Murder In Black Canyon

“Your family is camping there?”

“Not my family.” She gave an impatient shake of her head. “That hippie group or whatever you want to call them.”

“The peace-loving isolationists,” Dylan said.

Kayla looked at him. She wasn’t desperate or hysterical or any of the other emotions he might have expected. She looked—angry. At the injustice of the man’s death? At being forced to witness the scene? He felt a definite zing of attraction. He had always liked puzzles and figuring things out. He wanted to figure out this not-so-typical woman.

“Are you a member of the Family?” Ethan asked.

“No!” The disdain in her tone dropped the temperature in the room a couple degrees. She slid a hand into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a business card. “I’m a private detective.”

“What were you doing in Dead Horse Canyon?” Graham Ellison asked.

She took another drink of water, then set the glass aside. “A client of mine has a daughter who cut off contact with him. He hired me to find her, and I located her living with the group. Then he asked me to check on her and make sure she was okay, and to ask her to get in touch with him.”

“He had to hire a PI for that?” Dylan asked.

That hot, angry gaze again. “He hired me to find her, first. He didn’t know where she was. After I located her, he thought she might listen to me if I approached her initially.”

“Most parents wouldn’t be too thrilled about their kid running off to join a group some people might see as a cult,” Ethan said.

“Exactly.” Kayla nodded. “Anyway, I found the young woman, gave her the message from her father and was leaving when three men rushed into the camp, shouting. Two of them were dragging a body behind them. The body of a man. He was covered in blood and...” Her lips trembled, but she pressed them together, her nostrils flaring as she inhaled. “Part of his head was gone.”

“What were they shouting?” Graham asked.

“They said they were walking out in the desert and saw him lying there.”

“Saw him lying where?” Carmen asked.

Kayla shook her head. “I don’t know. And before you ask, I don’t know why they thought they needed to bring him back to the camp. I told the leader—some guy who calls himself the Prophet—that his men shouldn’t have touched the body, and that they needed to call the police, but he ignored me and ordered the men to take the dead man back to where they had found him, then report to him for a cleansing ritual.”

“He refused to report the incident?” Graham’s voice was calm, but his expression was one of outrage.

“He said they didn’t have cell phones. Maybe they don’t believe in them.”

“Phones don’t work in that area, anyway.” Simon Woolridge, the team’s tech expert, spoke for the first time. “They don’t work on most of the public land around here. No towers.”

“That’s why I didn’t call you, either,” Kayla said. “By the time I got a signal on my phone, I was almost here.”

“Did anyone say anything about who the dead man might be?” Graham asked. “Did you recognize him?”

“No. Everyone looked as horrified as I did.”

“Did the men do as the Prophet asked and take the body away?” Dylan asked.

“I don’t know. I left before they did anything. No one tried to stop me. I wanted to get away from there and I headed straight here.”

“What time was this?” Graham asked.

“I don’t know. But it’s a long drive. So...maybe an hour ago?”

“More like an hour and a half,” Carmen said. “Dead Horse Canyon is pretty remote.”

“Lieutenant Holt, I want you and Simon to check this out,” Captain Ellison said. “Ms. Larimer, you ride with Lieutenant Holt and show him exactly where you were.”

“We know where Dead Horse Canyon is,” Simon protested.

“The canyon is seven miles long,” the captain said. “She can show you the location more quickly.”

Silently, Kayla followed Dylan to his Cruiser. He opened the passenger door for her and she slid in without looking at him. He caught the scent of her floral shampoo as she moved past him, and he noticed the three tiny silver hoops she wore in each ear. By the time he made it around to the driver’s side, she was buckled in and staring out the windshield.

“You holding up okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” Her clipped tone didn’t invite sympathy or further conversation, so he started the Cruiser and followed Simon out of the parking lot. They followed the paved road through the national park for the first five miles, past a series of pull-offs that provided overlooks into the Black Canyon, a half-mile-deep gorge that was the reason for the park’s existence. Every stop was crowded with RVs, vans and passenger cars full of tourists who had come to enjoy the wild beauty of the high desert of western Colorado.

“How long have you been a private detective?” he asked.

She was silent so long he thought she had decided not to talk to him, but when he glanced her way she said, “Two years.”

“Do you have a law enforcement background?” A lot of PIs he knew started out with police or sheriff’s departments before hanging their shingle to do investigations, but Kayla hardly looked old enough to have had many years on the force under her belt.

“No.”

“How did you get into the work?”

She let out a sigh and half turned to face him. “Why do you care?”

“I’m making conversation. Why are you so hostile?”

She ducked her head and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Sorry. I think I’ve just had an overdose of arrogant, good-looking men today.”

She thought he was good-looking? He filed the information away for future reference. “I’m not trying to be arrogant,” he said. “Cops are trained to get the facts of a situation as quickly as possible. That can come across as brusque sometimes.”

She nodded. “I get that. It’s just been a tough day. A tough week, really.” She glanced at him, her expression a little less guarded. “I thought I was applying for a secretarial position when I answered the ad for the job,” she said. “My boss got sick and trained me to take over the business. When he died from cancer last year, he left the business to me.”

“And you like it enough to keep at it.”

Another sigh. “Yeah, I like it. Most of the time. I mean, it beats a job in a cube farm. I like it when I can help people, even if it’s just finding a lost pet or helping a woman locate her deadbeat ex so that she can collect child support. But you see the ugly side of people a lot.”

“What you saw today wasn’t very pretty.”

“No.”

She fell silent again, and he was sure she was back at the camp, picturing that bloody body again. He wanted to pull her away from the image, to keep her focused on him. “Who are the handsome, arrogant men who rubbed you the wrong way?” he asked.

“Daniel Metwater, for one.”

“The Prophet of this so-called Family?”

“Yeah. Have you met him?”

Dylan slowed for the turn onto a faintly marked dirt track that veered away from the canyon and the park. “No. What’s he like?”

“He talks a good game of peace and love and spirituality, or at least, that’s what he writes in his blog. But it all sounds like a con game to me, especially considering he preaches about the futility of cell phones and technology, yet he has a website he updates often when he’s away from the camp. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wanted to shake all those women who were making cow eyes at him and tell them he didn’t really care about any of them. He’s the kind of guy who looks out for himself and his image first.”

“What makes you think that?”

He halfway expected her to slap him down again. Instead, she relaxed back into the seat. “My dad was a charming swindler like Metwater—good-looking, silver-tongued and scary intelligent. His game was as a traveling preacher. I spent most of my childhood moving from town to town while he conned people out of whatever they would give him.” She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face. “I guess that experience has come in handy in my work. I can usually spot a grifter as soon as he opens his mouth. Daniel Metwater may be preaching peace, love and communing with nature, but I think he’s hiding something.”

“Do you think he killed the guy you saw?”

“I don’t know. It depends on when the guy died, I think. Metwater was standing with me for a good while before his followers dragged the body into camp. He was wearing white linen trousers and there wasn’t a speck of blood or dirt on him, so he didn’t strike me as a man who had just come from a murder.”

“So you think the man was murdered.”

“I think he had been shot. Whether the wound was self-inflicted or not is up to you people to determine.” She shuddered. “I’m going to spend my time trying to live down the sight of him. The only dead people I’ve seen before were peacefully in their coffins, carefully made up and dressed in their Sunday best.”

“Violence leaves an ugly mark on everything.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you could say reality does that, too.”

She turned away, staring out the side window, as unreachable as if she had walked into another room and closed the door. Dylan focused on the landscape around him—the low growth of piñon and scrub oak, and formations of red and gray rock that rose up against an achingly blue sky. He had grown up surrounded by this scenery. The country here didn’t look desolate and hostile to him, as it did to some, but free and unspoiled.

Simon’s brake lights glowed and he stuck his arm out the open driver’s-side window, gesturing toward a gravel wash to their left. He stopped and the passenger window slid down as Dylan pulled alongside him. “That’s the south entrance to Dead Horse Canyon,” Simon said. “Where do we go from here?”

“Turn in here,” Kayla said. “There’s a trailhead about a quarter mile farther on. I parked there, but apparently the campers have been driving right into the camp.”

“I’ll follow you,” Simon said, and waited for Dylan to pull ahead of him.

As camping spots went, this one lacked water, much shade or access, Dylan thought, as the FJ Cruiser bumped over the washboard gravel road into the canyon. But it did offer concealment and a good defensive position. No one would be able to approach without the campers knowing about it.

As if to prove his point, a bearded man in camouflage pants and shirt stepped into the road and signaled for them to stop. Dylan braked and waited for the man to approach the driver’s side of the Cruiser. “You can’t drive back here,” the man said, his eyes darting nervously to the Ranger Brigade emblem on the side of the Cruiser. The words Law Enforcement were clearly visible.

“We’re here to talk to Daniel Metwater,” Dylan said. “Officers Woolridge and Holt.”

“I’m not supposed to let anyone drive into the camp,” the man said. He was sweating now, jittery as an addict in need of a fix.

“What’s your name?” Dylan asked.

“Kiram.”

Dylan waited for more, but Kiram had pressed his lips tightly together. “Well, Kiram, we’re here on official business and you don’t have the authority to stop us. We don’t want trouble, but you need to step out of the way.”

Kiram ducked his head and peered into the car. “Hey, what are you doing back here?” he asked Kayla.

“I brought them to see your dead body,” she said, giving Kiram a chilly stare.

Dylan let off the brake and the Cruiser eased forward. Kiram jumped back. The two vehicles proceeded at a crawl up the wash, around the knot of trees and into the side canyon the Family had chosen as their home in the wilderness.

Dylan shut off the engine, but remained in the car, assessing the situation. The motley cluster of campers, tents and vehicles shimmered like a mirage in the midday heat. A child’s ball rolled a few feet, stirred by the wind, which made the only sound in the area. “The place looks deserted,” Kayla said. “Do you think they left?”

“Not without all their stuff. Do you notice anything missing?”

She studied the scene for a moment, then shook her head. “Only the people.”

“Stay in the vehicle.” With one hand hovering near his weapon, Dylan eased open his door, ready to dive for cover if anyone fired on them. But the camp remained silent and still.

“Daniel Metwater!” he called. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

No answer came but the echo of his own words. Simon joined Dylan beside his car. “What do you think?” Dylan asked.

“They could have all headed for the hills, or they could be lying low inside these tents and trailers,” Simon said.

“Come out by the time I count to ten or we’ll start taking this place apart,” Dylan shouted. “One!”

At the count of five, the door to the largest RV, a thirty-foot bus with solar panels on the roof, eased open. A slim but muscular man, naked except for a pair of white loose trousers, moved onto the steps. “I wasn’t aware we had company,” he said. “We adhere to the custom of an afternoon siesta.”

“Are you Daniel Metwater?” Dylan asked.

Sharp eyes scrutinized the three of them. “Yes,” he said at last.

“Call your people out here,” Simon said. “We have some questions about an incident that happened here this afternoon.”

Metwater shifted his gaze past the two cops. Dylan turned to see Kayla standing beside the car. “You had no cause to bring these people here,” Metwater said to her.

“We’re here because we understand you found a dead body this morning,” Dylan said. “Why didn’t you report it to the police?”

“We don’t have cell phones, and since nothing we could do or say could bring the man back to life, I made the decision to report the incident the next time I was in town.” Metwater spoke as if he was talking about a minor mechanical problem, not a dead man.

“Where is the body?” Simon asked.

“I ordered the men who brought him here to take him back where they found him,” Metwater said. “They never should have defiled our home with such violence.”

“We’ll need to talk to these men.”

“They are undergoing a purification ritual at the moment.”

“Bring them out here.” Simon wasn’t a big man, but he could put a lot of menace and command in his voice. “Now.”

Metwater said something over his shoulder to someone inside the RV. A woman with long dark hair slipped past him and hurried away. “She’ll bring the men to you,” Metwater said, and turned as if to go back inside.

“Wait,” Dylan said. “Who was the man?”

“I don’t know. I’d never seen him before in my life. But I believe he’s one of yours.”

“What do you mean, one of ours?” Dylan asked.

Metwater’s lips quirked up in a smirk. “I checked his pockets for identification. He’s a cop.”

Chapter Three

Kayla watched Dylan as Metwater dropped his bombshell. His was a face full of strong lines and planes, not classically handsome, but honest—the face of a man who didn’t have any patience with lies or weakness. Anger quickly replaced the brief flash of confusion in his eyes as he absorbed this new wrinkle in the case. The dead man wasn’t a stranger anymore—he was a fellow lawman. “Take me to him,” he ordered.

“The men who found him will—” Metwater began.

“No. You take me.” Dylan’s fists clenched at his sides, and Kayla tensed, expecting him to punch the smirk off the Prophet’s face. But he remained still, only one muscle in his jaw twitching.

Instead of answering, Metwater looked away, toward a flurry of movement to their right. Kiram and another burly man escorted two other men to them. “These are the two who found the body,” Metwater said. “They can answer your questions.”

Dylan pulled a small notebook and pen from his shirt pocket and shifted his focus to the new arrivals. Kayla thought they looked young, scarcely out of their teens, with wispy beards and thin bodies. Dylan pointed to the taller of the two, who stared back from behind black-framed glasses. “What’s your name?”

“Abelard,” the young man whispered.

“Your real name,” Dylan said.

Abelard blinked. “That is my real name. Abelard Phillips.”

“His mom was a literature professor,” the other young man said. “You know, Abelard and Heloise—supposed to be a classic love story or something.”

Abelard nodded. “Most people call me Abe.”

Dylan wrote down the name, then turned to the second man. “Who are you?”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Zach. Zach Crenshaw.”

“I want the two of you to show me this body you found this morning.”

Their heads moved in unison, like bobblehead dolls. Metwater started to turn back to his trailer, but Simon took his arm. “You’re coming, too.”

Kayla trailed along after them, sure that if Dylan remembered she was here he would order her to wait at the camp. But curiosity won out over her squeamishness about seeing the body again—that, and a reluctance to spend any time alone with the rest of the “family.”

Single file, the six of them followed a narrow path out of camp, out of the canyon and into the open scrubland beyond, following drag marks in the dirt Kayla was sure had been made by the makeshift travois Abe and Zach had used to transport the body. She estimated they had walked about a mile when Abe halted and gestured toward a grouping of large boulders. “He’s behind those rocks over there,” he said. “We put him back just like the Prophet told us to.”

“And you’re sure that’s where you found him?” Simon asked.

Zach nodded. “You can tell because of all the blood.”

“Show me,” Dylan said.

The two young men led the way around the boulders. Kayla hung back, but she still had a view of the dead man’s feet, wearing new-looking hiking boots, the soles barely scuffed. Had he bought them especially for his visit to the Black Canyon area?

Dylan and Simon stood back, surveying the scene, the wind stirring the branches of the piñons nearby the only sound. The sour-sweet stench of death stung her nostrils, but she forced herself to remain still, to wait for whatever came next. “Was he lying like this when you found him?” Dylan asked. “On his back?”

“Yeah,” Zach said.

“Why did you move him?” Simon asked. “Were you trying to hide something? Did you realize you were tampering with evidence?”

“We weren’t trying to hide anything!” Abe protested. “We just came around the rocks and almost stepped on him. There was blood everywhere and it was awful. Like something out of a movie or something. Too horrible to be real.”

“Once we realized it was a man, we couldn’t just leave him there,” Zach said. “There were already buzzards circling. And I thought I heard him groan, like maybe he was still alive. We thought if we got him back to camp, someone could go for help, or take him to the hospital or something.”

“We couldn’t just leave him,” Abe echoed.

“All right.” Dylan put a hand on Abe’s arm. “Tell me exactly what happened. Start at the beginning. What were you doing out here?”

“We were hunting rabbits,” Abe said. “We thought we saw one run over here so we headed this way to check it out.”

“What were you hunting with?” Simon asked. “Where is your weapon now?”

The two young men exchanged glances, then Zach walked over to the grouping of piñons. He reached into the tangle of branches and pulled out a couple crude bows and a handful of homemade arrows. “The Prophet only allows us to buy meat for one meal a week, so we thought if we could catch some rabbits the women could make them into stew or something,” he said.

“And maybe they’d be impressed that we were providing for the Family,” Abe added. He looked even more forlorn. “We weren’t having any luck, though.”

“Why were you hunting with bows and arrows?” Simon asked. “Why not guns?”

“The Prophet doesn’t allow firearms,” Zach said.

“We’re a nonviolent people.” Metwater spoke for the first time since they had left camp. “Guns only cause trouble.”

“They certainly caused trouble for this man.” Dylan looked at Metwater. “You said you checked his identification?”

“The wallet is inside his jacket,” Metwater said. “Front left side.”

Dylan knelt, out of Kayla’s view. When he stood again, he held a slim brown wallet. He read from the ID. “Special Agent Frank Asher, FBI.” He fixed Metwater with an icy glare. “What was the FBI doing snooping around your camp, Mr. Metwater? And what did he do that got him killed?”

* * *

AS EXPECTED, THE Family’s Prophet claimed to have no knowledge of Agent Frank Asher or what had happened to him. None of the three men had heard any gunshots or vehicles or seen anything unusual in the hour leading up to the discovery of the body. They were like the three bronze monkeys Dylan’s dad had on a shelf in his home office—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Dylan and Simon would bring them all in for questioning, but he doubted the interviews would yield anything useful.

With no cell phone coverage in the area, Dylan was forced to leave Simon with the body and the Family members while he drove to an area with coverage.

“I’m coming with you,” Kayla said, falling into step beside him as he strode back toward the camp.

He’d been so intent on his job that for a while he had forgotten about her. She was one more complication he didn’t need right now. “Why didn’t you stay in the car like I told you?” he asked.

“This place gives me the creeps. I’m not staying anywhere alone around these people.” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Do you think one of them killed that FBI agent?”

“I don’t know what to think. I need the medical examiner’s report on when he died, and what kind of weapon killed him.” He glanced toward the motley collection of RVs and tents. “I’m not buying that all of these people are unarmed.”

“The agent will have a vehicle around here someplace close,” Kayla said. “Those boots he was wearing weren’t worn enough for him to have walked very far, and I didn’t see a pack anywhere near him.”

Dylan stopped and considered her more closely. She had regained her color and no longer looked fragile and shaken. “I’ll get someone to look for the car right away. Maybe something in there will tell us why he was out here. That was a good observation,” he added. “Did you see anything else?”

“I think the two kids are telling the truth.” She glanced back in the direction they had come. “When they said that about not wanting to leave him for the buzzards—I believed them.”

“Maybe.” He had learned not to trust anyone when it came to crime, but his instincts made him want to focus on Metwater more than the two kids. “Them moving the body makes our investigation tougher. They may have destroyed a lot of evidence.”

“For a man who sees himself as a leader, Metwater is a cold fish,” she said. “He seemed more annoyed by the inconvenience than anything else.”

“He’s going to be a lot more inconvenienced before this is over. I’m going to get a warrant to take this camp apart. If the murder weapon is here, we’ll find it.”

“If it was ever here, they had plenty of time to get rid of it before we got here,” she said. “It could be stashed in a cave or buried in an old mine or broken into a million pieces on the rocks.”

“Maybe,” he conceded. “But we might find something else incriminating.”

They walked through the camp, which was as empty and silent as a ghost town, but he sensed people watching him from the windows of trailers and open flaps of tents. “Who did you come here to see?” he asked Kayla. “I know you said a client’s daughter, but who?”

“I don’t see how that relates to your case.” The frost was back in her voice.

“You’re the one who reported the body. You were the only non-Family member present when it was discovered. Some people might think that was an interesting coincidence.”

She turned on him, cheeks flushed. “You don’t think I killed that man!”

“My job is to rule out everyone. Do you own a gun?”

“I have a Smith & Wesson 40 back at my office. I have a permit for it.”

“But you didn’t have it with you today? Why not?”