Black Frog, page 20
Letting go of Emma and dropping his pistol, Cowboy brought his hands up to his face and tried to extract the dagger, but it had wedged firmly in his eye socket. Covering his face with both hands and moaning, Cowboy ran blindly in a small circle several times before seeing Anne with his good eye and charging toward her, screaming in pain and rage. She pushed at him with her good arm when he came within reach and he veered off toward the cliff edge. Realizing his mistake too late, Cowboy slipped off the cliff edge into thin air and disappeared into the intensifying thunderstorm.
EPILOGUE
One Month Later
Doug Bateman was surprised and pleased to find a parking place right in front of the Black Frog Restaurant. It was just before noon on a bright summer day and Greenville was jammed with Massholes and other tourists – lining up for soft serve ice cream and crowding into Kamp Kamp, Northwoods Outfitters, Black Frog, and the other businesses in the downtown area.
He had called Emma Lange earlier in the week and asked to have lunch with her so they could tie up some loose ends on the Cowboy case, as it was now being referred to in the press. Emma sounded enthusiastic and readily agreed to the lunch proposal. She seemed to have recovered quickly from her ordeal, with the sensation her follow-up story on the Cowboy and the Mt. Kineo marriage ceremony had created no doubt helping to lift her spirits.
Walking down the long hallway to the Black Frog Restaurant, Doug paused, as he usually did, to look at the vintage photographs of the heyday of the timbering industry that lined the walls. Two photographs of groups of loggers drew his particular attention, and he marveled again at the fortitude and determination of the lumbermen of long ago who labored through the long brutal winters of Maine.
He found Emma sitting at the bar, sipping on a cup of tea and chatting with Mitch Wagner, the owner of the Black Frog. Mitch was tall, lanky, with a full head of gray hair and large hands. He had run the Black Frog for several decades and always seemed in an upbeat mood. Today, however, he looked unusually somber and was wearing a black armband. Doug sat down next to Emma, placed a pile of folders on the bar, smiled at Emma and Mitch, and ordered a beer. As Mitch put the beer on the bar he asked the same question Doug had been hearing again and again over the past month.
“How’s Anne?”
“She’s doing really well, thanks to Emma here. Cowboy would have killed her up on Kineo if it hadn’t been for Emma. Anne told me that Emma twisted in Cowboy’s chokehold and threw off his first shot. And of course her stone dagger in the eye finished him off before he could get off a second shot.”
Changing subjects, Doug asked about the armband and offered condolences. Emma burst out laughing and Mitch explained why.
“Oh, nobody died Doug, at least nobody worth mourning. That Cowboy character isn’t worth even thinking about. No, I’m in mourning for the Black Frog. I’ve up and sold it – end of the summer, it’s shutting down for good. After thirty years of slingin Cheesy Weasels, me and the wife are sellin out and heading south for the winters.”
“I’m sorry to hear that Mitch – is it going to stay a restaurant?”
“That’s what I hear – somebody’s got fancy plans for it I think, but who knows what will happen. You know what they say – ‘Maine - Where dreams come to die.’
Anyway, what other news do you have Doug? Did they find the killer’s body yet?”
“Not yet. Looks like he had a clear fall 800 feet to the water. Given the wound he sustained, and the fall itself, there’s little chance he could have survived. He was likely dead when he hit the water, or soon after.”
Emma had been looking forward to pumping Doug about any new developments in the case, and broke in.
“What about the RV in the parking lot? Anything new there?”
“No. That was a total fuckup. We had warned everyone to stay away from it until we could bring some explosives people up from Augusta, but a couple of eager deputies apparently didn’t get the message and tried to pry open the RV’s door. The good news is they survived, but both received severe burns when the RV ignited. Fortunately we were able to clear the parking lot and the only other casualties were the half dozen parked cars that went up in flames. The RV and its contents were pretty much completely destroyed. There’s nothing to follow up on from that angle. We were able to trace the Mercedes back to a bogus registration in Quebec, and the vehicle itself was originally sold to a shell company that has since ceased to exist. So I doubt we will ever learn who was behind the Cowboy’s central Maine rape and murder spree.”
Turning back to Mitch, Doug changed the subject again.
“Mitch. I’m buying Emma lunch to thank her for her courage up on Mt. Kineo, and I think we’ll take a table out on the dock. I probably should take this chance to order a Cheesy Weasel and Curley Fries before the curtain falls on this place. And a draft beer for me.”
Emma ordered the same and they walked out onto the deck and managed to find a table among the overflow lunch crowd. Clearly curious, Emma gestured at the folders Doug had carried to the table.
“What’s with all the folders Doug?”
Doug smiled and avoided her question.
“First Emma, I want to thank you again, really seriously thank you, for what you did up on Mt. Kineo. There’s no doubt Cowboy would have killed Anne if you hadn’t taken him out. For that she and I will forever be in your debt. Thank you Emma.”
Emma teared up, smiled, and looked embarrassed at Doug’s praise. Doug continued.
“The other reason I invited you to lunch is to see what you think of a pretty bizarre theory I have been playing with regarding the Richard Potter killing. I thought that given all your research on the crime you might be willing to let me bounce my theory off you and see what you think. Keep in mind, Emma, that it’s all speculative and we don’t have enough evidence to pursue it any further. I’ve already run it by the prosecutor’s office and they pretty much laughed me out the door. ”
Emma’s smile broadened and she replied enthusiastically.
“Excellent Doug. I can work it into something I’m working on.”
“No, you won’t want to do that. This is strictly deepest background – just between you and me.”
Emma reluctantly took her recording phone off the table and sat back to listen to what Doug had to say. The waitress appeared just then with their burgers and fries, and when she had left Doug began to lay out his theory.
“The Potter killing has puzzled me almost from the beginning. We know Cowboy killed Peebles – you saw it up close, and we’re confident he killed both O’Connell in the Rite Aid parking lot and Virginia Breen behind the Kokadjo billboard. But what if someone else killed Potter and then Cowboy decided to copy the murder in order to fit a narrative - that all three killings were by the same person and all were linked to the Lily Bay project? It would have been a brilliant misdirection on his part. Remember that we never did find any evidence to link Cowboy to the Potter murder. We never got any Cowboy DNA from the Potter crime scene. And then the axes were different – the ones used on Potter were from the Lumberman’s museum and were vintage – dating to the 1940s and part of a government purchase. Cowboy’s axes, on the other hand were both bought at Kamp Kamp. So why was one set of axes stolen from a museum and the other purchased from a store? Was there something special or unique about the Lumbering Museum axes? Maybe their time period of manufacture or who they were made for?”
Listening closely to Doug’s theory, Emma nodded in agreement.
“Sounds plausible so far.”
Doug looked at his notes and continued.
“In addition, while we have continued to get new information that confirms Breen and Peebles’s efforts to acquire land parcels in the path of the planned East-West Corridor and can trace their finances back to the same overseas matrix of shell companies and shady banks, Potter does not appear to have had any involvement in their scheme. So it appears likely that Potter’s killer must have had a different motive.”
Emma nodded again. “That sounds logical.”
Doug continued.
“We’ve looked at all the obvious suspects – the ex-wife, the mobsters out of Boston, all the people he screwed in business over the decades, and they all came up clean as far as we can tell. So that brings me to the theory Anne and I have been working on for a while – the ‘What if Emma killed Litte Rick theory?’”
Doug paused and waited for a reaction from Emma, who laughed and replied, eyes flashing.
“Now your story is getting interesting. But the prosecutor didn’t think much of it?”
“No – he said I didn’t have any real evidence, just conjecture, and that any decent defense attorney would laugh us out of court.”
“Well then, please continue,” responded Emma, leaning back in her seat and visibly relaxing.
“Emma Lange was high on our initial list of suspects, given the fact that you were the last person to see Potter alive. But we ruled you out early in our investigation. Your fingerprints were all over the crime scene, but of course not anywhere that was incriminating – not on the body or the murder weapons, or his clothes, or the rope that was used to bind him to the tree. We also looked at your kayak, and couldn’t find anything there to link you to the murder. You placed yourself at the murder scene, but no one actually saw you commit the murder, and your timeline of what occurred that Sunday could be corroborated.”
Emma responded.
“So no physical evidence tying me to the murder from the crime scene.”
Doug nodded.
“And then there was the question of motive – what possible reason could you have had for killing Potter? You’d just met him the day before and had no prior business or personal connection to him that we could find. Maybe you two had a spur of the moment argument over your Sunday lunch and you ended up killing him. But that doesn’t work since the crime was clearly premeditated. The murder weapons were stolen long before the day of the murder. Whoever killed Potter was prepared beforehand.”
Doug paused to sip his beer as Emma summarized.
“So no physical evidence linking me to the murder, and no motive.”
Doug nodded.
“Anne and I decided to look harder at any potential motive you might have had for killing Potter, and that led to us looking deeper into your background. I remembered then that you had mentioned in your first interview that you had a family history here in central Maine. But when I looked I found that your parents didn’t immigrate to the US until the middle fifties and even then they settled in Portland, not Piscataquis County. So there didn’t appear to be any Lange family history going back before the mid-fifties on this side of the Atlantic, and there was no record at all of the Langes ever spending any time in central Maine.
But then the vintage photos in the hallway here at the Black Frog, the ones documenting the history of the local lumbering industry, offered a lead. I noticed several photos they had of the Prisoner of War camp that existed during WWII up at Seboomook at the north end of Moosehead Lake. I wondered if maybe the axes from the lumberman’s museum were specifically stolen because they were from the period of WWII and had been made for the US government? Maybe they were linked to the Seeboomook prisoner of war camp and something that occurred there seventy years ago. Then one evening when we’re sitting on the dock and trying to see if we could cast you in the role of murderer, Anne jokingly pointed out that Lange was a German name – maybe the local family history you mentioned referred in fact to one of your ancestors having spent some time at Seeboomook during the war. That sent me back to the photos in the hallway here in the Black Frog because I remembered a group photo of some of the guards and prisoners that was taken at the prisoner of war camp. The photo included a dozen men, and all their names had been written out in a caption at the bottom. One of the prisoners shown was named Peter Lange.”
Emma nodded wistfully.
“That was my grandfather. He never made it home.”
“Your grandfather wasn’t the only interesting individual I saw in the photo. Mitch came up behind me when I was looking at the Seeboomook group shot and pointed out another man standing off to the side holding a shotgun – obviously one of the guards. He told me that it was Richard Potter’s grandfather. I looked at the name at the bottom of the picture and the man was identified as Albert Gremill, not Potter, but Mitch explained that Richard Potter was named for his adoptive grandparents, and that his biological grandfather on his father’s side was named Albert Gremill.”
Doug paused and Emma folded her arms across her chest and said nothing.
“That’s quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say Emma – your grandfather and Richard Potter’s grandfather were both in the Seeboomook camp at the same time.”
“That is a surprise Doug. I had no idea.”
“Anyway, to continue with our crazy theory, I got access to the negative of the photo that showed the two grandfathers from the Army Archives and had it enlarged. It showed that your grandfather was wearing a small disk on a chain around his neck with a funny squiggle on it. Curiously enough, I found more recent photos of Richard Potter’s father Percy and in several of them he was wearing his watch fob with all those ornaments. One of the ornaments was a round disk about the same size as the one your grandfather was wearing in the earlier prisoner camp photo, and it seemed to have the same squiggle. Then the same watch fob, with the same disk, shows up in photos of Richard Potter, including the one you took here at the Black Frog when you had dinner with him, squiggle and all.”
Stone faced now, Emma sarcastically commented.
“Wow. I agree with you Doug. You and Anne have cooked up quite a bizarre scenario. And Cannabis is not even legal yet in Maine.”
Doug sorted through the top folder on the table and slid a photo across the table to Emma.
“Oh, it gets even more bizarre. I wondered what kind of disk would a German prisoner of war wear around his neck like that? It didn’t take long to find a likely answer – the lightning bolt squiggle was used a lot by German youth groups in recognizing accomplishments, so your grandfather probably earned it well before he joined the military. Clearly he was proud of it.”
Emma uncrossed her arms.
“I’ll have to look it up. I didn’t know that about grandpa Peter.”
“But why then,” Doug continued, “did Peter Lange’s lightning bolt disk end up with Albert Gremill, who then passed it on to his son Percy and then on to Richard? Maybe he lost it in a bet or to pay a debt. This is where old newspaper articles and some oral history comes into play. The library in Dover-Foxcroft had old newspapers on microfilm, and the historical society had some audio recordings of old-timers, including Jim Asch, who actually worked as a guard at Seeboomook. I found several Bangor newspaper articles from 1944 that mentioned one of the prisoners of war escaping and then being tracked down and unfortunately killed by guards a few days later. The story stated that he attacked the guards chasing him, and they acted in self-defense. Asch, however, tells a different story. He claims in the recording he made that several of the guards, including Albert Gremill, bragged afterward about how they killed Peter Lange in cold blood and laughed about it.”
Doug closed up the folder on the table and asked Emma what she thought of the theory.
“A fascinating theory Doug. Let’s see if I have this right. In a nutshell, I killed Potter in revenge because his grandfather murdered my grandfather here at Moosehead Lake over seventy years ago. The problem you have, of course, is proving your theory in a court of law. You don’t have any physical evidence tying me to either the murder or the theft of the murder weapons. You also can’t show that Albert Gremill deliberately killed my grandfather – all you have is the hearsay statement that an addled old man heard something Albert bragged about all those years ago – not exactly admissible evidence. In addition, this disk you mentioned – my grandfather had one at the camp, and then Percy, Albert’s son, shows up with one like it years later. Is it the same disk, or did he get it from a different source? If Percy did get it from his father, and his father got it in turn from my grandfather, maybe he received it as a gesture of friendship, or in exchange for extra food, or as a gambling debt. So even if the disk Percy and then Richard Potter had on their watch fobs originated with my grandfather, it certainly doesn’t indicate, or even suggest, that my grandfather was deliberately murdered by Richard Potter’s grandfather. You’ve got nothing.”
Nodding in agreement, Doug responded.
“That’s pretty much what the prosecutor said – intriguing theory that lacks enough evidence to proceed unless you can get a confession.”
“No chance of a confession from me Doug. Not a chance.”
“I didn’t really expect you to confess Emma. Why would you, in the absence of any real proof? Maybe we would have a better case if we ever were able to find the disk – it looks like whoever killed Potter also stole the disk from him. We recovered the watch fob along with the second axe stolen from the lumbering museum – the one used to cut his spinal column in half, in the water off his dock, and the disk was one of two ornaments that had been removed. If the disk does ever turn up, and I doubt it will, whoever ends up having it in their possession would have some explaining to do.”
