Earl dragged himself out of his seat and picked up his hat.
‘Who found him, and where?’
‘His mother found him in the garage,’ Marjorie said, relaying what she was hearing down the line. ‘Strung himself up from the rafters in the dead of the night. No witnesses.’
Earl glanced around the office. Nothing moved fast in Riggins, not even law enforcement, so he did not immediately leave. Filing cabinets that hadn’t been opened in months stood beside a board to which were tacked images of local felons wanted for minor crimes. A couple of big fish wanted by the FBI stood out, supposedly seen hiding out in the woods up near Crooked Creek by a couple of rafters, but that was the extent of the excitement. An acoustic country number spilled lazily from a radio on Marjorie’s desk.
‘Suppose I’d better have me a look, then,’ he said finally.
‘Suppose you should,’ Marjorie replied, her eyes fixed back on the well-worn pages of a romance novel.
Earl waddled out of the office, grabbed the keys to the Ford Ranger parked outside and opened the front door. The bright morning sunshine blazed down from a perfect blue sky, soaring hills and ragged canyons forming a dramatic backdrop to the tiny town. Nestled deep in a valley just south of Hell’s Canyon, Riggins had been built along the banks of the Salmon River and its tributary, where the mountains formed the confluence of the rivers. The nearest major towns were twenty miles in either direction on the only access road to Riggins, the US-95, and with only a couple of full-time officers available for duty, the department came under the jurisdiction of Idaho County Sheriff’s Department.
Earl pulled out of the station lot and drove north down Main Street past the diner and gas station. The nearby river glittered brightly in the sunlight between the trees that hugged its banks. He didn’t have to drive far. The MacCarthy family lived just off the 95 where a dead-end sign gave way to a small collection of sun-bleached clapperboard single-stories. The truck kicked up clouds of dust as Earl mounted the ramp and cruised slowly up to where Sally MacCarthy stood on the porch of her house, her face devoid of emotion, her eyes dark orbs that didn’t reflect the bright sunlight. Earl killed the truck’s engine and climbed out just in time for Sally to fall into his arms as the grief finally hit her.
‘Jesus, Earl.’
Earl wrapped his arms around her waif-like shoulders and held her for a long time.
He’d known the MacCarthys since he’d been knee-high to an elk. Old man MacCarthy had been a former prospector who’d thrown what little he’d made from the beds of countless rivers into a small diner on the southern edge of town. Three kids, all sons. Old Tom had gone to his maker six years previously, an early visit courtesy of smoking sixty Luckies a day for the better part of forty years. All Sally had left was her three boys: Cletus, Jesse and Randy.
Earl eased himself free of Sally’s embrace and looked down at her.
‘Tell me what happened, right from the start.’
Sally wiped away the tears from her face, her skin aged beyond her years like rocks weathered by decades of exposure, and spoke in a voice that sounded tiny to Earl’s ears.
‘He went out last night with some friends,’ she said. ‘I went to bed early but I din’ hear him come home. He wasn’t in his bed this morning but that ain’t unusual, so I just got ready for work. I found him when I came round to the garage for the truck.’
Earl looked across to the right of the tired-looking house to where the open car shelter stood. Little more than some timber beams surfaced with opaque corrugated plastic, stained with the dust of years. He could see an aged flat-bed parked out front.
‘Is he still there?’ Earl asked as gently as he could.
Sally nodded once, struggling to hold back more tears.
‘I left him in case your people wanted to do all those forensic tests on him, like I’ve seen on the TV. There’s no doubt he’s gone. Besides, I couldn’t have got him down even if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t bear to.’
Earl stepped away from Sally and approached the car shelter. As he rounded the corner he saw the body of Randy MacCarthy hanging from the central crossbeam. Beneath him, an old wooden stool lay on its side.
His hands hung limp by his sides, his boots a good three feet above the dusty floor of the shelter. Randy was twenty-three years old, best as Earl could recall. His two older brothers were well-known local woodsmen who often supplemented their meager incomes by taking tourists out into the wilderness on hiking trips. Randy had no criminal record, just a few minors for possession of marijuana, and worked at the hardware store.
Randy’s jaw was pitched steeply by the tight rope, but Earl could see that his neck was not broken. Asphyxiation then, from the noose. Inch-thick hemp cordage, double-looped over the crossbeam above. Earl looked up at the roof of the shelter, then at the parked flat-bed, and then at the dusty floor of the shelter. He unclipped his radio from his belt and keyed open a channel.
‘Marjorie, you there?’
‘I gotcha, Earl, what’s the story?’
Earl scanned the scene before him one last time.
‘You’d better get Grangeville down here with forensics,’ he said. ‘Randy’s definitely dead. I’ll photograph the scene here and get it cordoned off.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Marjorie replied, ‘that’s not good news for Sally MacCarthy.’
‘A death in the family’s not good news for anybody, Marjorie.’
‘I mean that Randy’s not the only one of her boys in trouble. One of the others, Jesse, just turned up at Old Meister’s lodge. The old man’s sayin’ Jesse’s brother’s been killed.’
‘He knew about Randy’s hanging?’
‘No, he’s saying that Cletus MacCarthy is dead too. You’d better get down there right away.’
Earl muttered a profanity under his breath as he walked back to his truck. Nothing happened in Riggins for months at a time, and then every man and his dog turns up dead.
‘I’ll be back soonest,’ he said to Sally, avoiding meeting her eye, as he climbed in and started the engine, wondering how he was going to explain this all to her. ‘Forensics are on their way, just don’t touch anything.’ Earl sighed as he drove back down Main Street and turned off down a track toward the river. He pulled up a few minutes later outside the hunting lodge of Charlton Meister, one of the old-school trappers who’d gotten too rickety to trek the woods anymore and too damned old to get on with the locals in town. A fierce-tempered old goat who went everywhere with a scowl behind his ragged beard, Meister had built the lodge and settled on the banks of the Salmon River a couple of miles out of town. Earl knew him well enough. Every few weeks they’d get called out to the lodge after local kids harassing the old man went squealing to their folks after Meister had gotten his hands on them and cracked their heads together or taken a horse whip to their legs.
Earl strode down a narrow track that wound its way along the banks of the Salmon River and the lodge, and glanced at the frigid waters. Breakfast might have settled in Meister’s nets, providing him with yet another way of avoiding going to the grocery store in town. But Meister wasn’t beside the nets. Instead, the old man was kneeling on the shoal bank over a body lying on its back, covered in blankets.
Earl hurried over, his boots crunching on the shoal alerting Meister to his approach. The old man turned, and for the first time in decades Earl saw concern creasing his features.
‘This boy needs a hospital, and I mean right now, Sheriff.’