Black Sun Descending

PRAISE FOR THE RED ROCK CANYON MYSTERIES

“Exciting, dense with literary references, and definitely worth a try. Legault's complex new series will appeal to conspiracy buffs, outdoors enthusiasts, and literary detectives.” —
Library Journal

“A perfect recipe for conflict: big money, business first, abuse of Native rights and history, all resulting in murder . . . a skillful story [that] marks a series worth investing your time in.” —
Hamilton Spectator

“Legault does a masterful job of making it all so believable. The human landscape in
The Slickrock Paradox
is littered with characters that are not what they seem to be, such that even the good guys are suspect, right up until the end.” —
Rocky Mountain Outlook

PRAISE FOR THE DURRANT WALLACE MYSTERIES

“Stephen Legault has proven himself to be one of the most versatile writers currently working in Canadian crime fiction.” —
National Post

“For those looking for a glint of Canadian history set in a riveting narrative, Canmore writer Stephen Legault's
The End of the Line
combines the guilty pleasure of a page-turning murder mystery with the brain food found in Pierre Berton's history books.” —
Avenue Magazine

PRAISE FOR THE COLE BLACKWATER MYSTERIES

“The Cole Blackwater stories are among the most riveting today, and
The Vanishing Track
is the best yet in this intensely dramatic series.” —
Hamilton Spectator

2: THE RED ROCK CANYON MYSTERIES

For Jenn, Silas, and Rio
For Greer
For the Grand Canyon and the
Colorado River, wild and free

SILAS PEARSON STOOD ON THE
edge of the world and contemplated its searing emptiness. It was spring. Again. The afternoon sun was warm but not yet hot; in the distance, in the Henry Mountains and the Abajos, he could see fresh snow clinging to the flanks of the soaring peaks.

The Colorado River lay below him, more than 1,500 feet down sheer walls of Cedar Mesa sandstone and the Honaker Trail Formation. Silas sat down on the edge of naked sandstone that was as red as a dying star, his legs dangling into vacuous space. He looked down from his promontory on the back of the muddy, churning Colorado. The same river that had cut through so much of his world for the last four years. The same river that his wife Penelope de Silva—missing all this time—had loved and admired and fought to defend.

The previous fall Silas had shifted his search from the Island in the Sky, just a few miles away across the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers, to this corner of Canyonlands National Park. Here, in the Needles, and throughout the adjacent Canyon Rims region of southeastern Utah, he had prowled looking for some sign that Penelope had passed this way whenever the winter storms didn't close the jarring dirt roads.

Last summer he had come as close as he had ever come to finding a trace of his long-lost wife: her prized journal—
Notes on Ed Abbey Country
—hidden deep in nearby Hatch Wash. The journal had led him to Josh Charleston and Josh—a misanthropic, brash, and egotistical youth masquerading as Edward Abbey's character Hayduke from
The Monkey Wrench Gang
—had revealed Penelope's purpose for being in the Utah desert in the first place.

A raven drifted overhead, black as obsidian against the pale spring sky. The sounds of the river floated up from far below, like people talking in muted voices. Silas couldn't see the first rapids of Cataract Canyon, but he could hear them a few miles around the bend in the Colorado, beckoning him to descend. The raven followed the river, and Silas knew that it had a far greater chance of finding his mournful prize than he did.

He fiddled with his
GPS
unit, too disheartened to call up the day's progress, let alone the exhausting statistics from the winter's exploration. He still transferred the data to the gigantic wall maps that adorned his home in the nearby Castle Valley, first cross-hatching in the territory he searched, and then going back to shade it in when he'd completed a second exploration. It no longer brought a sense of accomplishment. It felt like he was slipping deeper into the darkness of a crack in the stone, never to see daylight again.

Silas rubbed his face. His wife had left four years ago on one of her regular backpacking trips into the wild, monolithic country within a day's drive of Moab, the former uranium mining town now rife with tourists. What Silas learned from the discovery of her journal, and his subsequent conversations with Josh Charleston—if you could call the string of invectives issuing from Hayduke's mouth English—was that Penelope had been documenting all of the landscapes Edward Abbey wrote about in his twenty-two books. She planned to petition Congress to create the Edward Abbey National Monument, a sweeping undertaking to protect much of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico's red rock wilderness.

This had brought her into conflict with many of the Four Corners region's boosters: miners, oil-men, resort builders, off-highway vehicle promoters, dam builders, and the politicians who supported them.

And then she disappeared.

Silas stood up, his back aching, his legs worn out, his feet hot with blisters. He looked at the
GPS
unit in his hands and considered, momentarily, throwing it into the chasm that yawned before him. Instead he picked up his pack and stuffed the device deep inside, along with his water bottles, trail mix, maps, and first aid kit. He turned his back on the spectacle before him—the sun painting the sheer cliffs above the confluence a delicate burnt umber—and slowly walked back toward his camp.

IN THE DREAM
she was drowning, but not in water. Silas could see her, eyes closed, her face a mask of serenity against the flow, but he could not reach her. He never could.

When she opened her eyes he nearly jolted awake; he had learned, over the course of the last year, to remain sleeping. The dreams were his only connection to the hope that he might find his wife.

“I have seen the place called Trinity,” she said, through the slurry that was enveloping her, pulling the air from her lungs.

Silas remained silent in the dream. He knew if he spoke she would not hear him. He watched her disappear in the flood.

SILAS WOKE BEFORE
dawn, soaked in sweat, his cracked hands tearing at the sleeping bag. “I have seen the place called Trinity,” he said aloud. He punched the sleeping bag away from himself, aware of the cold beyond; he could see that snow had fallen on the tent through the night, its opaque mask filtering the light of morning.

He found his notebook and wrote the words in it. There were dozens of pages of such notes scratched in his rough handwriting. He gathered his clothing and pulled on his pants, shirt, and a down jacket, fitting a wool cap over his ears and pulling a pair of gloves on before carefully unzipping the tent. Heavy, wet snow fell into the vestibule. He pulled on his boots, stiff and frozen. The sweat from yesterday's hike had turned to ice in the night. He stood, his body creaking like an old wooden door, and gazed about him. He was the only person in the campground in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. A few inches of snow covered his Subaru Outback, the small picnic table, and the park entrance road. He walked to the car, retrieved his camp stove, fuel, coffee pot, and box of food, and hurriedly made breakfast, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands as he did. He had no idea where or what Trinity was, why Penelope had told him she had seen this place, or what it meant. He hoped that somehow it was leading him slowly back to her.

THE SNOW THAT
had blanketed the area had also fallen in the broad Spanish Valley around the town of Moab. The cliffs that ringed the town were plastered with white, and as the sun appeared over the horizon and warmed them, they appeared to be weeping. Silas didn't stop in Moab but turned off for Hal Canyon and took Highway 128 east.

He drove up the deep grotto of the Colorado River; where the sun had warmed it the road looked like an oily snake next to the red back of the river. He made the turn onto the Castle Valley road and soon was driving through thick snow to reach his small house. He parked and pulled an armload of gear from the back of the Subaru, then slogged to his front door. Silas opened it, dumped his gear in the kitchen, and without turning any lights on went into the living room. From floor to ceiling on three walls were maps of the Four Corners region. Each of them had sections hatched or colored in. The maps of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and of the Delores River in Colorado, had curling Post-it notes with the names of the dead Silas had found in those locations the previous summer and autumn. It had been six months since he had last led sheriff's deputies and the
FBI
to a body.

“I have seen the place called Trinity,” he said. He now considered himself a reluctant authority on the writing of Edward Abbey, and this passage sounded familiar. He scanned the maps and then looked at the small bookshelf next to the tiny table with its two chairs. Twenty-two books adorned the shelves. The last time he had pulled a book from this shelf he had called
FBI
Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Katie Rain at her home in Salt Lake City and directed her to two bodies on the Delores River. He drew a deep breath and reached for
Desert Solitaire
.