Chapter 1

As a stunning climax to its relentless, headlong rush through the canyons of the Embargo Mountains, the Coldwater River drops abruptly over a final series of precipitous cataracts. Plunging one hundred and fifty-three feet over a distance of less than eighteen meters, the river’s headlong descent is dashed by twenty-one irregular, rock-hewn, vertical drops of between six and nine feet. This segment has been rated at nine-point-seven on the Whal­ley-Littleton ten-point whitewater scale, and has been captioned: “Not conventionally navi­gable; may be possible to survive descent utilizing specialized craft and personal protective gear. Not recommended.”

This stunning display is known as the Coldwater Cascades. The roaring rush of the falls is the mountain river’s last hurrah as it spills its torrent, with abrupt abandon, into a gently sloped coulee called The Neck, a narrow prelude to the more extensive Coldwater Valley beyond.

Traversing The Neck, the Coldwater undergoes a wrenching personality change. Twisting through this final constriction, the Coldwater’s character shifts repeatedly from brashly bold to darkly furtive as it sweeps through the coulee, struggling against its transposition from the Embargos’ turbulent white water surge into the Valley’s genial, rolling stream.

Dissipating its mountain-steep energy in the gentle gradient of The Neck’s alluvium, the Coldwater makes a number of sharp, abbreviated meanders, dropping its heavier gravel load as it slows. These sedimentary deposits form pebble and grit bars through which the river snakes, alternating frothy rushes and deep, shadowed eddies.

The Coldwater’s spring flood, at its most extreme, can sometimes change the shape or, on rare occasions, even the number of these mounds of off-scoured aggregate. Even so, as the seasonal high water recedes, there were usually seven gravel bars, three reaching out from the north bank, four extending from the south, jutting into the stream like the interlocking teeth of a riverine predator.

Nineteenth century fur trappers and traders had called The Neck’s gravel bars keys, by which they meant quay, that is, a wharf or jetty. With the steep, frothy pitch of the Cascades looming above, the Coldwater Keys were the head of navigation for the canoes used to ply the fur trade. Men, and many women, of both European and North American native cultures, would use the gravel bars as quays, loading their canoes for the trip downriver or unloading them for the trek into or across the Embargo massif.

The name, Coldwater Keys, outlived the fur trade by nearly two centuries.

In these later later times, the Keys, once the site of an important salmon fishery for the native Ciranaga clans, had become known as a popular venue for fly fisherman. Favored especially by novices of that piscatorial art, those neophytes found The Neck’s open terrain, the access to the river’s protracted, varied course, as well as the range of fish habitats represented, to be a near ideal testing ground for practitioners of both wet and dry fly sects.

On a morning early in June, just at sunrise, a recently-minted fly fisherman, a business mathematics instructor from Austin Community College, watched as the mists cleared from the middle Keys. He had just selected a zebra midge from his fly wallet when a pair of squabbling ravens drew his attention. They were at the water’s edge at the end of the gravel bar, and an intervening pile of driftwood prevented him from seeing whatever it was that had drawn the ravens’ attention. Curiosity won out. The initiate cast-angler, in his brand new chest waders, trudged over the mounded gravel to see what was so important to the birds. As he drew closer, the ravens abandoned their skirmish, both of them flying to a nearby cottonwood tree, from which the two birds surveilled the intruder.

The ravens’ departure allowed the fisherman an unobstructed view of the carrion the birds had been contesting. For his trouble, that closer inspection struck an image which would come to haunt the man for the rest of his life. There, at the water’s edge, lay a woman’s nude corpse, her flesh ravaged, her body gutted, and her features ripped and shredded beyond any recognition.

The fisherman vomited his breakfast into the Coldwater’s unrelenting flow.

Monday, JUNE 8

Just past 10:00 (“ten hundred;” I use a 24-hour clock, as does, my boss, Chester Francis Weaver) Chet, the Administrator of the Coldwater County Health and Human Services Center (encapsulated as CCHHSC, but also known succinctly as the Health Center, or less precisely as the Center) stopped in my office doorway and said, “Knock-knock.”

Without looking up from the Developmental Disability Habilitation services contract I was reviewing, I said, “Sorry, sir, Mister Mazur’s not in.” That’s me, Gary Mazur, Clinical Director of the Health Center and freelance smart-ass.

“Your wife has been pestering me,” Chet groused.

I looked up and made hand-washing motions, then, as if I was shaking off the excess water, I said. “You’re her supervisor, not me.”

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into that arrangement. She’s like a pit bull. I can’t get her to back off.” He had moved to sit in one of the guest chairs in front of my desk.

“I’ll tell her you said so.”

“You won’t have to. I said those very words to her not three minutes ago.”

At that instant, the “pit bull” came storming into my office. “Do you know what that jack-booted squid called-- Oh, I see he’s already here crying on you shoulder,” Greta derided.

I sat back in my chair, tented my fingers in front of my lips, the way Jimmy Schuster, my predecessor, used to do, and said, “Now what seems to be the problem?” which was a question I’m pretty sure Jimmy had never asked anyone.

As my comely spouse took the other guest chair, Greta snarled, “That bitch in the prosecutor’s office is threatening to sue us for creating a hostile work environment, and the sailor boy,” she hooked a thumb toward Chet, “won’t do anything about it.”

Two years prior, Chet had retired after after twenty-two years in the US Navy, hence the naval references. He had been honorably discharged at the rank of Master Chief Petty Officer.

I said, “Whoa back, Greta. Your attitude makes it seem like there might be some grounds to justify a hostile environment complaint. What, exactly, is she saying?”

“She wants to shut the bakery down,” Greta said, her otherwise beautiful face still curled into a snarl.

“She wants to shut the bakery down? Are you talking about Babbitt?”

“Yeah, that bitch Adrienne Babbitt, the delusionally grandiose assistant DA who thinks her farts are incense for the gods. She stopped me in the hall to complain that the smell of baking bread gives her feelings of anxiety, so she’s talked to her own lawyer.”

The bakery in question was the St. Louis Bakery & Deli, a sheltered workshop, that is, an occupational therapy and job-training program within the service purview of the Community Mental Health Team, of which Greta was Team Manager.

With Chet quietly observing, I asked her, “Had she ever spoken to you about it before?”

“No. From what I understand, one of the clerks from their office had mentioned her bitching about the smell to somebody in our Admin Services office. Or at least that’s what I heard.”

Nodding, I said, “I think that’s the same rumor from when I was working Community Mental Health.” As one result of a spate of criminal violence the year before, I had been promoted from Community Mental Health Team Manager -- Greta’s current job -- to Clinical Director. “Did Babbitt ever send you a memo, or an email, or anything digital or in writing?”

“No,” she declared disdainfully, looking at me as if I’d asked her a question with an obvious answer.

With a head-tilt toward Chet, I asked her, “And what do you seek from Mister Weaver, your administrative supervisor?”

“I wanted him to go over there and kick some of that fat attorney ass. Instead, he suggested I calm down.” She looked at him and sneered, “Way to back us up, boss.” She made boss sound like an insult.

Normally, Greta’s position as Community Mental Health Team Manager would have been under my purview, since the Clinical Director supervised the Center’s five team managers. But, as Greta and I were married -- to each other -- and the county’s nepotism rules wisely forbade that sort of supervisory complication on its organizational charts, Chet had been penciled in as her official supervisor, while I acted as her nominal coordinator within the Center’s mission parameters. In other words, I called the plays, Chet caught the crap. Worked for me.

I looked at Chet and raised my eyebrows. “So, what’s the story, boss,” except I said boss respectfully.

Chet sat up in the chair. “I heard about this late on Thursday and I’ve already been over there. Ginny says that Babbitt has threatened to quit if things aren’t fixed.” Ginny -- Virginia Howard -- was the District Attorney.

“Great,” Greta said. “Let her quit. Problem solved.”

Chet frowned at her. “Except Ginny doesn’t want Babbitt to quit. She says she’s good at what she does, and getting a decent lawyer to work for Assistant DA wages here in the hinterland is a tough sell.”

“So, what’s the deal with the bread smell?” I asked him.

“Apparently, Babbitt has a letter from an allergist in Kingston saying she’s allergic to the smell of baking yeast dough.”

“Seriously? Like what is that? Secondary gluten odor sensitivity? Is that even a thing? Has she been diagnosed with celiac disease or something?”

“I don’t know.”

Greta said, “She orders sandwiches with our bread all the time. That should rule out a claim based on celiac disease gluten sensitivity.”

I asked Chet, “Is the allergist an MD or some other reputable clinician?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not our problem, that’s Ginny’s look-out for the unemployment claim if Babbitt quits.” Then he added, “Our problem is that Babbitt plans to sue the Health Center to cease and desist baking in the rehab kitchen.”

“Well, let’s just trump that with a federal civil rights complaint under the Americans with Disabilities Act,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Greta said. “The hostile workplace law is state. The ADA is federal.”

Chet said, “Except that we’re subject to the direction of Burt Rauch and the county commissioners, while the District Attorney is an independent county officer operating under a state charter. Burt is never going to allow us to butt heads with the DA or even an assistant DA. He’d just as soon see the Center move to some other county, if not another state.”

“Like that would avoid lawsuits,” I observed. The state required and funded certain basic health and social services for every county.

“Short of that, he doesn’t care if our billable service hours take a hit,” Chet said. “He figures all we do is sing kum-ba-yah with the Community Maintenance clients, anyway.”

The Community Maintenance Program (CMP) was a Community Mental Health service detailed with assisting people with severe mental illnesses to live in their home community. College-educated clinical technicians helped them develop self-care habits, including taking prescribed medications, that would allow them to get along in a more-or-less normal community setting and avoid admission to the state hospital. The bakery was one of several occupational services the CMP provided.

Many of CMP’s services could be billed to Medicaid, Medicare, or some private insurers. Medicare and Medicaid rules required that, to be eligible, billed services had to be provided by a college graduate with relevant major coursework in psychology, social work, teaching, or a few other related areas of study. A major portion of the CMP’s budget came from services billed to the federal programs.

“What is Burt’s problem?” Greta moaned.

I said, “I think he’s still mad at the nurse who swatted his ass just after he was born.”

The three of us sat there in silence for a bit.

Finally, I said, “Maybe we’re coming at this problem from the wrong end.”

Greta sighed noisily, scoffing. “We’re not chasing butterflies again, are we?” It was a reference to the Butterfly Effect as a metaphor for chaos theory. We’d used the notion before as a brain-storm technique. In fact, Greta had turned out to be the star of one episode in which we’d been trying to determine the motive for a murder.

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that, though there may be some useful application. What I meant was, how is that smell getting into those offices? They’re two floors above the kitchen.” I looked at Chet. “The Veterans Service office is right above the kitchen. Did you ever get any bakery smells when that was your office?”

“No, not unless both stairway doors were open at the same time. But that rarely happened because those are fire doors and are supposed to be closed normally. You’d have to prop them open, otherwise, because they have automatic door closers.”

“The DAs don’t prop their stairway door open, do they?”

“I don’t recall that it was open when I went over there, and I think I would have noticed. Besides, the ground floor door is always closed, except when someone uses the stairs. And fire stairwells are designed not to support interior updrafts, in the first place.”

Greta said, “How much smell are we talking about, anyway? And does she smell other things, like the meatloaf, or the spaghetti sauce, or the stuffed bell peppers, or is it just bread?”

I glanced toward my desk phone and said, “Let’s find out.” I looked up Adrienne Babbitt’s extension and I said to Chet and Greta, “I’ll put this on speaker, but you two keep quiet.” I eyed my beautiful wife. “I mean it, Greta, else I dump this problem back on you and you can watch the bakery fold.”

I keyed in the extension and punched the speaker button.

“Babbitt, DA’s office.”

“Miss Babbitt, this is Gary Mazur in the Health Center. I’ve been trying to figure out why your office has been subject to odors from the rehab bakery.”

“You’ll have to talk to my attorney about that, Mazur,” she snarled and she clicked off without a further word.

“That went well,” Chet commented.

He scooted closer to my desk, pulling the phone toward him. As he tapped in the number, he said, “I’ll talk, you two keep quiet.”

After two ringtones: “Coldwater County District Attorney’s office, this is Eva, how may I help you?”

“Eva, this is Chet Weaver, over in the Health Center. Is Missus Howard available?”

“Let me check, Mister Weaver.” A click left us waiting on hold, listening to the county’s cheesy music, but, mercifully, not for long.

“Chet? What can I do for you?”

“Ginny, we’ve been trying to figure out how we can accommodate Miz Babbitt, and it occurred to us that it seems odd that she is being subject to smells two floors above the bakery. I used to have the office directly above it and never noticed anything, unless the stairway doors were open.”

“Well, we don’t keep those doors open, but I can assure you the smell is reaching our offices.”

“So it’s not just Miz Babbitt’s office?”

“Oh, no, it’s quite pervasive.” Then her voice became quieter. “But the rest of us don’t mind. Most of the gang even enjoy it.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Even so,” she said, returning to her former tone, “I’m afraid none of that makes a difference at this point. Adrienne tells me that she’s retained an attorney and will be seeking monetary damages.”

Chet hesitated. “Oh. I see.”

I scribbled on my notepad: “Attorney?”

“Who is her attorney, do you know?”

“Yes. She’s retained Martin August from over in Plattsburg.”

“Really? The guy with the billboards?”

Martin August was a personal injury lawyer. He was known for his extensive advertising, in various media, most of them featuring his grinning face and the slogan, “Let me help you put the hurt on them!”

“Oh, yes,” Howard replied. “Unsavory as his marketing might be, the man is a pit bull.” I glanced at Greta to see if she reacted to the comparison which had lately been applied to her, but she seemed to take no notice. “The best I can do is wish you luck,” Howard concluded.

“Okay, thanks anyway, Ginny. See you.”

“Bye, Chet.”

He hit the disconnect button, then sighed, as he pushed the phone back toward its normal position on my desk. “As I recall, it was you two who talked me into this job.”

“I think that’s the pot calling the kettle black,” I observed.

“As if you had room to bitch,” Greta aimed at me. It was a fair comment. In the final analysis, we had all more-or-less manipulated one another into our current positions. We all ended up in jobs with considerably more responsibilities than in our former positions.

Chet sighed again. “I reckon we’re in this together, then. We’ll just have to wait for the papers to be served.” He shook his head, his face in a grimace. “I just can’t fathom Babbitt’s gripe.”

“Enough with the nautical terms, boss,” I said.

“Huh? What? You mean fathom? Are you kidding me?”

“No, boss. I think all that military jargon creates a hostile work environment. You’ll be hearing from my attorney.”

Greta, finally smiling, though with a bit of a feral twist, asked me, “How much do you think we can get?”

I ate lunch with Greta in the St. Louis Bakery & Deli, the rehab kitchen and cafe that had been set up as a vocational and occupational project for clients in our Mental Health Community Maintenance Program. We each had a bowl of split pea soup and shared a thick ham sandwich on fresh-baked whole wheat bread. It was one of my favorite meals at the bakery, and I mentioned that to Greta.

Between bites, she said, “You say that every day. You were the one who set up the menus. They’re all your favorite meals.”

Shortly after I returned to my office, the phone emitted the double tone of a county intra-network call.

“Health Center, this is Gary.”

Sheriff Tate Plummer said, “Remember Evelyn Durkee?”

“Ah, yes. It was our first date. You took me to a shootout in Limekiln. Is Evelyn shooting up the town again?”

“Nope. You know that body they found in The Neck on Saturday?”

“Oh, don’t tell me.”

“‘Fraid so. She’d been in the water for a number of days, and then chewed up by coyotes or something, so they had to ID her through dental records, pending a DNA analysis. Nick, her ex, had reported her missing, so that was one of the first IDs the state medical examiner checked.”

“Cause of death?”

“Because of the condition of the body and the animal damage, it’s hard to tell. There was a skull fracture, but what caused it or whether it was pre- or postmortem might not be able to be determined. She could have come down the Cascades, or all the way from Ciranaga Canyon, or she could have been bashed with a hammer and dropped in the river at the Keys.”

“Whatever happened to that lawsuit she filed against us? Or do I need to start working on an alibi?”

“There never was a lawsuit, just a notice of intent, and the time limit expired years ago. Besides, neither of us did anything the least bit wrong. Anyway, we were protected by qualified immunity. We took her to the state hospital and it pissed her off. But she was the one shooting up the town. I did her a favor by not filing any charges, knowing that she’d been under psychiatric care at some point.”

“Filing charges would have been a little awkward, what with her ex-brother-in-law being your chief deputy and the other officer on the scene. By the way, how’s John taking it?”

“Shocked, but I don’t think they were all that close, especially after the divorce. But, to be honest, I’m not sure how much they kept in touch. He’s probably more worried about his brother, though their divorce was final years ago. She and Nick apparently still got together from time-to-time.”