Free River of Ruin by Jack du Brul

lighter than his own and the other was more blue. The asymmetry made her striking, even if he hadn’t already found her so attractive. Through her tan, a sprinkle of freckles glowed on her high cheeks and across her nose. The other thing that struck him was how long and graceful her throat was and that without makeup her lips were still red and full.
    She stood with a casual confidence that told him this was-n’t the first time she’d witnessed such carnage. Mercer found himself flustered for a moment. He finally put out his hand.
    “Mercer. My name is Philip Mercer.”
    “Captain Lauren Vanik.” Her grip was firm and she never broke eye contact. As if nature needed to draw even more attention to her stunning eyes, her lashes were long.
    “The head of this expedition was a friend of mine,” Mercer told her. “He’d invited me here a while ago. I arrived with his wife around noon and discovered . . . well, this.”
    “And you sent a couple of Ruben’s boys back to get the police?”
    “Yes.” It was odd that an army officer would know such a mercenary. He asked, “Ah, how do you know Ruben?”
    Her quick smile revealed a narrow gap between her front two teeth. “I coordinate with Panama’s antidrug efforts for U.S. Southern Command. Ruben’s network has been a good source of information to us. I was in La Palma, the provincial capital, when word got out about this massacre so I came to El Real to see for myself. I understand Mr. Barber was some kind of treasure hunter. Is that what you do?”
    “No, I’m a mining engineer. Gary and I went to college together.”
    Captain Vanik had stopped listening. She was watching as the Panamanians trooped around the encampment. “Excuse me,” she said to Mercer and strode across to the head official. A holstered Beretta 92 slapped against her slim hip with each pace.
    As several of the other policemen unceremoniously stacked corpses into the larger boat, she began a shouting match with the group’s leader. Her Spanish sounded colloquial. Mercer moved closer, and a few minutes later Captain Vanik spun away from the cop. Her face had darkened.
    “What is it?” Mercer asked.
    “Damn fools. I was afraid this would happen.” She pronounced I as Ah. “I wish I had time to get a real forensic team from Panama City.”
    “Why?”
    “ El colonel Sanchez,” she sneered, “has determined simply by walking by the bodies that this was a failed kidnapping attempt by Colombian rebels who have already slunk back across the border.”
    It appeared Colonel Sanchez was more than satisfied that this was done by long-vanished narco-traffickers so he could just clear the site, fill out his report and go back to the sleepy office he kept somewhere. “That’s it?”
    “That’s it,” she parroted. “The lazy bastard’s convinced he’s solved another one. Five guerrilla attacks in Darien in four months and every time it’s the same story. Usually he doesn’t even come out to inspect the sites except this time a gringo got himself killed.”
    Not prone to making snap judgments of people, Mercer had to go with his gut impression that Captain Vanik cared far beyond her official capacity. It was in her quick anger at the police ineptitude. Since Sanchez wasn’t likely to act on his suspicions, he had to trust that she would.
    “He’s more wrong than you know. Want me to tell you what really happened here?”
    Lauren Vanik looked at him sharply. “What do you know?”
    Mercer led her a little away from the others. “These people weren’t murdered by Colombian guerrillas. In fact, they weren’t murdered at all.” Mercer took a breath, pulling together the small bits of evidence that had drawn him to a rather outlandish but inescapable conclusion. “They were killed by an invisible wall of carbon dioxide gas that swept down this valley from a volcanic lake farther up the river. The bullet wounds are all posthumous to make this look like an attack.”
    “What are you