The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

worked.
    Yellow police tape marked the spot where the cruiser had crashed off the road. The car had plunged twenty or so feet down, ripping off alder branches and evergreen boughs before landing sideways in a couple of feet of marshy muck. This was the manhunt’s inner perimeter, the zone where searchers would concentrate their efforts and expand out.
    I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Earlier this morning, Pete Twombley drove out alone to Rum Pond on his own authority, but to do what? Accuse my dad of murder? Twombley should have called for backup after things turned ugly, but instead he’d proceeded with my father toward the jail in Skowhegan. From Rum Pond, traveling along logging roads, it would have taken them at least an hour to reach this spot, at which point the cruiser went off the road. And Twombley was incapacitated long enough for my dad to take his weapons. Or so the deputy claimed.
    My father had been arrested before; he knew when a bogus charge wouldn’t stick. Did he think he was being set up? Again I came back to the question: If he was innocent, why had he fled?
     
    As the nearest government building with working phone lines, the Otter Brook Fish Hatchery was the logical site for a command post. It occupied a cluster of white clapboard buildings arranged around a long row of roofed spillways and tanks. The compound stank like a chicken farm from the meal pellets they fed the trout.
    In front of the old office loomed the State Police Mobile Crime Unit, an enormous white-and-blue motor coach nearly the size of the building itself. An ambulance, state police cruisers, patrol cars from Somerset and Franklin counties, warden trucks, and unmarked Dodge Chargers were gathered in the gravel lot.
    We went inside. There must have been twenty uniformed officers crowded into that dimly lit space. But the one I zeroed in on was Sheriff Hatch. He was leaning over a topo map spread out across a table, the center of attention. The room smelled of too-warm bodies and coffee brewing.
    Dim as it was, I kept my shades on, not wanting to make eye contact.
    The sheriff glanced up at me and scowled. “What’s he doing here?”
    “You want to step outside for a minute, Bowditch,” said the lieutenant.
    “No problem.”
    Why was I so surprised by their reactions? As a family member of a suspected cop killer, I should by all rights have been barred from the scene—would have been barred if not for the lieutenant. Uniform or not, I was the son of the fugitive they were all hunting. My loyalties were necessarily suspect.
    I drifted over to the nearest spillway. A slanting roof covered the sluice. Beneath the rippling surface of the water the blurred shapes of rainbow trout flashed like silver coins at the bottom of a fountain. I closed my eyes and imagined myself on the Kennebago River casting an emerger over a quiet stream, caddis flies rising around me, the sun hot on my neck.
    “Mike Bowditch?”
    I turned around. It was a man I’d never seen before. He was a muscular guy—a weekend weight lifter, by the looks of him—maybe forty years old, with a graying crew cut and close-set brown eyes. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and a navy tie still tightly knotted despite the heat of the day. There was a holster and a badge clipped to his belt.
    He held out his hand for me to shake. “I’m Wayne Soctomah.”
    “You’re investigating the homicides.”
    “Detective Menario and I are. The sheriff told me you spoke with your father last night.”
    “Not exactly. He left a message on my answering machine.”
    “You mind if I ask you a few questions about it?”
    “No.”
    I expected him to pull out a tape recorder, just like the sheriff did, but he didn’t even take notes. He asked exactly what I’d heard on my answering machine, and I told him, word for word.
    “Do you have any idea who the woman was with him?”
    “A girlfriend, I’d imagine. My dad is something of a ladies’ man.” I nearly said
lady-killer
.
    “No one in particular?”
    “Not that I know about. But we haven’t spoken in years.”
    “Do you remember him ever mentioning Wendigo Timber?”
    “No. The last time I saw him, this was still APP land.” I decided to see how far I could push my luck. “Look, I know your investigation is ongoing, but can you tell me anything about what happened up here last night? I read in the paper about the meeting at the Dead River Inn. Do you think it was connected to the