“You gonna be all right?” Tanner asked.
“I’ll have to be,” he said. “What happened?”
“We’ve got Dr. Cluff in the study with a shotgun,” the EMT said.
Dalton walked past Tanner. “Tell the new guy he can’t make it sound like we’re playing Clue.” Dalton ducked under the yellow tape. “How long until the medical examiner gets here?”
“An hour or so,” Tanner said.
“Did Bruce leave a note?”
Tanner shrugged. “Maybe. There’s a lot of things on that desk we can’t read anymore.”
Dalton stopped outside the front door and turned back to look down at the scene. The quiet old street was filled with vehicles now. He looked at his watch. In another hour the neighbors would get back from church, and this would all change from a concern to a calamity.
From where he stood, he could see across the rooftops south toward the red plateau, all the way to the national monument. The blue desert sky was brushed with abstract white clouds gathering at the horizon. He tried to keep ahead of the panic attack, let it hit him head-on like his therapist taught him. It’s the only way to know none of it is real. Don’t resist change. That just brings sorrow. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. Breathe. Follow your outbreath.
“I know you’re getting your game face on,” Tanner interrupted, “but our window of opportunity is shrinking.”
Dalton blinked. “Is Bruce going to get up and walk out of the house?”
“We’ve got to tag evidence before the ME gets here. You know, and it’s June. So, heat.”
“Is the A/C on?”
“They’ve got a swamp cooler, but it’s off. It’s pretty bad in there already.”
Dalton opened the door and went in and led himself down the hall and around the corner to the study. Tanner followed. The EMT was gone. “How’s Raylene?”
“At the neighbors’.”
“Please tell me she didn’t find him.”
Tanner nodded sadly. “She came home from church after an hour because Bruce was sick. She said he was supposed to be at a collector’s convention, but he canceled.”
“Does she know where that meetup was supposed to be?”
Tanner shook his head. “She says she can’t remember.”
At the doorframe of the study, Dalton stopped and gathered himself. He drew on his childhood memories to map out the space in his head, then he turned the corner.
The blood-soaked desk was covered with numbered plastic A-frames marking the evidence. The top half of the tall leather office chair was blown off, the wood frame serrated like the edge of a flint knife. Somewhere on the floor behind the desk lay the body.
“I told you it was bad,” Tanner said.
“I’m a big boy,” Dalton answered.
It looked like the shot knocked Bruce out of his chair, spinning it around so it faced away from the desk. He lay sprawled on the ground in a heap, the robe spread behind him, the shotgun flung from his hands, the books in the shelves behind him stuccoed with brown blood and bone. Dalton imagined what happened to the body when the gun went off, the energy of the shot oscillating through the jaw and brain, discharging from the other side of the skull.
A camera flash strobed behind him.
“And nobody’s touched anything?” Dalton asked.
“Nobody did,” Tanner said.
Dalton surveyed the Navajo rugs, porcupine quill baskets, cedar masks in blue and red, tiny unpainted clay birds, wooden flutes, small irregular petroglyph panels, old green and brown books, maps on wooden stands, bird fossils, purple crystals, whole geodes resting on plastic rings. There were so many treasures in this menagerie: a stuffed weasel, arrowheads in shadow boxes, spearpoints under glass, perfectly round stones of various sizes, framed newspaper clippings about Bruce and his discoveries, antique compasses large and small, steel protractors, and brass telescopes. But he noticed that quite a few shelves had empty spots.
“This place is right out of an old photograph. How would anyone know if something was missing?” Tanner said.
“Raylene might. There used to be a lot more pottery in here.” Dalton pointed at a plain bowl. “When I was a kid, this place was full of stuff like that.”
Tanner’s face became still. “A guy like Bruce with all this Indian stuff in here. I mean some of this has to be in the gray zone as far as the law goes. Are we looking at another Federal pot hunter crackdown?”
“I haven’t heard of anything.”
“I mean, if the FBI is looking into collectors again, you know, like that guy in Page who drove himself off a cliff once they came after him—if that’s coming around again, we’ll have all kinds of trouble. The Carver family will go nuts, probably get on YouTube and take over another tortoise refuge.”
Dalton walked around the body and tried to make sense of what he was seeing. He thought he’d have some kind of deeper reaction, but it was all flowing around him, like floodwater going around a boulder. He was fine now, but he felt the sand underneath him starting to loosen. “If you’re wondering about garbage like that, go talk to Stan Forsythe at the paper,” Dalton said. “Crazy talk is his love language.”
“I’m not wondering. I’m just thinking. The Feds would let you know if they were coming, right?”
“Feds do what they want.”
“That’s what the crazies say. I’m asking you.”
Dalton’s phone buzzed and he looked at it. It was his ex-wife. He lifted his thumb to open the lock screen, but instead he sent her to voice mail.
“The crazies aren’t wrong,” Dalton said. “I just can’t talk to them.”
___
Sophia Shepard shut her book, which was bristling with Post-it Notes, and she set it on the orange Formica dinette table. The scholarly title, UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Human Factor, set it apart from the whimsical Airstream travel trailer she was living and working in for the summer.
She took her insulated coffee mug and stepped out of the trailer and into the late afternoon air, which was hot and dry and riddled with the trilling of songbirds. The white sun filtered through the canopy of desert trees, mature sycamores, and cottonwoods that sheltered the trailer park from the blazing sky. In one direction lay the street, and beyond it, a self-serve car wash crouching in the open glare next to a run-down laundromat with two duct-tape Xs running across each of its dust-covered windows. Behind that bleached outbuilding stood an orange sandstone rampart that ran vertically for a hundred feet.
In the opposite direction, the other trailers were arranged in a semicircle like giant silver beetles. Across the way was Mrs. Gladstone’s trailer. It was an Airstream like the rest but larger because she was the owner. It had been upgraded with a covered porch, Tibetan prayer flags, and potted succulents, not all of them thriving. Mrs. Gladstone was asleep in a rattan chaise lounge, a Pomeranian perched upon her stomach with its nose in a bag of cookies.
Sophia shouted at the dog, who looked up at her, flicked an ear, and returned to the bag. “Hey, you little monster,” she said again, crossing from her trailer to the small patio. She wouldn’t call the dog by its name, Cleopatra, but had secretly renamed her Mīkrós Thḗrion, “the tiny beast.” Mikros, for short. It was one way she tried to keep up on her Greek while she was working in southern Utah.