Tom turned away from the sunset, to the east, toward Denver.
But in his meth-fueled haste, his trip was nearly cut short. Only a mile from Brubaker’s place and well before he reached a paved road he nearly crashed into an oncoming pickup, whose driver was speeding as fast as he was. Tom and the driver of the pickup saw each other and slammed on their brakes and wrenched their wheels simultaneously, both of their vehicles fishtailing on the gravel so that they skidded parallel to each other only a few inches apart. The driver was a young longhair, his gaunt face was a mask of rage as his car slid past Tom’s in cinematic slow motion, and Tom could see him shouting, “Fuck you, asshole!” and giving him the finger.
Another surge of adrenaline at this point was too much for Tom and he thought he was having a heart attack. His car having screeched to a stop, Tom relaxed his painful grip on the steering wheel and worked to slow his breathing. How banal it would have been for the story to end like this, Tom thought, and just when he was making progress in putting the pieces together. Of course, it might have been something just this random, a car wreck involving Ray Walker, that had set off the unlikely series of events that had brought him to this precise moment, racing from the scene of a bloody death in a manner that would only seem to confirm his guilt as the instrument of that death – if there had been anyone to witness it. In response to these meth-suffused musings, Tom vowed to drive more carefully.
He resumed his journey. The miles of empty canyon country rolled by until the road reached a broad plateau just south Grand Junction, the Grand Mesa rising to his right and the Dominguez and Escalante canyons falling to his left. There the horizon fell and the world was suddenly dominated by a vast darkening sky. Overhead, Tom could see the contrails of a half dozen planes, brightly illuminated by light emanating from a sun that had already slipped below the western horizon, carrying busy people to exotic destinations, from San Diego to Chicago, perhaps, or Phoenix to Billings, or Omaha to Salt Lake. He wondered who they were, the people in the planes, and where they were bound, and why they were in such a hurry. Was their reason for rushing as compelling as his? He wondered when he might fly in a plane again, something he once did routinely but had no immediate plans to do again. Someday, he was sure, a plane would take him somewhere, but he couldn’t guess where it might be. He had always wanted to see Vancouver and sometimes imagined himself trekking in Nepal, visiting the Buddhist temples at Angkor Wat, or on a safari in the Serengeti. He thought of all of the people at airports at that precise moment – children, wives and husbands; boyfriends and girlfriends – waiting for a loved one to arrive. Every once in a great while, a plane crashed, carrying loved ones with it into oblivion.
As Tom reached the interstate at Grand Junction and joined the stream of traffic, he contemplated his initiation into a separate class of human being. He was a killer now, but a righteous one, a victim who turned the tables on his depraved assailant and killed in self-defense. He felt no guilt at all, at least not while he was still under the influence of the meth, and what made it even sweeter was his calculation that he stood a good chance of getting away with it.
He cataloged all the reasons he was safe and need never report what had happened to anyone. There were no witnesses and Brubaker’s corpse might not be found for years or even decades. Hadn’t Brubaker himself observed that a body tossed in the ravine behind his shack would never be found? There were undoubtedly skeletons slowly disintegrating into dust in plenty of the abandoned homesteads, shacks and doublewides around Radium, the remains of hermits like Brubaker who died alone. By the time Brubaker’s murder was discovered, if it was discovered, his corpse would have been eaten by scavengers or rotted away and the trail Tom had followed from Sarah to Anya to Brubaker would be so cold that nobody would pick it up. Beyond that, any investigator would assume the death was related to the meth whose detritus would be fully evident at the scene. That would be true up to a point, but Tom was not a habitual tweaker and therefore not a likely suspect.
But perhaps what was most reassuring was Tom’s confidence that Brubaker’s life had been utterly worthless, maybe even to himself. Surely, no one would miss him or seek justice on his behalf. He might not even have had a mother, but more likely crawled out from under a rock. Anyone who had so much as crossed his path would be glad he was dead. Very possibly, if and when Brubaker’s corpse was discovered, the coroner or whoever it was who investigated, would not bother to look deeply enough into the circumstances to label the death suspicious in the first place, the bloody murder weapon, which Tom had left behind, notwithstanding. In the astonishing clutter of Brubaker’s shack, the fire poker would hardly jump out. Or the death would be chalked up as just another bit of unremarkable meth-related violence in a world that had plenty of it. Who would have the time or inclination to investigate further?
On the other hand, Tom had been observed in the vicinity by the driver of the pickup. And, he realized after he’d driven a hundred miles, he should have removed the fire poker, which was certainly covered with his fingerprints as well as Brubaker’s blood, rendering it into a piece of physical evidence that could incriminate him well beyond a shadow of a doubt if it fell into a prosecutor’s hands. Tom banished these harsh thoughts, at least for now, if only because there was nothing he could do about them. The driver of the truck could have been headed anywhere and would not tie Tom to the scene of the death unless Brubaker was discovered immediately, and what were the odds of that? In a week or so, the time of death would be impossible to pinpoint, making Tom’s presence nearby less relevant. As for the fire poker, Tom resolved to return to Brubaker’s place and retrieve and dispose of it later. Sure, that made perfect sense; it was a reasonable plan; he would go back and cover his tracks later. Tom was able to observe his own sloppy thinking under the influence of the meth with clinical dispassion. But even knowing it was reckless, he didn’t care. Raging on meth, to go for broke, fully confident that the needle could be threaded, felt not just sensible but mandatory.
Tom did not stop driving except to empty his bladder and fill the tank of his car, until he reached Denver, five hours later, arriving there before dawn. To Tom, the time seemed short, as if he had covered the nearly 400-mile distance from Radium in just half an hour, as if his Corolla were his own personal Learjet.
He parked by the Colorado State Historical Museum. He found a coffee shop nearby where he picked at a plate of bacon and eggs that he ordered even though he had no appetite and managed to down only a single gulp of black coffee, and he was waiting by the entrance when the museum library opened.
Within half an hour, he had found several magazine articles and chapters in books about Dick DeRichter.
From The Denver Post Empire magazine, dated July 23, 1953:
In the Uranium Belt, a King Opens the Gates to His ‘Castle’
By Candace DeGraw
On the Fourth of July, you won’t see a solitary soul on the streets of tiny Radium, in the far southwestern corner of Colorado, just a few miles from the Utah border. Every last one of the townsfolk is up on North Mountain, a dozen miles outside of town, where the Uranium King is hosting them at his lavish estate. The festivities begin with a traditional barbecue, followed by an afternoon of baseball and other traditional games, all capped off with a spectacular fireworks display that would be worthy of any big city like Denver.
The Uranium King is Dick DeRichter, the prospector who put this town on the map when he struck a mother lode of uranium, the famous Whispering Jim Mine, which has already produced millions of dollars of uranium ore. The colorful DeRichter often says that he owes his good fortune to all the citizens of Radium, the miners and mill workers and the town’s shopkeepers alike. Last year, this year and as far as he can see into the future, DeRichter plans to host them all on Independence Day as a small measure of his gratitude.
DeRichter fashions himself to be a latter-day Horace A.W. Tabor, Colorado’s legendary Silver King, who was for several decades before the silver crash of 1893 the richest man in the state. DeRichter owns almost every business in this town, including The Uranium Drive-In Theater, which he plans to replace with an indoor movie theater to match the famous opera houses Tabor built in Leadville and Denver. Also like Tabor, who was a lieutenant governor of Colorado and a United States Senator, DeRichter promises that he will soon throw his hat into the political ring.
“I’m just waiting for the right opportunity,” he told this reporter with a wink.
Up on North Mountain this past July 4th, the Uranium King himself was flipping burgers and turning hot dogs on the grill on the spacious patio behind his ranch-style home overlooking the San Miguel River canyon and the town of Radium far below. He seemed to know every child by name.
DeRichter’s gracious wife Betty handed out slices of ice cold watermelon to one and all, assisted by her three young sons, Frank, Richard and Albert.
After lunch, there were a three-legged race, a watermelon seed spitting contest, a greased pig catch, a tug-of-war, and other games.
When darkness fell, DeRichter said a few words.
“This old-fashioned celebration may mean just a little bit more to us here in Radium than it might to folks in other places,” he told the crowd, “because we mined the uranium ore that made the atom bomb which defeated the Japs and ended the war. We have helped make the United States of America the greatest military power the world has ever known. That doesn’t make us better than other Americans, but it does mean that we are the guardians of the freedom we celebrate today. God bless America.”
Then the Uranium King’s guests sang the Star Spangled Banner and fireworks filled the sky.
The story was illustrated with a half dozen carefully composed photographs. There was one of the King at the barbecue, wearing an apron, wielding an enormous set of tongs, and grinning at the camera. He was surrounded by children with their plates held out like so many Oliver Twists. Another pictured Betty, described in the caption as “the most fabulous hostess between Denver and San Francisco,” noting that she had hosted Mamie Eisenhower on North Mountain. Betty was as trim as a fifties sitcom star, Donna Reed, not a hair out of place despite being surrounded by her three young boys. Another photograph depicted the spacious living room at the North Mountain estate, Betty and Dick perched on a couch. The house was furnished “in an eclectic mix of Western furniture, hunting trophies, and carefully chosen European Old Masters,” the caption read.
The story of how DeRichter had discovered the Whispering Jim was legendary, and repeated with a few variations in many stories. Graduating from the University of Colorado in 1942 with a degree in geology, he was ineligible for the army due to poor eyesight, so he worked for a couple of years for several copper companies in South America. He returned home after the war and took a job with Standard Oil, but was fired for insubordination for doggedly, some would say obnoxiously, pursuing a theory of underground geological formations that he had developed in South America, which his superiors found dubious. He was informally blackballed in the oil industry.
Out of work just when the Atomic Energy Commission established guaranteed high prices for uranium, with Betty pregnant with their third child, DeRichter borrowed a $1,000 stake from his mother-in-law to join the uranium boom. Among the thousands of hopeful prospectors on the Colorado Plateau, he was again the odd man out. Most prospectors guessed that uranium-bearing carnotite would be found in surface deposits, since that was where it had always been found. They searched for claims by traipsing across promising terrain bearing a Geiger counter. But most of the deposits they found were small and quickly mined out, and thus of little interest to DeRichter, who dreamed much bigger dreams.
DeRichter believed that the small surface deposits found by others meant there must be far larger deposits underground, where they were not subject to the forces of erosion. He prided himself on “sensing” what lay beneath the surface of the earth, knowledge to be gleaned from a study of surface features, informed by the experience of seeing what could be seen in existing mines and oil well core samples and comparing that to what lay above. He theorized that carnotite would collect in long buried watercourses where minerals dissolved in water, like uranium, were the fossilizing agents of organic matter. In searching for uranium, he adopted the prospecting tool of the oil business: drilling core samples in promising locations.
He found an acolyte, Whispering Jim Stewart, and the two formed a partnership to drill in places that DeRichter identified as likely to hold uranium deposits. For two years the DeRichters lived in a tarpaper shack outside Radium and subsisted on the venison Dick hunted, dried beans, and oats. DeRichter and Stewart devoted hours to traversing terrain that was of little interest to other prospectors. DeRichter was looking for younger surface geology at higher altitudes than the more eroded formations where surface deposits of carnotite were found. There was a strong element of faith in Whispering Jim’s participation with DeRichter, as he could discern nothing different in the settings DeRichter found interesting than any other dry gulch or outcropping of rock. Was DeRichter a scientist or a diviner? When DeRichter finally staked a claim and drilled, Whispering Jim and Betty DeRichter and her children all had to develop a thick skin to fend off taunts about “DeRichter’s Folly,” especially when it turned up no uranium ore.
Jim didn’t live to see his faith in DeRichter vindicated when their third and what probably would have been their final attempt to drill for uranium hit a mother lode. But DeRichter graciously named the strike for his lost partner.
DeRichter leveraged his newfound wealth by establishing his own uranium mill outside the town of Radium, a mill supplied not only by the Whispering Jim and ore from other companies’ mines, but by DeRichter’s own additional claims. The skeptics had no choice but to concede that maybe he did “know” what the geologic structures beneath the earth’s surface looked like. Luck simply could not account for his success. By the late 1950s, DeRichter’s Uranium King Mining Co. was the biggest enterprise in the Four Corners, employing hundreds of men and diversifying into the traditional West End enterprise of cattle ranching.
By the early 1960s uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau was no longer profitable, the boom was over, and DeRichter’s businesses shrank. If his gift was that he sensed what lay beneath the surface of the land in the Four Corners region, it did him little good when the minerals to be found there were not marketable. Other business endeavors – a marble quarry, a vineyard, resort development in Telluride – were marginally successful at best. He and Betty spent most of their time in a Denver mansion, near their sons, their daughters-in-law and their grandchildren. Betty died of Alzheimer’s disease in the early 1990s, and shortly after that, according to the business pages of the Denver papers, Dick became estranged from two of his three sons, the family split into two warring camps in a bitter legal battle for control of UK Mining, or whatever was left of it.
A particular flash point was the vast sum being spent to convert the family ranch into a resort. On the one side was Dick and his youngest son Albert, who was developing the resort; on the other side, the two older sons, Frank and Richard. Frank and Richard accused Dick and Albert of squandering the fortune on dubious investments, and none more dubious than the resort. Dick and Albert rejoined that Frank and Richard had forfeited their inheritance by virtue of years of disloyalty to the family.
There was not a word in any of this family history, of course, about an illegitimate son named Ray Walker.