Slickrock Paradox (15 page)

The Chapin Mesa road wove its way along the high forested rim and then out onto the Mesa itself. After about half an hour of driving Silas arrived at the museum. Gratefully, he stepped from his car and stretched. At the museum entrance, a ranger ushered Silas to the back rooms. Silas knocked on the door they approached.

“Come,” bid a voice from behind the door. The room he stepped into was crowded with artifacts, mostly pottery, but also cases filled with flint shards, spear tips, tools, cooking ware, such as mortars and pestles, and even bones. A strong scent of earth tickled his nose.

“Over here,” came the voice again, and Silas found the source of the voice behind a tall stack of narrow drawers.

“Dr. Anton?” Silas asked.

“That's me.”

“It's Silas Pearson.” Silas limped around a large table containing numerous pots and pot shards. Anton was tall and lean with short gray hair and dark-rimmed glasses. His eyes were deep blue, and the hand that shook Silas's was firm and dry.

“So, how did you discover Kayah's body?”

After Silas told him, he asked, “Does that explain the limp?”

“Yes, but it's just a sprained ankle.”

“You were lucky—you not only survived but you found Kayah . . . And now you think I had an affair with her?”

“Well, I understand the two of you knew one another—”

“That's right, we did,” said Anton, leaning back on the cabinet of drawers.

“I mean, more than just professionally.”

“We were friends. I suppose I was a mentor to her, a father figure, while we worked together at Dead Horse. Her own folks didn't really pay her much attention or give her the support she needed. She was the only member of her clan to go to college. She graduated in the top of her class. A very bright girl.”

“Darla Wisechild told me that you and Kayah were in a relationship.”

Anton suppressed a smile. “You think I was sleeping with my protégée and that I killed her in some lover's quarrel.”

“Well, I suppose it does seem curious that Kayah Wisechild goes missing, and then, shortly afterward, you disappear to Saudi Arabia. And this information about an affair—”

“It's completely false; utterly and completely absurd. I've been happily married for forty-one years now, Mr. Pearson. I have never, never cheated on my wife and I would never even dream of doing so with someone as young and vulnerable as Kayah Wisechild. The timing is purely coincidental, and your accusations conjectural. I have been to the Middle East at least twenty times in my career. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the lost city of Babylon. My trip to Saudi Arabia was planned six months before Kayah went missing. I was very sad to hear she had disappeared, but not because we were lovers. We were friends, and she was a good archaeologist, dedicated and thorough. Her whole life was ahead of her.”

Silas listened to the man's rant. “Why would she tell her sister that you and she were lovers?”

“She was young, impressionable, and infatuated. I represented a figure of some influence in her life; maybe she simply had a crush and wanted to appear worldlier than her sister.”

“In the Hopi tradition—”

“Yes, yes, don't try to school me on the Hopi traditions, Mr. Pearson. I know that in their tradition having this sort of relationship would be taboo. Where would it not, at least in modern culture, outside of France? And for the Hopi the implication is nothing short of witchcraft. For this young woman to disappear as she has—and to be murdered and left in Courthouse Wash, no less—would be considered the work of a witch. I assure you, Mr. Pearson, I'm no witch.”

Anton's arms were folded defensively across his chest as he leaned back on the stacks of drawers. “Tell me about the work you did with Kayah.”

“Does this mean you believe me?”

“It doesn't matter if I do or not, Dr. Anton.”

“It does to me,” Anton said. His voice was calm.

“Let's say, for the sake of argument, I do. I don't know what the
FBI
will say.”

“The
FBI
is involved with this?”

“Of course they are. Kayah's body was found in a national park. The
FBI
field office in Monticello has joint jurisdiction.”

“Do they . . . do they know about me?”

“I don't know. I think I'm about a day or two ahead of them in their investigation. I just happened to ask the right questions. It's only a matter of time, but if things are like you say—”

“Of course they're like I say!” Anton banged his fist against the cabinet. Silas felt uneasy. Anton drew a deep breath and seemed to calm down. “You know how things are. The
FBI
comes to my home in Cortez, or here, and I'm through. I'm done.”

“Not if you have nothing to hide.”

“That's bullshit, and you know it. People talk. My wife will hear people whispering at her bridge game on Wednesday night. It won't matter what the truth is.”

“What if I told you the
FBI
won't hear it from me?”

“What do you want?”

“Just the truth.”

“I've told you the truth.”

“I want to know where you were working before Kayah was murdered.” Silas used the word deliberately, to drive his point home.

“Have you got a map?”

Have I got a map
, thought Silas. “Yes, in my car.”

They walked out to the parking lot of the museum. Silas opened the back of his Outback and found the large-scale map of San Juan County and rolled it out on the hood of the car. Silas put on his sunglasses, and Anton squinted as the sun reflected off the map.

“Okay,” said Anton, after a moment. “This is where we worked together. Right in here.”

“Hatch Wash.”

“That's right, and up here.” He moved his finger north to Kane Springs. “And Behind the Rocks,” said Anton.

“What were you looking for?”

Anton regarded him a moment. “You know, if the people at Dead Horse find out, I'll never work for them again.”

“I was under the impression that you no longer worked for them anyway,” said Silas.

“I don't know who told you that. I'm still involved, from time to time. I suppose not like I was before. Maybe that's what you mean. It's a little extra money. June and I, we take a trip or two a year on the money that comes in from these projects.”

“You might have to stay home next year. But I won't be the one to tell them. What were you working on?”

Anton looked around. The parking lot was crowded with visitors. He seemed to be making rapid calculations in his head. “For as long as I can remember, Canyon Rims and Behind the Rocks have been hot spots for the debate over wilderness and development in this whole region,” Anton said, circling the region on the map with his finger. “I don't know all the details; I try not to get involved with politics. I know that there have been some very public disputes between folks who want to protect these places and keep them wild and those who want more access to them.”

“Access for what?”

“Off-highway vehicles like jeeps, motorcycles, quads, as well as oil and gas development. I guess there's a lot of interest in these lands for exploratory drilling, too, and some big companies are showing interest in making substantial investments in this area. There's a ton of money to be made if they can hit a sweet spot. And then, about five, maybe six years ago, a Moab developer . . .”

“Jacob Isaiah.”

“Yes, Mr. Isaiah.” Anton drew a deep breath. “He wanted to explore the idea of a year-round recreation village outside of Moab. I guess most of the good real estate in Moab had been bought up, so he started looking twenty, thirty, forty miles outside of town for something really spectacular. He looked all over the place; up in the Castle Valley, down toward Potash, on the Colorado, and around the Abajo Mountains. He started to zero in on this area.” Anton poked at the map.

“The main reason was the water. Hatch Wash runs year round. It's
BLM
land, without much in the way of protection. They call it a ‘recreation area,' but you can do just about anything you want there. It was at about that time that Dead Horse was brought on board, just to do some preliminary assessment of the values that we were dealing with. What plants and animals were there? What was the hydrology? What pre-historic sites were in the region?

“We didn't find anything at first. The Hatch region has been known to have some pictographs, but not much else. I was the team leader doing the inventory. Kayah was working with me as a field tech. We spent two, maybe three weeks working in the field and didn't find anything.

“Then, just about the time we were going to write a favorable report to Isaiah, telling him there wasn't much to be found, we stumbled on something. We—well, it was actually Kayah who found the cliff houses, granaries, you name it. They were totally protected—from the elements, and from view. She found them in a little pocket canyon off the main stream of Hatch, just a few miles from Kane Creek.” Anton looked steadily at Silas, whose heart was racing. This was big news.

“It was significant. Nothing like here,” said Anton, motioning to Mesa Verde. “But it was pretty impressive. Completely untouched. In the main kiva, there were still thousands of artifacts, hundreds of pieces of pottery, dozens of ceremonial artifacts. It was a gold mine for pot hunters.”

Silas could hardly believe what he was hearing. “What did you do?”

“Nothing, at first. We didn't even tell Dead Horse. Not right away. We delayed our report and said that we still had field work to do. We spent a week there. It was like being Cortez himself, the earth felt so new. We camped down along the wash, and every day climbed up and did an inventory.”

“Was it just the two of you?”

“No. I hired another guy, a young guy, from the
NAU
program too, to help.”

“What was his name?”

“Kelly something. Williams, or Wilson. It was three years ago, and my memory . . . Anyway, we did the inventory and cataloged the site, then made a verbal report to Dead Horse.”

“Who at Dead Horse?”

“Jared Strom. He's the head of—”

“I've met him.”

“We did a verbal and told him that development in that area wasn't going to fly. No way. When the
BLM
found out, they would have to order a full environmental assessment. For that client, that would mean paying tens of thousands of dollars. Given the significance, the Park Service would likely argue that the whole Canyon Rims area should be added to Canyonlands. They would contend that it was on par with the Grand Gulch Primitive Area, or the Horseshoe Canyon, which got tacked onto Canyonlands. That's what the enviros have been saying for a decade or more.”

Silas looked at the map. “Can you give me the coordinates?”

“I don't see how that would help.”

It might help very much with the search for my wife
, thought Silas. “I want to see if I can retrace Kayah's last steps, get a feel for where she was before she disappeared.”

Anton pulled a Blackberry out of his pocket and looked up the co­ordinates. Silas found his
GPS
unit in his pack and recorded them. “Thank you. What happened after you made your report to your boss?”

“Nothing. My guess is that Strom made a report to Isaiah and that was the end of it.”

“That doesn't sound like Jacob Isaiah to me.”

“I don't really know the man. Like I said, I do pots, not politics. Given the amount of money they had invested in the project already, I was a little surprised that they just dropped it, but who knows. Maybe Strom made his point. He's pretty persuasive when it comes to preserving finds like this.”

“What exactly did they want to build?”

“An all-season resort. They would put an airfield up on Flat Iron Mesa, or maybe Hatch Point. They were planning as many as a thousand rooms in several sites, on Hatch, and on the Behind the Rocks Plateau, with a golf course, water pumped up from the creek, guided
ORV
trails, fine dining, a glass-bottomed sky walk off Hatch Point looking down a thousand feet into the wash. The whole deal. It would look a little like the worst parts of Grand Canyon Village, Aspen, and West Yellowstone, all thrown into one. They were talking about a five-hundred-million-dollar project over ten years. It would have been huge.”

“Did word of this get out?”

“You mean to the greenies?” asked Anton. “I don't know. I think there were rumors, but because Isaiah was smart enough not to put anything on paper at the time, there was no smoking gun. You'd have to ask the enviros, though.”

Silas nodded, knowing that something of this scale would have sent Penelope right off the chart. “What about this Kelly Wilson guy? Where is he?”

“I think it was Williams. I haven't worked with him since, but he's likely still in the Southwest. Remember, archaeologists get around a lot. He was young and keen, so I bet he's still in the community.”

Silas straightened up. “Dr. Anton, my suggestion is that you go to the
FBI
and tell them what you know about Kayah. They're going to learn that you worked with her. They might not hear the rumors about a relationship, but they will want to talk with you about what you know. Better to call them.”

“You're likely, right, Mr. Pearson.”

“Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. This has been helpful.”

“So you believe me?”

“About what? The ruins?”

“No, about Kayah.”

“Of course I do,” said Silas, though he didn't.