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  Fallen Sparrow: A Peyton Cote Novel © 2015 by D.A. Keeley.

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  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2015

  E-book ISBN: 9780738744261

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover art: iStockphoto.com/17105661/©AndrewSoundarajan

  iStockphoto.com/16684700/©EricVega

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Lisa

  Acknowledgments

  As always, I offer a heart-felt thank-you to Kevin Stevens, former deputy chief of the US Border Patrol. Kevin, thank you for taking time from your busy life to field my questions. Your insights and feedback are invaluable and certainly made this book more authentic and much better.

  Thanks to the people at Midnight Ink: To Terri Bischoff, for believing in Peyton Cote; to Beth Hanson, for all you do to promote my work; and to my editor Nicole Nugent, who is simply the best in the business. Period.

  To Julia Lord and Ginger Curwen, my agents: Thanks for having my back and for your unwavering belief in me. Thanks to Kim Sprankle, for reading my drafts.

  And to the home team, Lisa, Delaney, Audrey, and Keeley: This, and everything, is for you.

  There’s a special providence

  in the fall of a sparrow.

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Act V, scene ii

  What if man is not really a scoundrel …

  then all the rest is prejudice …

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

  One

  The charred remains of the cabin were black and smelled like the dying embers from campfires of her youth. A two-by-four tore away from the remnants of the ceiling and fell, hitting the soft ash floor like a branch landing in new-fallen snow, causing the cinders to dance and spark, and spawning a small flame.

  US Customs and Border Protection Agent Peyton Cote stood outside the cabin and pocketed her radio. The volunteer firemen could take their time; there was nothing left to do but douse the ashes.

  She moved around the perimeter, not risking entry because the walls were gone. Three scorched two-by-fours supported the entire roof. She recognized a metal bed frame, twisted and blackened. Above the cabin, past the lingering smoke clouds, lay a stark juxtaposition to what she viewed: a rolling canary-yellow canola field, the warm summer breeze swaying it back and forth in the distance.

  It was nearly 2 p.m. on a fine Tuesday in June in tiny Garrett, Maine, along the Canadian border. At 8:20 a.m., Marie St. Pierre had called the station saying she’d seen two men, in the light of the full moon, cross her husband’s potato field around midnight the previous night. The field spanned 450 acres and ran east to Canada.

  Behind Peyton, glass and wood lay near the tree line, forty-three paces away, by her count. She’d seen gasoline explosions. The flames here were long gone, but the lingering heat—even standing thirty feet away—told her this fire had burned extraordinarily hot.

  What had exploded and when? Marie never mentioned hearing a loud sound.

  The broken beaker on the ground stopped her.

  Peyton inhaled slowly, her mind turning cartwheels and transporting her back to the West Texas desert, to a shotgun shack she’d once stumbled upon. The long-held memory triggered a realization—and a fit of terror.

  She turned and sprinted back to the line of blue spruce trees, stopping finally to exhale like a swimmer bursting through the water’s surface.

  For a split second, her mind ran only to ten-year-old Tommy. At that moment, she wasn’t an agent, only a single mother. She breathed in the fresh air, gathering herself, hand shaking as she unclipped her cell phone from her service belt.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said aloud, then: “Bring DEA, and tell them they’re going to need HAZMAT suits. We might have a crystal meth lab in Aroostook County.”

  “The land is owned by Fred St. Pierre,” Peyton said an hour later, glancing warily through the pine forest at the four men in HAZMAT suits.

  She’d been joined by State Trooper Leo Miller and Garrett Station Patrol Agent in Charge, or PAIC, Mike Hewitt. The three stood, sipping coffee a safe distance away, watching the fire marshal and three DEA agents sift through the remnants of the charred cabin.

  “Fred owns all of this land?” Miller asked. Peyton nodded. “Hell of a tax bill,” he said.

  “This morning,” Peyton said, “around eight, Marie St. Pierre, who was my second-grade teacher about a hundred years ago, called the station to report two men had crossed her husband’s potato field last night around midnight.”

  “That’s Canada to the east,” Hewitt said.

  She knew what he was insinuating: a potential unmanned border crossing.

  The day hadn’t begun with fires and long-distance hikes. Peyton arrived at the station after using a half-day of vacation time for a field trip with Tommy’s fifth-grade class to a classmate’s lakefront home for an end-of-the-school-year swimming party.

  In northern Maine, Border Patrol served as backup for local and state law-enforcement agencies, so her shift began with a call to a domestic dispute. Next was the trip to Marie St. Pierre’s farm. Peyton had grown up in Garrett and had requested the transfer home nearly four years earlier. She knew the people and culture well. In this region, where farming was a way of life, the federal government was viewed with hostility. And she knew why, had seen it firsthand: many local farmers struggled to compete when the Canadian government subsidized its potato farmers. So she’d brought Mr. and Mrs. St. Pierre cookies, a thank-you for the tip, and started what she hoped would be a routine follow-up hike across Marie St. Pierre’s property.

  “You don’t think this was a fertilizer explosion?” Hewitt asked her.

  “Not on a potato farm,” she said. “And no one should go near the place until we know what was in there. The fumes could be toxic.”

  “Fred isn’t going to like having fire trucks cross his fields,” Miller said.

  “I’m sure they’ll try to avoi
d the crops,” Hewitt said.

  The annual potato harvest dominated the region. Schools commenced in August and closed for three weeks so teens could help bring in the crop. Peyton, the daughter of a potato farmer, had grown up before machinery ruled the labor force. She’d worked the fields each fall, side by side with laborers, lifting rocks from the potato rows to spare the mechanical picker from ingesting the stones.

  Now, for the most part, Aroostook County schools closed to honor tradition, though some farms still used teens. When stopping to check migrant workers’ documents, she loved talking to the kids. They might listen to Shakira on their iPhones as they work now, but they still wore jeans and flannel shirts, still felt the same cold hard potatoes in their palms that she’d felt nearly twenty years earlier.

  “Last time I was at one of these fires,” she said, “I was with six other agents.”

  Hewitt, wearing a nylon field jacket, poured Peyton and Miller coffee from his thermos.

  “In El Paso?” Miller asked.

  “Just west of El Paso, along the Rio Grande. There were seven of us there, but as luck would have it—”

  “The place still burned to the ground?” Miller interrupted.

  Afternoon sun slanted through the dense pine canopy.

  “No. I was the one to find the body—or part of it.”

  “Lucky you,” Hewitt said.

  “Part of it?” Miller asked.

  “Explosion,” Peyton explained. “I found a hand that looked like a slab of blackened tuna. At least this time I only found shards of glass. I spotted the first ones near the tree line.”

  Miller had been scribbling on his pad and looked up. “So we’re talking an initial explosion? Not a fire that led to an explosion?”

  “That’s my guess,” Peyton said. “Happens all the time at these places. That’s why the cooks are in such high demand. They find a body in there, chances are it won’t be a local.”

  “You sure this is Fred St. Pierre’s cabin?” Hewitt said.

  “He owns all this land,” she said. “About five hundred acres back here. When I was a little girl, I used to play in these woods with his daughter, Sherry. In high school, after my father lost our farm, I worked the harvest for Fred, picking rocks one year.”

  “You stay in touch with the daughter?” Miller asked.

  “I hear she’s downstate,” Peyton said, “a professor at the University of Southern Maine.”

  A quarter mile away, in the potato field, a deer moved quietly over the dirt. It was something Peyton loved about her job, about this region. Maine’s northernmost county, Aroostook, was a land mass the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, but home to fewer than seventy-two thousand residents. She loved conducting a border sweep on foot and seeing deer, moose, and bald eagles. Even stumbling across a black bear, which always led her to draw her service weapon, was a treat she knew few people outside this remote region experienced.

  But this rustic environment also meant 137 miles of international border for agents to prevent contraband from entering the US. It was easy to see why 9/11 terrorists had crossed the border here—a relentless cause of shame for agents assigned to this post. Up here, the memorial catch phrase Never Forget was replaced with Never Again.

  “After we hear what Mitch says”—Hewitt pointed toward the fire marshal—“I’d like you to go talk with Mr. St. Pierre.”

  She nodded and drank more coffee.

  Miller said, “I’ve got to call in my location.” He walked away, cell phone held out, searching for reception.

  They watched Miller talk on the phone for several seconds.

  When he returned, he said, “My boss wants confirmation of what we think it is.”

  “We haven’t verified anything yet,” Hewitt said, “so I’d appreciate you not spreading this all over.”

  “I’ve seen these before,” Peyton said.

  “So you’re sure?” Miller asked.

  “It’s not verified, Leo,” Hewitt said.

  Peyton turned to him. “There are a few ways to find out.”

  Hewitt nodded. “Yes, there are.”

  Then they heard the shouts and turned to see one of the young DEA agents vomit in his mask.

  Two

  “Mom,” Tommy said, “I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

  Tuesday evening, Peyton looked across the kitchen table at her ten-year-old son, his blue eyes turning away.

  “What am I going to say to you, Tommy?”

  Peyton’s sister, Elise, was at the stove, adding green peppers to her spaghetti sauce. Tuesday nights had become what the sisters referred to as “sacred sister nights.” Younger sister Elise and her four-year-old Max and adopted daughter Autumn, three, ate with Peyton and Tommy every week, the sisters alternating houses. Elise had lost her husband, figuratively at first, then literally, three years earlier. He left her for a former student, with whom he’d fathered Autumn. When he passed, Elise adopted the baby. Now she was raising her as her own, while taking classes year-round in hopes of becoming a high school teacher.

  “I know,” Tommy said, “I know. If I put my brain to it—”

  “Your mind to it, yes. So why do you say you can’t do it?”

  “Because it’s the truth.” He was crying now and looked at his aunt, embarrassed. “Mom, you don’t understand.”

  Elise poured a glass of red wine and set it before Peyton. “Things don’t always come easily to people,” Elise said to her sister.

  “I know that,” Peyton said.

  “Do you?” Elise asked and went back to the stove.

  Peyton watched her, but Elise said nothing else. Their mother, Lois—who Peyton thought incapable of going a single day without mentioning her daughter’s divorce (“It’s against the Church”), her career (“Why aren’t you a stay-at-home mom?”), and her gun (“What kind of lady did I raise?”)—had gone home after watching Tommy all afternoon.

  Autumn, playing with Polly Pocket dolls on the floor, reminded Peyton that not everyone started out life with advantages. She was the product of Elise’s late husband’s affair, and Peyton had found her as an infant, abandoned, on a cold fall night near the border.

  Peyton exhaled, turning from Autumn to Tommy. “Tell me what I don’t understand, Tommy. Tell me again.”

  Peyton looked past him out the window over the sink. The Aroostook County skyline was vastly different than the one she’d viewed in El Paso for seven years, and this was never more evident than at sunset. In the distance, a canola field, like a yellow river, rose to meet the setting summer sun. She’d never forgotten the Aroostook vistas—not when she’d left for the University of Maine and lived in Orono and not when she’d served her mandatory seven years on the Southern border.

  Elise tossed a salad. “You’d think this was my house,” she said, “the way I’m working tonight. How about you take a break and help your tired aunt, Tommy?”

  Tommy looked at her as if considering the lesser of two evils: math homework or dinner help? He stood and went to help his aunt.

  Peyton picked up Autumn and held her. She looked around the kitchen. She loved the new granite countertop. The contractor had finished it only the week before. An agent’s salary went further here than it might in other sectors throughout the country. After living with her mother for close to a year, she’d purchased a three-bedroom, two-bath cape two years earlier. But the house had been built in the seventies, and she felt as if she lived in a continuous cycle of saving to update another room every few months.

  “Every time I do a math problem,” Tommy said—Elise was showing him how to slice a cucumber—“it feels like I’m climbing a wall, and someone keeps knocking me off, and I have to start again.”

  “Math was never my strong suit either,” Elise said.

  “Where, sweetie?” Peyton said. “Show me where it happens
. I taught you how to carry the one yesterday.”

  “And my teacher showed me how to carry the one again today,” Tommy said. “It’s always someplace different. Every time. I told you that yesterday, Mom.”

  Max pushed a green-and-white John Deere tractor across the floor.

  Tommy had, indeed, told her that. And he’d said it the day before, too. His story never changed. So what was she doing? Interrogating her son? Hoping he’d say something different, as if long division would suddenly click? Fifth grade had proved more difficult than she’d anticipated for this little boy in a New England Patriots jersey. And his failing math quizzes had piled up. Tommy had now been referred to a learning disabilities specialist.

  Her cell phone vibrated. She saw the office number but didn’t answer. Right now, the office could wait.

  “What’s your math teacher’s name again?” she said.

  “Why?” He looked at her, and she could see his wheels turning.

  “Relax, sweetie.”

  “Don’t call her, Mom. She’ll think I’m stupid. It’s bad enough meeting with Dr. Thompson.”

  “Who’s Dr. Thompson?” Elise asked.

  “An educational consultant the district hired,” Peyton said; then to Tommy: “No one will think you’re stupid. How many times have you met with Dr. Thompson?” Thompson was evaluating Tommy.

  “Three. Don’t call my teacher. Please.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s bad enough at school. Please don’t.”

  She looked at him, saw the fear in his eyes. What was “bad enough” at school?

  Elise, standing behind Tommy, shook her head, as if to say, Let it go, Sis.

  “Okay,” Peyton said.

  After dinner, and after Elise and Max had left, Tommy read her a chapter from a Percy Jackson book. She didn’t call Tommy’s teacher afterwards. She, of course, emailed her instead.

  “Why didn’t you pick up when I called the first time?” Patrol Agent in Charge Mike Hewitt said.