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By Root 420 0

for m e in a hurry. He explained that the perp (they really do use that word) was operating exclusively in one-horse towns where budget shortfalls have forced the cops to deal only with the most serious and immediate problems . . . which means crimes against the living rather than against the dead. The cops say there are at least two hot-car rings and four chop-shops operating in the western half of the state, and those are only the ones they know about. Then there are the murderers, the wife-beaters, the robbers, the speeders, and the drunks. Above all, there's the old dope-ola. It gets bought, it gets sold, it gets grown, and people keep hurting or killing each other over it. According to Brandon the Police Chief over in Norway won't even use the word cocaine anymore — he calls it Powdered Shithead, and in his written reports he calls it Powdered S******d. I got the point he was trying to make. When you're a small-town cop trying to ride herd on the whole freakshow in a four-year-old Plymouth cruiser that feels like it's going to fall apart every time you push it over seventy, your job gets prioritized in a hurry, and a guy who likes to play with dead people is a long way from the top of the list.

I listened to all this carefully, and I agreed, but not all the way. 'Some of it feels true, but some of it feels a little self-serving,' I said. 'I mean, the stuff Joubert was doing . . . well, it went a little further than just "playing with dead people," didn't it? Or am I wrong?'

'You're not wrong at all,' he said.

What neither of us wanted to come right out and say was that for seven years this aberrant soul had gone flitting from town to town getting blowjobs from the dead, and to me putting a stop to that seemed quite a bit more important than nabbing teenage girls who've been shoplifting cosmetics at the local drugstore or finding out who's been growing goofy-weed in the woodlot behind the Baptist church.

But the important thing is that no one forgot him, and everyone kept comparing notes. A perp like Rudolph makes cops uneasy for all kinds of reasons, but the major one is that a guy crazy enough to do things like that to dead people might be crazy enough to try doing them to ones that are still alive . . . not that you'd live very long after Rudolph decided to split your head open with his trusty axe. The police were also troubled by the missing limbs — what were those for? Brandon says an uncredited memo saying 'Maybe Rudolph the Lover is really Hannibal the Cannibal' circulated briefly in the Oxford County Sheriff's Office. It was destroyed not because the idea was regarded as a sick joke — it wasn't — but because the Sheriff was afraid it might leak to the press.

Whenever one of the local law-enforcement agencies could afford the men and the time, they'd stake out some boneyard or other. There are a lot of them in western Maine, and I guess it had almost become a kind of hobby to some of these guys by the time the case finally broke. The theory was just that it you keep shooting the dice long enough, you're bound to roll your point sooner or later. And that, essentially, is what finally happened.

Early last week — actually about ten days ago now — Castle County Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and one of his deputies were parked in the doorway of an abandoned barn close to Homeland Cemetery. This is on a secondary road that runs by the back gate. It was two o'clock in the morning and they were just getting ready to pack it in for the night when the deputy, John LaPointe, heard a motor. They never saw the van until it was actually pulling up to the gate because it was a snowy night and the guy's headlights weren't on. Deputy LaPointe wanted to take the guy as soon as they saw him get out of the van and go to work on the wrought-iron cemetery gate with a spreader, but the Sheriff restrained him. 'Ridgewick's a funny-looking duck,' Brandon said, 'but he knows the value of a good bust. He never loses sight of the courtroom in the heat of the moment. He learned from Alan Pangborn, the guy who had the job before him, and