One Mile Under. Andrew Gross
day, until she saw his vehicle parked outside the station back in Carbondale. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to see him at work. Years. Certainly not since her mom had died.
“He’s on the phone,” a female duty officer said. Dani didn’t recognize her.
It wasn’t a big station, tucked into a corner of the Carbondale Town Center. Three or four desks, and some workstations. A room with a vending machine that doubled as an interrogation room. There were one or two detectives; whatever they did, Dani never knew. Any real investigation or forensic work was handled out of Aspen. When Wade took the job—the only job he could get—he joked that it was mostly setting up DUI roadblocks and the occasional marijuana bust.
And now, new state laws had even taken that away from him.
“If you wait over there I’ll tell him you’re here.”
“I’m his stepdaughter,” Dani said. “He’ll see me.”
She went right past her, the duty officer standing up, surprised, going, “Hey!” Wade was at his desk on the phone, his feet propped up against a drawer. The ever-present python-skin boots and that large, turquoise, Indian ring. He’d probably die with them on. On the shelf behind him were a couple of photos. Wade in his glory days. With his arm around Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Another with a younger-looking ex-president Gerald Ford. There were a couple of Kyle. One in his army uniform while in Afghanistan; the other, he and Wade fishing up in Idaho. Apparently, Dani hadn’t make the cut. There were a couple of AA books stacked on the credenza, and an empty bourbon bottle, which he always said he kept close as a constant reminder of worse days.
“Let me know when they finish up …” Wade was saying. He eyed Dani unhappily, as the young officer who had asked her to wait rushed in after. Wade waved her off with a Don’t worry about it gesture, motioning Dani into a chair.
She didn’t take it.
“I’ll check in with the guy from the Parks Service as soon as he finishes up,” he said. “Be talking with you then. Thanks.” He hung up and took his feet off the open drawer.
“The duty officer out there didn’t make it clear I was on with business,” he said, scowling at Dani like she’d burst in to sell him a new cell phone contract.
“You’ve got a problem, Wade.”
“Thanks for pointing that out to me, Danielle. Let’s see, five people are dead. The whole world’s gonna be breathing down our backs looking for answers. I always knew we did a good job by sending you back east to that fancy college.”
“Six, Wade. There are six people dead. And just to keep the record clear, you didn’t send me. Mom did.”
He wheeled his chair around to face her. “Well, I sure took you, didn’t I? So anyway, six. If you count what happened out on the river. You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been a pretty crazy twenty-four hours here. Not that the two are in any way related.”
“But that’s just the problem.” Dani stepped up to the desk. “I’m pretty sure they are. Related.”
Wade snorted a short blast of air out of his nostrils, his round, sagging eyes regarding her both skeptically and condescendingly. “I asked you to sit, Danielle.”
This time she sank into a hardwood chair across from him.
“And what makes you think some hotshot kid taking a spill on the river would be related to a tragedy like this …?”
“I was headed into to town to meet with Rooster,” Dani said. “Just after it must’ve happened.”
“Rooster?” Wade shrugged.
“Ron. Kessler, I think was his last name. He was manning that balloon.”
“I knew who was manning the balloon, Danielle. And I knew his name. I called him a lot of things, but Rooster wasn’t one of them. All right, you barged in here, you’ve got my attention. I don’t know why your paths would cross with the likes of him, but you were going in to meet with him why …?”
“He was at the Black Nugget last night.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me one bit.” Wade snorted derisively.
“A few of us were having a little tribute to Trey. Rooster … Ron was at the bar and cut in about how he saw something yesterday morning from his balloon.”
“He saw something …?” Wade rolled his eyes.
Dani said, “Exactly how I thought you’d react, Wade. And why Ron said he didn’t want to come to you with it in the first place. He heard us talking and he said what happened out there to Trey wasn’t an accident. That he wasn’t alone out there. He said he had seen something, but he backed down because Trey’s friend Rudy Thommasson and John Booth were a little drunk and got him all nervous. You know how Rooster gets. Anyway, he called me after I got home and asked me to meet him this morning in town.”
“Asked you to meet him …?” Wade scrunched his brow. “To tell you that Trey Watkins wasn’t alone on the river. Meaning, what, that someone was along with him? Or was there when it happened? You’re saying someone was responsible for his death?”
“I don’t know what he meant. Only that he said it wasn’t an accident. He was about to tell me after his run.”
“Look, Danielle.” Wade squared around. “I don’t mean to speak poorly of the dead, but Ron Kessler was a person who wouldn’t know what was real from a half-gallon jug of rotgut vodka. And when he wasn’t boozing he was just a fool who would say anything that came into his mind if he thought it would get a rise. I bailed his ass out in AA enough times and he was never once honest with me. I even volunteered to be his sponsor once, when no one else in the program would have him. I don’t know how they even let him operate that balloon, but from all I heard he did his job and it wasn’t his fault.”
“He wasn’t drunk,” Dani said.
“He wasn’t drunk?” Wade eyed her skeptically and snickered.
“Last night. He wasn’t. I know everything you said. We all thought so. But he made a big point of saying he’d been sober for three weeks. And I believe him. He even showed what he was drinking at the bar. Ginger ale.”
“Dani, I don’t care if the guy was sober as a preacher, Kessler would tell you whatever you wanted to hear if it stepped him up one tiny notch in his own importance. Your friend flipped his raft five miles out of town on the Roaring Fork River. Even if something did happen out there, whatever the hell he meant—which I’m not saying, only making a point—no way he could have seen that from the air.”
“He said he was the only balloon up that morning and he took some extra cash from the customers to stay up and let it drift a bit over the valley. That’s why he didn’t want to bring it up. He didn’t want what he did to come back to his boss and bite him. That, and because he knew you’d say exactly what you did. Which was why he came to me.”
“Well, I guess I never made it much of a secret.” Wade nodded. “You learn to live with people’s weaknesses in the program. God knows, I’ve had to own up to enough of mine. But let’s just keep it that ol’ Ron, or Rooster, or whatever the hell he went by, zigged when the world zagged one too many times over the years and the world hasn’t been a straight line to him since.”
“Then I’d guess you ought to understand that yourself,” Dani stared at him, “and be a little more sympathetic.”
Wade’s eyes grew fiery, but then they calmed, and he let out a long exhale. “Yes. On that point you’re right. I do. Understand. But I don’t have the time to argue that with you now …”
“Wade, look,” Dani pulled up her chair, “anyone who knows anything knows Trey could handle the lower Cradle rapids in his sleep. And even if what took place happened somewhere farther upstream, say around the falls, the raft