Black Sun Descending Read online

  “Just the usual,” mocked Ken. He wiped his mouth and shook his head.

  “Silas,” said Trish kindly. “What were you looking for?”

  “Found. What I found was a body.”

  “Not this again,” said Ken. “I thought this was over. I thought that shrink I recommended got your head back down to size.”

  “I’m afraid not, Ken.”

  “Do you know who it was?” asked Trish, putting a calming hand on her husband’s massive arm.

  “I just saw the skull, neck, and shoulders. Sheriff Willis asked the FBI to bring in Katie Rain to help with the excavation and identification.”

  “Ah, the very fine Dr. Katie Rain.”

  Silas stopped eating and looked up sharply at his friend.

  “Don’t play coy, Dr. Pearson. I know that you and the FBI’s forensic anthropologist have a mutual interest in one another.”

  “I haven’t seen her since the fall. She came to Moab to help me look for Penelope. That’s all. There’s nothing more.”

  “Suit yourself, Silas,” said Ken, shoveling potatoes into his mouth.

  “Do you think this might be Penny?” Trish asked carefully.

  “I don’t. I was just telling Dr. Rain that when these bodies show up now, I no longer think, Oh, I’ve found my wife! ”

  Silas told Ken and Trish about his dream.

  “I’m sorry, Silas,” Trish said.

  “Don’t be. I’m not. I just don’t want to be doing this anymore. I’m tired. I’m not interested in uranium waste and I don’t care if the uranium companies are tearing up the Colorado Plateau and the Arizona Strip. I don’t care! It’s not my fight. It might have been Penelope’s, but it’s not mine.”

  “Come, let’s finish this talk of corpses and radioactive sludge,” said Ken abruptly. “There must be more interesting things to discuss.”

  “Well, in fact,” said Silas, “there is. Turns out I am going to need a lawyer. Sheriff Willis wants me to come to the office tomorrow. I think the Department of Energy is going to press trespassing charges against me.”

  SILAS’S CELL PHONE BUZZED AT ten o’clock. Ken and Trish had just gone to bed. He was sitting alone under the pergola by the guest house, watching the stars above the darkened form of the Moab Rim. “Dr. Rain,” he said, answering.

  “Hi Silas.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “Long day in full-body protective clothing.”

  “At least you won’t have a surly orderly scrubbing you with a wire brush.”

  “I clearly need to get out more because that almost sounds like fun.”

  “What can I do for you, Doctor?”

  “Buy a girl a glass of three-point-two?”

  “Same place?”

  “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  Silas reached Main Street and sat in the nearly empty lot in front of Eddie McStiff’s. He let the swirl of his emotions settle before opening his car door and entering the bar.

  Katie Rain was sitting at a table in the nearly deserted pub. She stood when Silas entered. “If I give you a hug, am I going to need to get a decontamination shower?” Silas smiled weakly. They embraced a moment and then sat down. Silas filled her in on the events at the hospital.

  She regarded him a long minute. “You’ve been out a lot this spring?”

  “Yeah. I just spent several weeks in the Needles district of Canyonlands. And before that I was down along Dark Horse Canyon. Nothing. But I just can’t seem to stop. And now this dream.” Silas told her about his most recent nocturnal vision. “I don’t know if I want them to stop. When I had this dream the other night, out in the Needles, part of me was glad to see Penny again. To hear her voice.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, well, the problem is that when I see her she’s usually in trouble. It’s not like before. Before she’d be sitting at the dinner table.”

  Katie reached out her hand and Silas let her take his. She squeezed it, then took a drink of her beer. “I want to thank you for finding me a truly unique body to work on, Silas.”

  “What are friends for?”

  “I’ve never worked on a set of bones that have been buried in radioactive waste.”

  “Is that what this is? You think the bones were buried there?”

  “I think a body was buried there and has decomposed. We’ve checked with the US Department of Energy, which is running the cleanup of the Atlas site, and they haven’t reported any workers going missing, so this is a case of someone dumping a body.”

  “How would someone do that? The place has security.”

  “Well, you got in. You’re an English professor. How hard can it be?”

  “Do you have any idea who it is?”

  “No idea. I’ve got to go to work first thing in the morning and start on the ID. The fact that the body was buried in radioactive material is going to make this problematic. Like I said, we don’t have exact formulas for rate of decay in this sort of situation. Insect activity is responsible for a lot of the decomposition process, but because of the toxicity of the material this body was in, there was very little in the way of insects. There is a lot of anecdotal material on the record, from past experiments with radioactive contamination, but this isn’t like Hiroshima or Chernobyl. The fact that the site was wet further complicates things, because water speeds up decomposition. The degree to which these two factors might cancel each other out is another unknown. It’s going to be hard to pinpoint the time of death, and that will make searching missing persons files that much harder. Plus, I get to wear my hazmat suit the whole time, because the body is considered radioactive waste now. It makes for an interesting experience.”

  She continued, “The teeth are in rough shape. There’s been a lot of corrosion of the softer bones due to the nature of the material this body was found in. The body was close enough to the river that the aquifer was practically moving water through the substrate over the body on a continual basis. It’s a real mess but we might get a partial match. We’ll expedite the request for a match. If this is a known missing person, it shouldn’t take more than a few days. There are a few fillings that we might be able to line up with dental charts.”

  “Is it a woman?”

  “Yes, and we think she would have been in her mid-to late thirties. The pelvis was largely intact, so I was able to examine the sub-pubic arch. It’s U-shaped and diverges at an angle of more than ninety degrees. Just to be on the safe side, I examined the skull. The squamosal portion of the frontal bones are rounded, more … elegant.” She smiled at him. “Again, clearly female. She was white: a long, narrow—comparatively speaking—skull with well-developed bony brow ridges. That’s the easy part. After the age of twenty-five, and this woman was definitely older than that, there aren’t many major events that we can use to determine age at the time of death. No tooth eruptions, no ossification centers. That’s where different bones harden at different times. You might remember with the young Hopi woman, for example, that we knew she was under twenty-five by the fission points in her skull, and the fact that her collarbone hadn’t finished maturing.”

  Silas nodded. He watched her with rapt attention.

  Katie continued. “With this woman I looked at the skull. With men we start with the pelvis, but once I determined the sex of this subject, we had to look elsewhere due to the damage caused during parturition—sorry, childbirth.”

  “I know what it means,” Silas tried to smile.

  “Right. Professor of English. We use endocranial closure rate to determine age. The sutures in the skull start to close from the inside out. This isn’t exact. Nutrition, disease, and other factors play a role here, and the rate of closure varies. But we can get close. I put her age between thirty and forty years of—”

  “Do you think—?”

  “I’m sorry, Silas, I know this is hard. It’s just way too early to tell if this is Penelope. I don’t think it is. Your wife is Hispanic, and I believ
e our body was Nordic and not Mediterranean Caucasoid, based on face height, but the differences are slight. Also, Penelope hadn’t had children, and the pelvic bones in our subject indicate that she had at least one. I’m going to be doing a dental examination in the morning and I’ll know more then. What is it, Silas?”

  “I don’t know what I’m more afraid of: that this is Penelope, or that this isn’t.”

  IN THE MORNING SILAS WAS given a prescription for potassium iodine and told to see his family physician in two weeks in order to monitor any damage from exposure to radioactive material. He still had two hours before he’d been told to report to the Grand County Sheriff’s Department, so he decided to visit Red Rock Canyon Books, which he owned but hadn’t opened in nearly a month.

  Silas parked under the sweeping cottonwood tree that shaded the old adobe building that housed his on-again, off-again business. In the Moab business community he’d earned the reputation as the operation in town trying the least to succeed. At the doorstep he retrieved the mail from its ceramic pot and then unlocked the door. He stood for a minute there, feeling a peculiar sensation. The morning was quiet and calm on this residential street a few blocks from the main drag. He could hear a chicken in one of his neighbors’ backyards, and somewhere a dog barked. He turned around and looked up and down the street, wondering what made him suddenly feel as if he were being observed. He shook his head and dismissed the uncharacteristic bout of paranoia as the side effect of a sleepless night.

  Inside the bookstore, Silas switched on the row of pot lights that ran the length of the narrow building. The room was warm and smelled a little like books that had been packed in cardboard boxes for too long, which many of them had. Silas left the door open and closed the screen against insects and spiders. He walked to the back of the building, dropped the mail on his desk, and switched on the air conditioner. In a moment it was blowing icy air into the room so he walked back and pulled the front door shut. Before he did, he looked up and down the street once more. Nothing was out of the ordinary. The book business had been slow during the winter months. But he had the shop open for a few weeks around Christmas and, to his surprise, several local residents had come in to purchase gifts for their friends or family. It had astonished Silas not because his selection was poor—the books were, after all, from his own personal library, moved from his and Penelope’s home near Flagstaff after she disappeared and he relocated to the Castle Valley—but because people actually seemed to enjoy searching through his collection of rare and used volumes of contemporary western literature. If he wasn’t careful, he might actually find himself running a legitimate business. His months of restless searching this spring had left his shop in disarray: dust had settled over the volumes and spiders had set up house in the dim corners of the century-old building.

  Silas sifted through the mail, recycled the junk, and stacked the bills to deal with later. He turned on his aging desktop computer. Fidgeting in his chair, he opened an email browser. There was a note from his oldest son, Rob.

  Hey Dad,

  Hope all is well in the Canyonlands. Was thinking of you recently, imagining that you’re up to your old ways, prowling around in slot canyons and on the mesas. I want you to take care of yourself. I know that what happened last summer was really tough. Jamie and I are thinking about you. If you’re not careful one of us is likely to show up there and start crawling around on hands and knees looking under juniper trees with you! I’m not kidding: I am thinking about a trip to Utah sometime. It’s been too long, and it seems unlikely that you’re coming to Vancouver anytime soon. Jamie is well, he’s back in college again, studying what they call liberal arts. I’m thinking about taking a job with the RCMP! Can you believe that? It’s a good position, working in their Forensic Identification Services division, but it’s in Ottawa so I’m not sure if I want to move. I’ll keep you in the loop.

  I know things have been difficult and that you think that Jamie and I didn’t like Penelope, but that’s not true. We were just young, and didn’t understand why you left Mom. But that’s all water under the bridge, and we want to help. Or at least I do. Jamie will come around. So let’s talk about getting together sometime. Maybe do a river trip, or go for a hike.

  Love, Robbie

  What the hell was he doing? He should get on a plane tomorrow and fly to Vancouver. It had been more than four years since he’d seen his sons. Maybe it was time to move on.

  He was startled by the chimes that rattled when someone opened the door. The sign on the door read, OPEN WHEN I’M HERE. CLOSED WHEN I’M NOT. He was about to tell whomever had gotten lost and wandered into his store that he wasn’t really open when Silas recognized the bearded face of Josh Charleston, the young man who referred to himself as Hayduke. He felt the dueling emotions of gratitude toward this scruffy environmental activist and dread.

  “Hey, you open! Holy shit, I haven’t seen you in …” Charleston seemed to be counting in his head, “seven months!”

  “Hi Josh.”

  “It’s still Hayduke, man.”

  “I’m not really open. I just stopped in before I … before an appointment.”

  “It’s really good to see you!” Charleston crossed the distance and reached across the desk to give Silas an awkward hug. Silas could smell body odor and wood smoke on the man’s clothing and in his matted hair.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” said Silas, pulling back from the embrace. “Where have you been?”

  “You know, all over. I spent some of the winter down on the Baja coast. Did you know Ed Abbey spent time down there? I met some folks who knew him. It sounds like it was pretty crazy. And I camped down in the Sups near Tucson. You know, the Superstitious Mountains. Old Cactus Ed liked it there too. I found his fire lookout. It was a great winter.”

  Two things Silas hadn’t forgotten about Hayduke: his feverish passion for Edward Abbey and his frenetic energy. Silas couldn’t contain his smile. “Sounds like you had a good time. You didn’t have trouble getting across the border?”

  “You mean because of that business on Comb Ridge? Shit no. There was no problem. The feds didn’t give me any grief. Hell, I’m a war vet! People treat me like royalty at the border. But I was just down in Blanding, getting ready for a trip into the Abajo Mountains, when I heard the news.”

  “What news?”

  “The news, man! That you found another body.”

  “That was on the news?”

  “Shit, don’t you have a TV or get the internet on that thing?” Hayduke pointed at Silas’s computer.

  “I haven’t been online today.”

  “It’s all over the news, man. The media are running wild. I bet they’re camped outside your place again.”

  Silas’s heart sank. All he wanted to do was go home and forget about Edward Abbey and bodies. “So, Hayduke, what brings you by the bookstore? I haven’t been here in weeks, and here you are.”

  “I was looking for you, you know, when I heard the news. I thought I’d stop by and say hello.” Silas considered the young man as he watched him stroll along the aisle scanning the spines of the volumes. Charleston seemed less gruff than Silas remembered, less like the persona of George Washington Hayduke—the Edward Abbey character—and more like a late-twenties kid. “Do you have any idea who this body might be? Was this another one of your dreams?”

  Silas rubbed his face. He quickly recapped the events so far.

  “Holy motherfucker,” Hayduke said. “You don’t think this might be Penny?”

  “I won’t know for a while. The FBI is assisting with the forensic identification. Now, I don’t want to sound rude but I have to get to the sheriff’s office.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m being charged with trespassing.”

  “Those fuckers. You do them a favor, and they charge you for it. Figures.”

  SILAS LOCKED THE door behind him and watched as Hayduke, waving and promising to be back soon, crossed the road and got into his Jeep. Spin
ning his tires, he headed south.

  Silas drove the four blocks to the Grand County seat, the center of government of the county. Ken Hollyoak was waiting for him dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a sports coat, his shirt open at the neck, revealing the top inch or two of the scar that tracked his sternum.

  They entered the building together. Ken presented himself at the reporting desk and soon Sheriff Willis appeared. He shook hands with both Silas and Ken. “Do either of you want coffee?”

  Ken looked at Silas, puzzled. “No thanks, Sheriff.”

  Willis opened the door to the office and the men followed him to the conference room. This was where, the previous summer, Silas had first met Katie Rain and had been told the body he had found in Arches National Park wasn’t his wife’s but that of a young Navajo woman. It had been the start of a harrowing experience, and he had the feeling of teetering on the edge of a cliff as he stepped inside.

  The assembled group did nothing to calm his anxiety. Dwight Taylor, Eugene Nielsen, and Dr. Rain were in the room, but there was no one present from the Grand County District Attorney’s office. Once again Ken and Silas exchanged glances.

  “What’s going on here?” Ken remained standing.

  “We have some news for you, Dr. Pearson,” started Taylor. His deep voice seemed to fill the room.

  “Before we go any further,” Ken held up a hand, “my client has the right be notified if charges are forthcoming. If so, he has to be informed.”

  “Ken,” Sheriff Willis said in a weary voice. “I’ve convinced the Department of Energy not to press trespass charges.”

  Silas felt a wave of relief wash over him. Taylor continued. “We have an ID for the body you found. Dr. Rain was able to do quick work with dental records and we were able to compare these to missing persons files from across the region. This was not your wife, Dr. Pearson. We had her dental records on file. We have identified this body as that of Jane Vaughn. The deceased was thirty-five years old and a resident of Flagstaff, Arizona. Her records were also in our database.”