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  “Okay,” he said, “so if it wasn’t the state police, it wasn’t the FBI, and it wasn’t the CIA, who the hell went to see Matt Kingston?”

  “Whoever it was wanted to know what Matt saw in the woods that night. Matt said it was a female, wearing a windbreaker zipped up to her chin, sunglasses, and a hat.”

  “In June?”

  “Yup.”

  “Someone is fucking with this investigation,” Hewitt said.

  “That’s what I think,” she said and typed two names on her iPad.

  Hewitt stood and went to the file cabinet near the door. A Mr. Coffee machine was atop the cabinet.

  “You finally broke down and bought a coffee maker?” she said.

  “I figured, Who am I kidding? I drink six cups a day. Why keep walking to the breakroom? Want a cup?”

  She shook her head. He’d been military for a decade. And she’d heard all about military coffee. If she thought Tim Hortons was mediocre, she could only imagine how Hewitt made the stuff.

  “We need an espresso bar in this town,” she said.

  “Go to a town council meeting and ask for one,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll get right on it.”

  He poured himself a cup and brought it back to his desk.

  “I do have one update,” he said. “Stephanie DuBois cut a deal with Nancy Lawrence’s attorney for Nancy’s statement and potential testimony admitting she was paid for Freddy’s alibi the night Simon Pink was murdered.”

  “Really?”

  “You surprised?”

  “Stunned,” Peyton said, using her stylus to circle one of the two names she’d typed. “She was at the top of my list of those who might have talked to Matt Kingston.”

  “Still could be,” Hewitt said. “She has a lot to lose if she’s in any way tied to Pink’s murder. You’re biting your lip and staring at the floor. What is it?”

  “What’s Nancy’s agreement?” she asked.

  “Probation—for her admission that Sherry paid her to let Freddy sleep on her sofa and to lie about dating him.”

  “Probation? For what might end up being accessory to a murder?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t blame me for the lawyer bullshit.”

  “When I first mentioned Nancy to Sherry,” Peyton said, “she told me Nancy—she called her a ‘little slut’—was somehow behind all of Freddy’s problems.”

  “Maybe Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall, Ph.D. and all, is a little nutty,” Hewitt said.

  Peyton blew out a long breath. “Nancy’s statement won’t look very good for Freddy or Sherry. Do they know Nancy turned on them?”

  “If they don’t, they will soon.” He narrowed his eyes. “You do realize this is a positive development, right? The noose is tightening on Freddy St. Pierre.”

  “If he did it, it’s positive. If he didn’t do it, we got Nancy Lawrence to give us the wrong guy. We still can’t place Freddy at the crime scene, Mike.”

  “Maybe he’s the third guy Matt Kingston heard,” Hewitt said.

  “Maybe.” She wrote something on her iPad.

  “Sherry paid someone to be her brother’s alibi,” Hewitt said. “That’s an admission that he was guilty of something in my book.”

  “An admission of guilt for something, yes. But not necessarily of murder, Mike. And Len Landmark says he’s not representing Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall now, only Chip.”

  “They splitting up?” Hewitt said.

  “Sherry is sleeping with her research assistant.”

  “Not usually conducive for marital bliss,” Hewitt said. “Where are their kids?”

  “In Portland with Chip’s sister. The son is Chip’s adopted child. Sherry had him with someone else.”

  “So this will be her second divorce?”

  “I don’t think she was married. I was at the diner yesterday, and Sherry’s research assistant, a guy from Prague, was at the counter when Chip pulled up. The research assistant stopped him in the parking lot. They had an exchange, and Chip drove off without coming in.”

  “I’d have met him in the parking lot, too,” Hewitt said, “and I’d have kicked his ass for him, if I was trying to eat lunch and the bastard who was screwing my wife showed up.”

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “I can see why they wouldn’t like each other. But it was the other way around—Kvido was eating and Chip showed up. Why didn’t he walk in and punch Kvido’s lights out?”

  There was a faint knock on the door. Hewitt told whoever it was to come in.

  “Peyton”—it was Linda Cyr—“Freddy St. Pierre has requested a meeting with you.”

  Thirty

  “I’m sitting here shaking my goddamned head, eh,” Freddy said at 9:25 a.m. in an interview room in Garrett Station.

  “I hear this is your last day in Garrett,” Peyton said.

  She’d just sat down across from him. The window was wire mesh, but the glass was bright, as if sunlight outside reflected off it.

  Len Landmark—who said he no longer represented Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall (only husband Chip)—had apparently deserted both sister and brother because now it was young Steve St. Louis, a local attorney, who sat next to Freddy. St. Louis was all of twenty-eight and wore a Polo shirt and khaki pants. Peyton knew this was his first murder trial. His golf shoes were wet and full of grass.

  “Come from the course?” Peyton asked St. Louis.

  “Especially for this.” He smiled eagerly—the same smile the salesman had offered her when listing all the accessories on her new Jeep Wrangler.

  She said, “I hear they’re taking you to Houlton tonight or tomorrow, Freddy.”

  She knew Freddy wouldn’t like that, remembered well his comments about the farm outside Garrett being the last place he’d seen his mother happy. But she didn’t care. Now that he wanted to see her, she could play hardball.

  “They really moving me?” Freddy looked at St. Louis, who only shrugged.

  “I just got here,” St. Louis said, “but I’ll be sure to look into it.”

  Freddy turned back to Peyton. “You bullshitting me?”

  Peyton ignored him. “I also heard that Nancy Lawrence is kicking your ass to the curb. No alibi.”

  Freddy looked down at the tabletop between his forearms. “She’s a bitch,” he said.

  “I’ll ask that you treat my client with the respect and dignity that he deserves,” St. Louis said.

  “If I was treating him with the respect he deserves,” she said, “I’d taser his ass. How come, when I asked you to talk to me last week, Freddy, you wanted no part of it?”

  “I couldn’t then.”

  “But you can now?”

  Freddy looked up at her. “I have to now, eh.”

  “You’re a real sweet-talker, Freddy. I can see why Nancy turned on you.”

  “She told them because a cop lied and said she could go to jail.”

  “It’s no lie. It’s called Obstruction of a Criminal Investigation.”

  St. Louis was taking notes on a yellow legal pad, and his first murder case had him looking like a freshman trying to keep up in a linear-algebra class.

  “It’s only true if I was guilty of something,” Freddy said.

  “Okay, Freddy,” Peyton said. “Then can you please explain to me why you appear to be the first man in the history of the criminal-justice system to need an alibi when you are not guilty of anything?”

  “We need to speak seriously,” Freddy said.

  She took her iPhone out, hit Record.

  St. Louis reached over, tugged Freddy’s shirt sleeve. “I think we should discuss whatever you have to say privately, Fred, before you speak to Agent Cote.”

  “I can’t get myself in trouble, eh, because I didn’t do it all.”

  Peyton sat up straight, made sure the iPhone was recording, a
nd said, “I need you to explain that, Freddy.” No longer exhausted and frustrated, she knew if she could get Freddy to start talking the spool might come unwound.

  “Please be quiet now,” St. Louis said.

  “No,” Freddy said. “I want you to separate the fire from the shooting. They ain’t connected. I didn’t shoot nobody.”

  “Fred, that’s enough,” St. Louis said.

  Peyton leaned forward. “What are you telling me, Freddy?”

  “I didn’t know anyone was in there, Peyton. That’s the truth.”

  “None of this is on the record,” St. Louis said. “You hear me, Peyton? None of it.”

  “He’s been given his Miranda warning, Steve,” Peyton said. “You know that. Everything is admissible.”

  But she wasn’t looking at St. Louis as she spoke. She was staring at Freddy St. Pierre. And processing what he’d just said.

  “Did you set that fire, Freddy?”

  He looked at her. She waited. Stranger things had happened on farms in Aroostook County. The year before, a farmer couldn’t make payments on his loans. Mysteriously, his barn burned to the foundation. Three months later an insurance check arrived. It took the fire marshal six months to prove arson.

  Beads of perspiration popped on Freddy’s forehead.

  “You don’t have to say anything, Fred,” St. Louis said.

  “Can you separate the fire from the shooting?” Freddy asked.

  “You need to tell me the whole truth, Freddy,” Peyton said, “before we can discuss that. I need to know what really happened.”

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  “You know something,” she said.

  “I didn’t know that was part of the plan.”

  “Tell me what the plan was,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I did what I was paid to do.”

  “Burn down your cabin?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did your father think of that?” she said.

  “He didn’t know.”

  “Who paid you?”

  Freddy looked at St. Louis.

  “Again, Freddy,” St. Louis said, “I urge you to stop talking.”

  And he did.

  She turned off the iPhone recorder, pocketed it, and drove directly to Garrett High School.

  A half-hour later, Peyton was back in her service vehicle, driving toward a fishing spot called Black Water Creek, where she was to meet game warden Pete McPherson.

  Traveling north on Route 1 toward Caribou, she glanced at the Crystal View River. At this time of day, she knew you had to fish the edges, casting toward the riverbanks, hoping to pick off trout or bass moving slowly in the mid-day sun.

  She’d learned a lot in the past twenty-four hours from Matt Kingston and Freddy St. Pierre.

  According to Freddy, he had built the cabin with his father, and then been paid—as part of someone’s master plan—to burn it.

  Freddy wanted to separate the arson from the shooting. Seeing as he was facing a murder charges and they had the weapon, and it was his, that was smart. He would say, she assumed, that, sure, he’d gone to the cabin—probably early in the morning—discovered no one around, and lit the fire.

  What he didn’t know was that Peyton’s stop at Garrett High School had been highly productive: Matt Kingston recognized Freddy’s voice instantly as one of the three people he’d heard when Peyton played her iPhone recording. In court, the recognition might be merely circumstantial. But if Kingston took the stand, his reaction—the quick nod, the knee-jerk “No question that’s one person I heard”—could be damning for Freddy because it placed him at the scene of the murder when the murder took place. He may have met Nancy Lawrence at the Tip and slept on her couch, but he was definitely at the cabin earlier that night.

  So Freddy had been there and the late Simon Pink had been there. Who was the third person?

  She pulled to the side of the road, took out her cell phone, and dialed. When Stone Gibson answered, she said, “Remember when we said since you’re heading the murder investigation and I’m looking into what was taking place in the cabin, there would be overlap? Well, I have some news for you,” she said. “I can place Freddy St. Pierre at the crime scene when Pink was shot. Freddy doesn’t know it yet.”

  And she told him what Matt Kingston had said.

  Thirty-One

  “Thanks for volunteering to help out,” Pete McPherson said, climbing out of his green pickup, the Maine Warden Service insignia on the door.

  She liked McPherson, had known him a long time. He was in his sixties and had been a mainstay in the local law-enforcement community for as long as she could remember. He’d also been Tommy’s Little League coach the previous spring.

  “Volunteering?” she said. “Do people volunteer to pound their thumbs with hammers?”

  “Are you saying you don’t want to wander through six miles of trail,” he grinned, “making sure the boogie man isn’t out there preparing to bite the president? You’re as cynical as your father was.”

  She smiled. “That’s why you and I get along.” She pulled her backpack from the pickup’s bed and put a Nalgene bottle in the pack’s side pocket. “You knew him well,” she said.

  “Old Charlie Cote. Cynical but generous. Word around town was if you needed a team sponsored, even when the economy was down and everyone—even the bank and grocery store—said no, just go ask Charlie Cote. Cote Farm will sponsor your Little League team.”

  “Or Pee Wee basketball team,” she said, “or whatever team it was. Old softy. Until he lost the farm.”

  “And he’d probably have gone hungry to do so, even then,” McPherson said. “I was at my grandson’s soccer game, week before last and saw you there with your son. It made me think of Charlie.”

  “I wish he were here for Tommy, especially since I’m divorced.”

  She wore her backpack and her hiking boots were laced. In her pack were spare maps, PowerBars, an extra clip for her .40, a Maglite, and a first-aid kit with several Ace bandages. On her service belt were hair ties, her revolver, her handcuffs, a baton, and pepper spray. It might be a pointless, two-hour hike, but she followed protocol. As a BORSTAR agent, she’d seen what could go wrong when agents and hikers entered the wilderness unprepared.

  “Are Wally Rowe and his guys already in there?” She pointed toward the mouth of the trail.

  “The Secret Service isn’t coming,” McPherson said, “which, by the way, is a plus.”

  “I thought we were leading them through the trails,” she said.

  McPherson held his forest-green Maine Warden Service cap out and sprayed it with Ben’s 100. He had a full head of white hair and thick, liver-spotted hands.

  “Rowe cancelled,” he said. “You and I are supposed to go through the trail along the brook today, find some nice fishing spots—which is to say easy-to-access spots—and then we’ll lead them through when the president arrives.”

  “I think the president is going to cancel,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Last summer, when we did this, there were fifteen Secret Service agents with us, and we examined every knot on every tree.”

  “I don’t think he’s canceling. I think the Secret Service knows what a waste of time that was last year.”

  “And the Secret Service doesn’t mind you and I wasting our time,” she said, “as long as they don’t waste theirs.”

  “Again, your old man’s cynicism,” McPherson said and smiled.

  He took the lead, moving swiftly on the trail, with Peyton several steps behind. A bed of pine needles covered the path.

  “The president and his grandson might actually catch some fish this year,” McPherson said. “Judging from the pine-needle covering, no one’s been out here in a while.”

  “So the brook won
’t be fished out,” Peyton said, “if they actually come here.” She swatted a fly. “Of course, you have to fight the black flies in order to stand along the water’s edge to cast.”

  “That’s why they make Ben’s 100.”

  “Ever hear of DEET?” she said. She was maybe ten yards behind him, scanning the edges of the trail.

  “Screw it,” he said. “We’ll all die of cancer anyhow.”

  The trail was narrow, its sides lined with pines and balsam firs. Through the canopied tree cover, she could see a red-tailed hawk circling.

  “There are a few big, flat rocks to stand on,” Peyton said. “Should we mark the trees near them? I’ve got some tape.”

  “Not our job,” McPherson said. “They can hire a guide for that.”

  “I was also thinking we could flag rocks we thought would give Rowe and his colleagues vantage points to cover the president.”

  “Good idea,” McPherson said.

  “Wally Rowe didn’t ask you to do that?”

  “Nope,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Did he give any directions?” she asked. “Did he mention what we should be looking for?”

  McPherson turned to see her. “He said just to do a walk-through. See if anything looks out of the ordinary.”

  “I don’t see even one footprint,” she said.

  They walked for twenty minutes more, McPherson stopping at one point to throw a line in the brook.

  “Wish I’d have brought waders,” he said. “This is a good time of year to fish this brook. Ever come out here with Tommy?”

  “Not yet. Came here with my father, though. The brook looks deep in the middle.”

  “No more than four feet,” he said. “I’ve crossed it in waders.”

  “Fast moving,” she said. “Shouldn’t be crossing in waders. You ever slip, the current will pull you away. You’ll drown for sure.”

  “Okay, mom. I don’t cross it when it’s four feet, Peyton. I do that in late summer. In the spring, I use a fly, toss it to the middle, and let the current carry it downstream. Caught an eighteen-inch trout last year.”

  “My father and I used worms here.”