Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  His watch had cracked and stopped. The canyon here was broad and deep, so he guessed that he had been pushed out into Courthouse Wash proper. He studied the stars and guessed it was sometime after midnight. Maybe as early as three o’clock. He felt nauseous again and hunched over, gripping the cottonwood for support.

  When the retching passed, he lifted his head and regarded the changed landscape around him. He’d seen flash floods before, and had even survived one previously. Their power still surprised him. The canyon floor had been perceptibly altered. Two or three feet of quicksand, mud, rock and wood now covered Courthouse Wash’s floor. He regarded the size of some of the boulders lodged in the muck. Had one of those come in contact with his head on his precarious journey down Sleepy Hollow, he would be dead now. The trees too, and the water itself—the list of things that could have killed him during his flight was long. Branches of cottonwoods stuck out of the muck like daggers. His eyes were drawn to one branch close by, and he struggled in the starlight to see it better. This branch was unusual. He moved as much as his body would permit and blinked the grit from his eyes.

  Silas crawled on his belly a foot or two, stopping just a few inches from the protrusion. He realized that he was not looking at the branch of a cottonwood: It was a skeletonized human arm that jutted from beneath the sand.

  SILAS PEARSON WAS UNCONSCIOUS WHEN they found him. The sun had been up an hour. The young man turned to his female companion and pointed in the direction of the prone figure in the wash. “Is that a . . . person?” he asked, starting to walk faster.

  “Carlos, be careful.” The young woman was hanging back.

  “It’s a man,” he clarified over his shoulder as he got closer.

  The body was on a sandy bottom, lying on its side, legs bent behind him in an awkward contortion. The young man could see the marks Silas’s legs had made where he’d crawled along the canyon floor.

  “Silvia, I need your help here,” Carlos said as he hurried to Silas’s side and stooped down. “Hey mister! Hey mister!” He put his hand on Silas’s shoulder and rocked him gently. Silvia came up beside him.

  “Is he alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Check his pulse.”

  Carlos put his fingers on the man’s neck. “I can’t tell.”

  “Hey mister.” The young man looked around him, then took off his ball cap and knelt down. He pressed his ear against Silas’s back to listen for breath.

  “Hey mister.” He looked up at Silas’s face. “I hear something . . .”

  “Is he breathing?”

  “Quiet,” the young man said, and his companion straightened and crossed her arms, a look of fear on her face.

  “He’s alive, I can hear his breath. Help me roll him on his back.”

  “You sure?”

  They rolled him on his back and Carlos cleared the man’s mouth of sand. Silas choked and spit and his eyes blinked open, encrusted with sand and tears. To the two young people, he looked like Tom Hanks’s stunt double in Castaway, his clothing was so tattered.

  “You’re going to be okay,” said Carlos. “You’re okay.”

  “She’s dead.” Silas whispered so softly that Carlos had to lean in to hear him better. “She’s dead,” he said, more audibly.

  “Who is?”

  “Back by Sleepy Hollow. Under a cottonwood. She’s dead.” Silas closed his eyes. Carlos took out his water bottle and pressed it into Silas’s hand. Then he looked up at his companion.

  “Silvia, go back to the road and get help.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Sleepy Hollow is half a mile from here. He’s fine. Just banged up. I’m going to have a look.”

  WITHIN AN HOUR there were two park rangers on the scene. Silvia led them to where Silas lay, and Carlos, his face ashen, took them to where the skeletonized arm protruded from the mud beneath the cottonwood tree. There were the usual questions about disturbing the site of the body, to which Carlos simply answered, “We didn’t touch a thing.”

  Silas refused to be evacuated by the seasonal park rangers, neither of whom he’d met. He wanted to be there when the skeleton was exhumed. “It’s just a sprained ankle,” he told them, feeling better after drinking some of their Gatorade and sucking on a few energy gels. “A few bruises. It can wait.” He asked for Grand County Sheriff Dexter Willis and was assured he was on his way.

  Another hour and the sheriff arrived, along with his chief deputy and two others. Deputy Sheriff Derek Penshaw from San Juan County was acting on behalf of the Medical Examiner for the State of Utah, and Stan Baton was the chief ranger for Arches and Canyonlands National Park.

  “Silas, you’re looking well,” said Willis.

  “Hi Dexter,” acknowledged Silas, leaning against a boulder in the wash while one of the rangers put a splint on his ankle.

  “You’re going to need to go to the hospital, Silas.”

  “It can wait.”

  “You’re going to need X-rays.” The sheriff pointed to Silas’s ribs through the torn shirt. The left side was black and blue.

  “I found her.”

  “We’ll see, Silas. We’ll see. Tell me what happened.” Willis squatted on his boots in the sand.

  Silas told him everything except the dream. Willis was silent throughout the telling. The park ranger finished his work on the ankle and then handed Silas a cold pack to hold against his side.

  “Can you walk?” Willis asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Help me here, Stan,” Willis said to the chief ranger, and they helped Silas to his feet. With one on either side of him they made their way down the now crowded wash.

  DWIGHT TAYLOR WAS at the beginning of what promised to be a very successful career. He was thirty-four years old and was already Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the FBI field office in Monticello, Utah. He was an ambitious yet practical man. At the age of eighteen he’d enlisted in the Navy and had trained as a Seal, serving mostly in the Gulf. Twelve years later, Taylor had accepted an honorable discharge from the Navy to study criminology, and to begin work with the FBI’s agent training program in Quantico, Virginia. Born in Harlem, New York, Taylor was beguiled by the desert. He might have been more comfortable with a posting to Los Angeles or Chicago or New Orleans where he wouldn’t be the only six-foot-four black man, but he would never consider complaining about his station. He was a career agent now, and would serve where he was assigned.

  Taylor was driving from Monticello to Moab at seven-thirty in the morning on Tuesday, August 17, to respond to a call from the Park Service that a body had been found in Arches National Park. It was likely, in fact probable, that the body was that of a hiker whose disappearance had never been reported for a variety of reasons. The body was found on federal land, in the national park, and therefore posed complicated jurisdictional questions. In any other state, the FBI would have had exclusive or at least concurrent jurisdiction. But this was Utah. Here the FBI had to vie for jurisdiction with state and local law enforcement everywhere except on Indian reservations and military bases. Silas Pearson had discovered the body and that made the situation more interesting, and gave the FBI clear reason to assert its authority.

  Riding with Taylor was Special Agent Eugene Nielsen. A Utah native, Nielsen had served most of his thirty-year career in the Monticello Field Office, so he knew the canyon area well and he had a good relationship with local law enforcement. Behind them in a second vehicle was the Monticello Evidence Response Team: Agents Janet Unger and John Huston. Together they constituted the Critical Incident Response Team for the region.

  “Want me to put in a call to make sure there’s a chopper on the deck in Salt Lake?” asked Nielsen.

  “May as well,” said Taylor.

  Nielsen opened his cell phone and placed the call. They were approaching Moab. Taylor slowed the ubiquitous black SUV as they entered the city limits, his thoughts on what they might find in Courthouse Wash.

  Taylor had
met Silas Pearson just six months after taking on the Monticello Field Office. It was a missing person’s case that spanned state lines, which brought the FBI into the equation. The husband had called almost five days after his wife had left for what was supposed to be a three-day backpacking trip into an undisclosed location within a day’s drive of Moab. That meant a vast swath of territory covering all of the Navajo Nation, southwestern Colorado, much of the canyons of northern New Mexico and northern Arizona—including the Grand Canyon—and all of southern Utah. It had reportedly taken a call from Penelope de Silva’s hosts in Moab for Pearson to realize that his wife was missing in the first place.

  Pearson had behaved as you might expect after he reported his wife missing. He had driven through the night from his home in Flagstaff to Moab, where he had been deluged by local and federal law enforcement agencies. When, a few months later, Pearson relocated to Utah and made the unusual move of opening a business in Moab, Taylor grew increasingly interested in the husband’s role in the disappearance of his wife. More than three years had passed, and Taylor knew that Silas Pearson spent most of his time prowling the canyons rather than selling books. The agent was curious as to how this discovery in Courthouse Wash would play on Silas Pearson’s already addled disposition.

  The pair of SUVs sped out of Moab and soon made the turn into Arches National Park, bypassing the entrance gate and speeding up the steep switchbacks of the entrance road. The early morning light caught in the ramparts and domes near Park Avenue, and Taylor slipped on a pair of sunglasses.

  There were half a dozen police and park ranger vehicles pulled up along the shoulder of the road where it spanned Courthouse Wash. A uniformed ranger waved the vehicles to a halt as they approached and pointed to a spot where they could park. A Grand County sheriff’s deputy stood waiting for them. All four agents assembled there, the two Evidence Response Team members wearing backpacks and carrying suitcase-sized Pelican cases.

  The ranger pointed them in the obvious direction, and the sheriff’s deputy led the way. Taylor walked silently with the deputy. They arrived in time to see Grand County Sheriff Dexter Willis and Chief Park Ranger Baton hefting Silas Pearson to his feet and setting off down the wash. Taylor quickened his pace, sweat forming on his broad brow, and reached the trio a few hundred feet down the canyon. “Sheriff Willis,” Taylor called.

  The trio stopped and all three men looked back over their shoulders. “Looks like we’ll be turning you over to the feds,” Willis said to Pearson, only half joking.

  THE HALF-MILE WALK down Courthouse Wash was a solemn, painful trip. Silas, assisted by Willis and Baton, limped his way forward. He had no memory of crawling from the confluence of the wash with Sleepy Hollow the night before, nor could he remember passing out again in the darkness of the canyon, to be awakened by the anxious young couple a few hours earlier.

  What he could not forget was what he had found. He was certain it was her.

  It took more than half an hour to travel the distance he might walk in ten minutes on a healthy foot, but when the morass of the flood came into view, they all stopped. “Jesus, Silas, you’re a goddamned lucky fellow. You could have been killed,” said the chief ranger. “You were in that?”

  “Yeah. I guess I rode it for a mile or more.”

  “Guess?” asked the sheriff.

  “Don’t remember. Think I hit my head.”

  “Let’s have a look at what you’ve found, shall we, Mr. Pearson?” asked Taylor.

  “There.” Silas pointed to the earthbound cottonwood. The Sheriff’s Department had partitioned off the core crime scene area with yellow tape, strung between a patch of willows and some rabbit brush.

  Agent Taylor stepped forward. “You say the flood came down this way?” Behind him agents Unger and Huston were beginning their preliminary walk-around of the scene.

  “That’s right.”

  “How far up were you?”

  “Pretty much at the top. There’s a box a ways up, just past a spring that is tucked in along the canyon wall.”

  Taylor pushed his hands into his pockets and looked around him, taking note of the sheer cliffs of Courthouse Wash. On the walk down the wash he and Sheriff Willis had agreed that the FBI Evidence Response Team would provide support for the recovery of the body.

  “Okay, Mr. Pearson,” Taylor said, looking Silas in the eye. “Let’s see the body.”

  Silas pointed toward the log. “She’s over there.” Taylor turned and motioned for the two members of the team to begin. They stepped past the assemblage of men and walked toward the log.

  Unger slipped off her pack and opened the top and pulled out a hard-shell black case. She took out a small handheld digital video recorder and turned it on. Beside her Huston removed a camera and began to take photos of the mouth of the wash and the area surrounding the log. When he was done, Huston looped the camera over his shoulder and took out a sketch pad and made a drawing of the area. “We’re going to want to extend the crime scene perimeter back at least another hundred yards up Courthouse,” he said. “With the flood moving everything around, we don’t know what’s evidence and what isn’t.”

  Meanwhile, Unger focused her video camera on her companion, who spoke into the lens: “August seventeenth, Special Agent John Huston, location Courthouse Wash, Arches National Park . . .” He looked at this watch. “9:42 AM. Present are . . .” When he had finished the introduction to the video, he said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  He and his companion approached the log, recording their short walk. “Mr. Pearson,” said the first agent, “reports having dragged himself from this scene after sustaining injuries during the flood.” Silas watched as they slowly approached the skeletonized arm.

  The lead agent sunk up to his shins in the mud and quicksand. “Goddamn it.”

  “What’s the matter, Agent Huston, get some mud on your shoes?” asked Taylor.

  “Very funny.” Huston turned to look at Taylor, then continued to record his observations. “From where I’m standing, I can see depressions in the mud that lead to and are adjacent to the protruding radius and ulna. There appears to be no carpus present.” He took two more steps toward the log, the thick, heavy mud sucking at his feet. “Janet, see if you can get around behind the log, please.” Unger, still filming, side stepped the worst of the mud and circled around to get a better view of the arm. Huston bent down to get a better look.

  “Definitely human,” he noted. “Agent Taylor, I’m going to remove some of the top layer of recently deposited mud so see if we’re dealing with full or partial skeletal remains.” As Unger continued to film, Huston took from his pack a small trowel and began to remove, half an inch at a time, the uppermost layer of recently deposited red earth.

  Penshaw stepped forward, too, photographing the scene for the Medical Examiner’s office. “I’m not seeing the signs of any insects.” Penshaw bent a little so his face was closer to the exposed arm. “Nor do I smell any decomposition.”

  Silas felt a wave of nausea starting to build in his stomach. His whole body felt as if it were shaking. After all this time, here he was, watching the arm of his wife being meticulously unearthed by these strangers. He turned his head away and felt his legs go out beneath him.

  “Whoa.” Willis reached for Silas as he started to sink to the ground. “Grab him there, Stan. Let’s sit him down.” The sheriff nodded toward a boulder. “There, come on, Silas, let’s get you sitting down. Stan, you got any more of those energy gels in that pack of yours?”

  Silas’s head was swooning. How ironic, he thought, refocusing his eyes, that Penelope should be unearthed with this cadre of strangers standing around, all of their clinical eyes watching.

  “We’ve got the humeral trochlea,” said Huston.

  “That’s the elbow,” said Willis. Silas nodded, drinking more Gatorade.

  “We’ve got the humerus,” said Huston, sitting back and wiping a thick layer of sweat from his forehead. He looked at Unger. “We’ve got most of
the arm, but it appears to be extending straight down. That could mean the rest of the body is buried under a few feet of this sand and possibly this cottonwood. We’re going to need to more than my kid’s trowel to unearth this one.” He turned and looked at Agent Nielsen. “Special Agent, we need to bring in an excavation team. We’ll want Agent Rain to come down for this.”

  Silas had managed to follow the proceedings up to this point. With the agents’ shift in focus—he had been hoping for quick confirmation—he finally let go and felt himself slip into the blackness of unconsciousness.

  SILAS BLINKED AND TRIED TO force his eyes open. His eyelids felt like sandpaper. The room was dark, with only a thin thread of light coming through the curtains. He could make out a shape standing by the window, arms crossed.

  “Where am I?” he asked. He could smell a strong floral scent intermingling with something antiseptic.

  “Agent Taylor,” he heard a male voice say, “he’s awake. You’re at Moab Regional Hospital.”

  “Who . . .”

  “It’s Special Agent Nielsen, Mr. Pearson.”

  “Penelope?” Silas blinked again and the room started to shift into focus.

  “Let me get the Assistant Special Agent in Charge,” said Nielsen as he stepped away from the window and went to the door. He swung his body out, holding onto the frame, and Silas heard him say, “Mr. Pearson is awake, Dwight.”

  A moment later, Taylor entered the room, with Nielsen close on his heels. A nurse followed them in. The two FBI men stood by the window while she checked his vitals, made notes on a tablet computer, and then asked about his eyes.

  “Hurt like hell,” he said. She administered some drops and the pain eased. “Thank you.” He closed his eyes, savoring the relief.

  “I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes,” she said, patting his hand.

  Taylor stepped forward. “How you feeling, Mr. Pearson?”

  “I’m alright. Is it Penelope?” he asked, his voice rough.