Slickrock Paradox (5 page)

Silas pointed toward the log. “She's over there.” Taylor turned and motioned for the two members of the team to begin. They stepped past the assemblage of men and walked toward the log.

Unger slipped off her pack and opened the top and pulled out a hard-shell black case. She took out a small handheld digital video recorder and turned it on. Beside her Huston removed a camera and began to take photos of the mouth of the wash and the area surrounding the log. When he was done, Huston looped the camera over his shoulder and took out a sketch pad and made a drawing of the area. “We're going to want to extend the crime scene perimeter back at least another hundred yards up Courthouse,” he said. “With the flood moving everything around, we don't know what's evidence and what isn't.”

Meanwhile, Unger focused her video camera on her companion, who spoke into the lens: “August seventeenth, Special Agent John Huston, location Courthouse Wash, Arches National Park . . .” He looked at this watch. “9:42
AM
. Present are . . .” When he had finished the introduction to the video, he said, “Okay, let's go.”

He and his companion approached the log, recording their short walk. “Mr. Pearson,” said the first agent, “reports having dragged himself from this scene after sustaining injuries during the flood.” Silas watched as they slowly approached the skeletonized arm.

The lead agent sunk up to his shins in the mud and quicksand. “Goddamn it.”

“What's the matter, Agent Huston, get some mud on your shoes?” asked Taylor.

“Very funny.” Huston turned to look at Taylor, then continued to record his observations. “From where I'm standing, I can see depressions in the mud that lead to and are adjacent to the protruding radius and ulna. There appears to be no carpus present.” He took two more steps toward the log, the thick, heavy mud sucking at his feet. “Janet, see if you can get around behind the log, please.” Unger, still filming, side stepped the worst of the mud and circled around to get a better view of the arm. Huston bent down to get a better look.

“Definitely human,” he noted. “Agent Taylor, I'm going to remove some of the top layer of recently deposited mud so see if we're dealing with full or partial skeletal remains.” As Unger continued to film, Huston took from his pack a small trowel and began to remove, half an inch at a time, the uppermost layer of recently deposited red earth.

Penshaw stepped forward, too, photographing the scene for the Medical Examiner's office. “I'm not seeing the signs of any insects.” Penshaw bent a little so his face was closer to the exposed arm. “Nor do I smell any decomposition.”

Silas felt a wave of nausea starting to build in his stomach. His whole body felt as if it were shaking. After all this time, here he was, watching the arm of his wife being meticulously unearthed by these strangers. He turned his head away and felt his legs go out beneath him.

“Whoa.” Willis reached for Silas as he started to sink to the ground. “Grab him there, Stan. Let's sit him down.” The sheriff nodded toward a boulder. “There, come on, Silas, let's get you sitting down. Stan, you got any more of those energy gels in that pack of yours?”

Silas's head was swooning. How ironic, he thought, refocusing his eyes, that Penelope should be unearthed with this cadre of strangers standing around, all of their clinical eyes watching.

“We've got the humeral trochlea,” said Huston.

“That's the elbow,” said Willis. Silas nodded, drinking more Gatorade.

“We've got the humerus,” said Huston, sitting back and wiping a thick layer of sweat from his forehead. He looked at Unger. “We've got most of the arm, but it appears to be extending straight down. That could mean the rest of the body is buried under a few feet of this sand and possibly this cottonwood. We're going to need to more than my kid's trowel to unearth this one.” He turned and looked at Agent Nielsen. “Special Agent, we need to bring in an excavation team. We'll want Agent Rain to come down for this.”

Silas had managed to follow the proceedings up to this point. With the agents' shift in focus—he had been hoping for quick confirmation—he finally let go and felt himself slip into the blackness of unconsciousness.

SILAS BLINKED AND TRIED TO
force his eyes open. His eyelids felt like sandpaper. The room was dark, with only a thin thread of light coming through the curtains. He could make out a shape standing by the window, arms crossed.

“Where am I?” he asked. He could smell a strong floral scent intermingling with something antiseptic.

“Agent Taylor,” he heard a male voice say, “he's awake. You're at Moab Regional Hospital.”

“Who . . .”

“It's Special Agent Nielsen, Mr. Pearson.”

“Penelope?” Silas blinked again and the room started to shift into focus.

“Let me get the Assistant Special Agent in Charge,” said Nielsen as he stepped away from the window and went to the door. He swung his body out, holding onto the frame, and Silas heard him say, “Mr. Pearson is awake, Dwight.”

A moment later, Taylor entered the room, with Nielsen close on his heels. A nurse followed them in. The two
FBI
men stood by the window while she checked his vitals, made notes on a tablet computer, and then asked about his eyes.

“Hurt like hell,” he said. She administered some drops and the pain eased. “Thank you.” He closed his eyes, savoring the relief.

“I'll be back to check on you in a few minutes,” she said, patting his hand.

Taylor stepped forward. “How you feeling, Mr. Pearson?”

“I'm alright. Is it Penelope?” he asked, his voice rough.

“It's too early to tell, Mr. Pearson. We have a forensic anthropology team on site now. They've been on the ground for maybe . . .” Taylor checked his watch. “Two hours now.”

“What time is it?”

“It's 7:00
PM
.”

“Have you exhumed the skeleton?”

“Our team is in the process of doing that right now.”

“Is it all in one piece?”

“We're not able to say.”

Silas swallowed and felt the bitter coarseness in this throat. He opened his eyes and looked around for a glass of water. There was a pitcher on the small wheeled bedside stand and he reached for it, but his right arm had an intravenous tube connected to it. Taylor stepped forward and handed him a cup. Silas drank from the articulated straw. The water tasted better than anything he had ever tasted in his life. When Silas was done Taylor put the cup back on the table.

“What do you mean, you're not able to say?” Silas asked when he had swallowed again.

“Let's go over a few of the details of how you found this body, Mr. Pearson,” said Taylor.

“I told you everything when we were in Courthouse Wash,” Silas said, the annoyance in his voice obvious.

“Let's go over it again.”

Silas exhaled loudly. “There's nothing more to tell. I was looking for Penny. I wanted to search the upper part of Sleepy Hollow. I hadn't been there in three years. I wasn't paying attention to the weather. There was a storm over the Windows section of the park and I got caught in the flash flood. I must have hit my head, maybe on that big cottonwood log.” Silas reached up and felt the bandage that was coiled like a white snake around his head.

“When you came to, what did you see?”

“I've told you all this. I saw what I thought was a branch of a cottonwood sticking out of the mud. But it wasn't. It was bones. Looked like an arm to me.”

“Did you disturb it?”

“I didn't touch it.”

“How was it that you happened to be in Courthouse Wash when a flash flood uncovered these remains, Mr. Pearson?”

Silas looked from Taylor to Nielsen. He was dumbfounded. “You think I could predict a flash flood, Agent Taylor?”

“It seems very . . . interesting that you would happen to be in that location when the remains were unearthed.”

Silas shook his head. It ached. He reached up and touched the bandages again, his eyes pressed shut. “Mr. Taylor, I don't know what they teach you in Quantico, but maybe your colleague could educate you on the random nature of flash floods in the canyon country in the summer.”

“How long have you been looking for your wife, Mr. Pearson?”

“Since she went missing. Three years, five months, six days . . .”

“Since five days
after
she went missing,” interrupted Taylor.

“She was backpacking. It wasn't unusual for Penelope to spend a few extra days on the trail,” said Silas. His voice betrayed the defensiveness that haunted him.

“Mr. Pearson,” said Taylor, “why was your wife backpacking alone?”

“We've been through this a hundred times,” Silas replied wearily.

“Let's do it again.”

“She was a very experienced backpacker. She didn't always go alone, but she liked being in the desert and the canyons that way. She sort of scorned other people when she was in the backcountry.”

“You never went with her?”

“Once or twice. But it wasn't my thing.”

“But now it is?”

“Now it's different. I'm not out to appreciate nature. I've been trying to find my wife.”

“You've told us you think she was looking for something when she was hiking. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“I have no idea, Agent Taylor. I've told you before. Penelope often went hiking in places that were threatened with some kind of development: mining, logging, a hydro development. She would document what she found and use it to fight whatever threat there was.”

“But you don't know what your wife was looking for when she went missing?” Silas shook his head. Taylor continued, “So here we are, the middle of August, and you just happen to be hiking in a canyon where a body has been buried and somehow, miraculously, there is a flood that churns up enough of the canyon floor to expose it?”

Silas looked from one agent to the next. “Agent Taylor, am I a suspect in some sort of crime?”

“So far there is no evidence of a crime.”

“You won't tell me if these . . . remains . . . are those of my wife?”

“Not
won't
: can't. We won't know ourselves until our team recovers the body and has time to examine it in detail.”

“You know.” Silas pushed himself up onto an elbow so he could see Agent Taylor better. “When Penelope disappeared I had to beg local law enforcement to get involved in finding her. People said . . . they said that Penelope had likely just left me. Would turn up in Maine. In France. When
you
got involved—the
FBI
—the first thing you did was investigate
me
. At some point in all of this, I'd like somebody to take the disappearance of my wife seriously without accusing me of being involved.”

Taylor pushed his hands further into his pockets. “When a person is murdered by an intimate, a husband, a boyfriend, a brother, and that person is buried, there is sometimes a deep psychological need for the killer to lead authorities to the body. It brings them closure, even satisfaction.”

“They teach you that at bullshit at Quantico?” asked Silas, laying back down and closing his eyes.

“You want us to help you find your wife. For most of the four years I've been in Monticello this file has been open on my desk. Every time you and I talk, Mr. Pearson, I come away feeling that while you say you want us to help you find Ms. de Silva, all you do is throw up roadblocks. Every lead we chase down brings us to a dead-end. Every interview we conduct circles back to where we started from. Every theory of the crime we construct that doesn't sound like something from a movie leaves us with only one conclusion.”

“And what is that?”

“One third of all women murdered in the United States are killed by their husbands.” A long moment passed and then Taylor spoke again. “Like I said, we don't have an
ID
on the body in Courthouse Wash.”

The nurse came back at that moment and checked Silas's vitals. “Let's let him get some rest,” she said.

“Get some sleep,” said Taylor, pulling his hands from his pockets and turning to leave.

“It's Penelope,” said Silas, his eyes pressed shut, tears forming at their edges. “I don't know why she was there, or what happened to her. She was my wife. I loved her. Maybe I didn't give her everything she needed . . . but I would never have . . .” Silas's voice trailed off.

Taylor suppressed the urge to say “That's what they all say.” Instead he said, “We'll call you when we know the
ID
of the remains.” He walked out of the room, Agent Nielsen close behind him. The nurse finished her work, touched Silas's arm gently and left as well, leaving him in the darkness of the private room.