Damaged Goods: A Jack McMorrow Mystery Read online

“Here he is,” he said, pointed to the road.

  I didn’t see anything at first, but then they emerged from the dust. Tire tracks curling across the road, headed for the remnant of a tractor path, now just two faint lines in dense grass and burdocks. Between the tracks, the growth was brushed back, like freshly combed hair.

  “He’s still in there,” Clair said.

  I nodded, opened the door, and went to the front of the truck to lock the hubs on the front wheels. I heard a click as Clair put the truck in four-wheel-drive. I got back in, easing the door shut. He turned off the road into the dappled shadows.

  The path went straight in for thirty yards, then veered to the left and down. We’d both walked this land hunting deer and knew that the track went through the woods for about a quarter mile, eventually ending in an overgrown pasture. I tried to remember if there was a turnaround, picturing a place where the track widened under a stand of pines.

  Clair eased the truck along and it lurched into a mud hole, out the other side. I could see the pines up ahead. No Jeep. We drove on, Clair keeping to the track, brush scraping the sides of the truck.

  “There,” I said.

  Ahead to our right was a glint of metal. We drove closer, saw the front end of the Jeep protruding from the brush, fifty yards off the track. He’d backed in.

  We stopped. There was no one in sight. Clair turned off and drove through the grass. He stopped fifty feet from the Jeep and shut off the motor. We sat for a minute and listened, watching the woods.

  Nothing showed. Nothing moved.

  We got out and walked to the Jeep and were about to look inside when there was a rustle in the brush, then a crash, a flash of white as the guy ran deeper into the woods.

  Clair trotted to the truck, reached the shotgun from the rack.

  “Flank him,” he said. “Get up behind the stone wall. I’ll drive him from this direction.”

  As I started through the trees, I heard the snick of shells being pumped into the gun.

  The clearing under the pines gave way quickly to poplars and birches and I slipped between them looking for a deer trail that wove up into the pastures. I found it, just a faint impression in a grove of ferns and skunk cabbage, and I turned onto it and broke into a trot. The trail led through boggy bottomland and then back up. I slogged through mud, stumbled up an embankment, turned sideways to slip between the dense trunks of alders. The alders gave way to swamp maples and then I was into spruce and hemlock and finally into grass and burdocks and clumps of ash. I leapt the wall, and moved on the far side of it to my left, the general direction he had been heading.

  After a hundred yards, I paused and listened. From the distance came the sound of someone breaking through brush. I crouched behind the wall, peered into the woods.

  And there he was.

  The arms showed first, disembodied in the shadows, brushing branches aside. Then the rest of him, emerging from the leaves and brambles. He was big, heavy, bearded. The hat and T-shirt were black and sweat-stained. As he approached, I could hear him panting.

  I eased down lower, watching from the wall. He carried a small green bag, like Army surplus, slung over his shoulder.

  He paused and stood fifty yards from me, listening. He switched the bag to his other shoulder, then suddenly turned west, bounding through the brush and quickly disappearing.

  I jumped back over the wall, started after him, in a crouch, pushing branches aside. Then I stopped. Listened.

  Heard nothing but birds.

  He’d stopped, too, somewhere ahead of me. I began walking, freezing every ten feet to listen and peer into the trees.

  A hundred feet. Two hundred. I was in an opening now, hemlocks growing on the side of a steep ridge, trunks big enough for a man to hide behind.

  I moved cautiously down the grade, sliding on the bed of needles. Caught the side of a trunk and, as I eased past it, he broke from the other side.

  He was running but heavily, boots pounding as he slogged up the side of the ridge. I bolted after him, gaining quickly. When I was almost on him, he slipped, fell to his knees, came up and turned, a four-foot branch in his hand. He swung it like a sword and I jumped back, slid, and started to fall. He came sliding after me, boot heels digging into the soil under the hemlock needles. As I raised myself up, the branch whipped at my head and I jerked back. His momentum spun him and he fell, tumbling past me.

  I leaped and landed on him and we rolled down the hill, into a tree, and he was on top of me, a crushing weight, and I kneed him in the crotch and he gasped and fell back, scrambling backwards, grabbing for anything, coming up with a chunk of tree limb, a two-foot club.

  He was on his feet, coming toward me, breathing heavily, teeth clenched behind the beard. He charged, the club raised.

  And there was a blast.

  He froze. On top of the ridge above us, Clair jacked another shell into the chamber.

  “Next one puts you down,” he said.

  “Hey, I ain’t doing—”

  “Drop the stick,” Clair said, the calm in his voice chilling as a scream.

  The guy hesitated, then tossed the club and it slid and stopped. Clair started down the embankment, the shotgun slung under his arm.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, moving closer, looking him over. He was in his thirties, big but out of shape.

  “Nothin’.”

  Behind the black beard his eyes were small and dark. On his right arm was a tattoo of a bird, with tail feathers spread like a peacock. On his left wrist was a snake.

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” he shot back.

  “We can just run the plate on the Jeep,” I said.

  “You a cop? Game wardens undercover? ’Cause I—”

  “Private property,” I said, as Clair moved up to my right, out of range of a leap that would get the guy the gun.

  “Hey, I just was looking for a place to smoke a joint, you know? I thought you guys was cops. What are you, some crazy farmers or something?”

  “Something,” I said.

  “Well, I wasn’t gonna hurt nothing. Smoke a joint, take a little walk in the woods, head for home.”

  “Where’s home?” I said.

  He paused. “East Boothbay,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Driving down the main road, decided to have a smoke, you know? Kept driving until I found a good place.”

  “You’ve been up and down this road all day,” Clair said.

  “Just a coupla times. Once on the way, once on the way back.”

  “From where?”

  “Waterville. My girlfriend lives there.”

  “Where’s the bag?” I said.

  “What bag?”

  “The bag you had. The green Army thing.”

  “I don’t have no goddamn bag.”

  “Not now you don’t. But I saw it. You had it on your shoulder.”

  He shook his head. “You musta been seeing things.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I said. “You want to walk home? ’Cause we can blow the crap outta your car. A little target practice.”

  “That’s against the law.”

  “Where’s the bag?”

  He hesitated. “Okay. I tossed it.”

  “Where?”

  He motioned toward the woods. “Somewheres out there. It was just some dope. I thought you was cops.”

  I looked at Clair. “He’s lying,” I said.

  “You ain’t cops,” the guy said. “You can’t hold me here.”

  “Because we ain’t cops,” I said, “we can do anything we want.”

  He stared at me, black eyes darting from me to Clair and back.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said. “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

  “We can hold you until the authorities get here. You can explain why you were trespassing.”

  “You own this property?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What, you own the whole—”<
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  He caught himself again.

  “I’m going. Right now,” he said. He looked at Clair. “So be careful with that thing, man. You could hurt somebody.” And he put his hands up, started walking, moving away from us twenty feet before starting up the embankment.

  Clair looked at me.

  “Wilton had the same tattoo,” I said. “The snake on his hand.”

  We watched him walk into the brush.

  “You got the plate number?” I said.

  “All set,” Clair said.

  “I think he knows who I am,” I said.

  “I caught that. The land thing.”

  “I’m gonna find that bag,” I said.

  I backtracked to the place where I’d watched him from behind the stone wall. At that point, he’d had the bag and had started running. I’d trailed him more or less directly, too close behind for him to diverge far from the path I had taken.

  I stood behind the wall again, then started walking. I tried to estimate how far he could fling the bag if he had thrown it. In the trees, it was unlikely it would travel more than forty or fifty feet before hitting something.

  So every twenty feet along my path, I stopped and turned off. I walked slowly fifty feet into the brush, zigzagging to increase my coverage. I pushed alders aside, scuffed through patches of ferns. I looked up into the trees, in case the bag had hung up in the branches. When one pass was done, I did the same on the other side of my path. And then I walked twenty feet and started again.

  The light was dim under the canopy of hardwoods and visibility was poor in the spruce thickets. Scuffling through the boggy stretches unleashed clouds of mosquitoes that swarmed around my head.

  After an hour, I’d found a couple of mud-caked beer bottles. The remnant of a barbed-wire fence, trees grown up and encasing the wire so the trunks looked impaled. Unidentifiable pieces of rusty metal, a single rotted work boot.

  I was halfway to the ridge, where our friend had come out from behind the hemlock, when I heard someone coming through the trees. It was Clair, still carrying the shotgun, and he started to help, brushing blackberry bushes aside with the barrel of the gun.

  We worked our way through the grid. Clair found old shotgun shells, a rusted hubcap from an ancient Ford. Clair flushed a snowshoe hare, in summer brown and gray. I found a horseshoe, wondered if it would bring me luck. Clair saw garter snakes, sent them slithering into the brush; I nearly walked face first into a paper wasp nest, hanging like a Chinese lantern from a birch branch.

  I swatted at deer flies trying to burrow into my hair. Clair found a brassiere, disintegrating in a patch of grass. Then I saw a green canvas bag, the strap protruding from under a clump of ferns.

  “I got it,” I shouted, and Clair hurried over. When he got to me I was crouching in the ferns, oblivious to the mosquitoes biting my forearms and neck because I had the bag. I stood and held it out to Clair, pulling the top open wide. A pair of latex gloves, used. A pink pillowcase, wrapped up neatly. A roll of duct tape.

  Chapter 14

  We slammed down the tote road, slowed as Clair scanned for tracks, and saw that the Jeep had taken a left, headed for the main road. We went left and at the first rise, I called the state police. It was hard to explain—a guy in the woods with duct tape, my wife working for the Department of Health and Human Services. The dispatcher asked how long the vehicle had been gone and I said ten minutes. She asked me to describe it and then asked if I knew its direction of travel. I told her what I knew and she took my name and number again, said a trooper would be in touch.

  Then we were back at Clair’s. Roxanne’s car was in the driveway. I left the bag in the truck and went in. Clair went to put the shotgun away in the shop.

  They were all in the kitchen: Mandi sitting at the table, her leg stretched out in front of her. Mary was at the sink, washing lettuce from the garden. Roxanne was leaning against the counter, talking to Mandi. Sophie was lying on her stomach in the middle of the floor, still drawing.

  “Daddy,” she said. “I drew Mandi but I made her all better.”

  She held up a paper, a figure of a woman in a dress, two legs, two arms, and a big smile.

  “Hey, honey,” Roxanne said. “Thought we’d lost you.”

  “Went down the road,” I said, and smiled. “Clair will be right in.”

  I went to Roxanne, touched her arm. Mandi looked at me, grinned and said, “I feel like a princess here, being waited on like this.”

  “I’ll make you a princess,” Sophie said, and she started to draw a crown above the smiling face.

  “Don’t you worry,” Mary said. “You get back on your feet, we’ll put you right to work.” She shook water out of a head of romaine. “You’re all invited to dinner,” she said. “Chicken on the grill. New potatoes, asparagus, and a nice salad.”

  “I’m sitting next to Mandi,” Sophie said.

  I looked to Roxanne and she nodded.

  “Fine,” she said. “We have some nice wine.”

  “Why don’t we go get it then,” I said, and turned, catching Roxanne’s eye. She turned to follow me, stopped, and glanced at Sophie.

  Mary said, “Oh, she’s fine right there.”

  I walked out to the drive, Roxanne behind me. I went to Clair’s truck and took out the bag. I got into the Subaru and she climbed in, put the key in. She leaned over and kissed me, a glancing but affectionate peck.

  “We have to talk,” I said, the bag on my lap.

  “It’s okay,” Roxanne said, starting the motor. “You’re right. She seems nice. She’s sweet with Sophie. I mean, I’m sure there’s something pretty difficult in her past and she absolutely shouldn’t go back to what she’s been doing. I mean the health risks alone. But maybe we can—”

  “Not that,” I said.

  We were turning around in front of the barn. Roxanne stopped the car in the middle of the barnyard. She saw Clair cross in front of the window above the workbench. He was carrying the shotgun.

  “What?” she said.

  I told her about the Jeep, the guy in the woods. I held up the bag. She looked at it like it might explode. I opened it and she peered inside, blanched.

  “Oh, my God,” Roxanne said.

  “The Wiltons?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You said you talked to him.”

  “A friend of his? A member of the coven or whatever the hell they call it?”

  “It would be crazy. I mean, there’s a good chance they could get their kids back. With counseling. A safety plan. But this—this would be the end.”

  “We’re talking about a guy who takes his orders from Satan,” I said.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was kind of hard to explain. The trooper is supposed to call back.”

  She looked away.

  “I don’t want to scare Sophie,” Roxanne said.

  “I know. But she should know not to talk to anyone on the road, or anyone coming into the yard. Not that she’ll ever be alone.”

  “Not now,” Roxanne said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Clair will tell Mary. If Mandi’s staying there, she should know, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. I mean, if she’s in the house all day.”

  “I’ve got to call Richard at work,” Roxanne said.

  “The police will come here, I would think.”

  “We can meet them here. Sophie can stay at dinner.”

  The trooper called my cell as I half-heartedly opened the wine. We said Roxanne had to make a quick call for work, and I was going with her. Sophie was standing on a chair at the counter with Mary, arranging slices of cheese on a plate, eating every third one. She didn’t look up, and we left and walked down the road. The trooper pulled into the yard as we got to our door.

  Her name was Danielle Ricci and she was tall and strong, maybe twenty-five, serious, no small talk. We talked in the driveway by her cruiser, a maroon Crown Vic, no bar on the roof, lig
hts in the grille. The radio chirped reassuringly. Ricci took notes on a legal pad in a blue plastic folder. The bag sat on the hood of the car.

  “How far from where you encountered the subject to your property?” she said.

  “A mile,” I said. “Maybe a little more. But rough going, bushwacking your way.”

  “And your friend said he saw the car pass twice?”

  “Three times.”

  “So it could have been more but he might not have noticed?”

  “He doesn’t miss much,” I said.

  “This is the guy who fired the warning shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Clair—”

  “Varney.”

  She wrote that down. Didn’t look up. “Ms. Masterson. I know you said you’re involved in this particular case right now, but are there others that might lead someone to want to harm your child?”

  Roxanne was silent for a moment. Ricci looked up.

  “In the last two months, I’ve pulled seven children from four different households. None of them were happy about it.”

  “Any of them threaten you personally?”

  “You mean call me names? Sure. One woman said she hoped someday I’d know what it felt like, having my kids taken away.”

  “Did you report that?”

  “No, she was drunk. Angry. You get that a lot but they don’t usually act on it.”

  “That all? Threats, I mean?”

  “A mom said she hoped I burned in hell. Her boyfriend said I was lucky I was a woman because if I was a man he’d put me in a coma.”

  Ricci looked up at that one. “But because you’re a woman—”

  “Chivalry is not dead,” I said.

  Ricci looked at me, then got it. “So the one with the burning in hell. Is that these Satan people?”

  “No,” Roxanne said.

  “They don’t believe in Hell like most people,” I said. “They say Jews and Christians came up with it to keep the people in line.”

  “Worked for me,” Ricci said. “Went to Catholic school.”

  “There you go,” I said.

  She scribbled a bit more, then closed the case and capped her pen. “We should be able to find the car,” she said.

  Roxanne and I nodded.

  “And I’ll see if we can get prints off the tape.”