Carlyle put down his pen. “I’m going to take a guess. That one was missing too.”
Marshall looked suspicious. “How did you know?”
“We know Sanders and Blake were murdered.”
The room erupted. Carlyle quieted them down and briefly told them about the foot strap and missing log. “It seems reasonable to suspect that if the murderer failed to get your attention earlier, he would try something else, and two guides died. But why didn’t you follow up on the missing backboards?”
“I had a kid going crazy. My major concern was getting him out of there safely.”
“What did you do once you found out the second board was missing?”
“We sent Hernandez ahead to North Creek to call in a Medevac crew to the small meadow just east of the Boreas.” Marshall stood up and walked to a large topo map pinned to the wall. “They picked him up there. Right where the abandoned railway trestle crosses the Hudson.”
“But you never suspected sabotage?”
“Why the hell should I? Who goes out in those woods and steals a goddamn backboard? Ashcroft may have made a mistake, but there’s an insane person out there. Why keep blaming us?”
“DEC, the state police, and lawyers are going to ask you to go over all this again,” Carlyle said. “I’m just getting you ready for their questions.”
“You don’t sound like you’re on my side.”
“DEC asked me to help you out. Your season may be over, but I can’t save your business if you don’t come clean.”
“Let’s just get this over with.”
“I only have one more question,” Carlyle said. “What happened to Katz?”
“Alex and I went to the hospital as soon as the trip ended. His doctor said that Nash was correct; the boy had a severed artery in the back of his knee. Gangrene was a possibility. He advised us to leave before the parents got there.”
“When did you replace the missing boards?” Bognor said.
“The next day Alex wrapped bright orange surveyor tape around the trees to mark the spot. Then we went over to the other side of the river and put more tape there just to be sure we could locate it.”
Carlyle looked at his watch. “Sanders’s memorial begins in an hour. After that, we’ve got the other incident to discuss. I’d like you all back here by two thirty.”
The Methodist church stood at the far end of a cul-de-sac on the north end of the village where Sanders had grown up. It was an Arts and Crafts building covered in dark-brown shingles, with a steeply pitched roof and half a dozen blue, green, and red stained-glass windows lining the central aisle. Sitting at the top of a small hill, surrounded on three sides by a forest of jack pine and juniper, the structure had been built by lumber barons who wanted no part of the Roman Catholic theology their workers followed.
Insisting that everyone present at the funeral could be in danger, Caleb Pierce had placed his cruiser at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. Unwilling to increase his deputy’s paranoia, Bognor hadn’t told Pierce that a state police sniper from the Syracuse Barracks had been stationed across the street at the second-floor window of the parish hall.
Mourners filled every pew. Sanders’s family, friends, and immediate neighbors sat in the first two rows. Seated behind them were members of the volunteer fire company, employees of the nursing home where Sanders’s mom had worked, his colleagues and students from the local high school, all eight members of the Village Council, and the town highway crew from where his father had been employed. Karen Raines, furious that her BlackBerry would not function in the mountains, sat alone at the end of the second row. Two dozen Hudson River guides sat behind her. Six state police detectives disguised as pallbearers stood along the back wall of the church.
At the end of the hour-long service, Carlyle and Bognor walked across a gravel parking lot toward their vehicles. Clouds, gathering energy and moisture as they passed over the mountains, turned dark gray. Lightning and heavy rain would roll in later this afternoon, a typical Adirondack thunderstorm that locals called the two o’clock express.
Deep creases lined Bognor’s face. “Can you imagine drowning like that?” Carlyle had been forced to describe Sanders’s death a half-dozen times in the past week and had no stomach for going over it again. Bognor leaned against his cruiser. “Any chance this backboard thing could have been a prank? Teenagers running wild in the woods?”
“Kids around here know better than to tamper with rafting equipment. Guides are heroes; every teenage boy would die to work on the river. And who would take a hike like that for a prank?”
“Could one of his competitors have done it?”
“Absolutely not. Outfitters don’t have much love for each other, but they’re not crazy enough to steal lifesaving gear.”
“What about those jackasses out at the Mt. Rushmore Club? They’d love to evict the rafting crowd.”
Carlyle shook his head. “They’re too busy getting drunk and killing fish to worry about a couple of dozen rafts on the weekend.”
“Suppose some nut case got drunk one night and decided to raise hell. That could account for those missing backboards.”
“How would he know where Marshall had hidden them?”
Sanders’s wife, propped up by her parents, walked silently out of the church.
Bognor said, “No matter how this turns out, Marshall’s finished. Can you imagine anyone trusting his operation again?”
Carlyle reached for the door of his truck. “Did Marshall have any enemies that you know of?”
“I’ve never had any trouble with him, but others have. He buys up every seat permit that hits the market and fires employees for no reason. But who could hate him enough to do something like this?”
The crowd had begun to thin out. Two black limousines carrying grieving family members left the church and headed toward the graveyard on the far side of the village.
“What really scares me,” Carlyle said, “is that the guy who killed those two guides may not be finished.”
“What are you saying?”
Carlyle opened the
