One Mile Under (6 page)

“So tell me, where was Trey’s helmet, Wade?” Her tone was starting to grow a bit defensive now.

“I don’t know about Trey’s helmet. Maybe he wasn’t wearing a helmet. I mean the same guy would hurl himself off the summit of Aspen Mountain with only a sheet of nylon attached to him, so to me, it’s not much of a stretch that he would go out on the river without a helmet.”

“Well, you’d be wrong on that. Not since he had his boy. I saw him out there a dozen times. And yesterday you were sure he was either high or hungover. So what did toxicology come back with? I know the first thing they would have done was check his blood over in County.”

“Jesus, you’re sounding like a cop now. The river’s closed for a day or so, so maybe you can find yourself a whole new career.”

“He was a friend, Wade.” She kept her eyes fixed on him. “So I’m asking, what did they say? About his blood?”

“About his blood …?” Wade shrugged and rocked back in his seat. “They said nothing, Danielle. Hundred percent clean. I’ll give you that.” There was a pause, one that seemed to carry the weight of the many issues between them, until Wade shook his head. “C’mon, Dani, who the hell would possibly want to kill Trey Watkins? Honestly …”

“I don’t know.”

“And all this because of some news flash from a totally disreputable source that he wasn’t out there alone. Or your belief that he could handle that section of the river in his sleep? Or not finding any helmet?”

Wade stood up and came over, and sat on the edge of his desk. “Listen, Danielle, I get that he was a good friend, but what we have here are two tragic, but separate occurrences. Trey Watkins probably tried some ill-advised maneuver that got his head wrung up against a rock. That balloon, it’ll come out there was something going on. It imploded. That’s what the witnesses saw from the other balloon. Rare as it is, it happens. We get one shred of evidence that says it’s something different, I’ll be the first to jump on it. They got some team from the Parks Service in today and looking around the accident site. And I damn well know they’ll be going over that balloon shell with a fine-tooth comb to find whatever they can, though God knows what that would be as it’s nothing but a burnt-up mess, I’m afraid. How about you let me and Sheriff Warrick do our jobs. For God sakes, you’re as headstrong as your mother. And you saw how that went.”

“Seemed to go fine, Wade …” Dani said, her eyes flashing to the bourbon bottle on the credenza. “God knows how. Till those bottles were full and not empty.”

“Easy to blame me, I admit …” Wade nodded and frowned. “I know we got some unfinished business between us, Danielle, but I was always a friend to you.”

“Just look into it, Wade. That’s all I ask. Please …”

The female duty officer outside came in over an intercom. “Chief, Sheriff Warrick’s on the phone for you.”

Wade nodded and went back to his desk. “With your permission … I gotta take that now.”

Dani got up and headed toward the door. Her eyes went to the credenza behind his chair. “I meant to ask, how’s Kyle doing?”

“He’s fighting. They got him fitted up with a new leg. He’s learning how to get used to it. Thanks.”

“I know I should go and see him more.” She liked Kyle. For a couple of years, when she was twelve, he was like an older brother to her. Before he signed up.

“I’m sure he’d like that, Dani. And listen …” Wade picked up the phone and crooked it in his shoulder and held his finger on the waiting line. “I’m sorry about Trey. But how about you leave the police work to me and Sheriff Warrick. And when the river opens back up in a day or two, I know that’s where you’ll be.”

It continued to gnaw at her, no matter what Wade said: what Rooster said he saw. So the following morning, the river closed to traffic, Dani went back out along the stretch where she had found Trey’s body. There was a road that followed the river, paved at spots, mostly not, which the whitewater companies used to meet up with their rafts at the end of their runs, and cyclists and campers to head to the many trails and campsites in the park.

As she drove out, she reflected on yesterday’s meeting and her history with Wade. Her mother and her dad were divorced when she was six. He was in his residency at the Aspen Orthopedic Clinic, under a well-known orthopedic surgeon, and her mother, Judy, was the daughter of Tom Barnham, who owned the dry goods store on Galena, then bought the building outright, and then over the years, the one next to it and the one next to that, even becoming the mayor in town for eight years. When Dani was twelve, her mother married Wade, who’d had a few reversals in town, and who became the country sheriff mostly through his father-in-law’s influence. Whatever the glitzy veneer, Aspen was then and has always remained a small town at heart, where insiders matter. Dani recalled them happy at first, and Wade became kind of a sizable personality about town, strutting around alongside the rich and famous in his trademark cowboy hat, python boots, and flashy rings.

But when Dani was sixteen, a miscarriage made her mom depressed, and then she started getting headaches. And Wade, whose self-destructive nature took over, stopped taking the kids fishing and camping and started coming home drunk—from parties he used to call his “public responsibilities,” but then seemed to turn into all the time. Once he totaled his car and another time he got into a public fight with one of his officers right in the middle of town. He went into the program—even went away once for a month—but then he started using stronger stuff, which only came out much later, and which came to a head when he pilfered a couple of hundred OxyContin tablets from his own police evidence locker. By then it had all fallen apart for him and he was forced to resign. Her mother grew worse and worse, and Dani took a semester off to care for her. But in Dani’s sophomore year, Judy just suddenly seemed to give up and died. Complications from the disease, it was called. Her mom was taking her own share of medication back then, and Wade was mostly at his worst, and not much of a caregiver. But Dani still always pictured her in her mind, smiling and pretty, braiding Dani’s long, curly hair and singing “Sweet Baby James” and John Denver songs with her, with those Colorado blue eyes. Dani even tattooed an “Ai,” the Chinese symbol for love, on her shoulder, with her mother’s initials.

So maybe Dani did always blame Wade a bit for her demise. Or at least, for not helping. Dani was in the process of transferring back to Boulder when her mom just fell off a cliff. For years Dani blamed herself for not having been there at the end. The suddenness had taken everyone by surprise. Wade may not have actually killed her; Dani had finally come to terms with that. But his own problems surely sapped the strength out of her and helped her to decline.

Dani drove along the river to the spot at the Cradle where Trey was found, which was now blocked off by tape with a Pitkin County police van parked there. She continued down about a half mile to a spot they called the Funnel, where the various currents fed into a narrow channel, about a quarter mile up from the ford, where the rapids tour ended.

She parked in a small turnout on the side of the road. She knew the narrow pathway that led down to the river, which this far down was wider than upstream, but not much more than a rocky, shallow bed on each side. She knew this river like the back of her hand. She knew the currents, where they fed. As a kid, she had once lost a backpack in the current all the way back above the Falls, and weeks later she found where it had ended up.

At the Funnel.
Here.

Dani climbed down through the brush and onto the shoreline. The alluvial currents here had widened out a deep gorge in the aspens and firs. She knew it was kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. Without even knowing if the needle was even hidden here. She saw a beer can glinting among the rocks. A flip-flop sandal was nearby, which must have slipped off someone’s foot. A waterlogged Penn tennis ball. She kicked over an empty can of beans, stepping over the small, loose rocks. Because of the depth, the water color changed here from a clear blue and white to a musty gray.

It wasn’t around.

She kneeled in the shallow bed, disappointed. It was kind of a long shot anyway. If it had washed down, she was pretty certain it would have ended up here.

She scanned the opposite side before going back up to her car.

Something glinted. Nothing more than a fleck of color amid the rocks on the shoals. Across the stream.

White.

The river was shallow here and easy to ford. Except for the narrow channel in the middle that was still about two feet deep where you could still traverse a raft. Dani went in in her shorts and Tevas and made her way across. About thirty yards. Her sandals gripped the silty river floor, water rushing by her knees. The current was mild here. No threat of being swept away. Not like what she had to go through to get to Trey.

She crossed toward the object she’d seen, which was nestled amid the rocks.

Whatever hope she had that she’d found something faded.

All it turned out to be was just a white plastic drink container. She bent down, picked it up and tossed it farther off the riverbed into the brush. Probably someone’s water container that had fallen overboard. It could have been sitting here for months.

Maybe Wade was right. It was possible Trey had been just riding recklessly and hit his head against a rock. It’s possible he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Maybe Rooster did just make it all up—for the attention. To be the big shot. Anyway, it was now all kind of moot. Both Trey and Ron were gone. She’d never know, though something still inside her said—

Something farther along the shoreline caught her eye. Half submerged amid the vegetation along the shore. She went over, the black composite almost completely blending in with the gunmetal water and dark green vines.

She picked it up by the strap. It was a little scuffed, beaten up from its ride downstream, bouncing off rock after rock.

Her heart started to race.

Trey’s helmet.

But it wasn’t dented. Dented in the way it would have been if its wearer had sustained blunt-force trauma to the head.

Which had to mean one thing. That it hadn’t been on Trey at the time he sustained his injury. If he’d cracked it with enough force to kill him you would have surely been able to see it. Holding the black helmet, Dani knew
that had to mean something, right?

Her blood surged. So she wasn’t wrong, at least, not about that part. Trey had been wearing it.

So maybe she wasn’t so wrong about all the rest of it, either.

Back in her car, following the river back upstream, she searched for the spot above the lower Cradle where she had found Trey’s body.

The road narrowed there, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, with dense brush crowding in from both sides. The aspens and pines were so tall here Dani could barely see the sky. She came up to the clearing where the rescue vehicles converged when they pulled Trey out. It hadn’t rained since, and tire tracks and footprints were still visible all over the dirt road.

Dani heard the roar of the river slashing against the rocks below.

It was clear, even in just Class Two or Three rapids, that Trey couldn’t have just nested to a stop here. His raft must have been carried down from farther upstream and come to rest in the eddy. She heard Rooster saying,
You didn’t see what I saw. He wasn’t alone.
Now she was even
more
certain he hadn’t been lying.

But just what did that mean?

Had someone been along with him on his run? That wouldn’t be hard to determine. The ranger station would know. But if it was all just a terrible accident, surely that person would have called it in. And if so, they surely wouldn’t have taken such a lethal reprisal against Ron in the balloon.

No, it had to be something else.
It wasn’t no accident out there
… Someone had to have stopped him.

The police vehicle was gone now. Dani made her way down the slope to the ridge above the river and scanned upstream. The cold spray off Baby’s Rattle lashed at her, the sun glinting off her shades. It was possible that someone else had climbed down here and intercepted him on the river. But that would’ve had to have happened farther upstream. Or they’d have to have made their way down along the shoreline in between the first two rapids of the Cradle where the currents slowed a bit, in order for his body to have ended up here.

There were rocks in the river near where Trey was found. The Raptor’s Teeth, they were called. Three sharp, pointed rocks that protruded out of the water, four to five feet high. If Trey had sustained a crash hard enough to cause his death, surely his helmet would show the impact. And it didn’t. So how did it come off? How did it end up all the way downstream?

Dani followed the rapids from the high rocks, twenty or thirty feet above the river. She had to climb up and then down in order to follow the edge, but she was pretty nimble, having done her share of trekking and climbing in these hills. Once or twice, she even had to jump from one height down to another in her Tevas. If she stumbled she could easily fall in and hit her head or break a bone and be carried away. It was slow work; it took about ten minutes to climb a hundred yards.

Finally she made it to the Teeth. It was calm enough here for Trey to have been pulled over by someone. If a person had come out, pretending to need help. Or with a gun maybe. Yes, it could have happened here, Dani imagined. But why …? It was Trey. Why would someone have wanted to kill him?

She turned and looked back up the shore toward the road, and spotted something in the woods.

The narrowest pathway, which seemed to cut through the thick brush, barely wide enough to even be called a path. Barely wide enough for just a single person. It wound down directly above Baby’s Rattle, the second rapid in the Cradle, right above the Raptor’s Teeth.

So someone could have climbed down there from here.

Curious, Dani went back and followed the narrow path from the river’s edge back up the slope toward the road. Thorny branches slapped in her face and scraped against her bare arms and legs. She was no scout or tracker, but she had the feeling someone had been here recently.