Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  “They’re still going to fuck up Hatch Wash.”

  “Maybe. This whole mess is going to turn ugly when Nephi is formally charged. Tim Martin and Canusa are already backing out of the Utah Land Stewardship Fund, distancing themselves from the good senator’s office. So far there’s nothing to tie either of them in an official way to any of the deaths, but that doesn’t make a bit of difference. The media is all over them. They’ll be lucky if the dust on this settles in such a way that lets them go ahead with their Hatch Wash project.”

  “Fuck, man, that’s naive if I ever heard it. You really think that this gets Hatch Wash and Back of the Rocks off the hook? Fuckers will be back. It’s just a matter of time. Americans forget fast. They want that oil so they can drive their fucking SUVs to the Big Box Store and buy more Twinkies.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see. The one thing that keeps me up at night right now is something that Nephi said to me: that he had never been working for Canusa. The whole time I thought that he had been on their payroll and had gone to work for the good senator to try and grease his palms for the company, but it was the other way around. He was always on the senator’s payroll and was dropping into companies like Canusa to bring them on board with the Land Stewardship fund.”

  “Slippery motherfucker. Got any proof?”

  “No. C. Thorn has distanced himself from Nephi, obviously. Called on the courts to render swift and ultimate justice. Send the man to the gallows before he can spill the beans on his own furtive arrangements, I guess.”

  “You want to go after him?”

  “Who?”

  “The senator?”

  “Jesus, Hayduke, I just want to find my wife.”

  Hayduke took a swallow from the can of Molson’s. He finished it and looked around, as if seeking a place to toss the empty. Silas reached out and took it from him. “You want another?”

  “Nope. Got to hit the road. Two six packs to . . . well, wherever the hell I end up.”

  Silas wanted to change the subject. “Where are you going to spend the winter, Josh?”

  The young man shook his shaggy head. “I don’t know. Maybe down along the Arizona border. Or New Mexico. Fuck, I might go down to Baja. Old Cactus Ed liked it down there too.”

  “Well, amigo. I owe you. You let me know if there’s anything you need.” Silas stood up.

  Hayduke stood too and the two men clasped hands, mountain man style, palm on wrist.

  “I guess this is goodbye.”

  “Fuck that, I’ll see you again. This thing isn’t over, and we still got to find Pen . . . Penelope.”

  Silas watched as Hayduke turned and walked toward the door. He spun around at the door and held up the book and then was gone.

  “THIS DOESN’T HAVE to be formal, you know,” said Sheriff Willis. They were in a room at the Sheriff’s Office. Silas sat across the table from him. Ken Hollyoak sat next to him, his hands neatly crossed on the table, a look of bemusement on this face.

  “Anytime you fellas want to talk with my client here, I’m going to have to insist on being present. Too messy any other way.”

  It had been two weeks since the shootout on Comb Ridge and the pursuit across Comb Wash and into the Grand Gulch.

  Taylor said, “The Office of Senator Smith has decided not to pursue a breaking and entering charge against Mr. Pearson . . . Dr. Pearson, I mean. The peace bond is still in effect. You’re not to be within a hundred yards of the senator or his office.”

  Hollyoak turned to Silas. “We’ll have that matter cleared up shortly, I assure you.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Agent Taylor, “I for one am still not satisfied with your client’s explanation for all that has happened in the last month. I’m going to request that you take a lie-detector test and undergo a physiological examination to help the FBI get a better handle on your claims of . . . well, your claims of extra-sensory perception.”

  “Neither of those is going to happen,” Hollyoak said, his face growing dour. “The FBI is just going to have to live with my client’s explanation.” His voice rose an octave, taking on its courtroom tone. Silas put his hand on Hollyoak’s arm.

  “It’s okay, Ken.”

  “These jokers said this was going to be information sharing. Now they want to strap the lie-detector cuff on you. I say we get up and leave.”

  “Do you have anything that you actually want to share today, Special Agent Taylor?” asked Silas.

  Taylor leaned back in his chair and looked at the sheriff. Willis shrugged his shoulders. “I guess you must know by now that we’ve charged Charles Nephi with the death of Kelly Williams,” Willis said.

  “Has he confessed?” asked Silas.

  “No. He’s not making it easy on us. But the DA has enough to charge him. We believe Dr. Rain can provide us with enough forensic evidence that we can make this stick. We’ve followed the paper trail that we found in his office back to the time when Mr. Williams disappeared, and the dates add up.”

  At the mention of her name, Silas briefly lost his focus on the hulking man sitting across the table from him. Rain had left for Salt Lake just a day after the showdown in Grand Gulch. He hadn’t had the opportunity to say goodbye, and it left him feeling unsettled.

  He struggled to regain his focus. “What about Kayah Wisechild?” he asked.

  “We don’t believe Mr. Nephi is responsible for her death,” said Taylor.

  “Then who?”

  “Peter Anton,” said Willis.

  Taylor held up a hand. “Here’s what we think. Dead Horse Consulting was working for both Canusa Petroleum Resources and Jacob Isaiah. During their work for Mr. Isaiah, they dispatched an archaeological team that included Dr. Anton, Ms. Wisechild, and Mr. Williams to investigate resources in the Hatch Wash area. After several weeks of intense investigation, they discovered the ruins and artifacts in the box canyon and reported their findings back to Jared Strom. You understand that there’s no paper on this. The only records we’ve been able to discover—and we’ve taken Dead Horse apart over the last week—is a cryptic reference in the notes in their files about archaeological finds relating to Mr. Isaiah’s project. In our discussions with Mr. Strom he confirmed what you originally told us, Dr. Pearson—”

  “About the ruins.”

  “That’s right. And what we were able to extract from Dr. Anton before he disappeared. What happened next, I’m afraid, is still conjecture. But it adds up, based on the video footage shot by Ms. Wisechild. The discovery of the ruins didn’t slow Mr. Isaiah down. That’s when Canusa also hired Dead Horse to undertake their preliminary environmental assessment. Dead Horse already knew there were class one ruins in Hatch, but went ahead anyway, and we believe that someone, likely Dr. Anton, would have gone to Canusa to explain to them what they were dealing with. The ruins wouldn’t have stopped Isaiah’s proposal to build a resort. They would have slowed down, and maybe even stopped, depending on the courts and the Department of the Interior, the building of a dam on Hatch Wash. There was no official paperwork at that time—”

  “Someone involved in the project ordered the ruins cleared and razed.”

  “Yes. Sometime after the initial discovery—and we’ve got people working to extract an exact date from the digital file—Dr. Anton, Mr. Williams, and Ms. Wisechild returned to Hatch Wash to pillage the ruins. We believe that they were acting on orders from Mr. Nephi at this point. The records you pointed us to regarding the creation of the numbered company, with Nephi, Anton, and Mr. Martin involved, suggest that these three men stood to lose the most in the event that the project was halted.”

  “I was under the impression that Nephi was working for Canusa all along and that he was doing time in the senator’s office just to advance the interests of the oil and gas company. I was wrong. He told me so himself. He was working for the senator all along.”

  “That may be true. We can’t prove it yet. Senator Smith has put a mile of bureaucratic hurdles between Nephi and himself in the last two weeks
.”

  “He said it wasn’t about money. It was about power,” said Silas.

  “It’s always about power in Utah.” Nielsen was leaning on the door. “Money is just one of the ways we get to hold onto it.”

  “Anton, Williams, and Wisechild were acting on orders from Nephi to clear the ruins so they could report that Hatch Wash had nothing of value to prevent Canusa from proposing a dam. They could use the water for drilling on Flat Iron Mesa, along Hatch Point, and in Back of the Rocks.”

  “Dr. Anton’s affair with Ms. Wisechild got in the way,” said Silas.

  “That, and the fact that Ms. Wisechild got cold feet. It was a deadly combination for her,” said Taylor. “Nephi found out and put pressure on Anton.”

  “And he killed her.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He took her to Courthouse Wash and killed her there. They walked down the wash and he strangled her and buried her body under the cotton­wood log.”

  “Charles Nephi simply cleaned up the rest of the loose ends. He killed Kelly Williams,” said Taylor. “The story that Mr. Williams tried to blackmail him and he killed him in self-defense doesn’t wash. The wound is in the back of the head. We believe that he asked Mr. Williams to meet him out at Canyonlands National Park and hit him with the butt of his pistol. That was a mistake. We’re testing it for Mr. Williams’s DNA. We’ve tracked down some of his possessions from his family and will test them in the next couple of days, but we’re pretty certain we’ve got him on that.”

  “If Nephi was closing up loose ends, why not kill Anton?”

  “Well, expedience, for one,” Taylor answered. “For Wisechild and Williams to disappear was one thing. The girl was young, and her family Hopi, and unfortunately, her disappearance didn’t raise too many alarm bells. Young people from the reservation sometimes just wander off. They go to Flagstaff, or Durango, or Phoenix. And Williams, well, he was in trouble for his activities in Grand Gulch, and elsewhere it turns out, and the antiquities trade is surprisingly violent. The fact that he wasn’t reported missing by his family for some time after Ms. Wisechild didn’t trigger a connection between the investigations—”

  “You dropped the ball.”

  “Yes, we did,” admitted Taylor.

  “Nephi didn’t need to kill Anton. Not yet, at least. He had him by the economic balls, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of artifacts, and a 10 per cent stake in the profit from drilling all across the Canyon Rims region. After the bodies turned up, and his relationship with Wisechild, and then with Canusa and the senator’s office was revealed, he became a liability.”

  “That’s what we suspect. We haven’t found the bodies of either Dr. Anton or his wife. Mr. Nephi has nothing to say on the subject.”

  “They could have run.”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely, unless they went their separate ways and got some very good advice on how to vanish. Once they are in our system, the only way they could disappear is to do so on foot. They couldn’t get on a plane, rent a car, use a credit or debit card, nothing. No, Dr. Anton and his wife are dead. We just haven’t found their bodies yet.”

  “Speaking of bodies,” Silas said, looking at the sheriff. “Did you ever find out who told Jacob Isaiah that I was the one who found Kayah Wisechild?”

  Willis looked down. “I’m sorry about that, Silas. No, I haven’t. Short of dragging ol’ Jacob in here and putting the lamp on him, I’m afraid that one is simply on my head. I’m sorry about it.”

  Silas let it go. “What about Darcy McFarland?”

  “Dr. Pearson, to be honest, we don’t know. The tire tracks on the road to Island in the Sky might be helpful once we’ve apprehended a suspect, but right now, they are not much use to us. We’ve eliminated your vehicle.”

  Silas shook his head.

  “Any vehicle we can tie to Charles Nephi, Peter Anton, and Tim Martin have likewise been eliminated, but we haven’t been able to narrow the search for a suspect with that evidence. It’s a possibility the work Ms. McFarland was doing to protect the Colorado River and other waterways throughout the Southwest brought her into conflict with Mr. Nephi at some point. We’re going over her files, and his, but so far we’ve got no connection with the deaths of Williams or Wisechild, or Darcy McFarland. We think that Darcy McFarland’s murder is unrelated. It’s ‘open-unsolved’ at this point.”

  “But you’re still working on it?” asked Silas.

  “Of course.”

  “Any person of interest?”

  “We have people we’re watching.”

  “Me?”

  The room was silent except the hum of the overhead fluorescent lights. “Dr. Pearson, this brings us back to the question of how it is you have been able to lead us to three bodies over the course of a single month.”

  “Gentlemen,” said Ken Hollyoak, “that’s where I get to earn my generous fee. You can either charge Dr. Pearson, or we are going for breakfast.”

  “There’s no charge at this time,” said Willis. “Silas, you’re free to go.”

  “What about Penelope?” Silas asked after a moment.

  “What about her?” asked Taylor.

  “Don’t you think that before all of this started, before Anton discovered the ruins, she must have found them? Don’t you think that Nephi maybe—”

  “Killed her too?” asked Taylor.

  “Surely you can see it’s possible.” Silas was almost pleading.

  “It is possible, Dr. Pearson. We haven’t ruled that out. Nephi had already moved back to Utah at that time, but there is absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody, including your wife, had set foot in the ruins until Dr. Anton made his detailed survey of the canyon. Given that these ruins have since been destroyed, well, it’s going to be impossible to determine if your wife ever had anything to do with them.”

  Silas remained silent. He contemplated the journal that was still in safe-keeping at Ken and Trish’s home. He decided against mentioning it to Taylor. If he told them about it, the FBI would seize it as evidence, and he would lose the only thread that tied him to his wife.

  “You told me when we were in the ruins that you knew who had destroyed them,” Silas said to Taylor.

  “That’s right. We are building our case along with the BLM.”

  “It was Jared Strom, wasn’t it?”

  “He did the dirty work; Nephi gave the orders.”

  Silas asked, “What about whoever left me for dead in the kiva? Have you got that figured out?”

  “I’m guessing Peter Anton could illuminate that mystery, if he hasn’t already taken the secret to the grave with him.”

  Anton seemed like the only possibility. He was the one who sent Silas there in the first place. In doing so, he must have known that he was setting himself up, and so his best hope for evading detection as Kaya Wisechild’s killer was to follow Silas there and wait for the opportunity to kill him.

  That didn’t put Silas’s mind at ease. None of the explanations did. He figured at best the FBI had a fifty-fifty chance of winning a conviction against Charles Nephi on anything besides his own kidnapping. To win that conviction, Silas would likely have to incriminate himself in the break-and-enter at the senator’s office. He knew that he could make a deal for immunity, but as a Canadian in the United States on a long-term work visa, he might risk being sent home. That would mean an end to his search for Penelope.

  While the line of inquiry they were discussing made perfectly good sense to him, there was little or no actual evidence to lead to a rock-solid conviction against Charles Nephi. It was like the country that surrounded them. Even the most solid thing in it—bedrock—sometimes was slick with paradox.

  SILAS CAMPED ON THE RIM of Hatch Wash for three nights. He combed the ledges and benches of the wash, scoured the canyon bottoms, ticking off the miles with his GPS. Each evening he returned to his camp, cooked a simple meal, kindled the fire, and studied his topographic sheets. Before going to bed each night he read the journ
al Penelope had left in the now ruined kiva at the bottom of the canyon, tucked away in a hidden alcove, unseen.

  Every day he searched, but she was not there.

  On the fourth morning he heard a pick-up truck grinding across the Point in low gear, four-wheel drive. He put the pot of coffee on and prepared to greet his guests. Five minutes later, as he brewed a dark blend of coffee, he watched as Roger Goodwin piloted his truck over an outcrop of naked red earth and came to rest near Silas’s new Outback. Two men and two women sat in the truck’s king cab with him. Roger waved and got out and opened the passenger door for his guests. He helped the women down, and the men followed.

  Silas had been practicing for the last two days. He smiled at the woman and extended his hand and said: “Um pitu?” You have come.

  She took his hand in hers. “Um waynuma.” Yes, we have come. It was a traditional greeting for the Hopi of Third Mesa.

  “Owí,” said Silas and he greeted each member of the Wisechild family in turn: Leon, his wife, Evelyn, and their daughter, Darla. Roger introduced Silas to the fourth member of the party, a member of the Kykotsmovi Council named Frank Quochytewa.

  “Mr. Quochytewa is here to help the family put Ms. Wisechild’s memory—and her ghost—to rest,” explained Roger.

  They had coffee, sitting on folding lawn chairs that Roger pulled from the bed of his pick-up. As the sun chased the morning chill from the landscape, Roger and Silas donned heavy packs filled with extra clothing, food, water, and ropes, and the six companions started down the dry arroyo toward the drop-off into Hatch Wash. The procession was quiet and somber, with Leon Wisechild asking the occasional question about the ongoing investigation into his daughter’s murder, and Silas doing his best to answer.

  When they were at the rim of the canyon Silas rigged a rope and helped each member of the party descend the tricky sections. Soon they were all on the canyon floor, making their way through brightly colored tamarisk and willow to where the box canyon opened onto the main stem of the creek. They came to the head of the canyon where it opened into a semi-circular amphitheater, once filled with ancient Pueblo ruins, now choked with emptiness.