Chapter 69
When I arrived in Lake Havasu, I went directly to the office of Kelly Dumas, the deputy sheriff who worked the Leonard Harris case. Luckily for me, it seemed that nobody in Arizona ever changed jobs.
Kelly stood to greet me. She was a plain but pretty woman with a boyish bowl cut. But what caught my attention was her height-she towered over me.
We exchanged pleasantries, but I could tell she was less than enthused by my visit, especially at this late hour. I took a seat facing her cluttered desk and noticed a bumper sticker push-pinned to a cork bulletin-board behind her:
“So do you play basketball?” I asked with a smile
“As a matter of fact I played for Northern Arizona University. Three time all Big Sky Conference.”
“I’m impressed.”
My niceties didn’t fool her. “Did you come here to discuss my basketball career? My guess is you’re here to discuss the only two issues the national media is interested in talking to me about. So is it MTV Spring Break or Leonard Harris?”
“MTV Spring Break? I can’t watch that crap-it makes me feel two hundred years old,” I replied with another smile.
“So what do you want to know about Mr. Harris’ death?”
“I would like to know why your department called it an accident when it was a homicide?”
She looked annoyed. “Unless you have some evidence I wasn’t privileged to see, that’s a baseless claim. And you’re wasting my time.”
She opened a file drawer and pulled out the folders from the Harris case. The fact that they were so accessible after all these years told me that it must come up often.
I scanned through the reports. The folder was littered with pictures of Harris’ corpse that made my stomach queasy. It also contained sworn statements from the many witnesses. I searched until I found the statement given by Grady Benson and skimmed it.
“I notice you weren’t present at the crime scene?” I said, trying to buy time while I looked through the records.
“Mr. Warner, it’s late, so I’ll make this fast. It was the Fourth of July and there was only one of me. I usually traveled to an incident with the dive team, but it was impossible that night. The only thing out of the ordinary in this case was that one of the persons who died was a famous athlete. Besides that, it was a textbook carbon monoxide poisoning case. And if you read further into the reports, you’ll see that the coroner backed up the finding at the scene.” She let out an exasperated sigh. “A UNLV student died on a houseboat in the same manner last year and nobody shows up here to discuss it.”
“How can you be so sure no foul play was involved?”
“First of all, the way Mr. Harris and Ms. McCarron died-she was also a victim, but people seem to forget that-the bodies were in the semi-fetal position with legs loosely drawn up. Their arms were pulled close to the chest with hands limp and palms down. Do you know what that means?”
I felt like I was in eighth grade math class and forgot to do my homework. “Um … no.”
“It means it was a textbook accidental drowning. And when the toxicology tests came back, we found that Harris had a gas content in his body of fifty-nine percent, while Candi McCarron’s was fifty-two.”
“Is that high?”
“It’s a hundred percent fatal.”
“So he and Candi would have died regardless, even if they were on dry land?”
“The gas likely made them woozy, or pass out, which led to their drowning. The water was the final nail in their coffins.”
“But how did they know this at the scene? My guess is this thing is rare.”
Kelly shook her head. “I wish you were right, but over the last two decades there has been an epidemic of carbon monoxide poisonings on houseboats. Nine people have died here and six up at Lake Powell in the last seven years. That doesn’t include the many who had to be hospitalized.”
I never heard of anything like this. But I had a feeling that Grady Benson was well aware of it.
Kelly held up the photographs of Leonard Harris and Candi McCarron’s naked bodies. “Notice the blood around their mouths and dripping from their noses. And how their skin is splotched a cherry red color-it’s textbook carbon monoxide poisoning. Our divers knew the minute they found them.”
I picked up the photos and was drawn to the before-and-after pictures of Candi McCarron, whom I’d never seen before. The “before” showed stunning beauty, looking like a stereotypical California blonde. The one taken after her trip to the bottom of the lake was equally stunning, but not very beautiful. I made a mental note to research any connection she might have to a drunk driving fatality.
I found a copy of the rental agreement in the file folder, and as expected, Grady Benson’s signature was on it. His spiritual adviser had rented the boat for the party.
“Would it be possible for me to talk to the lead diver in this case? The one who was first on the scene,” I asked.
The vibrating sound of Kelly Dumas’ phone stole her attention. She looked at it and cringed.
“Looks like you’ll get your chance, Mr. Warner.”
Chapter 70
The situation centered on a houseboat in Copper Canyon, a secluded cove that was a favorite spot of houseboaters. A father and two young children took a ski boat out over two hours ago and hadn’t been seen since.
Either they had some sort of mechanical trouble and were floating around the lake, or this exercise would be about body recovery. There was no time to waste, and in what seemed like microseconds, I was standing in front of a dive locker in the marina, putting on a black wet suit.
Jerry Sidwell headed the dive team. A tall, fit man who looked like he lived in a gym, despite being in his late fifties. The pace was hurried, but I didn’t notice any panic. I helped with what I could, loading their dive tanks, buoyancy compensators, and vests. Once the entire crew was on board, the boat sprinted from the dock, hopping over the dark, choppy water.
I was surprised that Sidwell took time out of his duties to approach me. “Kelly told me that you had questions about the Leonard Harris drowning.”
“I do, but are you sure you don’t want to discuss it later?”
“I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. I know every inch of this lake and what we’re up against. So I need something to take my mind off what we might find tonight. So what do you want to know?”
“Anything you remember might be helpful.”
“I recall that it was a worst-case scenario that night from our standpoint. We couldn’t use the helicopter because of the lightning. Plus, it was Fourth of July, so we were short on manpower.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Nope. The minute I heard the call I knew it was the generators. They were already gone.”
“So you arrived at the scene with a pre-conceived notion of the outcome? Is it possible that you didn’t investigate all angles of the death because in your mind you already knew what happened?”
“No,” the self-assured Sidwell replied. He peered out into the black water, maybe seeing the ghosts of rescues past.
“Kelly was telling me about this carbon monoxide problem on these houseboats. Is that what you mean by generators?”
