Twelve
Carlyle sat in a booth at the North Creek Diner at 7:20 on Saturday morning and watched the rain, driven by an unrelenting north wind, lash the shuttered store fronts that lined Main Street. If the temperature dropped another degree or two, the roads would ice up and the whitewater crowd, with no stomach for these conditions, would stay away from the river this weekend.
Leo Wells came through the front door ten minutes later. “You ever see anything like this?”
“Is it still illegal to shoot weathermen?” Carlyle said.
Wells stripped off his parka and gloves and slid into the booth. His deeply lined face, toughened by a decade in the mountains, looked drained. He was devoted to high-altitude rescue work, but it was an exhausting and solitary infatuation.
Carlyle had been to Wells’s tiny, one-bedroom apartment once, several years ago. The place was filled with ice axes, crampons, first aid equipment, five pairs of mountaineering boots, high-tech flashlights, global positioning devices, a half-dozen portable weather radios, and enough camping gear to outfit an army platoon. Women who saw the place knew that Wells would never make room in his life for a family.
“What happened?” Carlyle said. “You look like shit.”
“I thought you admired the Marlboro Man look.”
“Seriously.”
Wells began rapping the salt shaker against the table. “A couple of kids in a rowboat tried to run the low-head dam below Thompson’s Falls. We’ve been out all night searching for them.”
Carlyle rested his arms on the table. “You find anything?”
“Just the boat and two life vests. The bodies will probably wash up downstream in a day or so.”
The waitress who took their order recognized Carlyle. “How soon before they catch that guy who’s been killing guides?”
“Wish I could tell you, Ruth.”
A four-man line crew from the local power company burst into the diner. They wore bright orange vests and carried heavy leather tool belts, thick felt gloves, and hardhats. One of them left his scrum to slap Wells’s shoulder. “Leo, I heard about last night. You went into that wave below the dam to look for the bodies? That’s insane.”
Wells drained his first cup of coffee. “Tell that to the parents.”
The lineman turned to Carlyle. “Your friend here’s going to get killed one of these days if he’s not careful. Keep an eye on him.” He rejoined his crew.
“It’s been nearly two weeks,” Wells said. “You have any suspects yet?”
Carlyle pulled a small notebook from his backpack and placed it on the table. “I did background checks on everyone who’s worked for the town the past five years. Three people—one on the highway crew and two in maintenance—have minor criminal records, but we haven’t been able to connect them to this.”
“Anything else turn up?”
“Marshall had a client a year ago who broke his leg in Soup Strainer.”
“Did one of the guides make an error?”
“No, but the dude fractured his left femur and eventually lost his job.”
“Why’d he show up on your radar?”
Carlyle watched the rain beat against the diner’s windows. “He wrote some angry letters to the local paper blaming Marshall for his injury. I don’t think he’s our guy, though. Ryan’s insurance company paid him to drop his suit.”
“Anybody else on your list?”
“The fly-fishing crowd have spent big bucks trying to keep rafters off the river. I don’t think they’re desperate enough to try rough stuff, though.”
“What about the paper mills? I heard Marshall’s father took them to court, angling for exclusive rights to the water coming off the Indian Lake dam.”
“If you’re asking me if these people would play hardball to protect their operations, the answer’s yes. They stand to lose millions.”
Every time someone entered or left the diner, a blast of frigid air poured into the room. “So we’ve got nothing to go on so far,” Wells said.
“Until that thing yesterday in Harris, everyone assumed that we had this guy confined to the Indian.” Carlyle moved their coffee cups to one side, pulled a map from his pack, and placed it in front of Wells. “Our mistake was thinking that the gorge was outside his reach.”
Carlyle pointed to the Hudson, a pale blue streak in the center of the page. It plunged due south and then east before flowing into the gorge, the vital link connecting the central Adirondack watershed to the ocean. “We neglected the surrounding territory.”
“What did we miss?”
“The first trail that would give him access to the gorge itself.”
Wells moved his hand slowly across the map. Carlyle shook his head. “Not south of the river. Look at the other side.”
Wells pointed to a tiny dotted line running east and south through the backcountry. “Holy Christ.”
“That’s right. The Huntley Pond trail. It dead-ends at Blue Ledges, two hundred yards from the Narrows.”
“How the hell did you find it?” Wells said.
“Are you kidding me? I’ve been staring at that map every day for the past two weeks.”
Wells pulled the ADK guide to the Central Adirondacks from his jacket pocket. “It’s no more than three miles each way. That means he can get to the river and back to the road in four hours.”
“And once Marshall’s rafts reach Blue Ledges, he’s a sitting duck in the canyon.”
“Why didn’t I see it before?”
“Because you’ve been too busy trying to save people who think they’re scaling Everest,” Carlyle said.
“What happens now?”
The waitress put scrambled eggs and toast in front of Carlyle, pancakes and sausage before Wells. “You read the paper this morning, Leo?” she said.
“It’s still in my car, but I have a hunch you’re going to tell me what I missed.”
“Marshall’s father is evicting the families living on his land. He wants them gone by Christmas.”
Wells put his knife and fork down. “What’s that got to do with these murders?”
“Do I need to spell it out for you? It’s why everyone around here hates his kid.”
“You don’t mean that,” Wells said.
“I don’t? Just ask anyone in here what they think about the little prick.”
As they drove away from Riparius in
