Slickrock Paradox (30 page)

“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—”

“
NCAVC
?”

“The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. It's part of the federal Critical Incident Response Group. Part of their job is behavioral analysis in mass, serial, or spree killings.”

“You think this is a serial killer?”

“We don't. Not now, at least. Unlike Wisechild and Williams, we think Darcy McFarland was killed on site. We think she knew her attacker; that he—or much less likely she—was someone Ms. McFarland trusted. We found some small flecks of sandstone consistent with that surrounding the potash site embedded in the skin on the back of her head, and one very small piece in the bone fragments there. It's possible this happened elsewhere. Navajo sandstone isn't exactly hard to come by around here. But there were trace amounts of crystallized salt on the stone, and we believe that means it came from the potash site.

“The blow didn't kill her, just stunned her, may have blinded her, as there was some damage to the optic nerve. There was also bruising around the hyoid bone, which indicates a violent struggle. We believe she was lured or possibly driven to the site, strangled violently, knocked unconscious, and then submerged in the water.”

“The killer in all likelihood would have gotten some of the slurry on him.”

“That's right. The body was ten feet from the shore of the lagoon, and in almost eight feet of water. The killer—or maybe killers—would have had to be very strong to heave the body into the slurry.”

“What about tracks? If the killer drove Darcy to the site, then there would be tire tracks.”

“There were eight different sets of tracks on the road leading to Island in the Sky. We took imprints, and will be running them through our database. It might not help us find the killer, but it might help convict.”

“You're going to want to look at my car, aren't you?”

“Silas, Taylor still considers you a person of interest, but
I
don't.”

“
He
's in charge.”

“True, but this is what I need from you: motive. We're not getting anywhere and we can't determine what motive ties these three individuals together.”

“What if they're not tied together?”

“That's always a possibility. But we need to eliminate the possibility of a link between them all first.”

“Katie,” said Silas, “I'm frankly stumped as to how these three people are connected, except by the frustrating fact that
I
found them all.”

Just then the doorbell chimed. Silas looked up. Josh Charleston—Hayduke—was at the door. Katie turned to look at him. “You have a customer!” she said, grinning at Hayduke.

“Yeah—”

“I should let you attend to him. Rent to pay.” She stood and offered her hand. He took it. “We'll be in touch.” She turned and walked to the door.

Hayduke picked up a book by Charles Bowden and ignored her. “Nice piece on the fed,” he said after she left.

Silas sat down. “What did she want?” asked Hayduke.

“To talk with me about my propensity for finding dead people.”

“I can see why she would be interested. Fuck, nice-looking piece of—”

“Enough.” Silas was weary of the Hayduke act.

Hayduke grinned. “So you found another corpse. I go away for one fucking day and look what kind of trouble you end up in!”

Silas signed heavily and brought Hayduke up to speed.

“I didn't know her,” said Hayduke. “I mean, Pen talked about Darcy, but we never met. I've only been to Flag once, and that was years and years ago.”

“Did you know her work?”

“Not really.”

“What does a water rights activist do?”

“Fucked if I know,” exclaimed Hayduke, looking around the store.

Silas drew a deep breath. “I guess I'll have to find out. Can you tell me if you've learned much about political contributions?”

“It's a fucking shit-show of corruption. I can tell you this, both Jacob Isaiah and this countryman of yours, Mr. Timothy
T
. Martin are up Senator Smith's ass so far they can't see daylight. Both of them are huge contributors. Isaiah has been handing him bags of green since the senator was governor in the 1980s. Your friend Isaiah ran this whole district for Smith when he was first elected to the Senate twelve years ago. He's backed off since, but still gives a fucking load of cash to him every year. We're talking about the federal limit for both individual and corporate contributions. Not to mention soft money. That fucker funds every industry group he can find that supports what Senator C. Thorn Smith backs in Congress.”

“What about Martin?”

“He's newer to the giving game. Started four years ago.”

“Well, he told me that his financial stake in this area started less than eighteen months ago.”

“Fuck, man, he might have only bought the leases then, but his contributions to Smith started four years ago. He gave the limit, and then some!”

“Soft money?”

“No, but some of his senior
VP
s also made personal contributions.”

“Don't you have to be American to donate?”

“Easy to get around if you own an American-based business, which Canusa qualifies as, given that it has offices in Houston, Salt Lake, and here. Don't forget, in America corporations are people too.”

“Yeah, in Canada too. Do you have a list of who inside Canusa made donations?”

“No, but I can run that fucker down.”

“Do, please.” Silas's cell rang and he held up a finger and answered. It was Robbie. “It's my son.”

“I can go—”

“No, it's related. Hold on. What have you got, Rob?”

“Well,” said Robbie. “You told me to follow the money.”

“Funny, I'm just talking with someone here about campaign contributions.”

“Well, it's likely to get funnier.”

“Do tell.”

“I looked at the money trail and it's just what you'd expect: lots of cash moving around between Canada and the United States on this project. Canusa is 51 per cent American, so they can skirt all sorts of domestic ownership laws in the
US
. There's been about twenty-five million pumped into the Canyon Rims project so far.”

“Twenty-five!”

“Yeah, mostly for geotechnical work and consulting fees.”

“These guys are way further along than they are letting on. Let me guess, most of that going to Dead Horse?”

“Yup, about half of it to them. The rest was divided up among half a dozen firms that do seismic testing, that sort of thing. Also, Dad, there's been at least a million spent on lobbying.”

“That's a lot of money. Certainly worth killing over.”

“Maybe,” said Robbie. “I don't know anything about that sort of thing. But here's something else I found. There's a revolving door between Canusa Petroleum Resources and the federal governments on both sides of the Medicine Line. We're talking about staff from Canusa working for the Department of Natural Resources in Canada and Alberta's Energy Minister, and in the
US
staff moving between management at the company and senior levels of the
EPA
and the energy department. It's not just within the bureaucracy. One of Canusa's senior managers has been doing a stint with one of your prime suspects, Dad. A guy named Charles Nephi.”

“Say that again?”

“Charles Nephi has been with Canusa on and off for almost a decade. It looks like he's from Utah, worked in Texas for Canusa, went to the
EPA
, next to Canada as a junior
VP
with the company for two years, and then four years ago, right around the time that Canusa started putting money in the hands of your senator? It looks as if they gave him Nephi, because he showed up back in the senator's office. I guess his official title is District Assistant, but according to some bloggers with the Natural Resource Defense Council, the guy is like Smith's bag man for the energy industry in Utah. He's basically running the trapline, bringing more energy business to the senator's home state. The biggest investor in both the petroleum business and in Smith's coffers is Canusa. Nephi is also an officer of the corporation you asked me to look into. It's a Utah company, and all I could get were the officers, which are your man Martin, this Nephi fellow, and Peter Anton.”