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have brought it downriver at a fast enough lick that it had somehow jammed itself through the open mesh of the basket and become wedged into the river bottom, bringing the entire fish wheel to a halt.
    He heard the sound of an outboard engine and looked up to see a Kuskulaner idling by in his skiff, watching him with a curious look on his face. He looked back down and wrapped his hands around the branch and tugged. It didn’t move. He wasn’t altogether sure he had enough upper-body strength left to make it move, but Pat Mack never lacked for stubborn. He set his jaw, squared his shoulders, dug his heels more surely into the gravel, and tugged harder.
    It came free with a whoosh of water. He dropped it and staggered back up the beach, sitting down hard half in and half out of the water, looking at what was in his hand. “How the hell—?”
    The current pulled at the wheel. The freed basket scraped across the gravel, still not moving normally.
    “Well, shit,” Pat said, and pulled himself to his feet.
    And then stood there, openmouthed, as the basket lifted free of the water to reveal the body of Tyler Mack crumbled inside it.

 
    Three
    TUESDAY, JULY 10, LATE EVENING
    Kushtaka
    The old man was sitting in his skiff, his back to the fish wheel, puffing methodically through a pack of unfiltered Camels.
    Jim picked up his evidence kit in one hand and used his other to vault over the side of Roger Christianson’s skiff. His boots crunched when they landed in the gavel.
    “Pat,” he said.
    “Got here quicker’n I thought,” the old man said, lighting another Camel off the end of the last one.
    “Chuck’s call caught me at the post,” Jim said.
    The old man drew in hard on his cigarette. “That’d be Chuck Christianson, going by in his skiff? Yeah, I saw he had his cell phone out.”
    Chuck had, in fact, snapped a picture of Tyler Mack in the basket of the fish wheel and texted it to Jim, but Jim thought it tactless to mention that. “Anyway,” he said, “I went straight up the hill, fired up the Cessna and flew to Kuskulana. Roger here was waiting on the strip. He brought me over.”
    The old man puffed out a cloud of smoke and peered through it. “Appreciate it, Roger.”
    Roger Christianson, staring with a sort of sick fascination at the body suspended in the fish wheel bucket above the swift-moving river, made a visible effort to pull himself together and said, “Glad I could be of help, Pat.” And then, as if the words were wrenched out of him, “I’m sorry as hell about this.”
    “Yeah,” Pat said.
    Which exchange sort of surprised Jim, because until that moment, he would have taken bets on neither man knowing the other’s name, let alone admitting to it out loud.
    The body was mostly inside the basket, knees bent, arms tucked in, sightless eyes wide open and staring at the water hurrying swiftly south below it. The basket rocked a little, the river’s current hitting the baskets still in the water. Jim spotted the line attached to the stump of a birch, holding the wheel steady against the push of the water.
    Pat saw him looking. “Tied it off when I got here. Figured you’d want to see him as I found him.”
    Jim nodded. Everybody knew about CSI , even Kushtakans.
    Water dripped from the body, making tiny circles on the silver surface of the river that quickly disappeared downstream.
    Still in his skiff, Roger swallowed audibly. “That’s really Tyler?” He was having the usual difficulty reconciling the sodden corpse with the living man.
    The old man nodded, still without turning around. “That’s him. Useless little fucker.”
    Shocked, Roger looked at Jim, who was making a bit of a production of getting out his iPhone and turning on the camera.
    “Couldn’t never get him to come up here, and then when I finally threaten him into it, stupid bastard falls headfirst in and drowns.” Pat inhaled, his cigarette burning down to his fingers. He lit another from the butt and flicked the butt