Black Sun Descending (4 page)

“I don't think so. It might have shifted when I moved some of the overburden away. The skull was at a slight angle, as were the shoulders. It appeared as though the body might have been positioned on its side a little.”

“You said
positioned
. You think the body was moved here from somewhere.”

“Yeah, don't you? It's not like someone who worked on site just went out for a nap, lay down in the radioactive dust, and never got back up again.”

Rain smiled. “No, but we don't know how old these bones are. This could date from when the mill was operating. Bodies in radioactive material could decompose unpredictably. We don't have decomposition rate charts for this sort of thing. Once I get this body out of the ground and do some work on it I'll know what time period we need to search for missing persons.”

They were silent a moment, lost in their own thoughts. “You've been busy?” asked Silas. He felt suddenly awkward.

“I have. We've been working on a case on the West Coast. More than fifteen decomposed bodies. I've been doing the forensics on them. I've been in Seattle and Portland most of the last two months.”

“I just—”

“Silas, let's talk later. It's hard for a girl to breathe in this getup. Let me get a look at what you found.”

“You know, when I dream now, I don't think that I'm dreaming about Penny anymore. I don't wake up and think my wife wants me to find her. My first thought after this dream wasn't Penny wants me to find her, but Penny wants me to find
someone
.”

“Let's go find out who.”

SILAS PARKED HIS SUBARU IN
front of the two-story adobe home of Ken and Trish Hollyoak and sat motionless behind the wheel. The afternoon sun had sunk below the Moab Rim. Clouds marched in tight formation across the western sky.
We might get more snow before April is over
, thought Silas. Startled by a tap on his window, he jumped and hit his head on the ceiling of the car.

Ken Hollyoak laughed so hard that he nearly doubled over. Silas rolled the window down. “You know, you shouldn't go sneaking up on people.
You
, of all people, should know what that does to a man's heart.”

“Dr. Pearson,” Ken said, growing serious. “It's not the shock of surprise that has made my heart grow weary. It's the lack of surprise I find in the woes of the world that has given my heart trouble all these years.”

“I thought it was booze, fried food, and sitting on your butt in a courtroom that did it.”

“That too,” the lawyer conceded. “Are you coming in or you going to lower property values in my neighborhood by sitting in your car all night long?” Silas nodded, rolled up the window, and got out. “My God, Silas, what the hell are you wearing?”

Silas looked down at himself as if seeing his clothing for the first time. “These are hospital-issue pyjamas.”

“I assume there is a good story behind all this?”

“Just the usual.”

“To the guest house with you. Leave your clothing in a pile on the doorstep. I'll burn them for you. I'll get Trish to find something in the closet that fits and you'll tell us the tale.”

“WHAT DID THE
hospital say?” Ken asked, handing Silas a plate heaped with roast beef, potatoes, carrots, and salad. Silas, Ken, and Ken's wife, Trish, were sitting at a table under the pergola, festooned with the early leaves of grapes that grew along its trusses. Silas sipped appreciatively from a glass of beer while Ken drank club soda and lime.

“They think I'll be fine. I got the hottest shower and the best scrubbing from a male orderly I've ever imagined. Used a brush like a giant toilet bowl cleaner on me. The nurses took some blood and say they'll look for radioactive isotopes. They may put me on a dose of potassium iodine. I have to go back tomorrow. Doc says they're going to run some tests on my thyroid. Just the usual.”

“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 believe 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?”