“Have you ever heard of two fatalities so close together?”
“Never.”
“There’s going to be an inquiry.”
“I’ll be glad to tell them what I saw.”
“We don’t just want your testimony. We want you to lead the investigation.”
“Why me?”
“The university says you’re this hotshot criminologist. Were they wrong?”
“I’m not a crime-scene investigator. I study the history of crime.”
“You were a guide on this river for a decade; you understand this world.”
“The state police will be furious if they’re not in charge.”
“Let me worry about them.”
“I told you, I’m no cop.”
“We’re not looking for a cop. We just need time to decide how to handle all the bad publicity that’s coming our way.”
“I get it. You’re going to sweep this thing under the rug.”
“Of course not. DEC wants this problem cleared up so we can get people back on that river.”
“If you put me in charge of this thing, I won’t stop until I find out what happened out there.”
“That’s fine. Just be at Marshall’s lodge at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. We’ll have your witnesses ready.”
Carlyle climbed onto the bus and walked to the back to give himself time to think.
Betts dropped into the seat next to him. “You even see anything like those jackals with cameras?”
“Try to stay calm,” Carlyle said. “The shit’s just beginning for all of us.”
At seven that night, when he was sure that no other boats would come down the river, he emerged from the woods. He kicked leaves away from the site and, gripping the long wooden pole in both hands, pried the log into the Indian. He stood there for several minutes to make sure the current carried it clear of the chute. Because it was too late to hike back to the road, he would camp out tonight and return to his truck before dawn, long before the main road would see any traffic.
Three
The five guides who were on the river when Blake died went their own way after being interviewed by the state police. Betts, Nash, and Hernandez went home to their families and drank beer until they fell asleep. Eric Munck picked up a woman in a bar and stayed with her until four in the morning. Carlyle ate in a restaurant in Warrensburg, then found a room in the lodge. Marshall slept on the couch in his office. When they all got back to Marshall’s place on Thursday morning at eight thirty, they found Karen Raines, John Bognor, the county sheriff, and Leo Wells, head of Search and Rescue for the region, waiting for them.
Marshall’s lodge sat on a forty-six-acre property surrounded by blue spruce, birch, maple, and flowering crabapple. The main building was a replica of the place Cornelius Vanderbilt had erected a hundred miles north of here a century ago. Sheathed in old-growth cedar, it contained a two-thousand-square-foot conference center, a dining room that could seat fifty, two offices, a guides’ lounge, and, around back, a retail shop that sold whitewater gear.
Marshall’s father, convinced that it would showcase his plans for the Johnston Mountain Project, had shelled out nearly half a million dollars for the lodge alone. The main room downstairs had a handcrafted stone fireplace, ten-foot mullioned windows, brocade wing chairs, walnut end tables, and oak beams framing a vaulted ceiling.
Each bedroom on the second floor contained a four-poster canopy bed, imitation Tiffany lamps, ship models, bentwood rockers, pack baskets, carvings of owls and loons, and original—if not especially charming—landscape paintings.
Raines opened her purse and took out a BlackBerry and a large manila file. “I just spoke to the commissioner. He wants people back on the river this weekend. If they’re not with Marshall, he wants them with another outfitter.”
Carlyle sat at the head of the table in the main room downstairs. “There’s something else we have to talk about first. The families of these two guides deserve to know why they died.”
“The commissioner has another priority: ending the bad publicity and pumping tourist dollars into this region.”
“There’s a half-dozen fatalities in this county every year,” Marshall said. “Why are you laying the blame for these tragedies on me?”
Sheriff Bognor turned in his chair to face Raines. “Karen, Blake’s parents have hired a lawyer. You can’t ignore the families.”
Bognor, age fifty-six, was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and scuffed work boots. When asked why he never wore a uniform, he’d said, “I didn’t get elected to this job because I look like Smokey the Bear.”
“Let’s get this investigation over with,” Marshall said. “I’ve got a business to run.”
All this talk of profit and loss appalled Carlyle. “DEC will need some reassurance that your people did everything they could to save Blake.”
“You can’t put the blame for what happened on my crew.”
“I’m just trying to make sure this never happens again.”
Marshall turned to Raines. “Are you going to let him railroad me like this?”
“Let’s just go over yesterday’s events and then decide what to do,” Raines said.
Carlyle turned to Betts. “Alex, you were with him all morning. Did anything happen before the trip that may have thrown Blake off stride?”
“He had an argument in the parking lot with his crew. They had hangovers and tried to sneak a six-pack of beer onto the bus. None of them had the right gear, naturally.”
“What did you do?”
“I took the beer and threw it in the back of my truck.”
Betts was six feet tall and nearly two hundred twenty pounds. Unlike Marshall, who wore expensive river gear, Betts adopted the ape-man look: torn wetsuit, ripped river shorts, ragged neoprene boots. Before every trip he strapped a ten-inch diver’s knife to his leg with two thick rubber cords. The patch on his life vest read “Paddle or Die.”
“Then what happened?” Carlyle said.
“I told them Grace Irwin would sell them gear that would keep them from freezing. I said she made eight bucks an hour, but if they were polite, she’d treat them respectfully.”
“Did that end the trouble?” Bognor said.
“You think they were dumb enough to pick a fight with
