Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  Silas had heard the stories too. “Who was Peter Anton working for?”

  “We went back to Strom at that point. We have accessory after the fact at the least with him, and the clearing operation, and maybe conspiracy. So we pressed him. He told us that when the ruins were discovered, Dead Horse was working for Jacob Isaiah—”

  “That doesn’t mean that Isaiah was in on it.”

  “No, of course not.” The waitress appeared and Rain pointed to both of their glasses. “My shout. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Isaiah was involved. It was four years ago.” She paused and then said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re thinking that your wife discovers the ruins while she’s out doing her environmental thing. She learns that Jacob Isaiah has this evil plan to develop a resort on the Canyon Rims area, and she confronts him. He kills her to shut her up. When the same thing happens with Williams and Wisechild, he kills them too.”

  The waitress brought their beers. “Sure, okay, so you do know what I’m thinking. Here’s the trouble. Canusa was also a client of Dead Horse. They come on the scene around the same time. That’s when Charles Nephi moved from corporate head office to backwater USA to help pave the way for a massive expansion of petroleum development into the canyon country. They contract with Dead Horse to do similar environmental and archaeological work as they did for Isaiah, and they come up with the same results. Instead of shutting the project down, there’s enough money in the oil play to warrant taking some risks. Canusa needs the water from Hatch Creek, which will mean flooding the ruins, and not just exposing them to some flat-footed tourists.”

  Katie picked up his train of thought. “Canusa says to Jared Strom, ‘clear out those ruins so we don’t have to deal with ARPA.’ They get their man Anton, who has a penchant for being light-fingered, to do it. And he brings Williams along, as we see on the video. Anton is allowed to keep or sell the pots in exchange for his silence.”

  “Something goes wrong. Kelly turns on them, or maybe the Wisechild girl threatens to expose the whole shop and Kelly goes along with her rather than going to jail,” finished Silas.

  “Tim Martin kills them?”

  “Or has someone else do it.”

  “Either way, it’s murder one. Life without parole. More likely a date with the executioner.” Rain looked thoughtful for a moment.

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “There’s a hundred more things. This is a tangled mess.”

  “Yes, but there’s one more thing that provides clear motive.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A numbered company. When I was digging around, trying to find out who was behind the applications for drilling out in Canyon Rims, I found a numbered company. There are three directors: Tim Martin, Charles Nephi, and Peter Anton.”

  “How did you—?”

  “My son is studying criminology.”

  “Handy and helpful. We’ll look into this.”

  “But it provides another link.”

  “Damn right it does. It ties both Nephi and Anton to Canusa.”

  “You know, there’s someone else here who stands to lose a lot.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Senior Republican Senator from Utah.”

  “C. Thorn Smith.”

  “His Utah Land Stewardship Fund is big money. It’s going to funnel vast amounts of dollars into companies for hiring. They will all be beholden to the good senator for his pork-barrel largesse. It consolidates Smith’s power, not just in Utah, but across the West.”

  “Are you telling me that you think a US senator could have killed these people, including your wife, because they found out about dirty dealings that would have prevented one petroleum project in the middle of nowhere in his home state?”

  Silas shrugged. “Could have been the tip of the iceberg. Remember, Penelope wanted to protect this whole region. Penny would have fought him every step of the way. With her out of the picture . . .”

  “Silas, environmentalists aren’t exactly fleeing the state just because one of their own went missing and another turned up dead. You read the headlines of the Salt Lake Tribune recently? There was a rally with over five hundred people outside of Thorn Smith’s office two days ago, protesting drilling around Canyon Rims.”

  “I’m not saying that it’s likely. Maybe Penelope had something on Smith, something other than Hatch Creek.”

  “How does Darcy McFarland fit into all of this?”

  “I’ve done a little digging with the help of a friend in Flagstaff who knew Darcy. Apparently she had a file thick with information linking the senator with a scheme to give away water permits all across the Southwest. I haven’t seen the info yet, but it’s conceivable that this information might be the smoking gun to tie the death of McFarland to the senator’s office.”

  “When will you have the file?” She leaned forward, interested.

  “Tomorrow, day after next. It’s on its way up from Flag.”

  “Taylor will want to see it when it arrives. Despite the fact that he’s a pompous ass, Smith has a clean record in office. The Bureau has never had to investigate him for anything.”

  “There’s a first time for everything.”

  Katie finished her beer and looked around. The bar was nearly empty. “It helps me to talk this through with you.”

  “Really?”

  “Taylor and Nielsen and the rest of the team, they’re smart but they look at things in a linear fashion.”

  “While I’m all over the map?”

  “Literally. Remember, I’ve seen your living room.”

  Silas wanted to tell her what he was going to do next, but he hesitated. “I know you go right back to Taylor and tell him what we discuss.”

  “Not everything, just the stuff that’s going to help us catch a killer. Are you okay with that?”

  Silas finished his beer. He felt it gurgling in his stomach. “I think if you were a little less charming, I’d be put out, but for now, the relationship works.”

  “And when it stops working?”

  Silas stood up and fished a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. “I go back to taking long walks in the desert, looking for my wife.”

  SILAS SAT IN THE LIVING room of his Castle Valley home and stared at the wall. Such a vast swath of country; even in his three and a half years of wandering he hadn’t covered half of the landscape that he wanted to. He had brought the portrait of Penelope from the bedroom and put it on the table. “What do you want?” he asked the wall.

  There was no reply.

  He went and stood by the map of Arches National Park. He picked up a yellow sticky note from the small bookshelf and wrote “Wisechild” on it, then stuck it on the map at the junction of Sleepy Hollow and Courthouse Wash. He wrote “Williams” on a second and pasted it near Grand View Point, next to the Green River Overlook on the map of Canyonlands. “McFarland” went on a third and went up near Potash, on the Colorado River. When he stood back and looked at the panorama of maps on the wall, the three yellow notes formed a rough triangle. Did that mean anything? He couldn’t tell. He went over and wrote the approximate dates of each person’s death on the notes.

  Kelly Williams and Kayah Wisechild were both killed two years ago. Wisechild had been reported missing in October, but Williams hadn’t been reported missing for several months after that, though according to the FBI, his whereabouts were unknown for a period of time leading up to the missing person report. His family thought he had just gone off on an archaeological project, as he often did, and hadn’t kept in touch.

  It was reasonable to assume that both had been killed about the same time, according to the information provided by Katie Rain. If they were killed by the same person, why was the method of murder different? Why were the bodies buried in different locations? Why go to all the trouble?

  Kelly Williams was bigger than Kayah Wisechild, and had been found closer to a road, but it was still a
long way from the parking lot at Green River Overlook to the promontory of land where he had been buried under stones. It seemed only reasonable to believe he too had walked to his grave, though unwittingly. That meant he too must have known his killer.

  What about Darcy McFarland? The ME report estimated that she had been dead less than three weeks. That meant that she had been killed after he had found Kayah Wisechild, but before he had found Williams. Had the killer of these first two learned of the discovery of Kayah’s body and panicked, thinking he had not tied up a loose end?

  McFarland’s body was dumped a matter of feet from a roadway. The ME report clearly indicated that she had been drowned in the slurry. There had been a struggle.

  To Silas it felt as if somehow the floodgates had opened, but for all the deluge of information that was pouring in, he didn’t feel any closer to finding Penelope. He’d gone from a sedate existence where he searched the backcountry for his wife and sold the occasional book to being at the center of three murder investigations. The sensation was not unlike what he felt as he was swept down Sleepy Hollow.

  He turned to look at the picture of his wife. “How does any of this relate to you? What are you trying to tell me?”

  HE PLANNED THE evening carefully. He’d never broken into anything before, so he did his homework. He didn’t remember seeing an alarm in the building, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one. He also didn’t know if there would be a night watchman, but he doubted it. The most difficult task would be to get into the building in the first place. He decided going through the window directly into Nephi’s office would be the safest. He remembered that the building backed onto an alley, and he surmised that there would be little traffic after dark. He packed his bag with a thin pair of leather gloves, a headlamp and extra batteries, a digital camera, and a small box of tools that he might need to pry open the window. Out of habit he added his first-aid kit, a couple of bottles of water, and some food.

  He put the bag in the car and walked back into the house. As he was walking through the living room, his phone rang. He grabbed it on the fourth ring. It was Katie Rain.

  “Having regrets about talking with me last night?” he asked.

  She laughed. “No, not yet, at least. I wanted to give you an update. I spent my morning working with some of my advanced equipment I had shipped down from Salt Lake. Moab Regional is starting to look like my office. We haven’t sent the Williams remains up to the Medical Examiner yet, so I spent my morning examining the wound on the back of his head. He was bludgeoned with the butt of a pistol. I’m about 90 per cent certain of that. I can tell by the shape of the wound. I’m running a test with sodium rhodizonate to see if there is any trace of gunshot residue on the skull.”

  “It could still be there after two years?”

  “We have some pretty sophisticated tools for measuring this sort of thing. There’s a new test that we can run with gas chromatography and a nitrogen phosphorus detector to separate and identify components. If there was any gunpowder on the grip of the pistol used to attack Mr. Williams, it could have left a trace on the skull. All we need is a single particle using this new test.”

  “Can you tell what sort of pistol?”

  “Not with any certainty. Certainly nothing dainty. Likely a large-caliber weapon such as a .44 or .45. If we recover a pistol during our search today, we may be able to match them up.”

  “How is it going?”

  “I haven’t heard anything yet. You’re not just sitting around the house waiting, are you?”

  “Oh, you know, I’m trying to catch up on my housework. Place needs a vacuum in case I have guests again.”

  “We bring our own, you know?”

  “Funny. Not that kind of vacuum. Anyway, no, I’m not just sitting around. I am waiting for the arrival of the info on Darcy McFarland. My friend is supposed to bring it up today. I was thinking about maybe going for a little drive. Do some thinking.”

  “Dangerous.”

  You don’t know the half of it, he thought to himself.

  HE CALLED HAYDUKE a couple of times but got no answer, so around 2:00 PM he left the Castle Valley and drove south to Blanding. The afternoon heat piled cumulus clouds on top of each other along the rounded backs of the Abajo Mountains. He parked half a block up the street from the small government building and rolled down the window. From time to time he raised his field glasses and studied the structure, but he was aware of how conspicuous this looked, so he kept his surveillance to a minimum. After an hour most of the building’s employees had left, and at five-thirty the security guard exited too, locking the door behind him. No other night watchman appeared.

  He went for a walk and found himself at the Edge of the Cedars State Park. The museum was open and weary, heat-stroked tourists wandered throughout the grounds. He walked past the tour buses and fifteen minutes later found himself on the edge of the park, past the Pueblo ruins and the gift shop, looking over the broken landscape toward the Abajos. He slipped off his pack and ate a meal of beef jerky, trail mix, and water, and waited for dark. He mulled over the great mass of convoluted information that was jostling around in his head.

  It seemed to him as if everybody was somehow involved in the death of these three people, but that was too spectacular to be possible. Silas hoped that the risk he was about to take would be worth it. If he got caught, he could go to jail.

  He was startled when his cell phone rang. He dug it out of his pocket and looked at the call display. He snapped it open. “Where the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Got delayed. Sorry. Fuck, man, I hate Flagstaff.”

  “What happened? No, wait, I don’t want to know. Are you on your way to Moab?”

  “Yeah, I’m on my way. Where are you?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “I got those papers. I went through them again today. You know, your compatriot Martin is in really fucking thick with the senator’s office. McFarland got some emails through Access to Information that basically show complicity between the two offices. Old C. Thorn’s name isn’t on them, just his lackey Nephi, talking like they are old friends. Why the fuck do people still carry on that way knowing that somebody, sometime, is going to get their hands on this stuff?”

  “Greed makes people stupid.”

  “You want me to drop these off? I could meet you at your shop.”

  “How ’bout I meet you there when I’m done.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what the fuck you’re up to?”

  “Best that I don’t.”

  “You’re doing the thing with the senator’s office, aren’t you?”

  “Listen, Josh—”

  “Hayduke, man—”

  “Listen, Hayduke, I’ve got to go. Why don’t we just meet in the morning? I’ll buy you breakfast and we can compare notes.”

  “Alright, fine. Fuck, I’m going to go sleep up in the La Sals. I’ll see you at, say, 9:00 AM at the Moab Diner?”

  “Sure. See you then.” He hung up.

  No sooner had he hung up than the phone trilled again. He figured it was Hayduke calling back. “No, you can’t help—”

  He heard Katie Rain laugh. “Well, I wasn’t really offering, but seeing how you asked so nicely.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I just wanted to let you know that Taylor has pulled up stakes here in Moab. The bunch of us are on our way down to the thriving metropolis of Monticello.”

  It was Silas’s turn to laugh. “I simply don’t know what to say.”

  “Tell a girl where she can get a decent cup of coffee in the morning.”

  “No can do. I’ll buy you a drink on my way back tonight if you want. All the 3.2 per cent beer you can drink before your bladder explodes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m . . . I’m out for a walk near Blanding.”

  “You’re not going to find any more bodies tonight, are you? I could really use some time to get cau
ght up. I’ve got half a dozen bone bags waiting for me back in Salt Lake too.”

  “As long as I don’t fall asleep out here, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “You’re just going for a walk?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, well, call when you’re coming through. It’s been twenty-four hours since I got a lecture from Agent Taylor, so—”

  “He busting your—I mean, giving you a hard time?”

  “Fraternizing with the enemy, you know.”

  “Didn’t think you cared. Thought I was just a source of information.”

  “Keep dreaming. Literally.”

  “I’ve got your cell on speed dial, now.”

  “Be careful, Silas.”

  He looked around to see if she might be watching him. He was alone, sitting on the edge of the desert, the sun nearly down behind the Abajos. “I will.” He broke the connection.

  HE WAITED ANOTHER HOUR AND then stood stiffly, his ankle sore, and walked the first few steps back toward the center of town. It had been completely dark for the better part of an hour. He made his way along tree-lined streets and past San Juan County Hospital until he reached South 100 Street.

  Looking around to see if he was being observed, he slipped into the alley behind the government building. There were no lights on, but to be sure he paused and watched for a moment, his heart beating in his chest, his hands sweaty. He dropped the pack and reached into the top pocket, pulling out his leather gloves and headlamp. He slipped the light on over his forehead and then re-shouldered the bag. Pulling on the gloves, he waited and watched again: nothing.

  Silas made his way to the window of Nephi’s office and stood beside it, scanning the alleyway and the cluster of other buildings around him. The quiet little town felt nearly deserted at 10:00 PM. He slipped the dusty bag off and pulled out a small crowbar. Slipping the tool into the crack at the bottom of the window, he leaned his weight on it. The old window moaned and creaked, then popped open, a piece of wood splintering off from the base of the jam. He heard something hit the floor in the office. He scanned again, then hoisted himself up and into the room, head first.