Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron

said no.” He glanced at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. “They should be at Down East Community Hospital by now. I haven’t heard how Prester’s doing.”
    “I hope he wakes up, just so we can get the story of what really happened.”
    “I’m not sure it’s such a mystery,” said Corbett. “Ben and Doris were always reporting seeing suspicious vehicles going by here, heading into the woods. Ben would get really worked up. I even did some of my own patrols down there, but I only scared up a young couple having sex.”
    “So you think maybe Cates had a regular place he was doing deals out in the Heath?”
    Corbett shrugged his wide shoulders. “It’s certainly off the beaten track. I go deer hunting down there every November and always get turned around a few times before I find my way out. It’s a scary place. I’m surprised you guys found the body at all.”
    “We figured he wouldn’t be far from the car. And we had a well-trained dog helping us.” I described the scene to him—the car, the bag of money, the loaded Glock, and then the startled expression on the corpse’s rimed face. “Cates didn’t look to me like a guy who had passed out in a snowbank. I’ll be curious to hear the coroner’s report.”
    “The sheriff will want to speak with you about it. Randall Cates was on her personal most-wanted list.”
    The longtime Washington County sheriff was a woman, one of only handful of female sheriffs in the state of Maine. Her name was Roberta Rhine. My professional experience working with sheriffs had thus far been hit-and-miss. The chief law-enforcement officer of Somerset County, where my father had committed his crimes, hated my guts, but back on the midcoast, I’d established a cordial relationship with Dudley Baker, the Knox County sheriff.
    “Well, she can cross him off her list now,” I said, rubbing my tired eyes. “What about the other one—Sewall?”
    “Prester?” Corbett grinned and shook his head. “He’s one of our favorite people over to the jail. We’ve had him in for just about everything—drunk and disorderly, B and E, check kiting, receiving stolen property. Nothing violent, though. A lot of these guys like Cates enjoy having a sidekick to tell them what big-time gangsters they are. Prester’s actually a nice guy when he sobers up, which is almost never. It’s probably all the antifreeze in his system that kept him alive out there.”
    I remembered how Sewall had skulked around the McDonald’s, a small guy trying not to draw attention to himself. “Does his sister work at the McDonald’s in Machias?”
    “Jamie? Yeah.”
    “I was actually in there this morning and noticed her.”
    “She’s easy to notice,” Corbett said with the sort of smile that didn’t belong on the face of a married man.
    “Prester and Randall were there, too. They were giving her some grief, and she ended up taking food out to their car.”
    “You’ll want to put that in your report.”
    Standing in the Spragues’ entryway, I found myself leaning against a wall for support. I had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, and I still had to shovel out my Jeep and drive back to my trailer.
    “I should say something to Mrs. Sprague,” I said.
    “You’re probably better off just hitting the road,” said Corbett. “The poor woman seems pretty shaken up. When I told her I needed to get an official statement from her, she asked if she could clean Joey’s room first.”
    “I need to give her back her snowmobile keys.”
    “You can leave them with me.”
    I shrugged and handed him the keys.
    *   *   *
     
    Ben Sprague had plowed a lane past my Jeep, pushing snow up against the tops of the windows. I had to use my cupped hand to scoop out a hole deep enough to get the tailgate open. From there, it was all shovel work. Beneath my layers of polypro, wool, and Gore-Tex, I began to perspire heavily.
    Every once in a while, I took a break from my