Slickrock Paradox (23 page)

“He could have killed the girl and this Williams fellow to cover his tracks.”

“I didn't say that,”

“No, but it's a possibility.”

“I'll run over to see Darla Wisechild this afternoon. I'll call you if I learn anything.”

“Thanks, Roger. I owe you.”

“I'll collect the next time I'm in town. I hear you're quite the chef,” said Roger. Silas laughed and they hung up.

SILAS STOPPED AT
the Red Rock Canyon bookstore on his way through Moab. He sat in the back at his computer and searched for the name Kelly Williams. It returned more than 8 million results. He narrowed it down: “Missing Kelly Williams.” He found what he was looking for at the top of the page. The first three or four stories were about the recovery of the man's body at Grand View Point. After that, the stories went back over two years, and he slowly read through them.

It turned out that there was more to Kelly Williams than a simple undergraduate student on a dig as a summer job. Williams had been twice charged with grave robbing under
ARPA
. Once he'd been charged with disturbing an ancient Pueblo site in the Grand Gulch area, west of Monticello. A second time he'd been accused of pilfering a grave on the Navajo Reservation. In both cases the district attorney didn't have enough evidence that Williams was directly involved to win a conviction, so the case was dropped. What was Williams doing working on a highly sensitive site like the Hatch Canyon ruin?

Silas began to wonder
when
the site had been cleared out. Peter Anton mentioned hundreds of artifacts. Were they stolen before or after Williams and Wisechild were killed? Did Williams play a role and somehow pay for it with his life? If Williams and Wisechild had been involved with the grave robbing—which is taboo for the Hopi—and paid for it with their lives, there might not be any connection with Canusa, with Jacob Isaiah, or with Penelope. He knew that this
shouldn't
bother him, but it did. He
wanted
there to be a connection.

The stories on Williams mentioned the charges against him only in the context of his disappearance and recent unearthing. He would have to look back through the records in San Juan and Coconino Counties, where the charges had been laid, to determine the timeline. He also decided that it was time to press Peter Anton for more information. Cortez was only an hour and a half from Blanding, so before going to Senator Smith's announcement tomorrow, he would pay Anton a visit.

The bell to his shop sounded. He looked up to see Jacob Isaiah walking down the center aisle, looking at the shelves packed with books as if he were simply browsing. Silas stood up.

“Sit, sit,” said Isaiah, “I don't need no help picking out a title.” Silas remained standing.

“I understand,” said Isaiah, as his stroll down the shelves brought him to the desk, “that you went and got yourself in
another
heap of trouble, Pearson.”

Silas opened his mouth to speak, but Isaiah cut him off with a pointy finger in his face.

“That's a nasty-looking cut, Silas, nasty. Now, what were you up to
this
time that got you all cut up like you've been in a knife fight with a Mexican?”

Silas closed his mouth. He wasn't going to play this game.

“Poking your nose into the wrong people's business, it seems.”

“And what business is that, Jacob?”

“Business is business. That's what your wife never could understand. Seems like you're going down that same sorry path, nothing but trouble. Look at you! You look like something that the dog up-chucked in the yard.” Flecks of white saliva formed at the corners of his mouth.

“Jacob, I don't have time for your insults today.”

“Maybe you have time for this, smart guy,” Isaiah barked, poking Silas in the chest with his finger. “A warning. You think that what you got in your professor head is going to help you find your wife. I'm here to tell you that's not the case. Nothing you know means what you think it does. Your wife ran off, plain and simple. There's nothing more to it. Not a goddamned thing. So get your head out of your ass and everybody else's business. Leave well enough alone.”

“You seem awfully agitated, Jacob, for a man who doesn't have anything to hide.”

“I've got nothing to hide, Pearson. I do have a lot to lose, and I'm not going to let you get in the way of a good business proposition that's going to put a lot of people around here to work, and put some money into this economy—”

“And into your pockets?”

“Maybe you don't like to make money up in Canada. Maybe you're all a bunch of fucking communists with your free health care and your socialist ways. Down here in America, we believe in the free market. We don't like people like you, or that wife of yours, poking your nose into our business. Fucking foreigners, Mexicans, Canadians, you're all the fucking same. Now your wife has gone off, and that's all there is to it. Them others, well, they had a run-in with some bad men, maybe. Lots of people on the road who would be happy to throttle you or bang you on the head with a stone as soon as look at you; sick people, sick times. I'm telling you, Pearson, this has got nothing to do with your wife, so you go back to your hiking and leave us to do our business. You got it?” He poked Silas with his finger again, his eyes wide and wild.

Silas drew in a sharp breath and exhaled. “Jacob, if you ever come in my store again and put that finger of yours in my face, I swear to God I'll break it off.”

Isaiah laughed, a speck of spittle landing on Silas's desk. “Son, there's nothing about
you
that scares me. I'll do whatever I goddamned well please. This is my town,
my
town, not yours. I'll be back and I'll put my finger where ever I damn well want to. Now, you mind what I just told you. It might keep you from getting that homely face of yours looking any worse.”

Isaiah turned and walked out of the store, leaving Silas as hot as if he'd been sitting in the heat at noon.

HE CALLED THE
Salt Lake City
FBI
office when he arrived back at his Castle Valley home. It was late afternoon and he sat under the pergola, watching the thunderheads build along the tops of the cliffs above the Adobe Mesa. Heat lightning flashed across the mesa as the clouds boiled with electrical currents. After a few minutes Katie Rain came on the phone.

“Hi Silas.”

“Hi Katie.”

“You're getting quite the reputation around here you know. We're calling you The Dreamer.”

“Really?”

“No, that's just me. What do you think?”

“Perfect,” Silas said. “What have you guys learned about Kelly Williams?”

“I'm a forensic anthropologist. I'm not an investigator, at least not for a long time now. Talking with you could get me in trouble. I mean, not trouble with a capital T . . .”

“It could. But not talking with me is going to get us nowhere. I think your guy Taylor is a good man, but he doesn't see the big picture.”

“And you do?”

Silas was quiet a moment, then he said, “It's starting to come together.” He told her his theory about Wisechild and Williams working together on the Hatch Wash ruins and somebody, maybe Peter Anton, maybe Jacob Isaiah, killing them to keep them quiet about the site.

“Tell me something,” he said, remembering his exchange with Jacob Isaiah. “Did the
FBI
release to the press or the public the cause of death of either Williams or Wisechild?”

“No way. We hold that pretty close.”

“Jacob Isaiah knew how both died. He told me so today. He was threatening me at the time, mind you, but he knew that Kayah had been strangled and Kelly bludgeoned. There are only two ways he would know that.”

“Somebody told him.”

“That's right, someone on the inside of the case. It sure as hell wasn't me.”

“Nor me,” said Rain.

“You have a leak. And of course, the other way he could have known was . . .”

“. . . if
he
killed them both.”

“That's right,” said Silas.

BY EIGHT THE NEXT MORNING
Silas was parked outside of Peter Anton's home in Cortez, Colorado. He had found the address through a contact in the administration department at
NAU
, and had left his home a little after six to make it across the border. He wanted to catch Anton off guard. He sat across the road from the two-story false-fronted adobe house just off Main Street. The rest of the neighborhood was 1950s-style bungalows, so Anton's modern home stood out. Just after Silas arrived, the front door opened and Anton came down the rust-colored steps and walked to his Chevy
SUV
. Silas stepped from his car and walked across the street. He left the cane behind, knowing that it reduced the effect of physical intimidation he wanted to convey. He called Anton's name.

The man looked up, startled. “Oh, it's you Dr. Pearson.”

“A little jumpy this morning, Dr. Anton?”

“Just a wee too much coffee is all. I've been up for hours working on a new project for Mesa Verde.”

“Are you off to the park now?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. What are you doing here in front of my house, Pearson?”

“This will only take a moment,” said Silas. He leaned against Anton's Chevy. “You know that Kelly Williams—”

“Is dead? Yes I know. I read the newspapers. Even here in Cortez, we get the news.”

“I found him.”

“Yes, I read that too.”

“You don't seem too upset or shocked by this.”

“Well, I suppose I'm not . . . not really surprised.”

“And why is that? Are you going to try and tell me he had it coming?”

“Kelly played pretty fast and loose. He took what he wanted and I suppose someone got tired of it.”

“You hired him to work on the Hatch Wash ruin.”

“Yes, that was before Kelly got sticky fingers.”

“I was there. I went to Hatch Wash.”

“I assumed you'd go. It's really quite amazing, isn't it? It makes the ruins in Grand Gulch look like a something a child would build.”

“It's been cleared out.” Silas watched Anton very carefully.

“What do you mean?” He put a hand against his
SUV
. His face seemed to register the shock.

“There's nothing left. The structures are there, but they are completely empty. Who do you think would have done this?”

Anton looked confused. “It could be anyone. There are hundreds of pot hunters in the Southwest. They steal what they can and sell it online or to unscrupulous collectors. There are literally tens of thousands of artifacts in circulation today that have been robbed from ruins like Hatch. I'm just sorry now that we didn't do something to prevent this.”

“You or Strom didn't report the find to the
BLM
?”

“We felt that by keeping it quiet we would stand a better chance of protecting the site.”

“That theory didn't really hold up, did it?” asked Silas. Before Anton could answer, he cut him off. “There might be hundreds of pot hunters, but who knew about Hatch?”

“I don't know. Just because we found it and cataloged it doesn't mean that some redneck on an
ATV
didn't drive up Kane Creek and happen to stumble into that box canyon. It was only a matter of time.”

“People have been stumbling around that canyon for more than a hundred years and haven't found it, at least not that we know of. It seems improbable that someone would find it now. Who knew about the ruins?”

“Me, of course. Kelly and Kayah. Jared Strom, and a few others at Dead Horse Consulting.”

“Do you think Kelly might have returned after you finished your work to clear the place? Sell it off?”

“It's possible. Even
probable
, given what he's alleged to have done.”

“Might that have—”

“Gotten him killed? Dr. Pearson, that is pure conjecture. Really, I have no idea why Kelly Williams, or Ms. Wisechild, got killed. No idea.”

Silas changed tacks. “Someone tried to leave me for dead in the Hatch Wash ruin. Did you know that?”

“My God, you're kidding. No, I had no idea. What happened?”

“I climbed into the kiva. I wanted to see if there was anything left. There wasn't, of course. When I tried to climb back out, I couldn't.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was no ladder. I used my rope to rappel in. But when I tried to climb out the rope had been tampered with.”

“How did you get back out?”

“Through the ventilation shaft.”

“Jesus Christ, man. You're kidding. I never would have imagined that it would be big enough. It can't be more than a foot and a half . . .”

“Almost exactly eighteen inches square. The elbow was the tough part.” Silas pointed to his face and showed Anton the marks on his arms.