Black Sun Descending

by Stephen Legault

  “The feds are taking over.” The sheriff didn’t try to hide his displeasure at this information. “The body appears to have been transported across state lines. That makes this a federal case now.”

  Silas was silent. He felt the blood draining from his face.

  “Dr. Pearson, did you know Jane Vaughn?” asked Taylor.

  Silas tried to clear his throat. It felt as if his words were getting stuck in a patch of blowing sand there. He reached for a glass of water and took a drink. “Yes, I know her. Knew her. Not as well as my wife did. They were friends. They … worked together. They were working on things together before Penelope disappeared.”

  NIELSEN CLEARED HIS THROAT. “HOW well did you know Ms. Vaughn?”

  “I didn’t know her well at all. I met her a few times at our—mine and Penny’s—home in Flagstaff. She was at a meeting my wife hosted there for the Grand Canyon Preservation Society. I think she was over for dinner once or twice, but I don’t really recall.”

  Taylor looked at his notes. “The Grand Canyon Preservation Society was the environmental group Ms. Vaughn worked for. What was your wife’s involvement with them?”

  “She supported them. Wrote them a cheque every now and again. She hosted a meeting once or twice.”

  “Did you know Penelope was on the board of governors for the GCPS, Dr. Pearson?” asked Agent Nielsen.

  Silas looked doleful. “I didn’t.”

  Both Taylor and Nielsen were silent for a moment. “When was the last time you saw Ms. Vaughn?” Taylor finally asked.

  “I don’t know. Before my wife went missing, when Jane was over for coffee. They were at the kitchen table discussing something. I was in my office. I didn’t really chat with her.”

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Ms. Vaughn?” asked Taylor.

  “This is starting to sound like an interrogation, Agent Taylor,” the attorney protested.

  “Agent Taylor, I just told you. I hardly knew Jane. She was a friend of my wife’s. They worked together. That’s all.”

  “What did they work on?” asked Taylor.

  “I don’t know. Environmental stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “I guess stuff to do with Grand Canyon.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I’ve told you before. I didn’t really get involved in my wife’s work.”

  “Did you ever have occasion to visit Ms. Vaughn at her home or office?”

  “Agent Taylor, I’m starting to think you’re hard of hearing. I told you I hardly knew this woman.”

  “Gentlemen, this has been a wonderful start to the day, but we’re going to excuse ourselves,” said Ken, standing up. Silas looked at him but remained sitting.

  “Was she murdered?”

  “We’re not releasing that information right now.”

  “Well, she didn’t climb over the fence and lie down in the radioactive waste at the Atlas Mill, did she?”

  “No,” said Taylor.

  “So she was murdered and her body dumped there.”

  “Yes, Dr. Pearson. I think that much is obvious.”

  “How was she killed?”

  “Dr. Rain hasn’t completed that portion of the examination. We’ve recovered the complete skeletal remains and we have a good deal of work left to do before we can determine cause of death.”

  “But you think she was killed somewhere else and her body brought to Atlas in order to dispose of it?” Silas looked at Rain.

  “That’s right,” replied Rain. “My guess is that whoever did this hoped to dispose of the body quickly. It’s just a hypothesis at present. I’ll know more when I complete the postmortem. I think that whoever did this was counting on the radioactive waste to speed the decomposition process and that the reclamation work would simply erase all trace of Ms. Vaughn. What they didn’t count on was that radioactive material only interferes with living cells.”

  “How long do you think she’s been there?” asked Silas.

  “We’re putting that together now,” Taylor said.

  “She had a family, I think.” Silas’s voice grew quiet.

  “Two children and a husband. He filed a missing person’s report with the sheriff in Flagstaff on November 17 of last year. That’s five months ago. Ms. Vaughn hadn’t returned home from work the night before. She hadn’t called or emailed to say she would be late returning from a trip to the Grand Canyon, so her husband called it in. Right away.”

  Silas knew that Taylor was taking a shot at him. He had waited five days to report Penelope missing. She had often taken more time on hikes than she planned. Silas had begun to come to terms with the fact that he had been distracted during her absence by term papers and his lectures at the university. He looked at Taylor and fought to control his emotions. “There isn’t much left. Is that normal?”

  “There is no normal for this situation. We don’t have any charts for rate of decay for a body dumped in radioactive waste. Even the body farm,” said Taylor, referring to the FBI’s training site for evidence response team members, “doesn’t run this sort of experiment. Dr. Rain guesses that the radioactive material might have actually slowed down decomposition, but that’s been offset by exposure to the rise and fall of the Colorado River water table here.”

  “Agent Taylor, do you think she might have been killed because of whatever it was she was doing?”

  “It seems unlikely. Despite what you might think, most murders in this country are committed by people known to the victim and the motives are usually pretty clear-cut. This is particularly the case with murdered women. One-third of them are killed by their husbands, boyfriends, or former partners.”

  “I recall you telling me that when you were accusing me of killing my wife.”

  “I think we should be leaving now, Silas. Gentlemen,” Ken turned to Agents Taylor and Nielsen and the sheriff. “If you have any further questions for my client, I trust you will respect the fact that as his attorney, I must be present.”

  “We wouldn’t dream of talking to him without you,” said Sheriff Willis.

  “Silas?” said Ken.

  But Silas didn’t hear him. He was remembering the last time he saw Jane Vaughn just before Penelope disappeared. A group of activists and academics from the university had met to discuss a plan to ban motorized boating on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Silas had been marking papers in his study and overheard the heated conversation. The main topic that night had been who, among the opponents of such a ban, would object most vehemently. He remembered someone—maybe it Jane—asking who might scream bloody murder if they proceeded with their plan.

  “YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT to stay another night?” asked Ken.

  “I’ve got to get back home. I need to think,” said Silas.

  “You can think here.”

  “No, I can’t.” Ken looked hurt. “It’s nothing personal, amigo, I just need to clear my head. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me.”

  “Well, don’t appreciate it too much. I’m going to send you a bill. One case of that cheap Canadian shit you call beer. We’ll see how much you appreciate my counsel then.”

  “Trish would kill me.”

  “And me.” Ken reached out a hand and Silas shook it. Then Ken turned and walked back to his house. Silas had already driven away by the time Ken reached the door.

  TO HIS GREAT relief there were no reporters staking out his Castle Valley home. Silas opened the fridge and found a can of beer behind a jar of mayonnaise. Then he looked at the clock and realized that it was only noon.

  “To hell with it,” he mumbled and drank half the can before walking to the living room to surround himself with his maps. He stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, facing east, and drank the rest of the can.

  “WHAT WAS THAT all about?” Silas asked Penelope. They were in their bedroom. She was brushing her teeth while he changed.

  “What was what all about?” she said, rinsing her mo
uth.

  “That? That meeting? People seemed worked up.”

  “Did we keep you from your papers, Si?” She laughed.

  “No. I got through it alright. I just put on some music. Your friend Jane seemed pretty angry with someone. Who was that?”

  Penelope emerged from the bathroom in a silk nightgown. Her hair was loose and flowed over her shoulders. Her narrow face was bright. “That was Chas Hinkley. He’s the superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.”

  “What were they going on about?” Silas sat down on the bed and reflexively picked up a book from the nightstand next to him.

  “Well, we invited Superintendent Hinkley to share his views on designating the Colorado River as capital-W wilderness. We think we have the superintendent of Grand Canyon in the yes column, but Chas does not support this.”

  “Why is Wilderness capitalized?”

  “It’s just a way of stating that it’s designated under the Wilderness Act.” She slipped into bed beside him. “When something is designated Wilderness by Congress it means that you can’t build roads, can’t strip-mine, and you can’t damage the experience of wilderness. That means no motors.”

  “Ah,” said Silas without looking up. “So that’s what the fuss was about. Motorized rafts.”

  “It’s big business. There are thousands of motorized rafts that go down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon every year. There are also hundreds of non-motorized rafts that do the same trip, just more slowly.”

  “Isn’t this just an ideological debate between people who want to turn back the clock in America and people who don’t?”

  Penelope smiled and shook her head. “Oh Silas, it’s never that simple. We’re fighting for the heart of places like the Grand Canyon. Motorized rafts trivialize the Colorado River. It would be like driving your car into the Sistine Chapel.”

  “There are drive-through churches, you know.”

  “There are, but there shouldn’t be. Just like there shouldn’t be motorized boats in the Grand Canyon. Or roads through every corner of the Southwest, or that dam—”

  “You know who you sound like?”

  “Who?”

  “That grumpy bastard Abbey.”

  She smiled and swatted him on the shoulder. He pretended to flinch and then returned his attention to his book.

  “Some day …” she said.

  “Some day what?”

  “Some day that river will run free again.”

  “Don’t go monkey-wrenching anything. If you end up in the clink, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “You’d miss me?”

  “I’d probably get fired. The university looks dimly on fraternizing with eco-terrorists.”

  “Wouldn’t want that,” she said, the smile gone, and picked up a copy of Edward Abbey’s Down the River from her own nightstand.

  TWO WEEKS LATER she was gone.

  SILAS HADN’T LIED to the FBI. Penelope had talked about Jane often in a reverent, almost hero-worship sort of way. Silas remembered growing tired of hearing the activist’s name at the dinner table.

  Penelope had said Jane Vaughn was a tenacious, take-no-prisoners environmentalist whose sole purpose in life had been to protect the Grand Canyon. Anybody who tried to despoil that treasure, Penelope had crooned, came face to face with Jane Vaughn.

  Now Jane Vaughn was radioactive bones on a steel table at the Moab Regional Hospital.

  Silas wondered if there was any relationship between Vaughn’s work and her untimely demise. It seemed unlikely that her murder—and he assumed that it was murder—was a random act, regardless of Taylor’s statements. If it was, her body might have been dumped in the woods outside Flagstaff, or left in a Dumpster downtown. The body being transported three hundred miles and buried in radio­active waste meant this wasn’t the act of a random killer. Someone had it out for Jane and had gone to great lengths to dispose of her in a way they hoped would mean she would literally disappear.

  The last time Silas had heard Jane’s voice was the night that Penelope had invited her activist friends to their home and talked with Chas Hinkley about his objections to designating Wilderness along the Colorado River. He recalled Hinkley leaving in a huff but didn’t know the extent of his frustration. Could the superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area have felt so threatened by Vaughn’s advocacy that he would kill her and then dump her body at the Atlas Mill site? If this man, whom Silas had never met, was so angry with Vaughn four and a half years ago, why wait so long to kill her? If their beef had been about protecting the Colorado River, why dump her in Moab? Why not dispose of her body in Flagstaff or, more appropriately, in Lake Powell, the reservoir that backed up behind the Glen Canyon Dam? It was the bane of existence for every environmental activist in the Four Corners region. Silas wondered if Chas Hinkley was still the superintendent at Glen Canyon. If so, what was the status of the decades-long fight over the dam, motorized rafting in downstream Grand Canyon, and the debate over Wilderness? Without Penelope to keep him informed on these issues, he hadn’t even considered them in the four and a half years she’d been missing.

  Silas went to the closet. Down on his knees, he pushed a few pairs of shoes aside and, using his pocket knife, lifted up one of the floorboards. A faint odor of earth drifted into the room. He reached under the floor and retrieved a heavy rubber bag fastened with a sturdy plastic buckle. It was a river bag that boatmen used for storing everything from a change of clothing to maps, charts, and beer. When the opening was folded over and securely clipped shut, river bags were ninety-nine percent waterproof. Silas opened the bag and wiped his hands on his pants to clean and dry them. He reached inside.

  The black journal was there: Notes on Ed Abbey Country. Penelope’s prized journal that he had recovered the previous summer and kept hidden from the FBI, the sheriff, and even Katie Rain during the investigation. This is where he secreted it away when he didn’t have it with him in the field. He knelt there on the floor, her picture next to him, and held it in his hands as one would a revered text.

  “I’M GOING TO FLAGSTAFF FOR a few days.” Silas was standing in his gear room, surveying the shelves of outdoor equipment there and talking with Katie Rain on the phone.

  “I don’t want to sound like an FBI agent, Silas, but have you cleared this with Taylor?”

  “You do sound a little like an FBI agent when you talk that way.”

  “Seriously, Silas.”

  “I haven’t talked with him, but I will. He’ll be my next call. I’m not a suspect in Jane Vaughn’s death, am I?”

  The line was silent a long time. When Rain spoke, she was very quiet. “Not a suspect but certainly material to the investigation.”

  “How did she die, Katie?”

  “Oh Silas, I don’t think I can tell you that. It would compromise the investigation.”

  “But she wasn’t buried alive, was she?”

  “No. She didn’t die in situ. She was killed elsewhere and transported to the Atlas Mill site.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “We’re still trying to construct a timeline. Normal decomposition rates don’t apply here. We suspect it wasn’t too long after she was reported missing last November.”

  “If you know that, can’t you ask around at the mill site and find out who might have had access to the reclamation pits at that time?”

  “Taylor is already on it. We’re interviewing past and present security staff. So far, nothing is popping.”

  Silas pulled a few more bits of gear off his shelves and stuffed them into an aptly named Black Hole Bag. He wanted to have a conversation with a few of the security personnel, but doubted he’d ever get the chance.

  “So, you still haven’t told me what you’re going to do in Flagstaff.”

  “I don’t know if I should. Is this Katie Rain, FBI agent, or Katie Rain, friend on the phone?” He said it whimsically, but as soon as he did he knew he’d hurt her. He stopped with the gear a moment and said, “
I’m sorry … I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay, Silas. I know this is strange. I really shouldn’t be talking with you. It’s just that I want to help.”

  “I’m going to try to find out what Jane Vaughn was working on before she was killed. Maybe try to suss out a motive. This may be connected to Penelope somehow.”

  “Special Agent Eugene Nielsen is in Flagstaff right now doing the same thing.”

  “I’ll keep an eye open for him.”

  “I’ll bet after you talk with Taylor that Nielsen will be keeping an eye open for you.”

  “Thanks for the heads up, Katie.”

  “Silas, when was the last time you were in Flag?”

  He closed his eyes as if to count. “Almost four years.”

  “Not since you sold the house and loaded up your books?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about.” He realized as he said it how stupid it sounded. He was poking his nose into a murder investigation.

  “I’m thinking more about your heart, Silas. Be careful.”

  THE DRIVE FROM Moab to Flagstaff was one he’d done dozens of times and it gave him ample opportunity to consider what he was getting himself into.

  What did he hope to learn about Jane Vaughn’s work that might lead him to Penelope? If Penelope and Jane had been working together to advocate for “capital-W” wilderness in the Grand Canyon, and if that designation had been objected to—maybe violently—by Chas Hinkley, then maybe Hinkley might have some answers for him about what happened to both women. Silas had used the computer in his bookstore before leaving Moab to learn that Hinkley was still superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

  What else had the two friends collaborated on?

  Silas passed the turn-off to the Hopi Reservation; he had friends there now, the family of the young woman whose body he had found the previous year, but he didn’t stray from his course. He was fueling up at the Shell station in Tuba City when it suddenly dawned on him. He almost sprayed gas all over his car and the tarmac as he jerked his hand back. Jane Vaughn wasn’t the only person Penelope had worked with who had died a violent death. Vaughn had also worked with another friend of Penelope’s, a woman named Darcy McFarland.