Adrian McKinty: Hidden River

Redhorse looks out over Denver and Aurora and Boulder and the Rocky Mountains. He stares down at the South Platte River and at Confluence Park, where the South Platte merges with Cherry Creek. The gold nuggets in Cherry Creek, the whole reason for Denver’s existence in the first place.

Cherry Creek. After getting the phone call, Redhorse took one of the police department metal detectors and searched the dried-up creek. He found the gun in about fifteen minutes. Forensics matched the pistol with the bullet they took out of Victoria Patawasti. And Beretta told him who owned a fancy gun like that. The wife of Victoria’s employer: Amber Mulholland. The gun. The murder weapon.

“There’s the creek,” he says.

His partner, Detective Miller, doesn’t reply. He’s reading the newspaper. The engines whine. There is a terrible grumbling noise.

“Undercarriage coming up,” Miller says kindly.

The plane hits turbulence and falls sixty feet. Redhorse bites down a yell and looks around. No one else seems alarmed in the least.

The aircraft straightens out.

Redhorse unclenches his fists and when the “Fasten seat belt” sign turns off, he goes to the toilet, stands on the seat, disables the smoke detector, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and smokes.

Rows of bicycles. The leafy quad. An empty punt floating down the Cherwell. It’s seven. The vast majority of the students are still asleep. But I have to be up. I have work to do. I’m on the hardest degree program in the university. The Bachelor of Civil Law. A three-year law degree taken in one year. Final prep on my paper before the tutorial. But first, breakfast and the news. I walk to the porter’s lodge and pick up the papers for the common room. Five British broadsheets, five British tabloids, and two American papers: The Wall Street Journal and USA Today .

Coffee, scone, clotted cream.

And the story.

Only on page four of USA Today, this morning.

The repercussions of the plea bargain.

It’s an open secret in Colorado that the DA has been as lenient toward the Mulhollands as propriety has allowed him to be. Indeed, observers of the Victoria Patawasti murder trial praised Amber Mulholland’s team of attorneys for getting the DA to accept a guilty plea on a charge of second-degree murder with diminished responsibility for an alleged crime of passion. Amber, however, won’t come up for parole for at least twenty years. Her husband, though, has escaped jail time for his guilty plea to charges of fraud and embezzlement.

Page four of USA Today . A few columns.

No one cares.

There are bigger fish to fry. Rumors about President Clinton and another sex scandal. A new IRA cease-fire in the works.

Even in Denver it’s not that big a story. The JonBenet Ramsey murder case has seized the headlines. Worse things have happened. Worse will come in the southern suburbs at a school called Columbine. But for now the media is done with the Mulhollands, the Patawasti murder, and the bloodletting in the ballroom. The latter is already passing into legend. Indeed, the Eastman Ballroom itself has been torn down to make way for condominiums.

I close the paper, push it away. Yawn, stretch, get up, leave the common room, find my bicycle key. Unlock the bike. Cycle down Fyfield Road.

Yes, it’s over. Done. Nothing to do with me.

Gone.

Only the continuity of violence remains.

Denver was born in blood: the native Cheyenne massacred at Sand Creek, the Comanche and Ute driven beyond the mountains in a vale of tears.

The Patawasti case is over and the ballroom incident is closed, unsolved, unsolvable, soon to be unremembered.

No one should be surprised.

In the end, all of history’s songs will be lost in the depths of time. And the great streams of memory will be as hidden as the rivers of forgetting.