Snakebit, page 5
Bowditch lifted his foot from the gas pedal. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m turning around and going home.”
“Like hell you are.”
“Now isn’t the time for us to bust down their door. We need to come up with a plan, Tommy. I’m pretty sure this is a setup.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What?”
“I don’t believe you’re turning around. I know you’re going to the farm alone. You want to prove to Shorey that he was wrong handing the case to me. You want to show how smart you are again, because you’re an arrogant prick.”
Bowditch pulled over, braking so hard his tires slid on the sand shoulder. “I swear that’s not it. Tommy—?”
But Volk had disconnected.
He tried calling back.
No answer.
Now he had no choice but to continue to the Gorecki farm if only to keep Volk from going in first with his gun drawn.
Ricky Elwell had called him back while he’d been on the line with Tommy.
“Nobody remembers seeing Naja,” the young butcher reported. “But the gravel pit wasn’t, like, super well lighted. It wouldn’t be a real party if you couldn’t sneak off into the shadows to do the dirty.”
“Is it strange she wasn’t there? Wouldn’t Naja Gorecki have been at a party just over the ridge from her house?”
“She’s not real social. Her folks homeschool her.”
Bowditch drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “What about a boyfriend? You don’t know if she has one?”
“You mean like Jax Stevenson? I can see where you’re going with this. The guy is a well-known player. It’s possible he hooked up with her, but if so…”
“What?”
Ricky paused to take a drag from his perennial cigarette. “There’s been something bothering me about how Jax got bit.”
“Go on.”
“Rattlesnakes are, like, shy and reclusive critters. They might be deaf, but they can pick up vibrations through the ground.”
“Like the idling of pickup trucks and the bass line of loud music blasting from a speaker.”
“That party would have been torture for that serpent’s nerves. We’re talking a mega-seismic disturbance. With all those people dancing and what have you, it should have slithered off.”
“Ricky, you are a zoological prodigy.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, man.”
“For all the help you’ve given me, I have a reward you’re going to appreciate. I managed to find another rattlesnake for you—if you don’t mind this one having a bullet hole through the head.”
Ricky laughed hoarsely. “Warden B., I believe you and I are going to be good friends.”
In the silence that followed the end of the call, Bowditch stared at the still-lighted phone screen.
After a moment, he tapped to open the web browser. He typed “Naja Gorecki” into the search box, but there were no matches. He tried again, using only her first name.
Naja is a genus of venomous elapid snakes commonly known as cobras.
The photo that illustrated the entry showed a rearing serpent with its doll eyes focused, its hood spread, ready to strike.
14
Rounding the last turn before the farm, he spotted, through the trees, pulsing blue lights as if multiple UFOs had set down in the cornfield. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand how other police vehicles had arrived first at the scene.
Two of the cruisers were black-and-gold SUVs belonging to the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. The third was an unmarked Ford Interceptor: a make and model driven by state police detectives. All three had their high beams blazing and their take-down lights focused on the gate. Silhouettes of men with drawn guns threw long shadows down the road and against the bushes.
The cable was hanging limply from a post, and the Subaru was parked with the left front door ajar and its interior lights on as if the driver had fled the scene on foot.
Bowditch heard the first gunshot before he could even skid to a stop. He missed seeing the muzzle flash. He had no idea whether it was a police officer or someone else who had discharged a weapon.
Then one of the blue strobes caught the detective with his shotgun aimed at the ground, almost at his own feet.
What the hell is he doing?
Flame leaped from the muzzle, explosive gasses combusting into light, and the roar of the big twelve gauge was loud enough that Bowditch could feel the noise in the chambers of his heart.
The deputies began shooting, also at the ground. They fired up the long eerily lit driveway. They fired into the weeds beyond.
Someone had set loose the snakes, Bowditch realized.
The scene had become a carnival shooting gallery. Somehow it was even more absurd and grotesque than a sideshow.
He sprinted toward the three men, shouting, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
But adrenaline and gun blasts had rendered them temporarily deaf.
Fay Gorecki appeared now in the barn door. Hard light etched her silhouette. She shrieked as she ran toward the armed officers, holding a long, hooked tool above her head. “Leave them alone! You fucking bastards!”
Bowditch called again, “Cease fire!”
But still the unhearing cops continued the slaughter.
Fay was halfway down the drive when she stumbled, crumpling at the waist as if she’d received a sucker punch to the solar plexus. She fell hard, dropping the snake hook.
Afterward, the technicians from the state police Evidence Response Team would determine that a bullet had clipped her femoral artery. One of the deputies had missed the rattler at which he’d been aiming. The slug had ricocheted off a rock and struck Fay Gorecki in the leg. A red geyser erupted from the wound, and the mother of two was dead from catastrophic blood loss in less than a minute.
What Bowditch remembered vividly—the image that would stay with him—was that one of the escaped rattlesnakes chose to tuck itself against the dying woman’s body, almost protectively.
At first, its presence prevented the warden from administering first aid. Then he caught sight of the dropped snake hook. He snatched up the tool and lifted the viper clear, at which point, against Bowditch’s wishes, the detective blew the rattler into smithereens with a blast of buckshot.
Still holding the hook, Bowditch glanced up at the lighted barn, where two people stood in the open doorway: one an old, disfigured man in tears, the other a slender girl, standing apart.
15
This was how the police had come to be there before him. One of the deputies had been parked along a darkened roadside near the Naples Causeway when a white Subaru went speeding past. The driver had refused to stop after the officer hit his lights and siren. She had increased her speed in fact, he later testified.
The pursuing deputy was joined first by another patrol officer from his department, then by Detective Roger Finch of the Maine State Police, who had been returning to his residence in Bridgton. None of the policemen got a good look at the female driver as she’d sprinted from the car into the barn, not a good enough look to make a positive identification. By the time they’d conferred at the base of the drive, snakes had begun slithering out into the light thrown from the open door of the barn.
In the minutes following Fay Gorecki’s death, Finch took command. He dispatched the deputies to control access to the scene. They waved through Warden Volk, then a reserve officer from the Fryeburg PD who was passing—a sweating, overweight man who offered no help and embraced the role of spectator—then finally the ambulance. The emergency medical technicians spent all of thirty seconds determining that the victim was “pulseless, apneic, and lacked organized cardiac activity.” She was, in other words, dead.
After he’d cleaned Fay’s blood off himself, Bowditch went up to the house, where Detective Finch had taken Ted Gorecki so that the infamous scientist could sit down while he was being interrogated. This was the warden’s first look at the infamous provocateur and environmental extremist, but what he saw wasn’t so much a wild-eyed zealot as a ruin of a man.
Gorecki’s shoulders were lopsided, and one half of his face was palsied. The stroke had left half of his mouth so slack he had to clamp a handkerchief to one corner to contain the saliva. The amputated stub of his left arm, purple and white, protruded from the sleeve of the T-shirt he wore with pajama bottoms.
“I don’t understand,” he kept repeating. “I don’t understand what’s happened.”
“You didn’t know your wife had left?” Finch demanded.
“I was asleep. I woke up when I heard the sirens. Fay and Naja were in the barn.”
Protocol required that the officers interview the surviving witnesses, father and daughter, separately.
Detective Finch insisted on interviewing Ted, believing the husband to be the most important person in the household. He was content to leave the girl with the wardens. Bowditch was not unhappy with this arrangement. At the detective’s direction, he joined Tommy Volk in the barn to get a statement from Naja.
He found the older warden with his pad out and a pen raised but not a single note taken after what must have been minutes of conversation.
“So you had no idea what set your mom off?”
“I think she just went crazy.”
Naja was dressed in an olive sweatsuit that appeared black unless she stood directly under one of the moth-beaten lights. She had her father’s stony jaw, her mother’s dark eyes, and her sister’s lifeless hair minus the green dye.
“But your mother was definitely the one who planted the rattlesnake in Warden Bowditch’s truck?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I just know she was away somewhere, and when she came back, the police were behind her, and she went into the barn and began knocking over the tanks.”
Bowditch inspected the barn. Heat lamps hung from the ceiling over the glass cages that comprised the family’s illegal serpentarium. Several of the big tanks had been knocked over, shattering as they fell, and bright shards glimmered amid the straw like so many discarded jewels. Occasional hisses and rattles sounded at intervals from the remaining terrariums.
The rear of the old building housed the rodents the Goreckis bred as food for their vipers. The strong odor of hundreds of mice and rats was what Bowditch had mistaken for rabbit hutches, he now understood.
Naja hung her head and sputtered, “Why did you have to shoot her?”
“We don’t know that she was shot,” Volk said with characteristic petulance. “We don’t have all the facts yet. But you can be assured the attorney general will do a thorough review of what happened here tonight.”
“I have a question,” said Bowditch, crossing his arms across his bulletproof vest.
Volk frowned at him.
“I’d like to back up a bit. Naja, were your parents releasing rattlesnakes from captivity?”
She raised her unlined face; her skin showed no hint of color, and her eyes were dry. “Yes.”
“Can you say why?”
Her chin lifted. “Is that a frigging joke, dude? Ted and Fay have been preparing for this from before I was born.”
“Can you describe how they were executing this plan?”
“They’d researched the historical hibernacula in the area and did GIS mapping to place the animals in the most promising locations—away from built environments, roadways, et cetera.”
Naja, it seemed, shared her estranged sister’s esoteric vocabulary.
“Did you assist them?”
“I’m in charge of feeding the ophids—the snakes. But I never went out with them at night to assist on the releases.”
Volk had lapsed into silence, unsure where his fellow warden was headed, and seemed resigned to listen as Bowditch forged ahead.
“So you were nowhere near that party in the gravel pit when Jax Stevenson was bitten?”
“I don’t go to parties.”
“That’s not what I asked. Do you know Jax?”
“No.”
“This is for the record, Naja. Your statement is that you have never met Jax Stevenson?”
“Yeah, I mean. I’ve met him and seen him around and stuff. But you asked if I knew him.”
In the narrowness of this answer, Bowditch saw a future for the young woman as an attorney.
“I’m going to be interviewing every person at that party, and if you’re lying to me about not being there, I’m going to find out.”
“Why are you being so mean? My mom was just killed in front of me!”
Her voice rose and cracked, but her deportment belied her words. She wasn’t shaking or even breathing hard. Bowditch understood that teenagers processed and expressed emotions differently from adults. But the vibe coming off Naja Gorecki wasn’t anger or disbelief. She had instead the inconvenienced and impatient air of someone who has places to go and things to do.
Volk stepped between Bowditch and the girl. “Warden, can I have a word with you outside?”
“I almost called you,” Naja snapped, directing her attention at Bowditch alone now. “I almost called a game warden to inform on what my parents were doing. I was worried someone might get hurt.”
“Someone did get hurt,” he said. “Jax Stevenson.”
“I meant someone innocent. Jax deserved to lose his leg. It’s too bad he didn’t lose his dick, too.”
“I thought you didn’t know him.”
“Mike,” whispered Volk, grabbing him by the arm.
But Naja had gone from bored frustration to high dudgeon. “If this is, like, an interrogation, then you’re breaking the law. I’m a minor. You can’t interrogate me without Ted giving consent or an authorized adult being present.”
“That only applies if we’re interviewing you as a suspect in a crime,” said Bowditch. “But you’re right. Maybe we should ask your dad how one of his snakes ended up biting a boy you have a grudge against.”
“Maybe we should!” And she smiled without showing her teeth.
16
On their way to the house with Naja in tow, Volk pulled Bowditch aside.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Mike?”
“The girl’s playing you, Tommy.”
The older warden bristled at the insult. “She’s just a kid who’s been manipulated by her parents her whole life. It’s obvious those two freaks controlled her. The girl’s a victim. I don’t get why you’re treating her like some sort of criminal mastermind.”
Naja, meanwhile, had stopped between the barn and the house. She had her head cocked, seemingly in an effort to eavesdrop on the two men.
“Did you not hear what she just said about Jax?”
“I heard it,” Volk claimed, but it was obvious to Bowditch that the import of the admission had eluded him.
“Can we hurry this up?” Naja called. “I want to see my dad. I have a right to be with him.”
“We’re coming,” said Volk.
Inside the house, Detective Finch had moved from gentle questioning to harsh interrogation. He glared at Naja and the two wardens as they entered the kitchen. For a moment, it seemed he might order them all out again; then he reconsidered, maybe thinking that he could use the grieving daughter to force a full confession out of an uncooperative Gorecki.
“With Fay gone, I don’t care what happens to me,” the old man was saying.
“What about Naja? Do you care what happens to her?”
“Are you threatening—?”
“I’m merely stating the reality here, Ted. You and your wife have been knowingly releasing dangerous animals into the wild in violation of state law. Isn’t that correct, Warden Volk?”
“It’s a violation of Title 12.”
“Which would normally add up to a half dozen misdemeanors, except one of your snakes happened to attack a kid a mile from here. Now he’s lost a leg. It’s a miracle he didn’t lose his life. So now we’re looking at reckless endangerment—at the minimum. I guarantee you that will just be the beginning of felony charges the DA will be presenting at your indictment. If you don’t want to lose your daughter, too…”
“Dad, he’s trying to trick you,” Naja said, surprising everyone except Bowditch with this perceptive observation. “The state is going to take me away no matter what you say. It already happened with Mel. These men want you to deny everything you and Mom have stood for. Don’t let them do that to you—for her sake.”
Bowditch started to slowly clap.
“What are you doing?” Volk growled.
But Naja’s words had already had their intended effect on Ted Gorecki. “Yes, I admit it. Fay and I acted because the bureaucrats were too small-minded and cowardly to do what needed to be done. Nor will I apologize for anything. Those animals resided here before the first human being ever set foot on this land. They have an absolute right to reclaim their habitat. They have a greater right to this place than any of us do.”
It took everything the broken, grieving activist had to summon the old fire and brimstone, and when he had finished, he was breathing heavily and had to mop his slack mouth with his handkerchief.
Finch seemed momentarily distracted by his victory. He focused instead on the phone he was using to record the interview, wanting to be sure he’d captured every word.
“Detective,” Bowditch said, “would you mind my asking Dr. Gorecki a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you know why your wife would’ve come to my house tonight to place a rattlesnake in my truck, Dr. Gorecki?”
He gazed up. “What?”
“Her vehicle was seen speeding from my home, which is why the deputies gave chase. That’s why we’re all here. That’s why Fay is dead.”
Finch snapped back to attention. “Warden, where are you going with this?”
Bowditch pointedly avoided looking at Naja standing in the doorway beside Volk with her arms wrapped protectively around her torso. “Or is it possible someone else was driving your wife’s Subaru?”
