He was right on that account.
I tried to lean forward, but my shirt adhered to the upholstery as if with paste. “Last night, you said you were willing to talk about Tom Wheelwright. Today, you gave me the slip. What made you change your mind, Captain?”
“Truth be told, I don’t recall our conversation all that well. As I said, I have a problem forming new memories. But back when Tommy and I were hotshots in the USAF—before my brain injury—I was as cocky as he was. It was the crash that humbled me. Do you know how often I overhear kids asking their moms about the man with the dent in his head? When the world looks at you and sees a freak, you no longer have the luxury of ignoring the truth.”
He absently stroked the moon crater in his forehead.
“But I still haven’t answered your question. What made me change my tune? I realized the significance of Tommy not giving you my name. He was afraid I’d acquired a conscience as a result of my misfortunes, and rightly so. People have been covering for that man his whole life—me included. I decided the time had come for someone to knock the great Wheelwright off his pedestal.”
* * *
Alone again in my car, I called the first woman whose name Fixico had given me, a former air force second lieutenant now living outside Omaha, Nebraska.
“How did you find me?” she’d asked with a flutter of panic.
And with that, my job was done.
3
My flight left without me. I may even have watched the plane take off from the freeway where I was stalled in traffic.
The cause of the holdup was a fatality, the second I’d witnessed on the Florida highways. The dead man lay in the median grass with a blanket over him. His wrecked car looked like it had gone through a junkyard compactor. In addition to the usual first responders, I spotted half a dozen white-and-green Border Patrol vehicles.
Unable to do anything except crawl forward, I put in a call to the officer supervising the search for a new chief warden pilot. Major Patrick Shorey had been on the panel that had hired me eight years earlier. His had been a dissenting voice. So of course, he was an unabashed champion of Tom Wheelwright.
“You said this Seminole you interviewed suffered a brain injury?”
“Captain Fixico is Miccosukee, not Seminole.”
“The point is he has memory problems.”
“But the two women I spoke with don’t, and they were both open about the extent of Wheelwright’s sexual misconduct—assaults is the better word.”
“Why didn’t they file complaints against him with the air force?”
“They say they were dissuaded from doing so by their superiors.”
“Two dozen people vouched that Captain Wheelwright conducted himself with bravery and professionalism. Why should we take the word of these women?”
“Because they didn’t know about each other. They never served together. There’s no way they could have coordinated their stories.”
“It’s a fine world we’re living in when a war hero can have his reputation destroyed by undocumented allegations.”
“Captain Fixico gave me more names if you’d like—”
“Just send me the damned report.”
The traffic began to inch ahead, then stopped again.
I checked my messages and found a text from the kid I’d hired to watch my dog. Logan Cronk was the son of friends who lived down the road from me on the Maine Midcoast. The boy was ten, blond, and big for his age (or any age).
Shadow ate a turkey poult! It landed inside in his pen while he was sleeping under the trees and it didn’t see him and he leaped out from the bushes and ate it in like three bites.
Legally speaking, Shadow wasn’t a dog; he was a wolf dog. To be even more precise, he was a gray wolf with a smattering of domestic dog genes. His “pen” was a fenced enclosure on my wooded property, roughly one and a half acres in area.
Logan had attached several photographs so that I could rest assured he had been fulfilling his duties. One picture was of himself holding a turkey wing pinion, presumably all that was left of Shadow’s lunch.
I wrote the boy back thanking him and adding that he’d better not have ventured inside the fence to retrieve those feathers. The wolf dog may have been raised in captivity, but he had spent the past few years on the run in the Maine mountains, killing deer and digging beavers out of their lodges, and I didn’t trust him not to eat children.
I considered the empty hours ahead. My ex-girlfriend Stacey Stevens, the woman I had once considered the love of my life and who was not insignificantly the daughter of my mentor Charley and his wife, Ora, lived less than two hours away.
Stacey’s last communication, months before, had been an email that ended with the words, “If by some small miracle you’re ever in Florida, I would love, love, love to see you.”
Before I could slip down this dangerous slope, I called my current girlfriend back home.
“I’m afraid I’m here for one more night,” I told Danielle “Dani” Tate.
“I hope the last interview was worth it.”
“Let’s just say that Tom Wheelwright will never be a member of the Maine Warden Service.”
Dani was younger than I was, a former game warden who had transferred to the Maine State Police because she saw greater opportunities for advancement. To the world, she presented one face: snub-nosed, gruff, blond hair tied up tight, a badass cop. To me and me alone, she showed a gentler profile: soft gray eyes, dimples that only made themselves known when she smiled, a heart that was twice the size of mine.
As the sky darkened at the edges, leaving a hazy dome of light above the city, I told Dani about Fixico. She listened quietly as I recounted the day’s revelations. Proud of myself, I ended the monologue with two of the women Wheelwright had coerced into having sex with him.
“Congratulations,” Dani said.
I detected an undercurrent of sarcasm. “Thanks?”
“No, it’s great that you nailed Wheelwright. But the odds are good that the guy you end up hiring will be a sleaze, too. He’ll just be better at covering his tracks.” She let that sit with me for a moment, then her tone lightened again. “So what are you going to do with your free night in Miami? Go clubbing in South Beach?”
“The last footprints I left on a dance floor were in junior high.”
“That’s probably for the best.”
The joke was at her expense as well as mine—Trooper Tate was not remotely footloose.
“What?” I laughed. “You don’t think I can dance?”
“You won’t like my answer to that question.”
I paused before I spoke again. “I promised Stacey I would be in touch if I ever got down this way.”
Dani didn’t skip a beat. “Doesn’t she live over on the Gulf Coast?”
“Everglades City. That’s about two hours from here, I think. Chances are she’ll be busy anyway, but I will have made an effort. And her folks will be happy—which matters to me, as you know. I’ll probably end up back at my motel with a pizza, watching baseball.”
“You’re presuming I’m jealous.”
“You’re not?”