by Mark Hall
a few feet from the river. He had been drug up there by his shoulders and was lying there in a way that you might have thought he was sleeping. He was a young man, barely 20 I thought, and had on full scuba gear with a small tank that wasn’t on his back but lying on the ground next to him. He was covered in a lycra suit and his mask was pulled to the top of his head. The mask front was cracked down the middle and he had a smartphone strapped to his wrist. It was in a waterproof case but had taken a beating and was cracked, full of water and certainly not working.
Upstream, there was a series of enormous rocks that has not been hidden by the rising water. Chris walked over the bank on this side and climbed out onto the rocks. He continued to look upstream, then back to the body in a repeated motion. Chris walked out into the trees and came back with a couple pinecones which he threw into the water and watched flow downstream. After a few minutes of this, he came back to the body and kept walking down the downstream bank. While the river was still high, the falls ended right at this point and the Towaliga flattened and slowed after the mill section.
“Has it been moved?” he asked.
“Just up to the bank”, Sheriff Taylor replied. “Who are you?” he asked.
“That’s Chris Calhoun, Sheriff, he’s with us” I answered. Not entirely untrue; witness protection could be a part of the US Marshal Service. The sheriff looked over at me. I wasn’t sure if he suspected anything but if he did, he shelved it for another day. He was a well-known and likeable sheriff, having served Butts County for a long time. He was certainly old school; always with two things – his Stetson and his Red Man.
“What do you think happened?” I asked the Sheriff.
“Damned if I know. This guy doesn’t have any id on him that we can see and everyone registered to camp is accounted for. All the folks with vehicles up on the day parking lot are accounted for as well. Whoever he is, he walked up. I couldn’t tell you what he was doing in that river this morning”, he added before spitting into the river.
“Or last night”, Chris added.
The sheriff turned to Chris, “or last night” he repeated, pushing his hat back on his head. “But that makes it even more odd. If I haven’t learned anything these past 35 years, it’s to never be surprised at what people are up to”, he paused, “especially at night.”
We spent several hours there walking either bank and trying to piece together what happened. Chris looked up and down the river several dozen times, went back to the body, and we met back up with Laura at the truck in the parking lot. The popularity of the park made it impossible to determine how he walked into the river and from what bank – there were tracks everywhere from the several hundred visitors the park sees each week.
“This one has me, Chris” I said, “I can’t figure out what he was doing here.”
“It is strange”, he answered, “but there was something in that river he was after. Something specific. He wasn’t just swimming around.”
“How do you figure that?” Laura asked.
“Well, he doesn’t have flippers on; he has on swim shoes, and the expensive ones, too. Those aren’t the cheap ones, they are thick rubber soled, made for walking in rivers for fly fishing or whatever. He was walking around but expected to be under water for a brief time, that’s why he had the tank with him and why it wasn’t on his back. He carried it.”
“Hmmm”, Laura answered.
“And I don’t think he was just trying to walk across the river just to see if he could walk across. There are at least three other routes he could take across the river that would have gotten him across. I think he was very specific about his location. That smartphone he had? Why take it with you? For a picture or a call? No. I think it was for the compass or the GPS to find a specific location in the river.”
“I think he was out on that river somewhere, looking for something, then slipped and tumbled and hit face first into one of those rocks out there that knocked him out and he drowned. His mask shows a crack that was caused by the fall. I also think he was alone.”
“How do you figure he was alone?” I asked.
“Because the campers drug him out, not his partner” Chris answered.
“That river is in no condition for us to start looking in it to figure out what he was after. We are going to have to wait until it calms down. A lot.” I said.
THREE
I hate to say it but we never could figure out what was going on in that case. This puzzle bothered Chris for several weeks. We did find a four wheeler on the Bennett Farm that borders the state park to the southwest and his truck was found several miles up the road where he had parked, unloaded the four wheeler, then rode onto the Bennett Farm and walked in from there. His name turned out to be John Schlottman, a Delta Airlines employee from Griffin. Nothing in his background gave us any information we might have used. He was a part-time student at Southern Crescent Technical College at night, and drove in to the Atlanta airport for work each day. He was a stand-up guy by all accounts, a good kid who liked the outdoors and was once a scout. After interviews with friends and family, a review of his bank records, his phone and email, his work history, all of those gave no indication as to why that man had decided to the walk out into the middle of an angry river in the middle of the night.
When the water dropped, teams of DNR agents scoured the river and rocks as best they could but the only item they turned up was the head lamp he must have used.
A couple months later, in the first of May on a Thursday, Chris and I were eating at Waffle House for lunch when my phone rang. When I looked at the name I recognized it as an old friend in a related law enforcement field, Cory Alexander. Cory had been the lead on the ground when we raided a dogfighting operation some time ago – Chris’ coming out party, so to speak.
“Hey there, Cory. You ought to be with us this afternoon, we’re –“
“I have trouble”, he said, cutting me off.
“What’s going on”?
“I need you and that boy Chris to come with you out here to Mr. William Sullivan’s place out here outside of Hawkinsville off of 26. You know where I mean?” Cory was a big, muscular man and just about everyone to him was ‘boy’.
“Did we shoot birds out there in his pasture several years ago?”
“That’s the place” he answered.
“Everything alright? What’s going on?” I motioned for Chris to pay the bill.
“My nephew Landon got run over by Mr. William’s bull a couple hours ago. He trampled him pretty good. It didn’t kill him but he is in really bad shape.”
“Aw man, Chris. What was he doing in Mr. William’s pasture?” Mr. William’s kids were grown and he didn’t have any teenagers in his house Landon’s age.
“That’s why I need you and that boy Chris to come out” he answered.
“We ought to be there in half an hour” I answered.
Several minutes later, we pulled off the road toward the Sullivan farm and I noticed several trucks across the road from the house at the corral where Mr. William’s cows were fed and loaded. The idea is that if you feed cows inside this wooden fence structure then when it came time to take some to market, or let the vet look at them you’d be able to feed them then shut the gate behind them and have them all in one place. The pasture sprawled out in every direction from the corral, taking up nearly a hundred acres. The sun was out and it was a fantastic spring day.
“Geez what an animal” Chris said as we walked up. He looked a little out of place among the farmer’s family and law enforcement folks but at least he had on boots. Cory walked up and shook hands with us.
“Thanks for coming out here, Mark”, he said. He was a solid guy and a good six inches taller than I am. We’ve known each other for several years.
“Not a problem” I replied. We walked up to the fence and it was clear that Chris had seen was an enormous Hereford bull. These bulls are usually a red color with a white belly and chest with a whi
te face. This bull was well clear of a thousand pounds, probably nearly fifteen hundred. There was a group of farm hands and neighbors around the corral, some standing, some sitting on the fence but everyone was looking at the bull and talking.
Cory filled us in. His nephew had been over the fence and inside the pasture and was run over by this bull. Luckily for him, this one was polled, or hornless, or he wouldn’t even be in the hospital now. I wasn’t sure why he called us but I was sure there was a good reason. There must be more to it than I knew.
“I don’t know what he was doing out here, Mark. He was just down the road here a bit past the house and climbed over the barb wire with a bucket of sweet feed. Of course the bull run over him a couple times but some sort of way he was able to get back through the fence, I think through the strands rather than over the thing. He is at Taylor Regional with a broken shoulder at least. The good news is that he was able to call his Daddy before he passed out and they got to him and got him to the hospital. They’ve got him sedated now so he can’t really tell us anything.”
“Maybe he was lucky” I said.
“Very” Cory replied. “Landon is a good boy, never been in any trouble. None. Straight A’s, boy scout, baseball player, the whole thing. I don’t know why he’d do such a dumb thing”.
“Or who might have put him up to it?” Chris asked.
“I thought of that,