Death Canyon by David Riley Bertsch Page A

funny, Keith. From what you’re saying we have something unusual on our hands.” She stated this more than asked.
    â€œMurder!” He threw his hands up in the air and laughed. “Unless you folks have been doing restorative dental work on some of the bears down there. Or it just fell out of some tourist’s souvenir bag.”
    Noelle and Keith went to lunch and spent an hour catching up. She’d missed him to some extent, but not enough to tell him that.
    Then Noelle thanked Keith, promised to write to him again soon, and put on her jacket. She went to her vehicle and entered the number into her cell phone of the man Keith recommended she call if she couldn’t get any traction in convincing the police to investigate this case as a potential homicide. The man, Keith told her, could become indispensable if it turned out that the local police were unable to find any leads on the case.
    Directly above the man’s phone number on the piece of paper, Keith had scrawled a name: “Jake Trent.”

7
WEST BANK, SNAKE RIVER. LATER THAT DAY.
    Jake’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He shuffled around in the backseat of the cruiser so he could pry the oversized and outdated device from his jeans. It was a local number, but one Jake didn’t recognize. He set the phone beside him on the bench seat rather than trying to stuff it back into his pocket. The minimal legroom in the cruiser’s backseat would have made it impossible, and the car was warm and stuffy. He was sweating. Sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser when you have no alibi for a man’s death wasn’t particularly comfortable.
    Jake had expected a visit from the police department that day. It seemed odd to him, however, that Chief Terrell had led him to the back door of the cruiser when he asked Jake to come to the station for questioning.
    â€œIs this really necessary?” Jake’s voice filtered through the wire mesh that separated him from the chief.
    â€œI told you, Jake. We’ll discuss it when we get to the station. You know how these things go. Better safe than sorry.”
    â€œHave you determined that the man was murdered?”
    â€œJake!” Terrell sighed, annoyed. “We’re investigating the possibility, yeah.”
    The cruiser passed over the river on a single-lane bridge. Jake gazed upstream past the boat launch to look for birds and moose. In the distance, perched near the top of a tall cottonwood tree, he saw fuzzy white-black-white vertical dots stacked like a snowman and recognized them as a bald eagle.
    Investigating, Jake thought, now looking downstream. He guessed the river was still several weeks away from being fishable. Snowmelt from the high country was still showing its influence.
    If the police were investigating, Jake assumed that something had been brought to the chief’s attention on the case. If not, why would Terrell go to the extra effort? Terrell was a good cop, but Jake doubted that the chief’s deductive powers rivaled his own. Jake settled on the uncomfortable conclusion that there was evidence that the man was murdered and it pointed to him.
    The chief pulled into the police station lot and parked the cruiser outside the front entrance. Jake reached for the interior handle of the car’s door, but quickly realized there was none. This backseat was not designed for convenient exit.
    The chief opened the door for Jake and helped him out of the car. As they walked toward the front door, the chief curled his right hand around Jake’s left elbow—as if to lead him inside as an apprehended suspect. Jake shot the chief a steely glare. The chief let go.
    Inside the police station, Jake was fingerprinted and seated in the interrogation room. He immediately questioned the chief—a role reversal that Terrell was not expecting:
    â€œWhat’s going on, Roger? May I ask why you dragged me down here rather than just chatting with me at the