Chapter 11 The River Authority

The Authority's director met them in the boardroom with the developer beside him and a bound proposal on the table, and by the time the coffee came Vail understood that he had walked into a sales meeting dressed as an interview. Rurik Kelso was fifty and fit and had the manner of a man who had never been told no, and his proposal had a name, the Vendra Winterway, and a drawing of the Keld as the heart of it, a frozen river turned into a tourist road with a viewing platform over the open water and a budget line marked signage. "You'd build a platform over the one place the river doesn't close," Vail said. "We'd build a platform over the most beautiful spot on the river." Kelso smiled. "People come from the cities to see open water in January. It's money the town has never had." "There have been four bodies pulled out of there in four winters." "And every one of them a drowning, which is a sad thing but not a reason to leave the river unused." Kelso closed the proposal. "That's why we're talking to the Authority and not to the police. The Authority says the current is safe. The Authority says the ice watch knows its business." "The Authority has never had a body in its budget," Vail said. "That is not the same as a body never being there." Kelso smiled the way a man smiles when he has heard an argument before and priced it. "You are asking a town that lost its mill to turn down its last bridge because of four sad accidents," he said. "You will forgive the council, Sergeant, if it chooses the bridge." Vail looked at the Authority director, who looked at the table. "Who signs off on the ice watch?" Vail asked. "The operations office. Otis Baird, our lockkeeper. He keeps the gauge house and the markers and the crew logs." The director slid a folder across the table. "That's everything you asked for. The gauge readings for the season, and the crew access log." Vail opened the folder. The gauge readings were neat, hourly through November, each line initialed. The access log was a list of key-card entries at the yard gate and the gauge house, with names and times. He read it slowly. "The Keld gauge accessed at four in the morning on the ninth," he said. "The tenth. The eleventh. Three nights in a row, over the window the ice was set to take weight. Whose card?" The director leaned over and read the name, and his face did not change, which was how Vail knew the answer would matter. "R. Sund," he said. "Every winter," Vail said. "Check the other years." The director pulled the earlier seasons and read them out, and the pattern held: three consecutive nights at first freeze, every year, always the same card, always the ice watch, always the person whose job it was to be out at the gauge at night. Vail copied the card numbers and the hours into his notebook and did not look up. There is a kind of evidence that is worse than none, because it points so cleanly that it teaches an officer to stop looking, and he had seen a case closed on a clean pointer once before, in a file with his own signature on it, and he was not going to let that happen twice, no matter how much of him wanted to believe the log. "That's her job," the director said. "That's what the ice watch does." "It's her job to read the gauge." Vail closed the folder. "It's also a perfect set of hours to be alone at the exact spot where four men went into the water on the exact nights they went in." They left the boardroom and found Otis Baird in the yard, a stooped, careful man in his sixties, filling the marker pole brackets with sand to weight them. He straightened when they came and brushed his hands. "You'll want to ask me about the log," he said, before they spoke. "We'll want to ask you about the log." "Then I'll tell you what I told the last one who asked, four years back, and nobody wrote it down." Baird leaned on the pole. "The gauge card for the night watch is not always held by the person whose name is on it. In the ice season we leave the yard key and the gauge key in the office for whoever's on the next shift, because we're all on the same river and we trust each other. A card can be swiped by anyone who has the drawer." "So the name on the log is not the name at the gauge." "That's what I've been saying for four years." Baird looked at the frozen river. "Everyone who ever worked the ice watch could have been at that gauge on those nights, and the log would still say the same thing." Vail looked at the lockkeeper for a long moment and then asked the question that had been sitting under the whole conversation. "When the ice watch leaves the key in the drawer for the next shift, who signs for it?" "Nobody," Baird said. "That is the point of the drawer. It is there so a man on the night shift can get in without waking the man on the day, and it has been that way since before I came, and it will be that way after I go." Runa asked the next question. "Who knew that?" "Anyone who worked the crew." Baird shouldered the pole. "Which is to say, half the town, and every one of them a neighbor. That's the trouble with a small river. It doesn't keep secrets, it just keeps them longer." They drove back through the falling dark, and Vail did not speak for a mile. "He's telling the truth," Runa said at last. "He's telling a truth that helps nobody." Vail watched the headlights run along the bank. "The log points at Ragna. The lockkeeper says the log points at anyone. All we've done today is prove that a woman with a job on the river could have been on the river, which the whole town already knew." "So we need something that can only be her." "Or something that can only not be her," Runa said. "You keep saying that like it is a plan. It is not a plan. It is a hope." "It is a habit," Vail said. "A man who closed a case on the wrong answer once learns to look for the answer that fits nobody, because the answer that fits somebody is the answer a tired officer takes, and I have been tired for twenty years and I am not going to be tired for this one." "Or something that can only not be her." He turned toward the station. "Tomorrow I want the cold room at the mill opened properly, with a warrant and a lab, and I want the tires on every vehicle on that island, and I want the reason a man with no enemies and a bad heart ended up in a fish hold." He parked and looked at the constabulary's lit windows and did not get out. "And I want one more thing," he said. "What?" "I want to know who cleaned that ferry hold." Runa did not answer, because there was no answer that did not name a person, and naming a person without evidence was the exact thing they had agreed not to do. They sat in the car outside the constabulary with the engine off and the windows frosting, and the building they had both worked in for years looked like what it was, a warm box full of paper and coffee and men who had decided to wait for spring, and neither of them wanted to go inside and be one of them. ---