Dead catch, p.1
Dead Catch, page 1
Also by the author
Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters
Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters
Opening Goliath
Lost in the Wild
Wolf Kill
Cougar Claw
Killing Monarchs
PRAISE FOR DEAD CATCH
“The terrain is rough—the characters rougher—in this suspenseful mystery set in the wilds of Northern Minnesota. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Special Agent Sam Rivers must wade through turbulent waters to determine if a childhood friend is guilty of walleye poaching and murder or if, as the ex-convict insists, he was set up to take the fall. The author weaves together the rugged landscape and his knowledge of those who inhabit it to spin a tale of corruption and deceit sure to please readers who enjoy a gripping outdoors mystery.”
—Lois Winston, author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries
“Dead Catch captures your attention from the opening sentence, and then, like Griffith’s first victim in the poacher’s net, you’re caught in a trap that’ll keep you flipping pages until the final twist. You’d best call in sick tomorrow, as this book will keep you up all night.”
—Jeffrey B. Burton, award-winning author of The Dead Years and the Mace Reid K-9 Mysteries
“A fascinating and thoroughly satisfying investigation into the shadowy world of illegal fishing”
—Pamela Beason, author of the Sam Westin Wilderness Mysteries
“Cary Griffith never disappoints. The suspense is taut as Special Agent Sam Rivers spins out a line to land a murderer in the wilds of Northern Minnesota. He pulls in one whopper of a story. This smart and gripping mystery is highly recommended.”
—Mary Logue, author of The Big Sugar
“The first chapter of Dead Catch by Cary J. Griffith has everything I love in a mystery: a remote setting, wildlife facts, a life in peril, and a twisted murder. Hook, line, and sinker, I was caught.
—Sara Johnson, author of the Alexa Glock Forensics Mysteries set in New Zealand
“Cary Griffith’s beautifully crafted Dead Catch, like the three preceding novels in his Sam Rivers series, is not a simple whodunit. No, it’s about the complexity of life: the importance of love in our lives and what love motivates us to do; the power of compassion and mercy; the need to make amends and begin life anew; and the renewal of a friendship lost in childhood. Dead Catch is about all these things and much more. It is a compelling read.”
—Brian Duren, award-winning author of Ivory Black, The Gravity of Love, and Whiteout
“Author Cary J. Griffith’s fourth Sam Rivers novel, Dead Catch, is an intimate journey into the Northern Minnesota lake country and the inner sanctum of fish-and-game law enforcement.
—Rob Jung, author of four mysteries, including Judgment Day, and the host of Minnesota Mystery Night
“Dead Catch kept me turning pages as Griffith revealed the high stakes in the walleye poaching industry. This fantastic mystery shows the depths of love, friendship, and the power of being given a second chance. A must-read series for all mystery and wildlife lovers!”
—Kathleen Donnelly, award-winning author of the National Forest K-9 series
Cover design: Travis Bryant
Cover photo: siraphat/Shutterstock
Text design: Annie Long
Author photo: Anna McCourt
Editors: Mary Logue, Emily Beaumont, Jenna Barron, and Holly Cross
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffith, Cary J., author.
Title: Dead catch : a novel / Cary J. Griffith.
Description: First edition. | Cambridge, Minnesota : Adventure Publications, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023050170 (print) | LCCN 2023050171 (ebook) | ISBN 9781647554019 (paperback) | ISBN 9781647554026 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3607.R54857 D43 2024 (print) | LCC PS3607.R54857 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20231108
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050170
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023050171
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2024 by Cary J. Griffith
Dead Catch: A Sam Rivers Mystery (book 4)
Published by Adventure Publications
An imprint of AdventureKEEN
310 Garfield St. S.
Cambridge, MN 55008
800-768-7006
adventurepublications.net
All rights reserved
Printed in the USA
For the Canfield Bay Boys: Jim Gray, Eli Nemer, Mike Reeve, Steve Sauerbry, and Drew Skogman
Buddies for more than five decades, we have lots of stories we cannot share.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
About Dead Catch and Discussion Guide
READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM CARY J. GRIFFITH’S NEXT NOVEL
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
Holden Riggins lay in the bottom of his boat, still as a stone-cold corpse. The day had dawned clear but sharp. There was a light breeze out of the northwest, causing Lake Vermilion’s surface to riffle. The breeze kept the fishing boat’s anchor rope taut.
Holden wore a faded black down coat with oil stains blotting its front. He liked to fry whitefish in Crisco, and he worked part-time as a small motor mechanic, so the stains could have been Crisco or engine oil or both. The coat had been patched in two places, obvious because the patching tape was a shade too dark. His Carhartt work pants were worn to a faded taupe, with their bottoms frayed over a pair of scuffed leather work boots.
Holden’s feet were splayed out, and his arms flung from his sides like a pair of catawampus windmill blades. The palm of his right hand was face down, with a crudely fashioned S-I-N-K tattooed on the top knuckle bone of each finger. The palm of his left hand faced the sun. You could not see it, but atop his left-hand fingers—cleaner, more stylized, and recent—tattoos spelled F-I-S-H. His face was round and puffy, and beneath a pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses, his eyes were shut tight as a toad. Most people would have thought the tattoo off the corner of his left eye was a mole. It could have been a teardrop. Holden had done prison time, and in convict parlance, a teardrop meant either a long sentence or testament to having killed someone. But it also had the shape of a crudely fashioned, 2-ounce split shot sinker. Regardless, lying in the bottom of his boat, his body had the kind of terminal flaccidness of someone who had been pole-axed in the middle of the night and left for dead.
Holden was in his late 30s but had the wizened appearance of someone much older. In his early 20s, he had learned to appreciate the day’s first beer buzz. By his mid-20s, he followed the beer with harder chasers. By the end of his 20s, he had become intimately familiar with most controlled substances. Growing up in Northern Minnesota, he had always been an outdoors guy, and the sun, combined with hard living, had turned his skin leathery with occasional age spots appearing on his face and across the backs of his hands.
Less than 3 feet from his prone body, an empty bottle of Old Crow rested against the boat’s live well compartment. Near the bow lay a half-filled fifth of Jack Daniels.
If not for the above-freezing embrace of Vermilion’s red waters and the sun, which an hour earlier had crested the boat’s gunwales, the man would have been covered in a patina of hoarfrost, already dead from a heart attack triggered by hypothermia. But Vermilion had kept Holden Riggins alive, though it was uncertain it could keep him alive much longer.
In the distance, the faint sound of an outboard motor cut through the midmorning like a chainsaw felling trees. Holden, of course, could not hear it. The sound did not reach over the boat’s gunwales. Besides, his body temperature was nearly 95 degrees. If he had been conscious, he would have been shaking like a man with delirium tremens.
On the leeward side of the boat, 20 yards into the lake, a pair of empty white jugs anchored each end of a 40-foot whitefish gill net. Minnesota DNR regulations were very specific and strict about fishing with nets. Except for a few weeks in late fall, netting was forbidden. Holden knew all about the regulations, in part because he had been fishing his entire life. Also, more than once, he had been arrested and convicted for poaching. The most severe penalty had been eight years earlier, when he was caught selling illegally netted walleye to local restaurants. Technically, it was a violation of the Lacey Act, and because he was selling the fish commercially, he was convicted of a felony.
There had been other violations, although none recently. For the last seven years, Holden had been clean, or at least he had not been caught committing an illegal act. There were a few people who believed Holden was a changed man. He had turned over a new leaf, so some said. There were many others, less sanguine, who believed he had finally figured out how to avoid getting caught. These people opined the Holden Rigginses of the world don’t change; they just get smart, or lucky.
Regardless, today, October 14th, there was nothing untoward about Holden’s gill net. It was strung 3 feet deep across familiar shallows. The net was perfectly situated to catch whitefish, which in late fall swam up out of Vermilion’s depths to spawn. There was nothing illegal about Holden’s net because last Thursday had been the whitefish netting season opener, and Holden had a license.
The motorboat was growing closer.
Beyond Holden’s whitefish net, the lake bottom dropped to a rugged, well-known 25-foot-deep rocky bottom. Locals knew it as prime walleye habitat and a great place to fish. But again, walleye could never be taken with nets. Minnesota’s walleye had to be caught the old-fashioned way, with hook, line, sinker, and live bait or lures or both. Or any one of a huge number of variations involving fishing poles, reels, and tackle.
Walleye fishing in Minnesota was big business. New boats similar to Holden’s Lund 1600 Renegade easily sold for tens of thousands of dollars and were outfitted with fish finders, GPS, live wells, rod storage compartments, swivel pedestal seats, steering wheels, gauge-filled dashes, and more. And providing you only used some variation of hook, line, sinker, and bait, whatever boat and fishing technology you could leverage was legal.
But Holden’s boat was old. Years earlier, he had purchased it used, and now its hull was scraped and dented. He had none of the newfangled electronics typical of boats purchased today. In many ways, Holden’s boat was a counterpoint to the Minnesota DNR runabout, whose gleaming hull rested 30 yards shoreward, tethered to an overhanging cedar branch. Affixed to the boat’s aft was a shiny black 150-horsepower Mercury outboard motor, now drifting up and down in the chop, its propeller occasionally scraping against the lake’s boulder-strewn bottom.
Twenty yards farther out into Vermilion, beyond Holden’s legal nets, bobbed a pair of faux pine branch floats. If you boated by, you would think they were tree debris, to be avoided if you did not want your motor to get caught up. The faux branches anchored each side of a 15-foot-long, 25-foot-deep gill net, set in a way designed to produce a maximum walleye harvest. Pound for pound, a single catch of walleye in that net would fetch enough money to keep a grown man stocked with Old Crow for a year. Maybe Jack Daniels too.
Annually, Minnesota restaurants sold $25 million of the prized fish, none of it commercially harvested in the state. Most restaurants and grocery stores purchased their walleye from Canadian fisheries or the Red Lake band of Chippewa, the only Minnesotans who could legally harvest and sell the fish.
Because of the cold and time of year, there was almost no one on Lake Vermilion. The lake contained more than 40,000 acres of water, dotted with 365 islands. It was strung across Northeastern Minnesota in a series of channels and bays that were so ragged and jagged that it had 341 miles of shoreline, the most of any Minnesota lake. There were a lot of places to lose oneself on Vermilion, which is why the distant sound of the motorboat, growing closer, was surprising.
The index finger on Holden’s left hand, the one tattooed with an elaborate “F,” twitched.
If Holden had not been nearly comatose, he would have recognized the sound of the approaching outboard. Like the patrol boat tethered to the nearby shoreline, the distant drone was definitely a 150-horsepower four-stroke Mercury, standard issue for the Minnesota DNR. From the approaching noise, he might have suspected the authorities were on their way. If he remembered or had been aware of any of the things that happened the previous night, he might have worried. But he was just beginning to regain consciousness; besides, he would have never guessed that the reason for the patrol’s approach was because, five hours earlier, a call was made to Minnesota’s Turn-in-Poachers (TIP) line.
“TIP line,” Dispatch answered, before dawn. “Can I help you?”
“Uhhh,” the caller began, not unusual for TIP line calls. “Think I got somethin’ to report.”
“A violation?”
“Well, don’t know exactly.” The voice sounded old, but with that inflection that identified a Northern Minnesotan. A man.
“What did you see?”
“On Lake Vermilion. Out across Big Bay. Near that big island. Two boats, one of them DNR, pretty sure. But nobody in sight. Leastways, that I could see.”
“And you think there was some kind of violation happening?”
“Looked fishy, know what I mean? Where the hell was they? And there were net floats. Could a been whitefishin’, but looked like there were two nets. That ain’t legal. Is it?”
“No, sir. Unless there were two people with licenses. Are you sure one of the boats was DNR?”
“Two empty boats. One of them DNR. I was a ways out, headed to my car. But when I seen the boats I come up close and hit them with my high beam. When no one popped up, I yelled. But . . . nothin’.”
“Can you tell me a little bit more about where exactly you saw them?”
The voice paused and then said, “North of the casino water tower. Clear ’cross Big Bay. Just ’bout a straight line, I’d guess. Up close to that long island.”
Dispatch repeated the location. She had been to the Lucky Loon Casino and was familiar with that part of Lake Vermilion. She didn’t know the island he referenced, but there were a lot of islands on that big body of water, and she thought she remembered seeing a map that showed a long island, due north of the water tower.
“What made you think the boat was ours?”
“It was . . . new like. With a big black Merc on the back. Pushed up to shore, just sittin’ there empty. But I seen that DNR sign on its bow. That yellow-and-blue map?”
“Map of Minnesota with M-N-D-N-R in big letters?” Dispatch said.
“That’s it.”
Lake Vermilion was in District 5, which was Conservation Officer Charlie Jiles’s territory. Dispatch had the rosters for all the COs, since they were typically the first to respond to TIP calls. But Charlie had the weekend off, and COs were forbidden to use their official boats for anything personal. She knew Charlie Jiles. He had a reputation. He was a good officer, but he didn’t always follow the rules.
“Can you describe the other boat? Was it against the shore too?”
“Nope. Bout 30 yards out, I’d say. A Lund. An old Lund. Just anchored there.”
“We’ll check it out,” she finally said. “Would you like to leave a phone number in case we have any other questions?” Dispatch had already captured the number from caller ID. But something about the caller sounded a little off. She wanted a name and was leading up to asking for it, thinking the phone number would be a good first step.
Then the line went dead.
Most people were reluctant ratters. DNR regulations could be ambiguous, and most were willing to give fellow outdoors people the benefit of the doubt. Others who might recognize a larcenous act refused to get involved because they were acquainted with or related to the perpetrator. And then there were a minority who thought if someone could get away with a little larceny, especially when it involved Minnesota’s abundant natural resources, more power to ’em. This caller’s voice sounded like it belonged to one of those guys—a Northern Minnesota good ole boy, she thought. And if the caller was coming across the lake before dawn, to get his car, he most likely lived in a cabin you could only reach by boat. And if he lived on the lake, surely he knew the name of that big island.
Something was a little off, but one thing was certain: they needed to check it out.
TIP calls were dispatched out of Brainerd, and it had taken nearly four hours to marshal two neighboring COs—Jennie Flag out of Grand Rapids and Bernie Olathe from Two Harbors—and get them over to Vermilion to follow up. Flag had trailered her boat. The pair then put in at the Lucky Loon Casino docks, feeling anything but lucky. The late morning was sunny but cold. Not ideal for being on water that in another three weeks would be solid ice.
