Carlyle looked away from Ashcroft, then down at his notes. “Go on with your story.”
“By then, my arms felt like lead weights. There was ice everywhere. We even saw a couple of whole trees coming down from up north. I thought I still had some time to turn them into a decent crew, but Katz began horsing around again. He punched the kid next to him and bounced around on the front tube like a madman.”
Pierce leaned forward. “Did it ever occur to you at that point to finally put him in someone else’s boat?”
“How was I supposed to do that while we were surfing down Cedar?”
“You could have ordered him to stop his bullshit.”
Betts laughed. “Why didn’t I think of that? We could carry handcuffs and clubs in our rafts next time.”
“People do what they’re told if they’re frightened enough,” Pierce said.
“Alex, just let Bob continue,” Carlyle said.
Ashcroft slouched with his head bent forward like a disgraced monk. “We came rushing up on Entrance. You all know how quickly everything turns bad there. One second, you’re floating past Virgin Falls, then you turn the corner and you see the river boiling.” He stopped and took a breath. “The boat hit a rock and Katz went airborne.” Ashcroft’s voice was hollow, as though he was describing a movie he’d seen. “When Katz tumbled over the side, his left leg got tangled in the chicken line.”
“For how long?”
“Thirty seconds or so. I couldn’t drop my paddle until we’d moved away from the worst hydraulics. Then I ran up the side of the raft, grabbed his life vest, and hauled him in. He lay in the bottom of the raft, thrashing around, grabbing the back of his leg, and screaming.” Ashcroft, head down, stared at his hands. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”
Carlyle looked at Marshall. “Ryan?”
Marshall scowled. “When we slid into Blue Ledge basin, Bob yelled that he needed some help. I grabbed the First Aid Kit, ran over, and sliced open the left leg of the kid’s wetsuit with a pair of scissors. I saw right away that it had begun to swell. And his foot had already turned white. People in the other boats could hear him crying.” The room was silent for a few moments.
“What then?” Carlyle said.
“I had Nash there. He’d been an EMT in the army for three years and had seen more blunt force trauma and open fractures than most surgeons deal with in a lifetime.”
“Keith, what about the kid’s leg?”
“The knee was dislocated, but that wasn’t what really worried me. I thought there was a chance that Katz had ruptured an artery in the back of his leg.”
“And that’s a real emergency?”
“If you don’t stabilize the leg and get the patient to a hospital immediately, there’s a good chance you get paralysis or worse.”
“Worse?”
“Gangrene. We had no way of getting back to the put-in, and North River was at least two hours away. Since we were just five hundred yards from Virgin Falls, I told Betts to run back upstream and grab the backboard we’d stowed there. It was in a stand of cedar ten yards from the river.”
“For the record, say how you knew this.”
Marshall leaned back. “Every rafting company puts backboards below each major rapid. They’re wrapped in plastic, bound with duct tape, and lashed upright.”
“How long was Betts gone?” Carlyle said.
“Five, ten minutes at the most. But when he got back, he said there was no backboard at Virgin.”
“You knew that couldn’t be true.”
“Of course not. We put that thing there three weeks earlier. Right before the season began. I marked the tree with orange surveyor’s tape myself.”
“You’re absolutely sure about where it was?”
“If you ask me that one more time, this interview’s over.”
“What did you do then?”
“Keith fixed up a splint using a spare paddle. It would do until we got down to Osprey where there was another board.”
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 Adir
ondack 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 door of his truck. “There’s three possibilities. He thinks he’s got a damn good reason for harassing Marshall, he’s started to enjoy watching the carnage, or he won’t stop until Marshall is dead.”
Seven
Carlyle was standing in the conference room of the lodge at 2:00 p.m. studying a stack of computer printouts when Marshall walked in. “What the hell’s all that?”
“DEC accident reports going back two years.”
“What do you expect to find there?”
“To see if you’re the only outfitter he’s after.” Carlyle, known as a quant guy by his colleagues, had earned his reputation through a meticulous analysis of crime statistics.
“You going to keep me waiting for an answer?”
“So far, looks like you’re his only target.” Carlyle dropped the files into his briefcase and sat down at the head of the table. “By the way, what ever happened to Katz?”
Marshall sat to Carlyle’s left. “He had two operations on his leg, but the infection spread. They had to amputate just below his knee.”
The door opened and Nash, Hernandez, and Betts came in, followed by Bognor and Pierce.
Carlyle looked across the table. “Ryan, you said something else happened last fall.”
“I never said it was connected to Sanders and Blake.”
“Why don’t you let us decide that?” Bognor said. The sheriff still had a black mourning band wrapped around the left arm of his uniform.
Marshall pushed his chair back. “It was the third week in September. Betts called me on Saturday at dawn to say the Hudson had erupted overnight. It was up to 8.5 and he wanted to know if I was going to cancel the trip.”
“And?”
“I told him to mind his own business. He knows I don’t cancel trips.”
“Why didn’t you change your plans once you heard that the Hudson was busting loose?” Carlyle said.
“We’d filled eight boats. I can’t afford to turn people away in my busy season. I told Betts that if he was afraid to do his job, Nash could run sweep.”
Bognor made several entries in a small spiral notebook. “Anything else you remember about that morning?” Carlyle said.
“Blake had just begun his second year with us. He said he wasn’t sure he could get a boat through Mile-Long when the river was near flood stage.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said this business is about guts, not brains.”
“You really let inexperienced people go out there like that?”
“That’s how we train rookies. They either survive or they look someplace else for excitement.”
Carlyle knew that Marshall, not understanding that his comments would get him in trouble later, was showing off in front of Bognor. “Anybody in particular give you problems that day?”
“There were six people I was keeping my eye on,” Marshall said. “They were butting helmets and pounding their paddles into the ground like year-old bulls. The usual macho shit, but there was something about them that I didn’t like.”
“Was that the end of their shenanigans?”
“I wish. One of them, a dude wearing a tricked-out new wetsuit, asked me what to do if he had to take a leak when he was out on the river.”
“And you told him the usual?”
“Right. I said we get two kinds of people here. Those who piss in their wetsuits and those who lie about it.”
Bognor said, “Since you thought that they might make trouble, what did you do?”
“I put them in Hernandez’s boat. He would never take any shit from people like that.”
“You regularly let troublemakers like that on the river?”
“If we turned away every asshole who showed up, we’d have no clients.”
“Anyone else in that bunch give you problems?” Carlyle asked.
“A tall dude,” Marshall said, “maybe six-two, six-three, dressed like the Terminator. Expensive wraparound sunglasses, new wetsuit, black diver’s watch, and a knife fixed to his life vest. You don’t see that often.”
“How do you remember all this?”
“If you hold on a minute, I’ll tell you. As we walked toward our bus, I said I didn’t think he’d need that knife today. He says, ‘I needed it on the Rogue. You can never tell when you’re going to get into trouble.’”
“That’s it? Just a guy with a big mouth?”
Marshall shook his head. “He had another knife strapped to his leg. Bigger than the first one.”
When Carlyle had worked here, he’d carried a small, black, saw-toothed Spyderco on his life vest, but he’d never seen a client wear a knife. “You remember the guy’s name?”
“I knew you’d ask, so I looked it up. Morgan Price. A Wall Street big shot with an attitude--paid cash for his entire posse. He started mouthing off again when our bus broke down on the way to Indian Lake.”
“You remember your driver that day?”
“Ben Albert, a cook with the school district. Been with me for a decade. Nothing wrong there except he smokes and is seriously overweight. His wife died of emphysema recently. Lives on a half-acre just outside of town.”
“You get along with him?”
“He drives just fine. But last December, he asked for two hundred and fifty bucks because he was short on rent money. I turned him down.”
“You think he might hold that against you?”
“What if he did? He couldn’t be involved in all this.”
“Why’s that?” Carlyle said.
“Ben Albert can hardly walk a hundred feet.”
“So what happened when the bus finally got going again that morning?”
“Price interrupted my safety talk. I’d just warned everyone that if they fell out, they should assume the safe swimmer position—on their backs and feet together. He shouted, ‘Come on, skip the pussy stuff.’”
“And you told him what?”
“I
walked back to where he was sitting and told him this talk was for his own good. He said, ‘I’m not looking for someone to hold my hand.’ After his buddies stopped laughing, I gave them the never-stand-up-in-moving-water lecture and said their guide would give them specific instructions when they got to the Indian. And I made the usual joke about my spiel being part of our parole agreement with New York State.”
“Price continued to give you trouble?” Bognor said.
“Ryan put that bunch in my boat,” Hernandez said. “I had trouble with them from the get-go.” For the next ten minutes, Hernandez continued to recite instances of Price’s arrogance and disregard for safety rules.
Hernandez had a reputation as a flake. On the coldest days, while handing out chocolate to his people, he would shut his right eye, turn his fist into a claw and bellow, “Energy for the gorge, me hearties, energy for the gorge.” He also had a withering sense of humor. One morning, he spotted a woman smoking near his raft. “I’d put that out if I were you.”
“Why’s that?”
“We fill those things with hydrogen. You ever hear of the Hindenburg?”
Hernandez was deadly serious about this job, however. He pored over videos of whitewater accidents and pestered the most experienced guides with technical questions.
“Did Price’s comment piss you off?” Carlyle said.
“Nah. I just told them that story about Elisha Belden to calm them down. I’m sure you used it when you worked here.” Belden, a fur trapper, unable to make it back to his cabin when a snowstorm hit the region in 1937, had his feet turn black from frostbite. A doctor sawed off all his toes, and Belden had to attach snowshoes to his stumps in order to stand upright. From then on, he made his living by going around to taverns, making drunks pay to watch rattlers bite him.
Hernandez’s crew had come alive in Cedar when they saw the Hudson working itself into a frenzy. “I pointed out the undercut ledges all along there and told them they were really dangerous, which they lapped up. Because the Hudson had doubled in size, we’d begun picking up speed. When the river turned right and began to collide with boulders, my crew went nuts, yelling and swearing, the typical macho bullshit.”
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