Slickrock Paradox (28 page)

“Was a report on the environmental and historical significance of the area part of that evaluation?”

“A small part. We looked at the petroleum reserve reports and the financial reports, but yes, there were those considerations as well. I have to assure you, there was nothing there to indicate that Hatch had anything more than a steady water supply.”

“You know what I hate?” asked Silas. Martin looked confused. “I hate being lied to.”

“I think it's time we put an end to this—” Martin stood.

Silas remained seated. “I think you have been lied to. Either that or you are lying to me. It's one or the other, Mr. Martin.”

“Well,
I'm
not lying, and I've got to tell you that it's time for this conversation—”

“If that's the case, then I'd ask some hard questions of your consultants.
They
knew over two years ago, and maybe longer, that Hatch Wash would be off limits to the kind of development you are considering to support your . . . what did you call it? Your oil play?”

“I intend to ask those questions. I assure you, nobody is being lied to. Not you, and not me.”

Silas stood and shrugged. “I'm afraid you're in for a rude awakening, Mr. Martin.” Silas held out his hand. “Welcome to Utah.”

SILAS WAS BACK
at his bookstore when his cell phone rang. It was Katie Rain. “We've picked up the memory card from your friend Roger.”

“Did you watch it?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“Agent Taylor has sent the file to the
FBI'
s Digital Evidence Labratory in Quantico for analysis.”

“What do you think?”

“I think Peter Anton is in trouble.”

HE WAS AWARE THAT HE
was dreaming but couldn't stop the pageant of images. “Si, it's like an installation from Mars or Saturn—vast, complicated, sinister, an alien presence,” Penelope said to him.

A sinister, alien presence
. He could see tears running down her cheek, but when he reached to push them away, he could no longer touch her.

THE BOOK WAS
One Life at a Time, Please
; not one of Edward Abbey's best known works. Not
Desert Solitaire
, not
The Monkey Wrench Gang
nor even
The Fool's Progress
. Abbey himself wrote somewhere that he preferred it, and his other books of essays, to those more commercially popular works. Silas found the line on page ninety-six. It was in the essay “River Solitaire: A Day Book,” chronicling Abbey's ten-day solo trip down the Colorado River. The writer had launched his skiff just upstream of Highway 191 and floated past the Atlas Mill and then Potash. The Potash plant was a massive industrial complex on the banks of the Colorado about fifteen miles from Moab, and to most observers, it did indeed appear like a sinister, alien presence on the red rock earth.

It was a good place to hide a body. Silas considered if he wanted to find a third corpse. Maybe it was time to let the feds earn their pay.

It was six thirty-five. Most sensible people were still fast asleep on the first day of the September long weekend.
What the hell
, he thought. He found the cordless phone and dialed the now familiar number. It rang four times before she answered.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Yes.”

“Silas, what is it?” Something in his tone had betrayed him.

“There's another body.”

THE TEAM MET
near the Atlas Mill, just off the highway. Silas stood next to his Outback, a cup of coffee in his hands. Two black
SUV
s pulled up, followed by the Grand County sheriff in his patrol car and then Derek Penshaw from San Juan County. Silas watched as Dwight Taylor first got out of the driver's side of the lead
SUV
, then Agent Nielsen and Katie Rain emerged from the passenger doors. They walked over to him.

“Are we ready?” asked Taylor. He had his hands on his hips and wore his inscrutable aviator sunglasses that morning.

“Just a minute. We're waiting for one more.”

“Who?”

Silas peered over his shoulder toward the bridge that spanned the Colorado where it emerged from Hal Canyon. He pointed at the Lincoln Navigator rolling across it, slowing down for the sharp turn near the Atlas Mill. “My lawyer.”

When Ken Hollyoak rolled down his window, his hair was standing on end and he had heavy bags under his eyes. “The next time you want to find a body, Dr. Pearson, try to do it during regular business hours, will you please?”

Silas got back in his car, leading the convoy, Ken behind him, followed by the cavalcade of law enforcement agency vehicles. They drove along the twisting curves of the Colorado River, the road hemmed in on one side by five-hundred-foot cliffs of Navajo sandstone and the slick red back of the river on the other.

Silas had no idea what he was leading everyone to, except that in his dream Penelope had been quite specific about where she wanted Silas to search. But for what? For her, or for another body somehow connected to her own disappearance? Silas felt his stomach twist further into a knot. The constant motion, the feeling of living on the razor edge of a cliff, was taking its toll on him. He checked his reflection in the mirror and realized he was rapidly becoming an old man.

Another twenty minutes of the winding road, the river, the acid green hue of the late summer cottonwoods, and they came to the gate of their destination: the Intrepid Potash Corporation's Moab mine. Silas got out as the other vehicles pulled up. In a minute a pick-up truck bore down the paved road beyond the gate and a man in a hard hat got out. He waved and unlocked the gate. Agent Taylor walked up and the two men shook hands.

“I'm sorry about this,” Taylor apologized. “We'll do our best to not get in the way.”

“You said on the phone that you believed there was a body on site?”

“That's right. We have reason to believe someone may have dumped a body here.”

“When?”

Taylor shrugged. “We don't know that.”

“Okay, well, the place is all yours. We ship about a thousand tons of potash a day out of the site, mostly by rail, so there is some activity going on,” the mine manager said.

The convoy followed the manager up the Potash Road, and in a moment the main mine site came into view. The mine manager handed them hard hats.

Silas ignored them all as he scanned the site. The Colorado River slipped quietly by. That would be the obvious place to start. The entire mine site might end up being part of his search, though.

“What is this place?” Katie Rain asked.

“Intrepid Potash,” said the manager.

Ken Hollyoak, now more awake, cut in. “Used to be Texas Gulf when it opened in 1963. The Saskatchewan Potash Corporation bought it in 1995, and Intrepid bought it in 2000.”

“Mine's unique in all of our operations. We pump Colorado River water three thousand feet underground to dissolve the potash and push it to the surface through pipes. We use settling ponds to separate the brine from the marketable potash, which we either bag or ship out as raw product.”

“What's it used for?” asked Silas.

“Everything from water softeners to fertilizer to drilling rig solutions.”

“It used to be an underground mine when it opened,” added Hollyoak helpfully. “An accident that very year trapped twenty-five men twenty-seven hundred feet below the surface. Only seven survived.”

“We've come a long way since then.” The manager leveled a stare at Hollyoak.

“Okay, Dr. Pearson,” Taylor interjected. “Where do we start?”

Silas looked back at him. “You know, the last two times I did this I was alone, without a bunch of people looking over my shoulder asking me questions—”

Taylor held up his hands as if in surrender and turned and leaned on his truck.

Silas walked toward the river, the sheriff, Agent Nielsen, and Katie Rain following him. He crossed the road and stood on the banks and then looked back up at the mill as if seeing the plant from a boat mid-stream. “Let's spread out. Start on the bank of the river and just work our way up to the plant.”

“Not many places to hide a body,” said Rain.

“We might need to bring in the ground X-ray machine if we don't find anything on the first pass,” said Agent Nielsen. Silas was impressed; they were taking his lead seriously.

Eventually Taylor and the two
ERT
agents joined them in their skirmish line. Within an hour they were soaked with sweat, and standing up in the shade of the hulking mass of the processing plant.

“What's next?” asked Taylor, taking a drink from a bottle of water.

“Inside?” asked Rain.

Silas shook his head. “I don't think so.” He closed his eyes to remember the dream.

“What else is there?” asked Taylor.

Silas looked around, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. “The settling ponds.”

They drove in a convoy behind the mine manager again. Half a mile from the plant, high on a bench of sandstone, were four hundred acres of settling ponds laid out like rice paddies. Massive earth movers were perched on the edge to scoop out the settled salt and potash from the slurry that filled the ponds. The ponds were electric blue. Set against the red earth they were startling.

“This is really the most amazing part of the operation,” the manager boasted. “Mother nature does most of the work. We get three hundred days of sunshine, and the relative humidity is 5 per cent, so we don't need to use any energy. We just let it sit.”

“Why is it so blue?” asked Rain.

“We add a blue dye, like food coloring, to aid in the evaporation process. The color absorbs more heat. The ponds are lined with heavy vinyl to prevent leaking. When we're ready to extract the final product we use laser-guided equipment,” he said, pointing to the giant earth movers, “to scoop out the potash and salt so we don't rip the lining.” He stopped and realized that nobody was listening any more. All eyes were on Silas.

“Which ponds have been recently excavated?” Silas asked.

“These three here.” He indicated the ones by the two massive excavators.

“So that leaves us with—”

“Another fourteen,” the manager said.

Silas looked around him, feeling defeated. He turned and looked at the manager. “How hard would it be for someone to get in here, say, after dark?”

“The gate is locked. We've got a team of security, night watchmen who make their rounds of the main plant and all the auxiliary facilities. I'd say it would be tough to come in the main gate—”

“Are there other accesses?”

“Well, there are other roads in the area.”

“Have you got a map?” asked Silas.

They stood around the hood of the manager's pick-up and compared the map of the mine with Silas's
usgs
fifteen-minute topographic sheet. Silas turned and looked above him at the cliffs that fronted Dead Horse Point State Park, and below them at the crumbling Paradox Basin. He traced several routes on the map with his bone-dry finger, then he stopped.

“Let's start over here.”

They followed the manager around the massive ponds to where the road threaded between two reservoirs and then crossed a level plane to another set of tanks. They drove to the far side of the ponds and parked.

“This road,” said Silas as they gathered around the map again, “is called the South Fork Road. It winds along the river and connects with the Grand View Point Road way up on the mesa. From here you could drive up and be on Island in the Sky in about an hour.”

They turned and looked at the settling ponds. “Alright, let's get to work,” said Taylor. “Remember, if we find anything, we're going to be looking for forensic evidence, so crime scene rules are in effect. Janet, I want full video documentation before we start here.”

They waited for half an hour while Unger walked a complete perimeter of the series of settling ponds, videotaping the entire scene. Meanwhile, Silas, to the consternation of Taylor, walked up the road toward Island in the Sky half a mile, looking for tire tracks.

When he came back, he said to Taylor, “Half a dozen vehicles have been over this road since the last rain. Tough to tell which was the most recent.”

“Leave the forensics to us, Dr. Pearson. You concentrate on whatever it is we're here to find. Okay?”

Silas moved to the ponds. Huston had returned from his
SUV
with an infrared camera and began to scan the ponds, slowly walking along the narrow banks. Silas walked with him, more out of interest than his ability to be helpful. He had to admit that at this point, with the sun bearing down on them, and the afternoon looking like it would turn into some kind of biblical storm event, he was prepared to admit that Penelope had led him astray. There were more than seventy miles of Colorado River in the essay in
One Life at a Time, Please
. Maybe he'd misread the dream.