The Last Thing She Ever Did(22)

“How long does it take to get to the bridge by Columbia Park?”

Cody computed the time. Numbers had never been a strong suit. He was more the artistic, free-spirited type. His tats proved as much.

Esther wondered if he was mentally counting the minutes on his fingers and toes or if he was actually calculating the flow of the Deschutes. “Cody?”

“Half hour,” he finally said. “Maybe twenty-five minutes. Depends on a bunch of stuff: time of year, current, and if you make it through the little rapids without a wipeout.”

The time of year was today.

“Fine,” she said. “What time do you open in the morning?”

“Ten,” Cody answered, this time with complete confidence. “We open at ten. Usually we have a line the second we put out the shade awning.”

“I need to know who rented here from opening to, let’s say, ten thirty. I’ll need to see their waivers.”

Cody did a little more of his very slow processing. “Don’t you need a court order?”

Esther kept her eyes on his. She didn’t think Cody was high. She suspected he just had the kind of empty look that made him appear as such. “You really want me to go to the trouble of getting one? Might trigger other trouble too. You want this place closed down, Cody? Drunk people shouldn’t be given a rental.” She indicated the young man who had ditched his beer. “It would invalidate the all-important waiver, you know.”

Cody looked stunned. Or not. Maybe that was how Cody looked all the time. “You wouldn’t do that, Detective. Would you?”

She needed the information and she needed it now. Charlie Franklin’s life was at stake. “Trust me, Cody, you don’t want to find out.”

The tatted young man turned toward the office part of the rental shack and motioned for her to follow. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. But you can’t keep the waivers. I need them. It’s procedure. You know, an important legal requirement.”

He disappeared inside and returned a beat later with a folder full of waivers.

“We have sixty-five. Pretty much in order,” Cody said. “You know, in sequence of when we get them turned in. The most recent ones on top. The first ones of the morning on the bottom.”

“I get it. Thanks.”

“Hey, you promise to get those back to me, right? I’m the assistant manager here and I need to follow procedure. It’s a superimportant part of my job.”

She looked down at the papers. “I know. I’ll copy these and get them back to you before the end of the day.”

“You better,” he said.

“No worries, Cody.”

Esther walked across the hot asphalt, got inside the hot car, and immediately turned on the air-conditioning. It had to be one hundred degrees. The last gasp of summer was a scorcher. She practically melted into the seat. As she let the air flow over her face, Esther leafed through the papers Cody had given her. She removed any with female names or whose ages indicated they were children.

Carole wasn’t sure about the age of the inner-tuber she’d seen, or really anything about his physical description. “He was white,” she’d said. “I really didn’t look at him. At the time there was no reason to. He was just another vacationer floating by. Maybe in his thirties. I don’t know, maybe older. I don’t know.”

“Think. Take a second. Nothing remarkable about him?” Esther had asked.

Carole, shattered as she was, came up with one more detail, although she was hazy on it. “I think he had a U of O T-shirt on,” she had said, before adding, “but that’s about half of the floaters around here.”

As the air-conditioning cooled her, Esther identified five names that seemed like possibles among the sheaf of waivers. Their ages ranged from twenty-eight to forty-two. Three were Oregon residents, though not locals. One was from Los Angeles, the other from Dayton, Ohio. All were staying in summer rentals. All included their home addresses on their waivers.

Esther called the names in to Jake, who had returned to the office to enter more details into the national database on missing and exploited children.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“We need to know where they are so we can talk to them,” she said. “One of them may have seen something. Maybe they didn’t even know what it was that they’d seen or why it could be important.”

“If they saw something, then why haven’t they called us? It’s been all over the news.”

“Like I said,” she went on, “they might not have believed they’d seen anything relevant.”

“Or just maybe they’re staying quiet because of something they did see. Or something they did. Any line on the canoe guy?”

“No,” she said. “Carole couldn’t remember anything about him except that he had a dog and was listening to music. Riparian doesn’t rent canoes.”

“Canoe color?” Jake asked.

“Red.”

“Anything on it?”

“Nothing. Have PR make sure to get the word out that we’re looking for the canoe paddler who was on the river at the time with a dog.”

“Okay, I’ll work the names.”



On her way back to the office, Esther stopped at the Miller place and rang the bell, but there was no answer. The heat of one of the hottest days of the year had turned a pot of geraniums into a brittle, lifeless display. The woman next door called over from her front porch that she’d seen Dan leave for the store.