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I tell him you’re refusing to cooperate in a murder investigation?”
    â€œI
am
cooperating.”
    â€œYou destroyed evidence when you erased that message.”
    Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. “Maybe we should wait for Lieutenant Malcomb to get here. I feel uncomfortable saying anything else right now.”
    â€œYou feel uncomfortable?” He grabbed the tape recorder and clicked it off. “One of my men is dead and another’s on his way to the hospital. So I don’t really give a damn how you feel.”
    â€œThe hospital? What are you talking about?”
    â€œWe lost radio contact with a deputy of mine named Pete Twombley half an hour ago. I’ve had men looking for him ever since. I just got a call that his cruiser was found off Route 144. They found Twombley beat up and handcuffed to a tree. I don’t know how your father overpowered him, but right now every law enforcement officer in western Maine is out there hunting for him. Maybe you should rethink the attitude and get on the right side of this. Because, the way it’s looking, the next time you see him is going to be at his funeral.”

8
    I sat alone in the lobby outside the dispatch office waiting for my division commander, Lieutenant Timothy Malcomb, to come through the door. The sheriff had gone off to supervise the manhunt. I felt like a kid waiting for his mom to pick him up outside the vice principal’s office.
    The enormity of what was happening was more than I could wrap my mind around. At this moment state troopers, deputies, and game wardens were hunting for my father in the woods along the Dead River. The FBI had been called in from Boston. TV news crews were probably rushing to the scene. By tomorrow morning the entire State of Maine would know the name of Jack Bowditch.
    When I applied to join the Warden Service, I worried a lot about my father’s criminal record and how it might affect my application. I remembered sitting in a room with leaded windows and flaking green brick walls while two interviewers peppered me with questions about my past. It was wintertime, but the room was as hot as a green house thanks to an old steam radiator that hissed at us throughout the interview. I was a sweating mess waiting for the moment when they would produce a folder with my father’s rap sheet—his mug shots taken over the years, his inked fingerprints, his list of drunk driving offenses and simple assaults and night hunting citations—but that moment never came.
    I left that interview believing I’d shaken off the past. But the moment had only been postponed. From this day forward I would be remembered as the son of a cop killer.
    So why was I more convinced than ever of his innocence? Whoever ambushed Jonathan Shipman and Bill Brodeur hoped to scare off Wendigo Timber by making a statement in blood. I knew my dad was capable of violence. But the cold-blooded murder of two men, including a police officer, for quasi-political reasons? He was a bar brawler, not a terrorist.
    If that was the case, then why had he fled? And how had he managed to overpower Deputy Twombley and crash the cruiser? The message on my answering machine seemed central to the mystery. Why had he called me last night and who was the woman with him?
    My greatest fear was that the searchers would corner my father in the woods and there would be a standoff ending in gunfire. In a few hours the case might be closed forever and I would live the rest of my life knowing I did nothing to save him.
    Screw it, I thought, rising to my feet. Let them bust me for insubordination.
    Heat was curling off the car tops when I crossed the parking lot, and the inside of my truck was like a Dutch oven. I started the engine, glanced in the rearview mirror, and my heart just about stopped. Lieutenant Malcomb was striding toward me across the asphalt. I rolled down my window.
    â€œWhat’s going on, Bowditch?”
    I