River Run

by Toni Dwiggins

  Her head throbbed. She was so weak. She needed to eat but she couldn't shove down any more Triscuits because she was almost out of giardia water and the only water now was the bad water in the little pool by the wall.

  She'd refilled her bottles from the seep, up above, and that took forever, and there wasn't really enough, but it didn't give her diarrhea so that was good.

  But maybe it made her a little crazy?

  When was that?

  When the boar tried to get you.

  Oh right. More and more, Becca relied on Bossy to keep track.

  Yeah, the boar. She'd been sleeping at her campsite and then a noise woke her up and she thought rescue and she yelled but nobody answered so she decided it was an animal. She'd reached for her headlamp but couldn't find it. She hadn't been using it much any more. So she just got onto her hands and knees, ready to move, in case it was a dangerous animal. Raccoons and foxes got into caves but that's not what she was scared of. She was scared of the boar.

  And it was the boar!

  It was coming for her. Its eyes blazed like the sun. She crawled fast as she could to that rock ledge at the back wall and she hid there. But its sun-eyes kept looking for her. She croaked, go away!

  That made the boar mad. It growled and grunted.

  Becca screamed and screamed.

  After a long time, or maybe it was just a minute, the boar went away. It made that noise. The noise that woke her up. Boar hooves on rock. And then everything was quiet.

  She slept. She woke up thirsty. She took her bottle to the seep to get more water. Only she was feeling dizzy and she tripped.

  And she fell.

  And Bossy screamed.

  And when they woke up they were in a different place. Hurting. Hurting.

  A long time passed or maybe just a minute and then Becca knew she'd fallen into the hole. The hole with the crumbly edge.

  Down here, it was weird.

  It smelled weird.

  It was more thistly than ever.

  She'd crawled around to find a place to hide from the boar—did the boar fall in too, or was there a second one down here? She didn't know. She didn't know.

  But she found her water bottle! That fell in!

  She was lucky. She had water and she was wearing her parka and hat and gloves. But no food, no sleeping bag, no supplies. So she curled up and sipped from the bottle when her tongue got too big and dry. And she dozed and let her brain go somewhere else.

  She went for a hike. After her besties left.

  She's hiking up the creek, and she gets a little lost, and she stops for a snack and unstraps the PFD from her backpack to sit on, and then she forgets it! Careless Becca. That's what Mom calls her. Jeff calls her dimwit, even though she's a hundred times smarter than he is. Wes calls her Rogue Becca or girlfriend, or Becks. Uncle Reid just calls her Becca. He smiles when he sees her. She wishes Reid was her father.

  Wait a minute. He ditched you!

  Whoops. Bossy was right, as always. Uncle Reid said he'd meet her for kayaking on the Lassen run. But he didn't.

  And that's why she's here. That's why she hitched a ride. Following Uncle Reid.

  Uncle Reid and his stupid friends. She gets lost, and then she backtracks, and then she hears voices. And then she...

  There was a sharp pain in her head, another one, from falling again.

  She slept.

  She woke up thirsty and took a long swallow of the cold lemonade.

  You're losing it girrrllll.

  Bossy was right. All she had was her giardia water bottle. She opened it and drank and drank and drank but it was only a trickle.

  It wasn't enough.

  There were thistles in her mouth.

  She rolled onto her side—she knew this move, she'd done this move before—and got onto her hands and knees and crawled on the thistly ground. She knew the way, she'd crawled there before, when she first explored this weird place. And she found it. Her seep. It came down from above, where her campsite was. Down here, it even made a little pool. She could stick her face in the water.

  She stuck her face in the water and slurped.

  She gagged, and spat.

  Serves you right.

  Becca told Bossy to shut up because, like, what else was she supposed to drink?

  This time she tried sipping. It still tasted bad. But she couldn't stop. She had to wash the thistles out of her mouth.

  Right, Sean? Right, Juan? Right, Molly? Right, Laz?

  Why'd you leave me?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I SAID, “IT WAS REID.”

  Special Agent Dave Quillen sat on the low wall that separated the concrete walkway from the drop into the Canyon. The wall was curved, forming a lookout. Quillen perched at the apex, staring out at the view. His back was to us.

  Walter and I sat on the arms of the curving wall.

  We were back at the South Rim, back from the neighborhood of the Shinumo. Walter and I were bandaged and rested and fed, and in the twenty-four hours since the chopper evacuation we had slept and worked and wept.

  We were back in the bustle of Grand Canyon Village. People strolled along the Rim Trail walkway, gawking at the scenery, taking selfies, ooohing and aaahing and chattering, and I wondered if anybody had told them there's a boatload of ways to die in the Grand Canyon.

  Quillen swiveled, swinging his legs over the wall, planting his brushed-suede desert boots on firm ground. He looked at me, his stoic expression the quintessential FBI mask. “Can you prove it?”

  I looked to Walter, and Walter was looking across the walkway to the suite of rim cabins. The blinds were shut in Neely's and Justin's cabins; they'd gone to Los Angeles to offer comfort to Edgar's family. The blinds were up in Walter's cabin—our lab—because we'd been working, because we wanted the daylight.

  No proof in our lab that it was Reid.

  I answered Quillen. “Not yet.” My battered jaw ached. Not ever?

  “Convince me,” Quillen said.

  I presented my hypothesis. “He knew we had the Tapeats and the Muav. He knew we'd be looking at sites upriver from where Sam Pendleton was found. He might have guessed I took photos of his fireplace—that we examined them. We're all geologists. So he took his backpack and went to the Shinumo. To lie in wait. To track us. He knew we'd come. And he knew the area. He knew where to keep watch. There were a hundred places he could have watched from, during our hike. Maybe he tracked our voices.”

  “Why not attack at the first opportunity?”

  “He didn't know how far we'd get. He waited until we got into that promising Muav area. Getting close to his site, I assume.”

  “Still no idea what his site is?”

  “None.”

  “Why assume a site exists?”

  'Because of the Tonto rocks. Because of his altered fireplace. Because of his mendacity.”

  Quillen took that in. “If he went there to protect his presumed site from you, how did he set it up? You down there in the canyon, him on the ridge, with the material at hand to start the avalanche.”

  “He didn't set it up. He was opportunistic. He tracked us to every stop, where we sampled. He didn't find those places opportune. Until the final. If need be, he would have tracked us farther, to another stop, or another. But he didn't need to go any farther.”

  Quillen said, “It's a reasonable set of assumptions. But none of it is proof.”

  Walter spoke. “I was the target.”

  I said, “We were. Edgar was collateral damage.”

  “No, Cassie,” Walter said, roughly. “You were not the true threat. You as a geologist, yes. You as you, no. I know Reid. I knew him, way back when, and we kept in touch until he disappeared. And when he was found on that beach, alive... I was grateful. And I misread him, grievously. Still, I knew something about him way back when, and I know it now. It's there, in the back of my mind. The key. Nagging me.” Walter folded his arms. “It's something he's afraid I'll remember. Or figure out.”

&n
bsp; Quillen said, “This something connects with his present goal?”

  “It must.”

  Quillen waited.

  “Something to do with that raft trip. His fishing buddies.” Walter grimaced. “He'll have seen them as conquests. As he saw our group, back in grad school. He'll see himself as the natural leader. And he'll protect his goal now come hell or high water.”

  “And thus, his presumed attack.”

  “Yes.”

  Quillen eyed Walter. “If he wanted you dead, he failed. That was an inexact way to attempt it.”

  “As opposed to a gunshot?”

  “Yes.”

  “He'd have to shoot everybody. Also, he's right-handed. That hand is casted. It would be off-hand shooting. The avalanche nearly got me. Instead of Edgar. Plus, it could be chalked up to force majeure.”

  I flinched. You don't have to do this, partner. You don't have to go all stoic, like Quillen. And you don't have to present a fucking hypothesis on the means with which your old friend tries to kill you.

  “But if you were the target,” Quillen repeated, “he failed.”

  “We left.”

  Yeah we did, I thought, wounded in body and spirit.

  “He doesn't fear you'll return?” Quillen asked.

  Walter said, “Of course he does. Still, he knows we don't have the Bright Angel Shale. He told us rafter Schrader carried it. Until she's found, there's a gaping hole in our suite of evidence.”

  “Then how can you find the site?”

  I shifted and looked out at the chasm of the Grand Canyon, that nearly unimaginable rent in the surface of the earth, glorious and precious and unforgiving. I couldn't see the Shinumo from here—our viewpoint did not extend that far to the west. We needed to be standing on the Powell Plateau, for a view down into the vast Shinumo neighborhood. We needed Schrader's Bright Angel Shale and some luck to find Reid's site, in that rugged country of ridges and canyons and prickly cactus and thick bushes.

  Walter answered. “We will.”

  WE WILL?

  I gazed wearily through the lens of my scope at the Muav chip I'd collected at the place where the avalanche hit.

  I'd been pleased, when I saw it. I'd even held it up for Edgar to admire and film.

  If I hadn't, maybe he'd have been standing elsewhere, getting his footage. Out of the way. If Neely hadn't urged us all onward—let's go get that Muav!—maybe Edgar wouldn't have felt duty-bound to film when we got there. If we'd listened to Pete and set up camp. If we'd given weary Justin a break, and stopped earlier.

  If only.

  But we hadn't.

  Now, under the comparison scope, the calcareous mottling in the Muav was similar to the mottling in Sam Pendleton's chips.

  Close.

  But, as the saying goes, close counts only in horseshoes.

  What close gave us was, you're getting warmer. If there hadn't been that avalanche, maybe we would have poked around and found the site. Or, maybe it was farther away. There were a number of different paths deeper into the Tonto Group Rocks.

  My jaw ached.

  What puzzled me was the Tapeats. Earlier today I'd compared the samples we took near the granite outcrop to the chips from the baggie on the ghost raft. It was a match. The Tapeats source was on that stretch up Shinumo Creek. And we'd hiked another half-mile before coming to the 'close' Muav site.

  I'd expected that the Tonto Group rocks gathered by Reid would be in proximity.

  And so the Tapeats nagged me. I wondered if perhaps it was a signpost. Saying, you're on the right track. Just keep going.

  Going where? How far?

  And a signpost for who? Not for Reid and his party, who presumably knew what they were hunting.

  My neck was stiff, leaning over the microscope.

  I straightened. I looked at my partner. He was bent over his scope, examining the chips of Bright Angel Shale that he'd collected. Since we had no evidence at hand, the best Walter could do was to characterize the shale so it could be compared to Schrader's shale, should she be found.

  Ranger Molina had a river SAR team scouring the banks and the eddies and the keeper holes of the Colorado, downriver from the Shinumo. He had an 'over-the-edge' SAR team combing its canyons and ridges.

  I had done my own scouring, before the chopper came to evacuate us. I'd looked for traces of Reid and I'd taken samples of soil, up on the ridge above the avalanche site.

  Avalanche site. Euphemism. Call it what it is. The site of Edgar Easton's death.

  I felt so weary. I told myself to knuckle down. Do what Edgar always did.

  Do the job.

  “HE HAS NO ALIBI,” SPECIAL Agent Quillen said.

  Quillen and Walter and I were again seated on the curving stone wall. It was later, nearly evening. We were wearier, nearly finished with the job.

  I said, voice thick with outrage, “Then you've got something.”

  “I've got negatives.” Quillen again sat facing the Canyon. He sure liked the view. He abandoned it, to swing around and face us. “No alibi means just that, nothing more. We've got no proof. I had no warrant—no probable cause—but he allowed my agents to search his extraordinary home. There was no hiking gear—packs and such. He claimed his gear had worn out and he hadn't gotten around to replacing it. There were no boots, of any sort. There was no clothing in the laundry. Same story. I've got negatives.”

  “You haven't got anybody else.”

  Quillen snorted. “Of course I do. I have somebody who has disappeared, somebody with Pyrodex in his car trunk and a professed antipathy toward the river dams.”

  No. Wes Hawthorne might sabotage a dam but Wes Hawthorne would not rain boulders down upon us. I said, “The Shinumo has no dam.”

  “Opportunistic,” Quillen said. “A choice place to stop your investigation.”

  “We aren't investigating dams.”

  “You connected him with Pyrodex. His cousin no doubt informed him of that.”

  The thought came, unbidden and unwelcome, that the Shinumo neighborhood was located between the two biggest dams on the Colorado River. And Wes Hawthorne was a seasoned Colorado River boatman who presumably knew that river run, from dam to dam.

  But he wasn't a geologist.

  What about the Tonto rocks?

  I said, “You're surely not ruling out Reid?”

  “I don't rule out suspects.” Quillen indicated the plastic bag at his side. “As to Mr. Lassen's travels, I collected his sneakers, and maybe you'll hit pay dirt with those.”

  Pay dirt? Had Special Agent Quillen just made a joke? He wore his stoic mask. I picked up the bag and looked at the white Nike running shoes, which appeared spotless. I'd scour the shoes, the soles and the eyelets and the interior, and see if I could find a grain or two that might match the soil from the site where the avalanche was launched.

  Still, Reid Lassen was a geologist, and he surely knew where soil could adhere, and how to remove it.

  “As of now,” Quillen continued, “we can't place Mr. Lassen at the scene. We can't even establish that he traveled to the Shinumo area. His vehicle has been in a Flagstaff repair shop for over a week, awaiting parts to rebuild the transmission.”

  I said, “Then he borrowed a car. Or he hitchhiked.”

  “I presented those options. Standard interrogation. Watching his eye movements. Watching for microexpressions. There was no deviation from baseline. He has a great poker face.”

  Walter said, “He was the champ.”

  There was no fondness in Walter's voice—all those poker nights in grad school. There was only weariness.

  I DID NOT HIT PAY DIRT. Reid Lassen's Nike soles showed only traces of tan bark, a match no doubt to the tan bark around his patio. Seemed he wore the shoes while tending his meat smoker.

  Walter and I called it a night, and I dreamed the fitful dreams of the lost until I was startled awake by Walter pounding on my door just after dawn.

  I opened the door to see a haggard Walter framed by the stea
dfast Canyon.

  “Quillen phoned,” Walter said. “There's been an incident.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DOWN BELOW, THERE WAS a river runner.

  I shivered, remembering my run at the Lassen river.

  We passed Lee's Ferry and then came to the dam and I half-expected the pilot to dive and swoop to challenge the monumental concrete beast but this pilot was FBI, not a crazed predator hawk, and we passed serenely above Glen Canyon and Lake Powell and then it was straight on across salt country—there was no dilly-dallying along the course of the Colorado, no dips and banks to get footage—and only when we'd reached Paradox Valley and the Dolores River did the pilot drop the chopper down to closeup level.

  “There.” Quillen's voice growled in my headphones.

  I craned to look.

  Yeah. There. Where the soil was all torn up.

  The pilot set down on a flat stretch of gypsum-white ground, and Quillen and his two agents and Walter and I disembarked.

  Quillen led the way toward the bank of the green Dolores, which was just visible through the tangled brush and bushes. The area was cordoned off by yellow crime scene tape.

  A single sheriff's deputy stood guard.

  “Nobody's entered?” Quillen asked, as we approached.

  The deputy looked to be about twelve, gangly and pimply and earnest, and he said, “No sir, nobody's gone in, not since the facility supervisor called us. I mean, the supervisor went in of course to find out what happened, why they had a sudden power drop on the pumps, and then he called his supervisor and she called us.”

  Quillen said, “Thanks, stay put,” and ducked under the yellow tape and his agents and Walter and I followed.

  We grouped around the blasted-out gouge in the ground, looking down at twisted and ripped metal pipe.

  Quillen addressed his agents. “You'll be looking for traces of the initiator or detacord or Pyrodex. Standard procedure. I'll be a happy man if you find anything more. Find me a blasted length of pipe bomb and I'll buy you lunch at that barbecue place.”

  The agents—younger than Quillen, older than the adolescent deputy—set off to grid search.