Leave No Trace Page 8

  Brian glanced sideways at Meg as the dogs trotted beside them. “You know it’s inevitable we’re going to go over that bridge.”

  Meg studied the narrow bridge with resignation. “Of course we are. Because I’m doomed.”

  “For this case, you seem to be. You’re in the Appalachians. Chances of every search being at ground level is pretty much zero.”

  “Chances of any search being at ground level seems to be pretty much zero.”

  They moved from the parking lot to a wooden boardwalk leading to the bridge labeled with a large white on blue sign marking it as property of the TVA.

  “Hello!”

  As a group, they turned to see a man getting out of a Polk County Sheriff’s SUV. Tall, lean, gray haired, and in a brown uniform complete with sheriff’s badge, he covered the ground to them quickly. “You must be the FBI team. Sheriff Burt Hastings.” He held out his hand, and Torres stepped forward to shake it.

  “Special Agent Sam Torres. These are FBI handlers Meg Jennings and Brian Foster and their dogs, Hawk and Lacey.”

  They shook hands. Meg noticed his gaze quickly dart over her face—she was looking better, but some splotches remained—before dropping down to study the dogs with interest.

  “Those are fine-looking animals.”

  “Thank you,” Meg said. “They’re also great trackers.” She turned to study the dam. “Where was the victim killed?”

  “Over there, on the far side of the river.” Hastings pointed to several short buildings across the dam.

  “The body has been removed, I assume?” Torres asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You left the arrow for the dogs to use for scent?” Meg knew Hastings’s answer simply from his wince. “Pretty much no. There was no way. And I don’t think you would have gotten much scent from it.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Meg said. “Why was there no way?”

  “Because the shot pinned the victim to the wall of the tram house. Hit with enough force to take him right off his feet and left him dangling there, dead. I doubt he even struggled. From the placement of the arrow, it went through or between his ribs, through his heart, and out the other side before embedding in the wall. He died instantly. To recover the victim, it was either lift the body up and off the arrow, or cut the arrow off right behind the arrowhead, leaving the shaft inside the body, and transport them together. The county coroner wanted it done the second way to preserve the body for autopsy.”

  Torres grimaced for a second and then controlled his expression into neutral lines. “The coroner will be doing the autopsy? Is he qualified?”

  Hastings’s laugh had a cynical edge to it. “Hell, no. He’s an elected official. He’s a construction foreman in his real job but moonlights as the coroner. Most importantly, since it’s a federal case, he can order an autopsy by the medical examiner in Chattanooga when there’s a suspicious death, which he did. And considering the placement of the arrow, he thought he’d better leave it in the victim.” He nodded toward a white panel van in the parking lot. “My crime scene guys are still here waiting to collect everything that’s left once you’ve checked it out and done whatever it is you do to get the dogs started. Just in case there’s anything that might be useful for you.”

  “Thanks,” said Meg. “We understand the victim, Mr. White, was here to oversee some repairs to the dam.”

  “Not the dam. The flume.”

  “A flume? Like at an amusement park?” asked Brian.

  “Only in the strictest sense of the word if you consider a flume a man-made channel to carry water. In this case, that’s all it carries. You never heard of the Ocoee Flume?”

  Brian shrugged his apology. “We’re from DC?”

  “That could do it. If you live in this area, you practically live and breathe facts about the flume because it’s our most important local landmark. I guess you didn’t watch the 1996 Olympics? The white-water kayaking was done upstream from here on our Class III and IV rapids. The flume is a national historic landmark and it got some PR at the time.”

  “I guess we missed that part of it. Is it going to be important?”

  “Might be.”

  “It’s also owned by the TVA?” Meg asked.

  “Yup.”

  Brian exchanged a glance with Meg. “Then you better give us some background on it.”

  “Sure. It was completed in 1912 and is an eleven-foot-high, fourteen-foot-wide wooden channel that runs five miles from Ocoee Dam #2 to Ocoee Powerhouse #2.”

  Brian stared unblinkingly. “Why would you run water five miles to the powerhouse? Wouldn’t it be easier to have it closer? That’s a long distance to move water.”

  “It is, but you need to be able to drop the water from a height to get energy for power generation, and this dam is only thirty feet high. That’ll generate nothin’. Five miles downstream, it drops two hundred and fifty feet to the powerhouse. Come this way.”

  He led them along the boardwalk and past the gated and screened entrance for the suspension bridge to the walkway on the far side. They stood at the apex of the dam with a calm, level body of water on the upstream side. On the downstream side, the concrete overtopping of the dam dropped in jagged steps down thirty feet to the shallow riverbed below. At the far end of the dam, a gush of water flowed into the river, the remaining river water held back by the dam.

  “That’s the flume over there.” Hastings pointed across to the far bank. “That wooden structure.”

  Meg tipped her hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun. Just above where river water spewed in a white froth, a wooden structure branched off from the top of the dam to run along the side of the mountain rising above the south side of the river. Long, horizontally stacked planks formed a solid wall running parallel to the river, held in place every five or six feet by vertical staves. A wooden railing topped the structure.

  “You said it’s made of wood. How does it keep from leaking?” Meg asked.

  “Precisely fitted tongue and groove pine that was assembled wet because that’s the state where it’s waterproof. It’s a marvel of engineering and carries over eight hundred million gallons of water per day.”

  “There’s a number that’s hard to wrap your head around. White was on-site because of some repairs?” Brian asked.

  “He wasn’t doing them himself, but was coming to check out some concerns about leaks.”

  “I thought it didn’t leak.”

  “Normally it doesn’t, but you see the location? The flume is built into a rocky shelf carved out of the slate hillside. Any system built around a mountain, be it roads, bridges, or flumes, has to deal with the risk of rock slides. They happen a lot around here.” He turned and looked up at the sheer rock wall behind them. “We have to do a lot of road clearing.” His gaze slid back to the flume. “When a rock slide hits a wooden structure like the flume, it can do catastrophic damage. In 2014, the flume got knocked out for about eight months. A previous rock slide did considerably more damage and left the whole area highly unstable. It took years to get the flume and power generation going again.”

  His hands resting on the railing, Torres studied the structure across the water. “That’s a long time to be without power generation. Is that one of the reasons for the new dam project?”

  Hastings nodded. “So they say. They have no intention of closing down the flume—when it functions, it creates a significant amount of energy for the TVA—but they need a contingency plan for when it fails, which seems to be every few years lately.”

  “White was somewhere on the flume when he was killed?” Brian asked.

  “No, he never made it that far. The repair site is about a mile downstream. He was over there”—he pointed at a squat white building on the far side—“getting ready to get into the tram that runs up and down the flume. One shot was all it took.”

  Torres stepped away from the railing. “Can you take us across? I’d like the dogs to get started ASAP.”

  “You bet.
Follow me. The bridge is single file, though you might be able to manage the dogs beside you.” Hastings led them to the gate for the bridge, pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the gate, and opened it wide. “Go on through. I’ll follow behind and lock the gate after us.”

  Torres stepped through first. “Is anyone on the far side?”

  “I left one officer to watch the site, but pulled everyone else out. Once you mentioned dogs, I wasn’t sure if having guys on-site would contaminate the scene or confuse the scent, so after we removed the body, I thought it best to pull all but one out.”

  Meg went through the gate, Hawk heeling at her knee. “Thanks, that’s helpful.”

  She and Brian stopped at the edge of the bridge. The narrow suspension bridge stretched all the way across the dam, hanging roughly twenty feet in the air. Heavy metal cables were anchored in the rocky hills on either side of the river, supporting the host of smaller cables that braced the wooden floor of the bridge. Three horizontal cables ran parallel to the decking all the way to waist height, supplying a hand rail and providing safety in case of a slip on the bridge.

  Meg scanned the bridge, taking in the width. “There’s no way to go two abreast. I’m going to take Hawk off lead.”

  “Ditto.” Brian bent and unsnapped Lacey’s leash.

  “Agent, why don’t you go first,” Hastings said from behind as he relocked the gate. “I’ll bring up the rear. Just be warned ahead of time, especially with this much foot traffic, the bridge really bounces. But it’s solid. It won’t give way.”

  “Terrific,” Meg muttered.

  “It’s not that high,” Brian murmured. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I’m going even if I’m not fine. I’ll go after Torres, send the dogs after me, then you come after them.”

  “Go get ’em, Tiger.”

  Meg gave him a pointed look, then stepped out onto the bridge about ten feet behind Torres. “Hawk, come.” She turned to make sure Hawk followed her out onto the bridge and then faced forward, gripping the twisted metal top cables alternately in each fist as she moved forward. The first few paces were stable, the wood steady under her hiking boots, but once she got about fifteen feet out, the motion started. What began as a gentle wave soon turned into an elastic bounce from not just her own footsteps, but the group as a whole.

  It made her stomach pitch and she almost felt like she was floating, taking each step with the bridge decking ending up at a different height than she anticipated when she put her foot down. She glanced to her right, looking out over the dam to the rock-strewn riverbed several stories below.

  Undulating bridge aside, they made good time over to the far side of the river, and Meg stepped off the bridge onto a small concrete pad with an audible sigh of relief. She knelt down to snap Hawk’s leash on and stayed there for a few seconds longer than needed as she got her legs under her again. Then she stood and studied her surroundings.

  They were beside the small control house situated right over the flume gate, where a small amount of water was allowed through the dam to spill out over the nearly dry riverbed. Ahead of them, a slightly larger structure sat at the head of the flume.

  “Where was he killed?” Torres asked.

  “Here.” Hastings led the way across a short steel bridge over the spillway and onto a larger platform behind the second building. A set of stairs carried them down a level to the space under the building where a single sheriff’s officer stood keeping watch over the site. The platform under their boots was constructed of wooden planks built around a set of railway tracks that entered the space, dead-ending just in front of a large, bright yellow buffer stop. A yellow tram, with likely enough room for at least a half-dozen people, sat at the end of the track.

  Meg looked down at Hawk. He stood ramrod still, his body a straight, alert line from nose to tail, pointing to the corner of the building past the tram.

  He can smell the death scene.

  “Hawk, find,” she said quietly. She let him lead her to the site of the murder just inside the concrete pilings.

  Blood had streamed down the wall to pool in an obscenely large puddle. The arrowhead was lodged into the wall, with only a very short section of shaft protruding before abruptly terminating.

  “Definitely a heart shot.” Brian’s voice sounded behind her. “It looks like he bled out onto the floor.”

  “Not totally, but that’s likely about half his blood volume.” Meg studied the little that was visible of the arrowhead. “We won’t be able to get the dogs close enough to try to scent it without them wading through the blood. And the rest of the arrow is gone. As if being hours late wasn’t already a big enough disadvantage.”

  “Hey, buck up. Our dogs have skills. Don’t underestimate them.”

  “You’re right. We just need to get them started and they’ll be fine.” She took a step back, studied the arrowhead, and then turned 180 degrees to follow the straight path it must have flown.

  The tracks spread out in front of them, running along the river bank for several hundred feet before banking to the left. A steep slope, heavily treed in the bright green of new spring growth, rose hundreds of feet above them. Her gaze tracked up toward the peak, down again, and then back to the arrow. She stepped toward it, lining her index finger up with the shaft, but not touching it.

  Her finger ran parallel to the floor.

  She spun around. “The shot came from this level. The shooter wasn’t in the hills, he was . . . on the tracks?”

  “On top of the flume,” Hastings stated. “That’s how I read it, too.”

  “Ballsy,” Torres said. “The shot that killed Hubbert was through the trees and over a gully. We assumed the shooter was wearing camouflage, because no one saw him. One of the responding officers was Georgia State Patrol Captain Wilcox. He seems to know a thing or two about bowhunting, and he was impressed with the skill of the shooter. Said it came in from about a hundred yards away. If we assume about the same distance here . . .” He stared down the wooden structure of the flume.

  “That’s almost all the way to the bend in the track,” Hastings said. “That’s a hell of a shot if that’s true.”

  “We’ll take the dogs out there and we’ll find out for sure if that’s where the shot originated from. If so, we’ll track from there. We’ll call you from wherever we end up.”

  “Signals can be touch and go around here,” Hastings said. “You might not get through with your cell phone.”

  Brian patted the pack on his back. “We have our satellite phones. We’ll get through one way or the other.”

  “Good.”

  “Ready?” Brian waited for Meg’s nod. “Let’s go, then. If it’s just a matter of running along the top of the flume, this won’t be that hard.”

  “Hang on a second.” Hastings made a grab for Brian’s arm as he moved to step out into the sunshine. “This isn’t going to be as easy as you think.”

  “No?” Brian studied the track. “It looks straightforward. Is the structure not secure?”

  “It’s secure, but there’s less of it than you think. Follow me.”

  Hastings stepped out into the light and strode down the wooden planks between the tracks. The first twenty or thirty feet was about twenty-five feet wide, likely to allow for the loading of people and materials into rail vehicles. But after that, the platform narrowed down to only fourteen feet across, resting directly on top of the flume. More terrifyingly, shortly after that, the platform simply disappeared to reveal the churning waters of the flume below.

  The bottom dropped out of Meg’s stomach as she stared down in horror. The top of the flume was open to the elements, only crossed every five or six feet by beams attached to the external support staves. The railing ran along the length of the flume, and beside it ran paired 1” × 5” boards nailed to the cross beams, the only way to traverse the rushing water of the flume beneath.

  She instinctively pulled back on Hawk’s leash with clammy hands, her gut instinct to protect
her dog. He resisted for only a moment, his head already in the search, which meant forging ahead.

  How were they going to manage running along the top of a five-mile flume when they each had only ten inches of path to balance on? And there was no way she could tie herself to Hawk, or vice versa. One misstep, one wobble, one second of faulty balance and you’d be in the raging water. You could try to hold on to a cross beam, but it’s doubtful anyone would last for long against that kind of current. And if you let go and were floating down the flume, you wouldn’t be able to keep your head above water without risking a crushing, fatal blow against a cross beam. Yet to stay in the water meant death by drowning in the strong, sucking current, for human or dog. The water had to be ice-cold, but on the bright side, hypothermia wouldn’t be a concern. You wouldn’t live long enough to freeze to death.

  Meg met Brian’s gaze and saw the same foreboding in his eyes.

  “To follow the suspect this way means a pretty risky run over wet, slippery boards. Can you follow alongside on the slope?” Hastings asked.

  “We have to follow the direct trail the dogs pick up. If that’s along the flume, then that’s where we need to go. If he shot from the hills beside the flume, then we have a mountain search.” Meg studied the water where it flowed from under the wooden platform. “And there’s only one way to find out.” She stepped back a few paces. “Hawk, come.” She knelt down and unsnapped his leash. Then, reaching under him, she unbuckled his work vest and pulled it off. She held out the vest to Torres.

  Stepping forward, he took it. “What’s this?”

  “I don’t want to carry the extra weight of the vest for what could be a long search, so I need you to hold on to this for me. If there’s any chance that Hawk gets into the water, I don’t want the bulk of the vest weighing him down. It’s likely a fatal dunking, but on the off chance he can stay afloat, I need him as buoyant as possible.” She stood and faced Brian. “Maybe it’s a good idea to throw the net wide at the beginning. If you and Lacey find a way to get onto the peak over there”—she pointed at the rising hills to her left—“we could cover both—”