Snakebit, page 2
Volk punched the kid playfully in his bony shoulder and nearly knocked him to the ground.
5
The Mallard Mart in Bridgton was the only store that stayed open twenty-four hours a day. Having two warden trucks in the lot didn’t seem to hurt its late-night business, which was based upon the four staples of rural life: gasoline, beer, cigarettes, and scratch tickets.
Bowditch and Volk leaned over the bed of the younger officer’s GMC, looking at the big cooler into which they’d folded the increasingly rigid snake and half buried it in bagged ice. Both men drank hot coffees, and Volk had a wad of Skoal tucked between his teeth and gums. The imagined flavor combination of black coffee and wintergreen dip made Bowditch want to retch.
“Why were you late, by the way?” he asked. “What happened to you?”
“I found another rattler squashed on Route 11. It had been pretty well flattened, but when I saw it was a dead snake, I thought it was worth pulling over for a look, and sure enough, there was a broken rattle on the tail. I cut it off for testing.” He reached into his pocket to display his prize. “Seriously, Bowditch, what the hell is going on here?”
“It’s like the eleventh plague of Egypt. Someone must’ve seriously pissed off the Big Guy.”
The biblical allusion seemed to befuddle Volk who, normally, would have had a quick rejoinder. Instead he dribbled some tobacco juice onto the black top.
Rather than explain the Book of Exodus, Bowditch changed the subject. “Any news about Jax?”
“Who?”
“Jax Stevenson, the kid who was bitten?”
“The docs think he’s going to pull through. But he will lose the leg. It was swollen up like a balloon animal, I heard.”
The novelty of the injury would once have energized Bowditch, but he was now more likely to imagine the boy’s future as an amputee. On his patrols he found himself confronted daily with the lingering human toll—the horizonless aftermath—of the crimes and crashes he’d attended.
“So tell me about the Goreckis.”
“Husband-and-wife lunatics. He was a big-time professor at some university in Massachusetts before he got fired for having a fling with his student, Fay. They moved up here—this must’ve been nineteen, twenty years ago—and opened a weird little lab in Windham milking venomous snakes to make antivenin. They did tours of the facility and everything. Then, about ten years ago, it all burned down.”
“Ricky suggested it was arson. Did they have enemies?”
The older man expelled a tobacco stream into his now-empty coffee cup. “Ted, the husband, was a zealot. He was trying to force the state to reintroduce timber rattlers into Maine—as if that wasn’t the dumbest idea ever. The media loved those two because Ted made for good stories and Fay was a looker. Swiss Weems, the department snake expert back then, nicknamed them ‘Nut and Honey.’”
In Bowditch’s experience, there was always some group pushing to reintroduce a species that had been long extirpated from Maine. Caribou, wolves, mountain lions—the kinds of animals to which his girlfriend, Stacey, referred as “charismatic megafauna.” Publicly pushing for the state to bring back rattlesnakes struck him as likely to succeed as a campaign to establish breeding populations of black widow spiders and murder hornets.
“I can’t say I’m surprised nothing came of it.”
“All the towns around here started passing ordinances prohibiting people from owning venomous snakes. Everyone was freaked out the Goreckis might secretly breed and release them into the woods. So yeah, you could say they had a few enemies who might’ve wanted to torch their business. I don’t remember what the fire marshal determined about the cause.”
“I still don’t understand why I’ve never heard of these people if they were so infamous.”
“Because, after the fire, they gave it all up.”
“What do you mean ‘gave it all up’?”
“Honestly, I was under the impression they moved away or … something. The last time I heard Ted’s name was when he cosigned a letter of support when Massachusetts wanted to turn an island in the Quabbin Reservoir into a sanctuary for rattlesnakes. I remember reading the letter online and seeing his attached name and thinking it was like hearing the voice of the dead.”
Bowditch followed a moth with his eyes as it ascended into the false moon of the arc light above. He’d been feeling bored and stuck in his job, but this bizarre incident had shaken him out of his mild depression. He felt his mind fully engaged by the problem of determining where the snakes were coming from. He needed to know if Jax Stevenson had been the victim of a crime or simply gross misfortune.
“I got a call from a woman yesterday reporting seeing another rattler on Black Cat Mountain.”
“Who was she?”
“A hiker. She didn’t give me her name. I had a look along the trail but didn’t come across so much as a garter snake.”
Volk crumpled the coffee cup in his strong hand. “I don’t trust anyone who won’t give me their name. Anonymous people are always playing an angle. What have they got to hide?”
“Everyone has something,” said Bowditch.
“Now you’ve got me wondering about you,” the older man said without a trace of irony.
6
Bowditch couldn’t sleep. His girlfriend Stacey was away with college roommates on a canoe trip down the wild St. John River, and he missed not just her presence but also her counsel. She worked as a state wildlife biologist, and even though her area of expertise was moose, she could have helped him make sense of this sudden reptilian invasion.
He grabbed his laptop and propped it against his knees in bed and began searching the web for information about the Goreckis.
They made quite a couple. In photographs and several old video clips, Ted appeared every bit the severe and humorless ex-academic: a bespectacled man of late middle age with a jutting chin, a butting forehead, and a wide lipless mouth. Volk had mentioned him being disabled, but at the time, Ted showed no signs of physical limitations. If anything, he seemed robust.
Fay, the wife, was indeed a honey with honey-colored hair cut in a Joan of Arc style and eyes as hot as coals still smoldering in the first light of dawn following an auto-da-fé.
Ted was undeniably quotable. In an interview with the defunct Maine Times, he’d remarked, “Of course rattlesnakes are dangerous! They’re dangerous in what they reveal about our prejudices. These shy animals threaten any claim humans have to being morally and intellectually evolved. No wonder people fear and hate them.”
Fay Gorecki came across as more measured. “All we’re suggesting is speeding along the inevitable,” she was quoted as saying. “Timber rattlesnakes are already repopulating their native range across the Northeast. They’re in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and will be here in Maine eventually. We should welcome these wonderful creatures home from their banishment.”
Before sunrise, Bowditch dashed off an email to the retired head of the wildlife division. Swiss Weems had been the Goreckis’ favorite punching bag during their quixotic campaign.
The warden was surprised to receive an answer from the man—a fellow insomniac, seemingly—almost at once.
“Those two were the banes of my existence for a few years, I don’t mind saying. They walked right up to the legal line of defamation and criminal threatening. There were times, after a contentious public meeting, I thought I might find a rattlesnake under the seat of my vehicle. I worried about their sanity and the well-being of their kids. They have two daughters, I believe. What I’ve never understood is why they disappeared so utterly. The Goreckis didn’t go out with a bang or a whimper. They just vanished one day. I would’ve thought they’d moved away if I didn’t hear people say they saw Fay occasionally at the supermarket in Webbs Mills.”
Bowditch typed: “What about the girls? Their daughters? People must see them around. ”
“Homeschooled, I expect.”
Leaving his bed, Bowditch decided he would detour past the Gorecki farm on his way to Augusta to deliver the snake to the state herpetologist for dissection.
As he set out on his journey, he could see the planet Venus, a burning ball in a sky from which all the darkness was draining.
He circled the north shore of Sebago Lake, looking for but not finding any road-killed snakes, although he counted two dead snapping turtles and greasy spots that had recently been frogs. From Webbs Mills, he turned off the paved road onto a rattling gravel track named Rolfe Brook Road. He was beginning to recall the place now from his early patrols, when he’d been exploring his new district, its pine barrens and leatherleaf bogs, trying to commit the land to memory with the focus of a straight-A student trying to memorize an epic poem.
The property abutted the south side of Rattlesnake Mountain where the cliffs tumbled down to a particularly forbidding wetland. The woods had been heavily and repeatedly cut at the base, leaving the trees stunted as if they were in no hurry to grow tall enough to attract the interest of greedy men with saws and axes. He saw turkey vultures riding the thermals above the rocky summit, a red-tailed hawk among them.
Even before the Goreckis’ fields came into view, he encountered the first warnings. In addition to the razor wire, the owners had properly posted their acreage with signs spaced no less than one hundred feet apart so that no trespasser could seriously claim to have wandered in without seeing one.
The Goreckis had also allowed bushes to grow up as a partial screen: a dusty partition of sumacs, dogwoods, and viburnums hiding their land from prying eyes. But the shrubs made for an imperfect wall. Between the insect-attracting blossoms, he could see a weathered farmhouse that should have been larger—an original wing had seemingly been torn down—leaving the structure unbalanced as if it some essential part of it had been amputated. A panel of glass was missing from an upstairs window; one door had come off its hinges and was awaiting repair. Nearby was a barn in even worse shape. If not for the Subaru parked in the dooryard, he might have assumed the property had been abandoned years earlier.
Bowditch lifted his foot from the brake and idled forward to the driveway where a cable gate blocked him from proceeding up to the farmhouse.
He had just climbed out of the truck when he glimpsed a female figure leave the house and cross to the barn.
“Hello!”
The woman froze like a prey animal that was trying not to be seen against its background. She wore denim overalls. Her short hair might have been prematurely gray. But Bowditch had no doubt she was Fay Gorecki.
The woman refused to answer or move. The air rippled with heat rising from the baked earth. In her motionlessness, she seemed to be steadily losing definition behind the distorting haze.
“Mrs. Gorecki? Can I have a word with you?”
He stepped up to the taut cable to signal he wouldn’t be leaving without a conversation.
Still she remained motionless.
“I only want to ask you a few questions,” he said, trying to project his voice without shouting. “I want to talk with you about rattlesnakes.”
The Goreckis raised vegetables—he spotted a field already tangled with squash, an acre of young corn behind it—but he saw no livestock, not even chickens. And yet a familiar yet unexplained odor hung on the air. He smelled what he was half-sure were rabbit hutches, but no cages were visible.
She put down a galvanized bucket she’d been carrying. Even from this distance, he could feel the dark intensity of her gaze boring into him.
Finally, she spoke. “I can’t help you.”
He glimpsed someone in the upstairs window of the house now. He had the impression, from the posture and the narrow silhouette, that it might be an adolescent girl. The younger of the two daughters?
Bowditch tried to put a little lightness into his tone. “Would you mind coming closer so I could explain without yelling?”
“I’m not going to help you,” Fay Gorecki said.
The firmness of her refusal didn’t give him reason to think he could cajole or sweet-talk her.
He raised his voice. “In the past few days, three timber rattlesnakes have been reported in the vicinity. People are saying the snakes escaped from your farm.”
“We don’t breed snakes.” She declined to approach any closer. “Not anymore. Not for a long time.”
“But you did.”
“I’m not going to help you. You’re only wasting your time. I have work to do. Don’t come back here.”
And with that, she turned on her heels, picked up her pail, and, deaf to his entreaties, disappeared into the maw of the ancient barn. The girl in the window had also vanished, he realized.
7
At the department headquarters in Augusta, it wasn’t just the state biologists who were eager to see the rattler but everyone from the senior wardens to the license clerks in their cubicles. Many took snapshots with their phones of the snake stretched across Bowditch’s tailgate until the commissioner learned about the commotion in the building and came out of her office to warn them that any employee caught posting a picture online would be strung up by their toes.
“I won’t have a panic about poisonous snakes in Casco,” she said.
“Venomous snakes,” Bowditch corrected her.
The commissioner had been a major donor to the governor’s election and knew little about the outdoors aside from the ski slopes at Sugarloaf and the posh golf club in Belgrade where she was a member.
“Excuse me?” she said.
It was generally known in the building that no one talked back to the commissioner, least of all a junior warden.
“Poisonous means that they’re dangerous to eat. Venomous means that they secrete toxins to paralyze and kill their prey.”
The staff who hadn’t already scattered fell silent. No one corrected the commissioner.
She pulled at an earlobe in which was set a fourteen-karat gold hoop. “You know what I meant. Now why don’t you stop acting like a teenager and get back to the work the state pays you to do.”
Instead of leaving, however, Bowditch made his way to the office of the woman who kept the archives of permits issued by the department to individuals and organizations to own “restricted species.” Reptiles belonging to the family Viperidae were Category 1 Restricted Species—along with exotic animals ranging from zebras to kookaburras—meaning the state of Maine made prospective owners fill out copious forms to prove they had legitimate reasons to import these luckless creatures and hold them in captivity.
The clerk found the folder of documents—actual hard copies, because the materials were so old—pertaining to the Goreckis when they ran their lab providing venom to biotech firms to make CroFab antivenin. Ted and Fay hadn’t just farmed timber rattlesnakes, he learned, but also more dangerous species, such as diamondbacks, coral snakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths. The file included import forms and annual reports from wildlife inspectors who had visited the Goreckis’ facility.
“There’s nothing here about the fire,” Bowditch said to the clerk.
“There wouldn’t be, Mike,” she told him. “If the snakes all died, the owners would have just stopped renewing their permit applications since there were no critters left.”
This assumption bothered Bowditch.
Had state inspectors simply taken Ted’s and Fay’s words that no serpents had survived the blaze?
“There’s nothing in here about the Goreckis continuing as private individuals to own pit vipers,” he said.
“If they are, they are violating the law.”
This, too, struck Bowditch as suspicious. Fire or no, surely a noted herpetologist like Theodore Gorecki wouldn’t have adopted a snakeless existence. People don’t surrender their passions without a knock-down, drag-out fight.
He paused at the door of the Warden Service’s second-highest ranking officer, Major Patrick Shorey, but was stopped before he could enter the room, let alone take a seat.
“I have a meeting in five, Bowditch.”
“This will just take a minute.”
The major had let it be known in the bureau that he considered Bowditch to be an arrogant, insubordinate asshole and the worst hiring mistake he’d made.
“The answer is no,” Shorey said, rising from behind his desk.
“I haven’t asked the question.”
“The answer is still—”
“There’s circumstantial evidence that the rattlesnake that bit Jax Stevenson came from a farm owned by a couple named Ted and Fay Gorecki.”
He held up his hand before the warden could speak again. “And you’d like my help securing a warrant to search their property for other contraband rattlers? The answer is no.”
“At least let me lay out my case—”
“I have an important meeting.”
“And three rattlesnakes being reported within a ten-mile radius of their farm is unimportant? What happened to Jax Stevenson is already in the news. The media is going to be all over us to find out where these animals are coming from.”
“I’m not saying the situation is unimportant,” Shorey said, approaching the doorway in which Bowditch stubbornly hovered. “I’m saying it’s too important to be handled by an immature officer who can’t obey a simple order to get the hell out of my office. I’m giving this one to Volk.”
Shorey’s insistence on rewarding stupidity made Bowditch understand, finally, the crux of his career crisis. The young warden was derided by the brass as a troublesome know-it-all—which he certainly could be—but these same officers refused to give him opportunities to prove himself. And by so doing, they stood in the way of his advancement to a detective-level position where he could put his intelligence and grit to better use. Endless shifts spent inspecting motorboats for milfoil was penance for the sins of his ambition.
Bowditch was done playing coy. “Tommy isn’t up to the job.”
“I’ll let him know you said that.”
“This can go wrong all kinds of ways, Major. You know I’m the right person to manage his case.”
