Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  Half an hour passed with the team methodically searching along the banks of the electric blue ponds. The heat radiating off the water was dazzling and for a moment Silas imagined passing out and falling into the corrosive liquid. His hallucinations were interrupted.

  “Got something!” called Huston. “Got something, right here.”

  “Nobody touches anything,” ordered Taylor, “especially you, Dr. Pearson.” The big man walked carefully to the edge of the pond. “What you got, Huston? Talk to me.”

  “I . . . got . . . yup, I got a body, right here.” He lowered the camera. Silas could see nothing through the bright blue dye in the slurry of river water, salt, and potash.

  “How far into the pond?” asked Taylor.

  “Not far. Ten feet.” Huston put the camera to his eyes again. Silas was aching to look through its lens.

  “Alright,” said Taylor, looking around. “We need the Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team on site. Everybody back to the vehicles. Huston and Unger, you’re on documentation and evidence recovery.” Taylor turned to the mine manager, who looked worried. “We’re shutting this section of the site down. This whole area is a now a crime scene.”

  SILAS SAT ON THE REAR bumper of his Outback in the shade of the only cottonwood in the vicinity. Ken Hollyoak had opened a folding lawn chair and set it up nearby. His eyes were closed, his head lolling in the oppressive heat. Thunderheads boiled above, shot through with radiant incandescence. Silas drank a Dr Pepper and reread One Life at a Time, Please, because there was nothing else to do.

  It had been five hours since the discovery of the body in the settling pond. Taylor had told them to leave the crime scene but to stay in the vicinity. An hour and a half after the body had been found additional agents arrived from the FBI’s Monticello office, along with two additional members of the Grand County Sheriff’s Office. They had set to work collecting evidence.

  A helicopter had arrived two hours after that and four men had disembarked carrying massive cases of gear. Silas suspected this was the underwater recovery team, but he hadn’t been allowed on the site.

  Silas was summoned by one of the Monticello agents around five. He nudged Ken, who woke with a start.

  “Ken, they want me to head up to the site.” Ken struggled to his feet and rubbed his hands over his face. They walked up to the settling ponds where a dozen and a half people were in various stages of the investigation. Taylor and Rain approached Silas before he could reach the location where the body was being examined.

  Rain stopped in front of Silas. “It’s not your wife, Dr. Pearson.”

  Silas looked down and drew a deep breath. He could smell the ozone in the air.

  “We want you to have a look, if you’re willing. What we’ve got here is a woman, looks to be in her late thirties, early forties, but it’s pretty hard to tell,” she continued. “There has been considerable burning from submersion in the potash, as well as a lot of tissue loss due to dehydration from the salt. The preliminary assessment is that the remains have been here for less than a month. Maybe as little as two weeks.”

  Ken put his hand on Silas’s shoulder and looked at his friend. “Silas, you don’t have to do this—”

  “It’s okay, Ken. I don’t mind.”

  “Okay, Dr. Pearson,” directed Taylor. “This way.”

  They walked along the narrow pathway between settling ponds. The dive team was shedding their heavy gear and being hosed down just below. Other agents continued to collect possible evidence in the vicinity. Silas could see them making molds of tire tracks on the road that led up to Island in the Sky.

  Sheriff Willis was hunched over the corpse. A white shroud covered her. He looked up as Silas approached. “Thanks for doing this, Silas.”

  Silas walked up to him. The man pulled the shroud back. The ghastly sight that met Silas took his breath away. The woman’s face looked as if it had been eaten by acid. It was covered in dark red sores that in places exposed bits of bone. Her lips and much of her nose was missing, and her eyes were empty sockets. Her long hair was matted with thick knots of salt. Her earlobes were missing, and what was left was raw and red. What skin hadn’t been burnt off by the potash was sucked dry of moisture so it appeared as if in the early stages of mummification. Despite this, he recognized the face.

  Silas stood up and felt dizzy. The sheriff stood and steadied him. Silas pressed his eyes shut. A crack of thunder overhead made people look up. The sky was dusky black and a strong wind was picking up, blowing upstream. It smelled like rain.

  “I know this is hard,” said Rain. “Do you know who—”

  “Her name is Darcy. Darcy McFarland.”

  “You know her?”

  “My wife did. Penny did. They were friends in Flagstaff. She . . . Darcy . . . was a water rights activist. The Colorado River was her specialty.” He looked down from the terraced bench of red rock at the river as it swept patiently by.

  “NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY sense,” said Silas. He was sitting on the back porch, under the pergola, of Ken and Trish Hollyoak’s home. It was after eleven in the evening and the stars lay thick over the Moab Rim. After the brief rain, the desert now smelled fresh, as the first bloom of autumn’s wildflowers emerged from the cracked and baked summer soil.

  Ken drank an ice tea and ate a sandwich. Silas sat in a recliner and watched the flicker of candles that Trish had lit. He was exhausted, but he didn’t want to retire to the guesthouse where he had agreed to sleep for the night so Ken and Trish could keep an eye on him.

  “None of this makes any sense,” he repeated.

  Ken wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Hombre, none of this is meant to. We’re talking about people killing other people. Now, where is the sense in that?”

  “Three bodies,” mused Silas, almost talking to himself. “Three bodies, two of them just bones. One of them fast becoming a skeleton. Good God, the state of that poor woman.”

  “Your girlfriend at the FBI said she would know the cause of death tomorrow?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. She’ll like me more after I’ve been a skeleton for a few years. Anyway, she said that because this wasn’t anthropological she wouldn’t be primary on the determination of the cause of death.”

  “If you’re insinuating that very fine specimen of woman is not interested in you, I think you’d better think again, Dr. Pearson. I detected noticeable chemistry between you two.”

  Silas looked up at Ken, his face caught in the dance of light from the candles as he took a sip from his beer. “We were in an interview room with two other feds who were raking me over the coals about how I keep finding bodies, Ken. She was the only one not trying to hang me out to dry for three murders. Of course there was chemistry.”

  Ken shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “I will. Why do I keep dreaming about Penelope pointing me in some direction and when I follow her lead, instead of finding her, I find someone else?” Silas’s hands were shaking.

  “Silas, I am a happily retired lawyer from the great city of Salt Lake now living a quite retirement in the desert with my fourth and final wife. I am your friend, and I am happy to act as your counsel, but alas, I am not a psychologist, let alone an expert on dreams. For that, you will need to consult the experts. What I can surmise is this: for the better part of three and a half years you, my friend, have been wracked by guilt.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Hear me out, Professor. When it came to Penelope, you were not particularly uxorious in nature as a husband. It’s not that you were a cheating scoundrel. You just had . . . other priorities. When your dear Penelope disappeared, your guilt over being an absentminded professor more interested in the masochistic gloom of Cormac McCarthy than your elegant and, I must say, very sexy wife, got the better of you. You’ve been carrying that guilt around with you for coming on four years now. It’s only a matter of time before our minds need to expunge some of that guilt. I’m amazed that Canadian beer and TV dinners a
re your worst acts of self-mutilation.”

  “You think this is just my guilt-addled mind opening a pressure release valve?”

  “Like I said, I am a lawyer, not a head shrink. I could make you an appointment with my own witch doctor, but somehow you don’t seem the type.”

  “It may come to that, Ken. You see, when I had that first dream, and even the second, I couldn’t help but think that maybe somehow, through my subconscious, Penny was leading me to her.”

  “That is what you wanted to think.”

  “The first two bodies have both been dead for two years, and had been buried. They were both archaeologists, though their pedigree is certainly in question, as it appears that at least one of them, and maybe both, was involved in raiding the ruins in Hatch Wash. Both worked for Peter Anton, and through him Dead Horse Consulting. The consulting group worked for one or maybe both of the proponents of competing development proposals at the same location, out on the Canyon Rims: Jacob Isaiah’s heatstroke-induced dream of a golf and destination resort, and Tim Martin’s vision of energy security.

  “I don’t know if Penny knew either of these people, but I do know she knew about the ruins, because that’s where I found that notebook you’re holding onto for me. It stands to reason she knew the ruins, and the wash—and the whole Canyon Rims area, for that matter—were threatened. The Canusa Petroleum Resources boss Tim Martin tells me that he’s only been looking at the Canyon Rims area for less than eighteen months, and those bodies are two years old. Penny has been missing for much longer than that.”

  “He could be lying.”

  “That has occurred to me,” said Silas, “but that doesn’t help me understand what happened today. Darcy McFarland has been a water rights activist for twenty years. She lived in Flagstaff, and her thing was the Colorado River Compact—that whole muddled mess of laws and policies that govern the Colorado River. She and Penny knew each other. I remember her coming over for dinner once, and the two of them sat on the porch and talked about politics. I think she believed that Penny had strayed over the last few years, but I can’t say . . . I was an inattentive husband.”

  “Silas—”

  “No, it’s okay, Ken. Darcy was not an archaeologist, and she has no apparent connection with Isaiah—though to be perfectly honest I suspect Isaiah has pissed off every environmental activist in the Four Corners states with one project or another over the years. Darcy has no obvious connection to Canusa Petroleum. Nor does she have any connection with any of the other people I suspect might have had involvement in Williams’s and Wisechild’s deaths—Anton, Jared Strom, or even Senator Smith, at least none that I can see.”

  “Yet. None that you can see yet.”

  “Why Darcy? What is the connection to these other two that I’m just not seeing?”

  “Maybe there is no connection. Maybe we’re talking about completely different situations; different . . . cases. Maybe there is no connection whatsoever between the murders of Kelly Williams and Kayah Wisechild and the murder of Darcy McFarland.”

  “What about Penny?”

  “No connection between any of these situations.”

  “There is a connection,” said Silas.

  “What’s that?”

  “Me. I’m the connection. I found Kayah and Kelly, and now Darcy. If I could figure out who between these players was most likely to want Williams and Wisechild out of the way, I’d feel like I was getting somewhere.”

  “You know, when I was a prosecutor, like forty years ago, before I learned that money could buy things and before I had gone through a few wives, I learned something profound. If you want to get to the root of all evil, follow the money. ‘Men die and worms eat them, but not for love,’ I think your friend Abbey once said. Most often it’s for money, and for power, which money can easily buy, especially in Utah.”

  “I don’t know the first thing about following a money trail.”

  “I bet you know someone who does. Isn’t one of your suspects in all of this mess Canadian?”

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing, calling so early?” asked Robbie Pearson.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot about the time change. Do you want me to call back?”

  “No, it’s okay, I’m awake now. Is everything alright?”

  “I’m fine. I mean, well, I’m alive and in one piece . . .”

  “Dad, what is it?”

  “Well, remember when you emailed me about the body in Courthouse Wash?”

  “Yeah, you said it wasn’t Penelope.”

  “It isn’t. Wasn’t. What I didn’t tell you was that I found the body. And now I’ve found two more bodies. Neither of them Penny, but all entangled somehow with something that Penny was working on before she disappeared—”

  “Dad, hold on. Did you say you’ve found three bodies?”

  “Yes.”

  “Holy shit.” Silas could hear banging in the background.

  “Look, if it’s a bad time, I’ll call you back.”

  “No, I’m just making coffee. I think I’m going to need it. Tell me what’s going on, Dad.” Silas told him the whole story. Robbie asked questions, and Silas answered them as best he could.

  “What can I do?” asked Robbie.

  “I need some help following a money trail. This company, Canusa, is based in Calgary. I suspect that we might be able to learn a lot about what they want to do in the Canyon Rims area, and for how long they’ve wanted to do it, if we could just learn more about how they are financing the project. Can you do that?”

  “Are they publicly traded?”

  “I don’t know.” Silas could hear his son at his computer.

  “Let me look into this,” Robbie said. He was clearly typing. “Tell me more about some of the other people involved.” Silas told him.

  “There’s one more thing. A numbered company is involved in some of the drilling proposals. I have no idea if they are connected with Canusa. If I give you the company number, can you do your internet thing with it?”

  “Yes, I can do my internet thing. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to find out, but I should at least be able to get you the names of the people behind the number. I’ll call you back in a couple of hours. It’s going to be alright, Dad. You’ll see.”

  They hung up the phone. Silas sat still for a moment. He felt better than he had in weeks, having spoken to Robbie, so he couldn’t figure out why he wanted to weep.

  HIS CELL PHONE rang. He was on Main Street buying a coffee.

  “You want to know?” asked Katie Rain without saying hello.

  “Of course.” He stepped outside the coffee shop with his americano.

  “She was drowned.”

  “She didn’t drown, she was drowned?”

  “That’s right. We found a hairline fracture on the back of her head and bruising on her neck. Her lungs were full of that slurry of potash, salt, and water. She died after she’d been submerged.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Silas looked down at the sidewalk.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t very pretty. A lot of burning on the internal tissue from the potash. We know for certain that her lungs filled up before she was dead. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Are you still in town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to split my americano with me?”

  “Is this a date? You know I can’t fraternize with a person of interest.”

  “Information sharing.”

  “Okay. Where are you?”

  SILAS SAT AT his desk, Katie Rain in the chair across from it. She looked around the room. “This is nice.”

  “It’s just a ruse.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s for show. I don’t really want to run a bookstore. I don’t really care about selling books. In fact, these are all mine—”

  “Pride of the small-business owner—”

  “No, I mean, these were all from our library in Flag. When I moved here I didn’t have any place to put them. You’ve seen
my place.”

  “All maps, all the time.” Katie smiled.

  “Right. And I thought that I might go a little, you know, crazy”—he twirled his finger beside his ear—“if I didn’t have something else to do, so I rented this place, put in some shelves and track lighting, and put my library in here. Nobody ever comes in. I sell maybe a dozen books a month. When I’m here, which isn’t very often.”

  “I can’t imagine what would make someone believe you were crazy.”

  He studied her. She was solidly built, with powerful arms that looked as if she could do more chin ups than he could. She wore her gun on her hip and her badge clipped next to it. “You really are an FBI agent, aren’t you?”

  She looked down at her sidearm. “I don’t wear it very often, but Taylor insisted that if I was going to be on the team, I had to take it out of my travel bag and strap it on.”

  “I didn’t think FBI science types carried weapons.”

  “I was an agent first. That was almost fifteen years ago. I was in the field for two years in Los Angeles and then Oregon. I finished my PhD and went into forensics. The Bureau put me through my doctoral program, and then post-doc work. I still have field agent status . . . What ?” His face had fallen while she spoke.

  “For some reason I thought I wasn’t talking with a ‘real’ FBI agent.”

  She pinched herself. “Yup, real as it gets. I just don’t do investigation work these days. You know, Silas, getting out of Salt Lake City and out into the real world has been a relief.”

  Silas let out a long breath and managed a smile. “We said information sharing. Share away.”

  “We spent the morning on the line with our people in NCAVC. We’re coming up with a working theory—”