth birthday, Stacey and I fastened our skis on top of my Scout and we started off into the mountains.