“Do I look like I have ten thousand dollars?”
“What about your car? Maybe you could sell it.”
She pointed to a 1970s Oldsmobile sedan in the parking lot. It made my Pig look like a shiny Mercedes. The windshield was cracked, the tires bald, the vinyl roof pilled, and the most visible color was gray primer.
“You think somebody would give me even a hundred bucks for that? Besides, it’s not even ours. We borrowed it from a guy in Jonah’s band.”
“I thought the band, Purgatory, was supposed to be pretty good.”
“They do okay, for a band. That means maybe eight or ten shows a month, a couple of thousand bucks split four ways, and after the manager takes his fifteen percent. It’s not enough to even cover my tuition or our rent. Purgatory isn’t ever going to make any serious money unless they sell out. Start doing pop.”
I asked some more questions and learned that she hadn’t spoken to her parents in years and that they didn’t have any money anyway. Jonah’s parents had both moved to Israel two years ago and he had barely heard from them since then. Mattie was financing her education with partial scholarships and loans. She and Jonah had about five hundred dollars to fund their remaining vacation.
“Okay,” I told her, trying to sound reassuring. “So you’ll qualify as indigent. The judge will appoint someone. He has to. You won’t have to pay a dime.”
I knew that sometimes you’re a lot better off with court-appointed counsel. A good public defender—a true believer—can be better than a dream team. The True Believers care about more than just money. It’s a calling for them. A crusade against cops and prosecutors, which, having seen things from my brother’s side of the law, I didn’t really begrudge them. Unless, of course, their swords were hacking at me. Plus the state will pick up the tab for experts and investigators, something a defendant himself has to do if he’s represented by private counsel.
But it’s hard to convince defendants they’re usually better off with a public defender or appointed counsel. It was even harder in this case.
“Luke—the prosecutor—told me the judge is going to call around. There’s bound to be someone with the free time and willing to accept the court’s rates.”
Mattie’s look, even concealed behind sunglasses, told me just how bad that sounded.
I sighed and decided to get down to business.
“Are you willing to talk to me about what happened yesterday? About the river trip, and how the kid ended up in the water.”
“Why should I tell you anything? You’re the guy who put Jonah in jail.”
I wanted to tell her that I’d had no choice. I’m a cop, and that’s what cops do when it’s apparent a crime may have been committed. Especially when it involves the death of a child.
But all I said was “Because it might help Jonah if we can learn all the facts.”
Her version was pretty much the same as the guide’s. And Jonah’s. The kids’, too, although like Pete and Jonah she was emphatic that the kids were throwing rocks at them. Trying to hit them, she believed. And she’d watched Cody Wallis pick up the stick and swing it at Jonah’s head.
After hearing her out and making my notes, I put my card on the plastic table next to her.
“Call me if you think of anything else. Or if you hear that someone’s giving Jonah a rough time in the jail.”
She said nothing, and she didn’t touch the card.
“Look, Mattie. I’m sorry about all this. I had no choice but to arrest Jonah. If I hadn’t, the state troopers would have. Or the people up on the road would probably have torn him to pieces. My only job now is to collect all the facts and evidence and turn it over to the county attorney. He’s the one who files charges and decides what those charges should be.”
In other words, the biggest cop-out for a cop:
Just doing my job, ma’am.
She still said nothing. She just watched me squirm, through her dark lenses.
I sighed, closed my notebook, and stood up. I was halfway to the gate in the iron fence surrounding the pool, weaving among the milling children, when she called out.
“Hey!”
I turned around and went back to her.
“I saw in the paper that the funeral’s going to be on Sunday. Should I go?”
Now it was my turn to stare blankly at her. All this trouble, all this anger and resentment, and the woman thinks she ought to go to the funeral. Yesterday I’d suspected that Jonah was truly remorseful, that he was probably a good guy. The same was clearly true of her. I wasn’t used to dealing with these kinds of people.
She looked away from my stare.
“I’d really like to go,” she said softly.
I remembered the clenched jaws I’d seen in court that morning among the relatives and spectators. The slaps on the prosecutor’s back and the “Hang him high, Luke. Hang him high.”
“Don’t,” I told her. “The family’s pretty upset. The whole community, too. It would be better if you didn’t. Your presence there might just make it worse. You should lie low, stay out of sight until this all gets sorted out.”
God knows it can’t get any worse,
I thought.
Or can it?
fifteen
I
was hanging in space at eight o’clock on Saturday morning. It was exactly where I wanted to be.
Two hundred feet off the deck, the right half of my body wedged in a fat crack splitting the underside of a forty-foot roof, my muscles shaking with an overdose of lactic acid, and my breath coming in ragged gasps, I was happy. It didn’t matter that sharp crystals were grinding into my shoulder and forearm and knees, or that there was a very good chance I was about to drop like a bomb and take the big swing—a swing that would end in an explosion against the rock face below. I’d made it out almost twenty feet from the little cave where the roof began. Halfway. Farther than I’d ever made it before. Now if I could just get some protection into the crack, I’d be safe.
The rope ran back to the anchor in the cave from where it was tied to the self-belaying device on my harness. Only one piece of pro kept it from drooping all that way: a Number 5 Camalot whose expanded quad cams I’d placed by standing in the cave and reaching out as far as I could. But that was still fifteen feet behind me.
If—when—I fell, I would drop straight down at first, toward the green blur of aspen leaves that grew up to the side of the cliff. Then, as the rope caught my weight, it would swing me toward the smooth granite face below the cave. I would bash into it, just as I’d already done three times that morning. But this time, since I was farther out than ever before, I knew the cost of a fall would be magnified by the increased momentum of the swing. I would pay the price for progress with pain.
But I was determined to pay and pay until I couldn’t lift my arms above my head, until the skin on my shoulders and hands was ripped clean off. Then, stripped bare, I’d load Mungo in the Pig and drive to Denver.
But I wasn’t feeling the fear, or the pain, or even the anticipation of seeing Rebecca and my baby daughter. All my consciousness was focused on nothing but somehow freeing my left hand, snatching up the cam clipped to my waist, and cramming it into the crack. There was no other thought in my head. Some people call it flow, or being in the zone. What climbers and surfers and skydivers call it is feeding the Rat. The addictive joy of putting yourself in a situation so primitive and physical that your awareness of everything else in life is turned off completely.
I let go of the crystal I had been pinching with my left thumb and fingers and reached for a cam on my harness. Immediately, I felt myself on the verge of taking a dive. Gravity hung on to my back like a three-hundred-pound gorilla. I was suspended only by where my right elbow, palm, and both knees were jammed up into the flaring crack. Suspended, but barely—a feather could have brushed me out. My hand was shaking so bad I couldn’t get the cam unclipped.
Then a shrill tone cut through the air.
And my world suddenly accelerated at warp speed.
I dropped in a great swoop, the wind roaring in my ears and the colors of sky, stone, and trees all running together.
Fall like a cat,
I reminded myself as I did the opposite and wrapped my arms around my head and brought my knees up to my chest. Then, just as the momentum reached its peak, I struck the cliff.
I hit the rock wall like some large, stupid bird smacking into a plate-glass window. A retarded pelican, perhaps. A long
aaaahhhhh
came from my mouth, and it didn’t want to stop. It seemed like minutes before I could actually inhale a new breath. And by that time, of course, the phone in my pack in the cave had stopped ringing.
When the stars stopped dancing and I looked up to see where I’d fallen from, there was a surprise. The Number 5 Camalot swung there prettily, maybe twenty-five feet out under the roof. I’d somehow slapped it in before cutting loose. Next time, if I could clip the rope to it, I’d be protected. No more crashing into the wall. And only fifteen feet more to the lip!
I wanted to shout in premature triumph, but I was hurting too bad for that. I hollered in my mind, though—I was getting closer to climbing what had to be the hardest wide crack in the world. This realized, I began to wonder if Moriah, when older, would really appreciate having the world’s hardest fat crack named after her. Maybe, I thought, I needed to think up a new name.
Then the phone began ringing shrilly again.
I grabbed at holds on the merely vertical face and hauled my battered carcass up into the cave. If my life were anywhere approaching normal, I would have left the damn thing in the truck. But when you’ve got an ex-fiancée you’re still half in love with, a six-month-old daughter, and a handicapped, drug-addicted brother, you tend to want to stay in touch. Staring at the screen, though, I saw that it wasn’t any of these reasons I had for carrying the phone.
“What the hell, Luke?” I asked after reluctantly hitting the button.
“The defense has arrived. And you aren’t going to believe who they got to represent this scumbag.” He sounded genuinely alarmed. “Get your ass over here and talk to them. Pronto. I don’t want them to have any reason to try and continue this thing. I don’t want them complaining to the judge that our lead investigator dragged his feet on this.”
And then he hung up.
“The stakes have gone up,” Luke announced when I walked into his office an hour later.
He was grinning, but it wasn’t the shit-eating grin he’d worn at the arraignment the day before. This one looked strained. And a little sick.
“What happened? Who is this guy?”
He shook his head and stretched the shallow grin further.
“You’ll see, Burns. You’ll see. Just try not to piss your pants, okay?”
Walking stiffly in his well-worn boots, he escorted me down the hall to a closed door. Here he paused, forcibly settling his features into what was probably meant to be a friendly, slightly bored expression. I noticed he was wearing a suit even though it was Saturday morning.
The man and the woman in the conference room were wearing suits, too. They sat on the other side of a big table, with file folders and laptop computers laid out in front of them. Evidently they’d been working while waiting for me. The room reeked from an overdose of someone’s cologne. The scent of chemicals, spice, and leather was too heavy for a woman, so it had to be the man’s.
The woman—who I couldn’t help but notice first—was more than a little bit attractive. She had blue eyes, blond hair, and a spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones. Wearing no jewelry or makeup, and with her pulled-back hair cut prudently above her shoulders, she looked like an athlete. A hard-core athlete. A runner or a biker, I guessed. Maybe even a climber. We might have something in common. The way she looked up at me, though, was far from friendly.
The man was good-looking, too. He was probably twenty years older, in his mid-forties. He had a lantern jaw and gray-black hair sculpted back from a high forehead. His dark green suit was probably the most expensive I’d ever seen. And he was wearing it on a hot Saturday morning in Badwater, Wyoming.
They were staring at me, not Luke; the man smiling, the woman most definitely not. Other than for the blonde’s glower, I saw no reason to wet myself as Luke had suggested I might.
“This is Antonio Burns. He’s acting as my lead investigator on this,” he said. “Burns, meet William J. Bogey.”
He said it like he was announcing the presence of royalty. Or introducing me to my executioner. The man’s name was vaguely familiar—I knew I’d heard of him somewhere before.
I leaned across the table and held out my hand.
“Nice to meet you.”
He rose halfway out of his chair to take my hand, then hesitated. I followed his eyes down to my outstretched paw and saw why. Dried blood caked my knuckles and the sticky residue of athletic tape made my hand look none too clean. Certainly not the kind of hand he’d want brushing his bright white French cuffs. But he swallowed and shook anyway.
“The pleasure’s all mine,” he said in a smooth baritone. “Let me introduce you to a former student of mine, Brandy Walsh. She just graduated last month and has agreed to act as my co-counsel in this matter.”
“Hi.” I smiled at her.
She didn’t smile back or offer her hand.
Feeling persecuted by her gaze, I irritably wondered why Luke had agreed to meet with these people on a Saturday morning. Luke was, after all, fat and lazy. It would have been more his style to insist on office hours. But I figured it was a good thing that someone who so obviously made him nervous was taking Jonah’s case. Maybe it would bring him to his senses, or at least pressure him to offer a reasonable plea deal. Maybe it would make this whole thing just go away.
“I was a student of Boogie’s at UWyo, too,” Luke said to me. “That’s what they call him: Boogie. Has to do with his seventies-style hippie politics or something. He was a pretty good professor, though.”
“And Luke was a very good student. But I’m afraid any attempts to pass on my political or legal views utterly failed.”
Both men laughed. Brandy Walsh didn’t—she was too busy giving me the stink eye. For a few more minutes Luke and Bogey sparred with fake good humor, remembering old classroom debates, until Luke finally pulled out chairs for both of us.
“So, you ready to talk a deal?” he asked. “I’m not really sure what I can do for a guy who murdered a little kid. Not even for you, Boogie.”
“Maybe we can talk about that after we exercise our due diligence, Luke,” Bogey said with polite condescension. “I think perhaps we should try and discover a little more about what happened on the river.”
Luke smirked.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. A big shot like you needs to do a lot of research, then bill the county at your hourly rate. I forgot—but hey, I’m just a dumb hick prosecutor.”
I was beginning to sense that the animosity between them was more than knee-deep.
Still smiling nicely, Bogey said, “We’d like to begin by asking Mr. Burns some questions. Brandy prepared a preliminary list last night.”
Brandy flipped open her computer.
I looked at Luke, who shrugged.
“Sure, he’ll answer your questions. But you could just wait and read his reports.”
“I expect we’ll want more detail than what will likely be in his reports,” Bogey said diplomatically.
Brandy was still watching me. She gave me a grim, unpleasant smile. When she spoke her voice was fake-sweet.
“You don’t mind, do you? We just want to make sure we get the same answers from you on the witness stand.”
I did mind. What a bitch. I’d met her only two minutes earlier and she was already implying that I was a liar. In fairness, though, I’d already decided that
she
was a liar. She was a defense lawyer, after all, or at least training to be one. And most likely a True Believer like her professor. Luke’s comment about Bogey’s “seventies-style hippie politics” was something he’d often complained about in the old days when we’d be called to the stand and dragged over the coals by public defenders. They were often True Believers—attorneys who believed that anything, from misdirecting the jury to outright lying to slandering cops and prosecutors, was justified in the cause of getting their clients off. Over beers after one grueling trial, a PD who belatedly decided that I wasn’t, as a cop, necessarily an emissary of Satan told me, “It has nothing to do with the search for the truth. Not for your side, and not for mine. A trial is war. Once it’s declared, when the county attorney files charges against my client, all questions about right and wrong, the truth, and the reasons for the war in the first place get thrown out the window. There’s only one thing both sides are focused on and that’s to win. At all costs. Using whatever tactics are necessary. You challenge the arrest. You indoctrinate the jury. You annihilate the witnesses. Hell, you firebomb Dresden if you have to, you nuke Hiroshima.”
“I don’t mind answering your questions,” I told Brandy Walsh.
“Good.”
She plucked a mini tape recorder from where she’d apparently been hiding it in her lap and thumbed it on. Then she posed her fingers above her keyboard. She was going to record this two ways, just to be doubly sure she could prove any lies and to let me know that she expected nothing less of me.
“First, we need to know how to reach you in case we have later questions.”
I gave her my cell-phone number.
“And your address?”
I recited the office’s address in Cheyenne.
She looked up. “No, your address here in Badwater.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Then where are you staying?”
“Here and there. Camping out, mostly,” I admitted.
“Don’t be evasive, Agent Burns. We have a right to know.”
I looked at Luke, wanting to roll my eyes. He was slouched back in his chair, pretending to be bored again. I looked at Bogey, but he was watching his protégé with apparent pleasure. And she was still staring rudely at me, waiting for my answer.
“I’m not being evasive. I live out of my truck. I sleep wherever I want.”
I’d always thought it was kind of cool, not having a fixed address. I liked sleeping under the stars far more than I did under a ton of beams, plaster, and injected-foam insulation. But the way she was looking at me made me feel like a homeless person. And homeless not by choice—a person no one would tolerate in their home.
“They don’t pay these DCI fellows as much as they do us lawyers,” Luke joked.
The questioning went on. I held back my annoyance and told them what I’d seen and heard and exactly what their client had said. I kept my opinion that the whole thing was a stupid accident to myself, as well as the fact that I thought their client was a pretty good guy. My opinions had nothing to do with the legal case; stating them would serve no purpose but to piss Luke off and get me in deeper shit with my own office.
It wasn’t until we were past all my dealings with Jonah that she switched to leading questions. Lawyers love these, particularly with witnesses they deem hostile. They’re a great weapon—with them it’s so easy for a lawyer to trip a witness up, or make him look bad, or twist his words into something he never intended. Their sole purpose is to nail you in a tricky way, and trying to avoid them is like trying to dodge hurled knives while strapped to a revolving wheel.