Slickrock Paradox (33 page)

“Really?”

“You Canadians really think we're all malevolent masochists, don't you?”

“No. Well . . .”

She took a drink. “Here's the kicker. He admitted to having ‘relations' with the Wisechild girl, an affair.”

“I guess that lands him in pretty hot water, doesn't it?”

“Gives him clear motive. We pressed him some more, but he wouldn't confess to murder. He was in tears before the interview was over. I think he would have given up his mother if he thought it would help.”

“Did you get anything on the ruins?”

“He started off saying he had worked with Dead Horse on the assessment. Said he didn't know who the client was; explained that this was part of the procedure: minimized conflict of interest. He said that he had discovered the ruins and reported it to Strom, and that Strom had ordered him to back off.”

“Doesn't sound right. If you were a professor of archaeology and you discovered a new set of ruins, wouldn't you tell everybody? Publish a paper?”

“This is where it gets interesting. You see, we knew we were going to want to interview him before you called this morning, so we had the paperwork done up with our Durango office and had them standing by with a judge. As soon as we got him to confess on the Wisechild affair, we pushed the paperwork through and searched his home. We must have found five hundred artifacts there. There's no way of knowing which are legit and which were stolen, but we've got the
BLM
's top archaeologist on her way to Cortez in the morning. We were able to tell him this about four hours into the interview. We also told him we had the video. That helped.”

“
Just
helped?”

“We're going to need our facial recognition expert to match his face with the image on the Wisechild video, but he didn't know that.”

“So he rolled over?”

“He admitted to clearing the site, but not to destroying it, and insisted he had nothing to do with Wisechild's and Williams's deaths.”

“You believe him?”

“No, but he wouldn't give anything else up. Not yet.”

“Did you guys look into Kelly Williams's history?”

“Agent Nielsen did. Williams had two charges but no convictions against him for offences under
ARPA
. He was a pot hunter and a grave robber, but nobody could prove it. Not hard to imagine him working with Peter Anton to clear the site and then things getting out of hand between them. You talk with the enforcement people at the
BLM
and they'll tell you that they've never seen a more violent culture than the one around the illegal artifacts trade. I guess these grave robbers make poachers look like a bunch of Sunday school students.”

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.