SILAS SAT ON the edge of his bed, surrounded by topographic maps. The small lamp on the bedside table cast a yellow glow on the framed photograph in his hands. He touched the glass over the cheek of the woman immortalized there as if brushing away a tear.
He put the photo down, turned out the light, and lay on top of the sheets, staring at the ceiling. Darcy, Kiel, and Penelope: all three bodies were found along the Colorado River. All three were advocates for the watercourse. Someone, or some people, wanted all three dead, and the river was at the heart of this mystery.
4
“DR. RAIN HAS JOINED US for our conversation, Dr. Pearson.” Dwight Taylor met Silas at the front door of the Grand County municipal building. “She wanted to share her findings with you in person.”
Silas and Robbie stepped into the building and followed the towering black man to the familiar conference room. “You met John from Kane County, and of course you know Grand County Sheriff Dexter Willis. Stan Baton is representing the Park Service. As you found out last year while we were looking into the death of the Hopi girl, Utah is a bit of an anomaly; anywhere else, we feds would have sole jurisdiction over a body found in a national park, monument, or national recreation area, but here in the Beehive State we have concurrent jurisdiction, hence the cramped seating.”
Rain stood and shook Silas’s hand. She smiled at him and said, “I’m so sorry, Silas.” Then she introduced herself to Robbie.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Robbie said, sitting down next to his father.
“And I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Alright, now that all of that is out of the way, Dr. Rain?”
Rain opened a folder, but she didn’t look at any of the notes there. “I’m just going to deliver this to you straight, Silas. If you want me to stop, say so.” Silas nodded and Katie continued. “Penelope de Silva, female, thirty-six years old at time of death. We identified Ms. de Silva by dental records we had on file. It is going to be difficult to be precise regarding the date of death, but I have no reason to believe that she wasn’t killed right around the time you reported her missing.
“I have concluded that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head. The bullet entered the frontal lobe and exited the occipital lobe. The weapon used was a large-caliber firearm, likely a pistol, and probably .44 or .45. There is some indication of a spider-web pattern around the entrance wound. This is consistent with the weapon being fired at point-blank range. There was no skin from which to take gunshot residue samples, nor could we check for powder burns as the remains had been submerged in water for too long.” Katie looked at Silas.
He nodded and she continued. “The exit wound was large, and I have calculated the angle of the gunshot at about thirty-one degrees, meaning the shooter was above the victim, shooting down. There were no ballistics recovered from the body, and John Huston, our crime scene analyst, says that nothing has been recovered from the immediate vicinity of where the body was found.
“We believe that shortly after death, she was put into the water. Decomposition was slow; the water temperature was usually around forty degrees. The body may have been exposed to open air sometime in the last two years. The bones we have recovered were dry. We’re working with the Park Service to gauge exactly where the water level in Lake Powell was at the time Penelope disappeared.
“We have traces of anipocere; this is a waxy, almost soapy material that is often associated with bodies recovered from water, and it helps hold tissue and bones together. Once anipocere forms it’s there for good. There was some insect activity that impacted the amount, but its presence clearly shows that she was submerged for a long time. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to recover all of Ms. de Silva’s bones. About seventy percent are accounted for. The recovery team is still searching the area.
“She was found entangled in logs and other driftwood material, and there was a lot of sand and silt with the skeletal remains. If she hadn’t been lodged in this debris, we might never have found her. They formed something of an anchor to hold her in place and to keep her remains from dispersing.
“The only other thing I have right now is that the definitive cause of death would lead me to conclude that she died instantly. She didn’t suffer.”
The room was completely silent. Silas rubbed his hands together and then rubbed his face. Robbie touched his father’s arm but Silas just stared at Katie Rain.
“If you have any questions I could try and answer them.”
Silas started to speak but his voice was hoarse.
Dexter Willis stood. “I’ll get you some water.”
Silas nodded and waited. Robbie just held onto his arm.
“Here you go, Silas.” Dexter put a glass of water down and Silas drank from it.
He cleared his throat. “Was anything else found around the body?”
“You mean like clothing, or jewelry?” asked Agent Taylor. “No, nothing. So long in the water means that any clothing would have decomposed, or floated away. We haven’t recovered anything else from the scene. If she was wearing hiking boots or a leather belt, they might still be there, but …”
“But her feet …”
“It’s to be expected, Silas,” said Rain. “Feet and hands are usually the first to go. There isn’t much of a current in Lake Powell, but there is enough. And it’s still fifty feet deep there.”
“We’ve got a dive team going down,” said Stan Baton. “But as you know, it’s pretty murky down there.”
“Was there any evidence that she was, you know … assaulted?”
“There is no evidence, Silas.” Rain looked directly at him. “But given the state of decomposition, all of our usual tests for this sort of thing won’t work. No other bones were broken and this wound suggests that this was a murder, and not an assault that led to murder.”
“Does where she was found tell us anything?”
“It could be that the killer dumped her body into the lake in the log debris to keep her hidden below the surface. If that’s the case, it worked. It’s also possible that during a flood or maybe a storm, her body just happened to become entangled with this material.”
“We think there was maybe five or six feet of water over that debris five years ago, Silas,” said Baton. “There’s been some up and down to the water level, but it’s been very low for the last ten years or so, since the big drought. It’s possible that there was as little as a foot or two of water covering her.”
I never looked there, thought Silas. I hadn’t even thought of looking there. It was too far away. If I had, I might have found her. He shook his head. “But you don’t think she was killed there?”
Taylor answered this question. “We haven’t recovered any evidence at the scene. We’ve got a team from Kane County and our own experts combing the area. The Hole in the Rock is a long, narrow passageway that leads from the Jeep track above down into the waters of Lake Powell. It’s a big area to search. We’ve got a special dog team on site and a dozen forensic people. We’ve been at it for about eight days and so far nothing.”
“What are you looking for?” asked Robbie.
“Ballistics.”
“Silas, if you want to know anything else, just let me know. I don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re getting there,” said Katie.
“We’d like to ask you just a few questions before we let you go,” said Taylor. Silas said nothing and the Special Agent continued. “In the past, we’ve always assumed that when your wife went for this hike, the one that she was on when she disappeared, she was alone. Now we think maybe she was with someone. Can you think of who she might have been hiking with?”
“Everybody she might have been with is dead,” Silas said. “Darcy McFarland, Jane Vaughn, who I found at the Atlas Mill last year, Kiel Pearce.”
“What about Josh Charleston?” asked Rain. “Hayduke?”
Silas nodded. “Yes, it’s possible. But he and I have been … working together, as you know, to try a
nd find Penny. He’s helped with these other … situations, these other people who have been killed. He got shot last spring while we were investigating Jane Vaughn’s murder. I haven’t seen him in months; I think he went down to Baja to recover. First he was with his folks up in Seattle, then I got a postcard from Mexico. That’s the last I heard from him. If he was with Penny around the time she disappeared, he would have said something.”
“We’ll look into it,” said Taylor. “Silas, I know we’ve been through this before, but we have to ask now that we know that your wife was murdered: Can you think of anybody who would have wanted Penelope dead? Did she cross anybody? Did anybody hold a grudge?”
Silas thought about the journal he had found the year before outlining her plans for an Ed Abbey National Monument: the sweeping protected area that would cover so much of the canyon country both she and Abbey loved. He had kept this journal hidden from the FBI. It was a record of all the places she had considered important and worthy of inclusion in a presidential proclamation she hoped would protect the Southwest. In the journal there were notes about developers and others who opposed her, people she considered obstacles to her progress. “I need to think about that.”
“Dr. Pearson, we need to take this seriously,” said Taylor.
Silas stood up, weary. “Special Agent Taylor, I’m glad that you’ve just come to this realization, but I’ve been taking this seriously for the last five years. Now, when can I bury my wife?”
5
SILAS AND ROBBIE WALKED OVER to the Moab Diner for lunch and afterward visited the Red Rock Canyon Bookstore, tucked away from tourist traffic and any possible book buyers four blocks off Main Street.
“I’ve never been here,” Robbie said as they opened the door. Silas gathered up a month’s worth of junk mail from the ceramic pot by the entrance.
“Really?”
“No; I got here and we went out to Castle Valley and then went down the Green.”
Silas turned on the lights that illuminated the two parallel rows of bookshelves. The room was musty and hot. He walked to the back to flick on the air conditioner and took two Dr Peppers from the fridge, handing one to Robbie. Silas sat behind the desk that doubled as a service counter and Robbie took the chair in front of it. The young man looked around.
“You really did just move all your books from Flagstaff and started selling them.”
Silas seemed lost in thought. “What? Oh, yes. I thought I needed something like this to keep me busy. I didn’t want to be known as the crazy guy who was wandering around the desert looking for his missing wife …”
“How’d that work out?”
“Not very well. The nightmares haven’t helped. The FBI calls me ‘the Dreamer.’”
“What happens when you sell your last book?”
“I don’t know. Don’t tell Mary at Back of Beyond Books, but I’ve actually ordered a few new ones to fill in some of the holes on the shelf.”
Robbie looked around. “You’ve got messages,” he said, pointing to the blinking light on the telephone.
Silas smiled. Looking at his son, he hit the speakerphone button and then the speed dial option for his messages. There were half a dozen messages waiting for him. After a beep the first one started.
“Hi, um, you don’t know me.” It was a man’s voice. “I mean, we’ve never met. I live in Colorado. My wife is missing too. I know this sounds crazy but I wonder if maybe you’d, you know, try to dream about her. I know that maybe it doesn’t work that way, but I thought I’d try. I just don’t know what else to do.”
Silas erased the message. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Robbie said, looking down, his voice catching in his throat.
“I get half a dozen calls like that a month. I don’t have the heart to call anybody back. I don’t know what I’d say.”
“SO, DAD, ARE we going to talk about it?” He was looking at the books on one of the shelves.
“Talk about what?”
Robbie sat back down. “What the FBI just told you.”
Silas seemed to return from a daydream. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I don’t know what to make of this. I always thought I’d find her. I thought she’d be curled up under a juniper and that she would have died of exposure or dehydration, or maybe she would have fallen into a slot canyon and not been able to climb out.”
“Even when you started finding other bodies? Didn’t this seem, I don’t know, inevitable?”
“There was nothing inevitable about it to me. I suppose I figured this was a possibility, but why have all these dreams if someone else is going to find her?”
“I studied criminology, not psychology. I don’t have an answer for you.”
“I guess I’ll need to see my shrink and ask her.”
“You’re seeing a psychologist?”
“Ken Hollyoak introduced us. He’d been seeing her for years.”
“Dad, when the FBI asked if there were people who might have wanted Penelope dead, you didn’t say anything, but I knew you were thinking something. What was it?”
“My wife made a lot of enemies, Rob. People around here didn’t like her. She had friends, most of whom I never really knew, or even knew about, but she made a lot of enemies too. I’d say at the top of that list would be Jacob Isaiah. He’s a local business developer. He builds resorts and condos and dabbles in oil and gas. There is Chas Peers, who used to be the superintendent of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and his buddy Paul Love, who owns a marina and a powerboat rafting operation.”
“Didn’t he pull a gun on you last spring?”
“He’s the one. He’s awaiting trial. He’s likely going to get probation.”
Robbie shook his head. “Probation for a weapons offense.”
“This isn’t Canada. His buddy Peers has been transferred from Glen Canyon to a small national historic site in Oklahoma or something. It’s the Park Service’s way of burying a problem that they don’t want to deal with.”
“Who else?”
Silas thought a moment. “Well, there is this senator.”
“As in, an elected senator?”
“They elect everybody down here. He’s a big name in Utah politics. Started in Salt Lake as the mayor, then was governor for two terms, and now is a US senator.”
“Does he want to be president?”
“Maybe. I don’t know and I don’t really care. He’s behind almost every conservation disaster in Utah, and a fair number in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. I think he and Penelope clashed a number of times over her proposal for an Edward Abbey National Monument.”
“Could he have, you know … ?”
“Killed her? I don’t see why not. Or had someone else do it.”
“Anybody else?”
“I’m sure there is. Her body was found in Glen Canyon but that whole area around where she was found is part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I bet there’s all sorts of stuff Penny was involved in that I don’t even know about. Maybe that’s why she was found there.”
They were silent for a while, both men lost in thought. “So, what’s with the Edward Abbey connection?”
Silas smiled. “Penny was crazy about him. About his writing. She loved his vision for the Southwest. She was trying to immortalize that vision in a sweeping National Monument that would protect, I don’t know, five, six, maybe seven million acres of the Four Corner states.”
“How about this Hayduke character? How did he get mixed up in this?”
“Hayduke.” Silas said it as a statement. “He and Penny were friends. His name was in the journal I found in the kiva down in Hatch Wash last year. It was scribbled inside of the cover: Call Hayduke. I called him and he’s been helping me out. He actually saved my life once.”
“What do you mean, scribbled? You mean Penelope had left herself a message to call this guy?”
“Yeah. It was written inside the cover and had his cell number. What was strange was that I
had run into him up in the La Sals just the week before, out on an old logging road. I had driven up there to do some thinking, you know, get out of the heat, and there he was. We chatted and I went on my way. I don’t think I even got his name that time. It was just for a few minutes. Then the next week I found Penelope’s journal. I asked Mary at Back of Beyond and she described this guy to a tee. It clicked. So I called him and we met and it turns out he and Penelope were friends. He’s been pretty helpful.”
“He knew Penny, as well as Darcy McFarland and Kiel Pearce?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how well. I mean, to hear him say it, he and Penny knew one another pretty well. He calls her Pen.”
“I can see by the look on your face that you don’t like that.”
“Would you?”
“I’m just trying to think through the connection between these three open cases.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too. The thing that ties these three people together is the Colorado River. Darcy was found near here, at a place called Potash. It’s a huge mine site where they are processing potash and shipping it all over the world. It was in Abbey’s book Beyond the Wall. Kiel was found in Paria Canyon, which flows into the Colorado near Lee’s Ferry, in a location mentioned in One Life at a Time Please.”
“And Penelope was found in Glen Canyon.” Robbie saved his father from having to say it.
“Abbey talked about Glen Canyon in many of his books; he hated Lake Powell and the dam.”
“You think the three of them were into something that got them killed?” asked Robbie.
“I don’t know. But that seems more and more like a distinct possibility.”
6
THE CHIME OF THE DOOR saved Silas from thinking too much about the murder of his wife. “We’re closed,” he called out.
Then he saw it was Katie Rain. “The sign on the door says Open when I’m here, closed when I’m not. You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Not really. Dr. Katie Rain, you’ve already met Robert Pearson, my eldest spawn.”
The Same River Twice Page 2