CHAPTER 1
“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.
“Yes, sure, the PFDs.” 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 with Search and Rescue, and he had a lot of years responding to trauma in the Canyon. He had a round boyish face that belied those years—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 bowline.”
I nodded. The yellow line lay in a tangle at the bow.
Plus, there was the zipper baggie pinned under a coil. 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 bowline just came untied from its anchorage, it'd be trailing in the water.”
“So somebody just tossed it aboard.”
“Looks that way. And that makes no sense, because you don't untie the bowline until the motor is running. And at that point, the rafters should be wearing their PFDs.”
But they hadn't.
I said, “About the vests...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—'rigged to flip,' as he'd put it, meaning no gear would be lost if a raft got into trouble. And there was no sign of partying. 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 the boatman area. They had black webbed straps and heavy-duty clasps, with no sign of breakage.
There was a fourth vest—the spare, Pete had explained—stowed with the spare motor in the boatman area.
The only thing obviously out of order on the raft was the bowline. One end was attached to a low rail that fronted the deck. And that's where the line should have been neatly secured. But it wasn't.
I saw the ranger's point. We had a raft that was rigged professionally. And we had rafters who had then turned careless.
Pete waved a hand. “All 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.”
Walter smiled in return. “And this is your river.”
Pete didn't argue. “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 gathered rock chips, and left that baggie on the deck. Then, somebody unties the bowline—too soon, with the motor off, with the rafters not ready.”
I said, “Maybe the line guy got impatient.”
“Then he doesn't belong on the river.”
I guessed not.
“And look at the line. You can see a couple of coils. Looks like he was reeling in the loose rope from the anchorage, coiling it, but he didn't finish the job, didn't wrap the coils to secure the line...” Pete shook his head. “He must have just flung it half-done on the deck.”
We looked.
Walter said, “Maybe it started with impatience. And then went beyond that.”
“To?”
“Panic.”
“All right. What panicked them?”
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. And the rafters left behind. Procedure would be to call for help. Or wait for another trip to come by and hitch a ride, recover their raft.” The ranger stared at the eddy. “But they didn't.”
“So then, they could be ashore. Somewhere.”
“Or,” I said, “they went into the river to try to catch their raft.”
Pete just shook his head. “You have no idea the power of the Colorado.”
I was getting the idea.
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 V-wave!” The river had waves. Standing waves, where fast water collides with slow water, building a wave that seems to stand still. And V-waves, where standing waves cross and rear up like liquid jaws, and break big. 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 did go 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.”
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