The Same River Twice

by Stephen Legault

  “But Penelope looks like she was on her knees when she was shot. Isn’t that right?”

  “We think so, Robbie. Listen, I don’t know if Silas would want to hear this.”

  “He knows. He’s smart; he could see where the blood was, and where the bullet entered the rock. He figured it out. It means that she was either begging for her life, or executed, or both.” There was a long silence between them. Robbie fiddled with his coffee cup. “Does the FBI have a new profile based on all of this?”

  “We’re looking to see if there is a connection. I don’t think you have to work at Quantico to see that there is a strong relationship here. Pearce, McFarland, and your stepmother all knew one another; all were killed in a way that suggests a personal connection between the killer and his or her victims. They were all killed close to the Colorado River. What we get is only a thumbnail, but what we believe is that all three victims knew their killer.”

  “And you think it’s one killer, and not just three random murders?”

  “We’re proceeding as if they are all related, though not necessarily all the same killer. It’s possible that all three killings are linked by motive, but different people carried out the murders.”

  “So who had motive?”

  “That’s out of my area of expertise.”

  “Dad told me you used to be a field agent.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “I bet you were good.”

  “I had some game.”

  “Let’s pretend it’s the old days then. Dad seems to be focused on this business of the resort in the Escalante because it was where Penelope died, and because she and her friends were fighting it in the years leading up to her death. Smith was supporting it, and Eleanor Barry, Jacob Isaiah, and Paul Love were all part of the team advancing the project. Dad’s got a history with Isaiah and Love, as did Penelope. And Paul Love pulled a gun on Dad and his buddy Hayduke last spring. These guys all had millions of their own money on the line, and hundreds of millions in possible profits at stake. Maybe most damning of all was that Penelope and her friends were blackmailing the senator.”

  Rain stopped eating and raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s right. They had photos of him with Eleanor Barry; nothing too racy, but enough to stall, or maybe even sink, his career. They were lording them over Smith so that he would back down on his Colorado River Compact bill, which he did. They had given the photos to a reporter named Kresge with the Tribune, with the agreement that he would sit on them until the time was right, but he never got the chance to break the story.”

  “He died. In a car accident. I remember when that happened.”

  “Brakes went out on Soldier Summit.”

  “It’s a nasty piece of highway between here and Price.”

  “Which is the senator’s hometown.”

  “You think that Smith cut the lines?”

  “Doesn’t that sound familiar? Maybe it wasn’t Smith himself. Maybe it was someone who works for him. The senator’s assistant tried to kill Dad just last year doing the same thing on Comb Ridge. I think everybody thought that he just went crazy and tried to kill Dad, but maybe this is his thing. And there’s something else. Have you heard the name Tabby Dingwall?”

  “No, why?”

  “His name was in the same file that Kresge had on Smith. Can you find out who he is?”

  “You know, I got into forensic anthropology so I wouldn’t have to run names through a database anymore.” Rain was smiling when she said it. “I’ll do it, but you have to do something for me. I need you to tell your father to back off Smith. And Eleanor Barry.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Robbie, there’s more going on than you both know. I can’t get into it. But you’ve got to tell your father to back off.”

  “He won’t listen to me. I tell him that he has to stop and it will—”

  Rain’s phone rang. She made an apologetic gesture and answered it. She listened and after a minute said, “I’m with him now.” Robbie looked up. Then Rain said “okay,” and hung up.

  “Well, you might not have to have that conversation after all. Your dad just confronted a US senator at a town hall meeting and accused him of adultery and multiple homicides.”

  30

  SILAS PEARSON STOOD NEXT TO his rental at a pull-out looking over the Escalante National Monument on the Hogsback road. The stone plateau was pocked with a hundred canyons capped with countless domes, reefs, and rises. Silas felt a wave of relief that he would no longer have to search this desolate and lonesome landscape.

  He was startled when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked around as if he might find a cell tower but there was none. He looked at the call display and it read CALLER ID BLOCKED. He answered the ringing. “Pearson.”

  “It’s Rain.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “It is raining out—over the V, where Harris Wash meets the Escalante River. You should see it.”

  “Silas, where are you?” He told her. “I just got a call from Agent Taylor.”

  “They sending you to bring me in?”

  “No. But he’s pretty pissed.”

  “And he thought that I would listen to you rather than him?”

  “I’m calling as a friend. This is my personal cell. What you did back there in Boulder wasn’t very smart. You have to stop. You’ve got to trust me that the FBI is going to do its job and catch whoever killed your wife. But you’ve got to stop acting like a bull in a china shop.”

  “Smith is guilty.”

  “Maybe. But that’s not your job to determine. It’s not even our job to determine that. Our job is to work with other law enforcement agencies to build a case and make an arrest. The District Attorney will then lay charges and a court will make a determination of guilt or innocence. You’ll be involved in that, Silas, but what you are doing right now is going to destroy our case, if we even determine that Smith, Barry, or Isaiah are behind your wife’s murder. I want you to cooperate with Taylor. Give him what information you have, and then leave it to his team to take it from there. I know that Penelope’s murder is the most important thing in your world—”

  “Of course it is! She was my wife!”

  “I know, Silas, and I don’t blame you for doing what you’re doing, but you’ve got to trust me. If you don’t step back, Taylor is going to arrest you.”

  “Is that what he told you to tell me?”

  “He called me to see if I could reach out to you before it’s too late.”

  “I think trusting you was a mistake.” There was a long silence over the phone. Silas wondered if he had lost the cell signal on the wind.

  “It wasn’t a mistake, Silas. You can ask Robbie. We just spent two hours together. He’s on his way back to Escalante now. But you’ve got to listen to me.”

  “I’ve got to go, Dr. Rain.”

  “Silas—”

  He hung up. He threw the phone into the SUV and stood facing the wind for a long time.

  “DON’T YOU START on me too.” Silas sat in one of the hotel room’s two chairs, a set of maps and books laid out over the table. Robbie was in the room’s small kitchenette, microwaving dinner.

  Robbie put the food down in front of his father. “I’m not starting on you. I’m just checking to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

  “Five years, Robbie. And now we’re getting close, and everybody wants me to back off. For most of my life I’ve just sat back and let things happen. That’s the way it was with your mother, and that’s the way it was with Penelope. Easy come, easy go, I always thought. I’m tired of being a pushover.”

  Robbie sat down and they started to eat. Silas drank beer from a can and played with his food. “I wanted to hit him. Standing up there, smug, that look on his face like he was invincible; I wanted to walk right up to him and punch him in the face.”

  “I think we’d be having this conversation through a Plexiglas wall if you did that.”

  “I know
, but I don’t care.” Silas took a bite of his dinner and then pushed the plate away. “So, everything you’ve told me about Kresge and his car accident and the bribery, all of this was just sitting in some box of files in the archives of the Tribune? How is it that this didn’t come out before?”

  “Kresge was an old curmudgeon and didn’t trust anybody else with the story. He sat on it. When he died, nobody went through his files. They just boxed it all up and put it in storage.”

  “What’s this guy Harvey going to do with it?”

  “He’s starting to build the file from scratch, but without the source of the information, he’s reluctant to do anything with it.”

  “And that source was Penny.”

  “And Kiel, and Darcy, it turns out.”

  “And this other guy whose name you say was on file, Tabby Dingwall?”

  “That’s right. Have you ever heard his name before? I’m going to go down to the Devil’s Garden and look him up online.”

  “There is one other person who might know what’s going on.”

  “Where is Mr. Hayduke?” asked Robbie.

  “That’s a good question. My guess is he’s out in the Monument somewhere. If he was part of this band of friends working on taking down the Glen Canyon Dam, maybe he’s got a copy of these photos, and can verify their validity.”

  “If he does, why hasn’t he said anything about it so far?”

  “That seems to be the way he is; it isn’t until events start to crest that he shows up with some piece of missing information.”

  “And you don’t think that’s a little … strange?”

  “I think it’s a lot strange.” Silas told Robbie about Hayduke’s criminal record and history with PTSD. He filled his son in on Hayduke’s recent hospital stay.

  “I know this guy has been helpful over the last year—more than I have been—but I really don’t like him. He’s a few cans short of a six-pack, and that’s saying a lot for a guy who thinks he’s George Washington Hayduke.”

  “Maybe if you can find this Dingwall guy he’ll know more about the photos. If he was friends with Penelope and the others, why hasn’t he shown up before now? I need to find Hayduke and ask him about the photos. After that, I’ll cut him loose. Sound alright?”

  “Sounds like we have no choice.”

  31

  THERE WAS A KNOCK AT the door to Silas’s motel room. Robbie had been gone for an hour and he guessed that he had left without his key. When he opened the door, Katie Rain stood before him. “Buy a girl a drink?” she said, smiling.

  “I’M SORRY,” SILAS started after the pitcher of beer arrived. The restaurant was nearly empty. Robbie had been surprised to see them, but chose to continue on the computer terminal while Katie and Silas took a table and ordered beer.

  “So am I. Taylor called and put some pressure on me and I agreed to call. I crossed the line between agent and friend. That’s the way it’s been since the start. He was taking advantage of that, and I shouldn’t have let him. I’m sorry too.”

  “So you got in your car and drove for five hours just to tell me that?”

  “I guess I did.”

  “So now what?”

  “I don’t know. We drink our beer. Let your kid do some cyber-sleuthing over there. Go for a hike in the desert under the moon?”

  Silas smiled for the first time in what seemed like a month. “You’re not going to tell me what’s going on with Smith?”

  “I can’t. There’s a line and I’ve crossed it but I can’t do that.”

  Silas drank the rest of his glass of beer and refilled both of their mugs. He heard his son thanking the proprietor and then Robbie was next to him, his face drawn with concern.

  “What is it, Rob?”

  “Tabby Dingwall is—was—a Salt Lake City private investigator. He’s been missing for the last six months.”

  THEY WERE BACK in their hotel room. Robbie picked up where he had left off. “Tabby Dingwall was a fifty-something ex-cop. I found a story on him in the Tribune from fifteen years ago. He was a detective with the Salt Lake City police. He shot a kid, a twelve-year-old. Kid was dressed up all gangster-style, had a plastic gun, was hanging out with some friends near a Shop N Go. Dingwall rolls up responding to a reported break-in nearby and the kid pulls the gun. The papers suggest the kid did it on a dare from his friends. Dingwall ordered the kid to drop the gun but he didn’t. What happened next is conjecture, because Dingwall was riding alone and this was before Salt Lake City was carpeted in closed-circuit cameras. Dingwall in his hearing said the kid fired the gun and it made a sound like a twenty-two-caliber going off. The other kids who were there said they set off a firecracker. Whatever the case, Dingwall shot the kid, killing him.

  “He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but he quit the force. His marriage went up in flames the following year. He didn’t have any kids of his own, and here he was, in his mid-thirties and washed up. He started drinking. On a whim he signed up for a trip with the Southern Utah Wilderness Association. They went on a hike in Canyonlands. That was his turning point. I got all of this from the blog on his website. He got clean, got his PI license, and spent his downtime hiking in the canyons.”

  “Did he know Penelope?” asked Silas.

  “He did.”

  “How do you know?”

  Robbie reached into a folder and pulled out a sheet of paper. “This was on his blog. He called it Wilderness Investigations. Get it?” Robbie handed his father the sheet of paper. On it was a printed photograph.

  Silas took it and in the yellow light of the kitchenette examined the image there. It was low quality, printed on a cheap printer on standard paper, but the faces staring back at him were clear enough.

  “It’s alright, Dad.” Robbie put a hand on his father’s knee.

  “Silas, what is it?” Katie asked.

  “It’s a photograph of a group on a beach on the Colorado River. Kiel Pearce, Darcy McFarland, Tabby Dingwall, a clean-cut version of Josh Charleston, and Penny.” Silas looked away and swallowed.

  “They did a trip together in the spring seven years ago. I think that’s how they all met.” Robbie tapped the photo.

  “Darcy and Penny had been friends before,” Silas noted.

  “But Josh and Tabby were on the trip. And Kiel was the guide.” Robbie pointed to Pearce in the photo.

  “Just like in the Monkey Wrench Gang,” said Silas. “Do you remember in the spring when I was talking with Jane Vaughn’s husband about her burial wishes?”

  Katie nodded. “You went to Lee’s Ferry.”

  “In her will it said that if Jane, Darcy, or Penelope died first, then the other two would take care of scattering their remains on the Colorado. It said ‘the boys’ were on their own. Dallas Vaughn and I thought that meant us. But it didn’t. It meant Josh and Tabby.”

  Robbie nodded. “Dingwall went missing around the time that Kiel Pearce was killed. He had a client meeting set up and he never showed. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  “You think it’s possible that Dingwall is our guy? Was he involved in the business with the senator?” asked Silas.

  “He could have been. He’s either responsible somehow, or dead. It seems pretty suspicious. Unstable ex-cop becomes wilderness-loving crusader. His friends start to go missing—get killed—and he takes a flyer just as the last of them gets knocked off.”

  “Not the last of them,” said Silas. He was staring hard at the photo. He closed his eyes.

  “When we were in Moab, right before the fire, I paid a visit to Jacob Isaiah’s office.”

  “Silas, you didn’t break in, did you?” asked Katie.

  “Let’s just say that it wasn’t a social visit and leave it at that. One of the things I found was a set of personal files. He had one on Smith, on Barry, Love. He had one on Penny. There were photos in it: shots of her at a public event, shots of her having coffee. There were other files too, lots of names I didn’t recognize. I think Tabby Dingwall was one of them.” />
  Robbie said, “You think Dingwall was working for Isaiah—like a double agent—taking pictures, following Penny and the others?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was working for both Smith and Isaiah. I don’t know. I need to get that file.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Rain. “You go back in there and anything that is in those files will be inadmissible in court. As it is, it’s likely tampered evidence.”

  Silas tapped the arm of his chair, his head bobbing rhythmically up and down. “Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe Dingwall was straight-up with Penny. Maybe he was part of the gang. If that’s the case, where is he?”

  “I need to tell Taylor about this.” Katie started to stand.

  “And I need to find Josh. He’s the only one left. He’s likely in serious danger.”

  “The question is, danger from who?” asked Robbie.

  “Everything points to Smith,” said Silas.

  “I’m not one hundred percent certain of that,” Katie said, pulling a cell phone from her jeans. “I think Hayduke is in trouble, but I don’t know that it’s because of Smith. I’m going to call Taylor and tell him about this connection. I can’t believe that the locals overlooked it.”

  “The FBI wasn’t investigating Dingwall’s disappearance?”

  “No, it was Salt Lake County Sheriff’s. We don’t get involved unless the crime extends across state borders and I guess there was no reason to believe it had. This changes everything.”

  Rain stepped out of the motel room and onto the walkway that connected the second-storey rooms. Silas looked at his watch. It was almost ten at night. He found his cell phone and rummaged through his bag for his address book.