RIVER RUN
Toni Dwiggins
________
The Forensic Geology Series
Book 5
Digital Edition. © 2019 by Toni Dwiggins. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviews—without prior permission of the publisher.
All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Certain geographical features have been slightly altered. If there are factual errors in River Run, they are mine alone.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
MAPS
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
FROM THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MAPS
Grand Canyon National Park
Course of the Colorado River / Wikimedia
EPIGRAPH
“WE ARE THREE QUARTERS of a mile in the depths of the earth... We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not."
Down the Great Unknown, 1869
John Wesley Powell
Grand Canyon Explorer
“WHEN ALL THE RIVERS are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all the land.”
Address to conference on irrigating the arid West, 1893
John Wesley Powell
Watershed Surveyor
CHAPTER ONE
“THERE'S A BOATLOAD of ways to die in the Grand Canyon,” the ranger said. “But this...” He did not complete the thought.
I considered, again, the scene in front of us.
The raft nosed the shore of the muscular Colorado River. It had been caught in an eddy, pinned by a tree branch, its trip interrupted, the raft itself abandoned. The beach where we stood was lightly haired with brush and bordered by a steep cliff of hard schist. The beach was unmarked, save for our own footprints and the churned-up sand at the downriver end where the helicopter had deposited us.
There was no sign of the rafters.
I yanked my attention back to the frowning ranger. In our short acquaintance, National Park Service Ranger Pete Molina had not once failed to complete a sentence.
“But this?” I asked.
“This one's hard to read, Cassie.”
“You talking about the life vests?” I indicated the three vests stowed in the raft.
“Starting with the PFDs, yes.” He added, “Personal flotation devices.”
I knew what PFD meant. Life or death, it seemed. “If the rafters went into the river without them...”
“Then they sure made drowning easy.”
Pete Molina was head of Search and Rescue, which gave him a lot of years responding to trauma in the Canyon. He had a round boyish face that belied those years—tanned, lightly weathered, thanks no doubt to that long-billed ball cap. He had already impressed me with his vast knowledge of this river, this canyon, this world. Born in the nearby town of Tusayan, a Grand Canyon native. This place was bred in the bone, as he'd put it.
“Plus,” Pete continued, “there's the strangeness with the bow line.”
I nodded. The yellow line lay in a tangle at the bow. Plus, there was the zipper baggie pinned under the bow line. The rock chips inside the bag were the reason my partner and I were here.
My partner Walter Shaws and I are forensic geologists: Shaws and Oldfield, Sierra Geoforensics, home base in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. What we do for a living is analyze earth evidence at scenes of crimes and crises. Thirty-plus years on the job for Walter, well weathered. Ten-plus years for me, scrupulous about using sunscreen but nevertheless carrying my own marks from the field.
Walter turned from studying the raft, to the ranger. “Pete, what's your take?”
The ranger considered. “To begin, the ignition key's in the off position, which means they never started the motor. So let's begin ashore.”
Walter frowned. “Here?”
“I doubt it.” The ranger indicated the lack of unfamiliar footprints on the beach. “I'd say the raft came from someplace upriver.”
“Runaway raft?” I said.
“Yep, but not like any I've ever seen. If the bow line just came untied from its anchorage, it'd be trailing in the water.”
“So somebody tossed it aboard.”
“Looks that way.”
I glanced again at the vests. “About the PFDs...do you get people who just don't wear them? Careless, too many beers, whatever.”
“We do. But I don't think this was a case of party animals.”
“Why?”
“Look at the rigging.”
I wasn't certain what a party-animal raft would look like but I suspected it would be messier than this. The ranger had already inspected the craft and found it properly rigged and neatly arranged. No crumpled beer cans or empty Doritos bags or discarded articles of clothing.
The raft was in the neighborhood of twenty feet long, built upon an aluminum frame with rubberized side pontoons. At the bow, the frame extended to a deck of sorts. At the stern was a small motor and tiller and seat for the driver. There was a recessed compartment in the center, as Pete had explained, to store coolers and gear. A padded mat covered that compartment, and more gear was stacked there: metal boxes and duffels and dry bags and tubes holding fishing poles. Everything was positioned for best weight distribution, and securely tied down with cross-straps. Rafters would sit atop the boxes and duffels, as Pete had explained, except when running big rapids, at which point they'd get down on the floor mat and hold onto the cross-straps. Good idea, that.
The three PFDs were clipped to rigging straps. Two yellow vests at the duffels. An orange vest back in t
he boatman area. They had black webbed straps and heavy-duty clasps, with no sign of breakage.
The only thing obviously out of order on the raft was the bow line. One end was attached to a low rail that fronted the deck. And that's where the line should have been neatly coiled. But it wasn't.
I saw the ranger's point. We had a raft that was rigged professionally. And we had rafters who had carelessly tangled their line and forgotten their vests.
Pete said, “This is why I'm finding the incident hard to read.”
Walter said, “Shall we walk it through?”
The ranger allowed a smile. “You're the detective.”
“And this is your river.” Walter smiled in return.
“Yeah, it is.” Pete's smile widened into a grin. Then he sobered. “All right, the rafters are getting ready to leave but they haven't yet put on their vests. Not yet boarded...or busy stowing gear. Somebody's left the baggie on the deck. Somebody unties the bow line and is ready to secure it, but for some reason just tosses it down.”
I said, “I take it we're assuming the line guy isn't just careless?”
“You take it correctly.”
Yeah, not party animals. “So why does he throw the line?”
Pete shrugged. “Something distracts him.”
“Maybe,” Walter said, “one of the rafters got hurt, trying to get aboard. And they all rushed to help.”
“The line guy too?” I said. “Now he's getting careless.”
“Then maybe it went beyond distraction. To panic.”
“What panicked them?” Pete said.
Walter considered. “One of them gets hostile, maybe a fight. Or maybe an outsider threatened them.”
“Lot of maybes,” Pete said. “Anyway, we end up with an unmoored raft drifting away. I can see what comes next. The rafters rush into the river to catch their boat. They miss—probably the current takes it. And the rafters swim after it. Not wearing their vests.” He looked at the river. “You have no idea the power of the Colorado.”
I was getting the idea.
“You don't go on the river without your PFD. It's simple.”
I found myself liking this resolute ranger, this Grand Canyon lifer who read the rules of the river the way Walter and I read the rocks.
I looked upriver. The water was calm enough, as rivers go, but the current steadily rippled the surface like muscles working beneath skin. It made a low-voiced rumble, unceasing. I looked downriver. The water foamed and roiled—a rapid. You'd want to sit low for that. Hold onto those cross-straps. And check the buckles on your PFD. Because you're running the Colorado River and you should have an idea of its power.
It is a force of nature.
It carved the Grand Canyon.
It runs from the Colorado Rockies to the Gulf of California, in the process dropping two and one-half vertical miles, and some of those miles go through psychotic rapids, many of them here in the Grand Canyon.
Although I'd been reading up on the river I had yet to venture onto it, onto a raft. Back home in California I'd done some kayaking on lakes and ocean bays. But rafting the Colorado was a different order of magnitude. And it was surely on the agenda. Walter had always wanted to ride this river, a bucket-list longing, and I had agreed to give it a try.
And then I saw the YouTube video. Some rafting outfitter filmed it, a boatman on shore videotaping a boat full of passengers shooting a rapid called Lava. The cameraman was narrating, and the voice-over rose in pitch as the raft fell into the jaws of a river gone mad. “There they go!” his voice punched it up. “Into the standing wave!” Unlike waves in the sea, these river-rapid waves did not break, did not flatten, just remained standing, risen like liquid jaws to engulf whatever was foolish enough to come their way. In the video, the raft disappeared down down down into the rapid they called Lava. Drowning. Death. Who knew, because for seconds which stretched like minutes there was no sign of the raft, there was just the churning water and the narrator's whoops. And then the raft popped up. Popping free of the jaws of death—oh yeah, my own sense of drama had ratcheted into high gear—and the boatwoman steering the raft raised a fist and the cameraman on shore crowed “Gnarly!” and zoomed the focus in tight on the passengers. Drenched, dripping. Grinning like mad creatures, pumping their own fists in the air, but I thought I could read the residual fear on their faces.
Sure Walter, let's shoot some rapids.
I turned to Pete. “If our rafters went into the river, could they make it to shore?”
“Possible. That's one more reason I'd like to know where the incident occurred—to focus the search area.” The ranger studied us. “Can your geology tell me anything?”
Walter said, “It's what we do.”
CHAPTER TWO
RANGER MOLINA OPENED his pack and removed a coil of nylon rope. “I'll tie off the raft.”
He waded into the water.
He was dressed for river work, wearing quick-dry green shirt and pants and mesh water shoes. His arms were tanned and muscular and bore a few scars, testament to a boatload of Search and Rescue missions, I figured. The round boyish face belonged to a rugged Grand Canyon man.
I watched Pete disentangle the tree branch from the rigging and then haul the raft up to the sloping shore, so that its bow rested on dry sand. He secured his rope through the rigging and then tied off the line on a nearby boulder.
I said, “Lucky for us the raft eddied-out.”
He turned. “It's common.”
I could see that—rafts getting caught in those swirling patches of water where the downstream current was interrupted by some underwater topography, forcing the surface current to work its way back upstream. The eddy here was gentle, looping to the shore. And then that tree branch had finished the job.
Early this morning a passing rafting party had come across this abandoned boat, parked in the eddy, and called the Park Service. The search mission was hastily put together at NPS headquarters. HQ was at Grand Canyon Village, up on the South Rim. The boatman who called in the report, and described the scene, had given the raft a brief inspection. He'd noticed the tangled bow line, and the zipper baggie of rock chips caught underneath. And that had led to the inclusion on this mission of two forensic geologists, who just happened to be in the neighborhood.
Pete said, “All yours.”
We took our field kits out of our packs. Time to go to work.
We'd not expected a case like this.
What brought us to the Grand Canyon was an entirely different proposition. A couple of weeks ago, at our lab at home, Walter got a phone call from an old friend with a request, and Walter then pitched the job to me as part vacation, part work—we were indeed going to get paid—although the work was simply geology consultation. A consult in the greatest geological lab on the planet, as Walter pitched it.
What's not to like?
No crime, no crisis, nothing grim or soul-sucking. Bit of a change for us.
Or so we'd expected.
And now, two days after arriving at the Canyon, just getting into the nuts and bolts of our official job, an abandoned raft is found on the river and the most likely outcome is three people drowned.
Walter and I moved for the raft. Like the ranger, we were dressed for work, wearing water shoes and quick-dry nylon, although our clothes were slate gray and not ranger-green. Walter boarded first. I watched him step over the bow railing and onto the aluminum deck, taking care not to catch a foot in the tangled bow line. I kept an eye out, as always, for any sign of incoordination. He was in his mid-sixties but that wasn't the issue. Several years ago he'd suffered a series of mini-strokes, which had alarmed us both. In the years since, he'd dedicated himself to a mostly healthy lifestyle. Diet, sleep, exercise, stress reduction—all the guidelines. He complained. I told him how good he was looking, that he made sixties look like the new forties. He pretended not to be flattered.
I followed him onto the bow and barked my shin on the railing. I was in my early thirties, health
y and fit, and thinking that I made a dry-lander look like a dry-lander.
We knelt in front of the yellow tangle of braided cord. We'd agreed on the division of work. Walter would examine and then bag the line. I would examine the rock chips in the baggie.
I plucked the bag out from under a heavy coil of bow line and then headed with my prize to the right-hand side pontoon. I settled there. The seat was cushy. I took off my sunglasses so as to get a clean look at the rock chips. I'd just opened the zipper seal of the baggie when I heard Pete say, “Molina.”
I looked. The ranger had taken a call on his radio.
I refocused on the baggie, peeking inside. My pulse quickened. I found myself eager to identify these chips, to unravel the rafters' perplexing story. Before I could do more than note that the color was brown, I heard Pete say, “How about that.”
Walter and I turned from our work.
The ranger came to the edge of the deck. “We have an ID on the rafters.”
“How?” I asked.
“The participant list. Regulations require every member to be listed. The trip leader is Reid Lassen, age fifty-six. From Flagstaff—that's about ninety miles away, common jumpoff for Canyon trips. Others are in their forties. Frank Hembry from Page, Arizona. Megan Schrader from Boulder City and Sam Pendleton from Las Vegas, both Nevadans.”
It took me longer than it should have. “That makes four in the group.”
“Yes it does.”
“Four rafters, three PFDs in the raft. So the fourth could have been wearing a vest.”
“Possibly.”
Walter rubbed his chin. “How does this change our scenario?”
I glanced at the baggie. “How about the fourth rafter collects the chips and then goes aboard to put on a vest. In the process, drops the baggie. Doesn't notice. Then goes to untie the bow line. And then throws it aboard, trapping the bag. Then comes the panic, they're all on the beach, the raft is going adrift, and they all go into the river—the fourth rafter wearing a vest.”
Pete said, “That's one way to explain it.”
River Run Page 1