The Edge of Justice (30 page)

The ranger too ignores Tobias's harangue and looks hard at my eyes as I speak. It looks as though he has already spent enough time with the captain of CBI to assess his character.

“I will not be ignored!” Tobias tries to shout over me as I continue talking. “Burns, you are under arrest!”

His underling again looks from Tobias to me, still awaiting an order.

The ranger asks, “Can you document any of this?”

I nod, but then hesitate. “My briefcase, reports, and the photos are in my hotel room in Laramie . . . and there is some other stuff at the DCI lab in Cheyenne . . .” But then I remember that I'm suspended, that I don't want him calling the office. And Ross McGee's in the hospital. “You can call Sheriff Don McKittrick of Laramie County. He's got one of the suspects in custody. He'll vouch for me.”

Tobias is still shouting as I speak. A slight foam is gathering in the corners of his mouth. He points at his heavy underling and says, “Arrest him. Now!” just as the ranger asks what I want done. The captain is afraid to come near me himself, it appears. He must remember being thrown to the floor in the hotel room.

His toady moves toward me, reaching around his heavy waist for the handcuffs he keeps on his belt. I keep my eyes locked on the ranger's, knowing the man is about to make a decision.

“What do you want?” he asks, staring back.

“Helicopter your S & R team and me to the summit. The sight of the copter alone may be enough to save the witness. When we're over the summit, we can rappel or sling off the copter—” Tobias's toady tries to take one of my arms, but I shrug him off.

The ranger holds his hand up to the heavy man as if he is an unruly child. “Stop it. No one's getting arrested here.”

The underling stops and looks again to Tobias. I can see the captain is losing it. The foam at his mouth has grown. His face is as red as a fire engine and his eyes have taken on a crazed look. The captain reaches into his own jacket and puts his hand again on the butt of his gun. I feel my own knees bend slightly, preparing to spring.

The ranger sees it too and quickly steps between Tobias and me. With an icy look he freezes Tobias's hand as it withdraws the gun. “Captain Tobias,” he says sharply, “you aren't arresting anyone. This is a national park; this land belongs to the federal government, sir—you have no authority here.”

I almost smile when I see the fight go out of Tobias's eyes at the same time the blood drains from his face. Twice in two days the man's been caught outside his jurisdiction.

“Now sit down while we work this out! If there's any truth to what Agent Burns is telling us, he's of far more value here than he would be in your jail.”

A twisted smile creeps to the captain's lips. He slowly lowers himself on a hard bench and shoots me with a look of pure hate.

The ranger turns to me and says, “Now I'm responsible for law enforcement and public safety in the park. But what you're talking about, a murder suspect and a potential kidnap victim up there on the wall, is way outside my league. And it's way outside my team's training. Most of them aren't even in law enforcement. What I'm going to do right now is make a call to the FBI.”

“There's no time,” I argue. “The girl already may be dead, or he may be about to drop her.”

“Agent Burns, surely you noticed that the winds are gusting thirty to forty miles an hour down here.” Now the ranger's a little annoyed with me. “How hard do you think it's blowing up on the Diamond, nearly five thousand feet higher? There's no way I can send a helicopter anywhere right now. The boys and girls out there aren't going anywhere either,” he says, indicating the S & R team with a finger pointed at the door. “In fact, this storm may have already killed anyone who's on that wall tonight.” He walks to a desk and pulls a thin phone book out of a drawer. Turning his back to me, he picks up the phone and dials a number.

As the ranger talks into the receiver, I spot a large, hand-drawn map of the Diamond posted on a wall and stand before it. I find the route called King of Swords and mark it with a red pen I take off another desk. I trace it upward, from where it begins a third of the way up the wall on a ledge called Broadway. The Broadway Ledge itself is more than five hundred feet off the ground, above a small glacier. According to the map it can be accessed either by a circuitous couloir far to the south of the face or by a more direct, and more difficult, chimney that rises off the glacier. It looks as if King of Swords begins in a corner to the right of a prominent buttress, and then follows a series of wide, off-width cracks for a few hundred feet until a fist crack leads through a steep roof. More cracks lead onward and upward, through more small roofs, until, after a single crackless pitch of tiny holds, the route reaches a long platform known as Table Ledge. Again, more wide cracks lead from there to the top of the climb, just to the right of the highest point on the Diamond and the 14,255-foot summit of Longs Peak.

I stare at the topo, memorizing all the detail I can of the seven roughly 150-foot pitches, not even including the three to four easier ones beneath the Broadway Ledge, until I hear the ranger put down the phone.

“They're waking up the Special Agent in Charge at the Denver office. Apparently someone from the Wyoming AG's Office already has been trying to call, Agent Burns. The FBI will call us once they are briefed.”

I suppress a groan. I don't have much time before it is discovered that I'm suspended. I point at the topo and say, “I know you're used to rescues. Say you had someone hurt on that wall tonight, how would you go about getting them off?”

The ranger stands beside me at the topo and studies it too, rubbing the coarse shadow on his anvil jaw. “Heli sling-out or heli to the top and rap are out of the question tonight, at least for now. The wind's coming out of the west, probably blowing over the summit at a hundred to a hundred twenty miles per hour. A helicopter is not an option in this wind, especially at night. But the Diamond has at least a little protection from the wind, since it faces east. It'll still be gusting eighty to ninety on the wall, though. The only way to do a rescue is either to wait out the storm or go up from the bottom, maybe on an easier route like Kieners or the Notch,” he says, referring to more moderate routes to the left of the face, “and rappel laterally from below the summit.” He pauses for a minute, then shakes his head as he notices the red tracing I've done next to King of Swords. “But if you're talking someone on Swords, when we don't even know where they are on the route, you can't do anything but wait it out. You can't rappel that route—too many roofs and no permanent anchors. See, you would have to go all the way up it to find them in the dark. And there are only a handful of climbers in the country who can get up that route, and that's when it's in good condition.”

The phone rings again and the ranger answers it. “I'll be right back,” I say to the ranger, who doesn't hear me. Tobias looks pale and confused as I swing my pack over one shoulder and push open the cabin's door. I step out into the night.

I can hear them inside as I pause, buckling the hip belt. The wind is holding the door open.

“Where's he going?” the ranger asks Tobias and his underling.

“He took his pack outside,” the toady says.

“Shit!” I hear Tobias yell in realization.

I'm already a little ways up the trail, moving fast and disappearing into the darkness of the swaying pines, when I hear Tobias shouting at the S & R team gathered outside the cabin.

“Where'd he go?”

“Dude just ran up the trail,” one of the team members answers.

THIRTY-ONE

I
DON
'
T USE MY
headlamp as I run up the rocky trail through the pines. My eyes adjust quickly to the light of the moon and I run without stumbling, trying to move as my brother would, at one with the gusting wind and the stones beneath my feet. The gear inside the heavy pack I wear jangles out a rhythm. The switchbacks take me higher and higher until the pines grow smaller, stunted by lack of oxygen at this elevation.

Coming out of the trees, I can see a vast, starless obstruction in the sky to the west. The Diamond. It looks like what astronomers call a black hole, sucking in all the space around it, big enough and yawning wide enough to swallow the Earth. I pause for a moment, gulping some water from a bottle, transfixed by the size of the absolute darkness. Fear freezes me for a moment, then a stinging rain of wind-blown gravel slaps my face. At this altitude there are no more trees to protect me. I run on, against the wind, toward the huge sucking hole.

The trail keeps rising, along a broad ridge above empty fields of talus, before it traverses the side of a small mountain. At one point I'm halted by a fat patch of ice that drools down across the trail and into the deep valley below. Its hard gray surface angles slightly toward the abyss. Without removing my pack, I reach up and behind me to unclip one of the ice tools. I don't take the time to put on my crampons. I move gingerly over the ice, both hands on the ax, the pick always buried deeply in the frozen water, trying not to think of how a slip will lead to a 500-foot tumble into the gorge.

I've long since sweated through my fleece. I'm jogging along the trail now, the hip belt of my pack blistering my sides through the damp pile. Lactic acid burns ferociously in my legs. My throat is hot and dry from an hour of panting. Just when I feel the rigid grip of exhaustion seizing my muscles, I let the stifled anger leach back through me like the gentle turn of a pressure valve.

The trail rises onto a wide field of broken rocks. Over the howl of the wind, I can hear the soft gurgling of water running over them. I splash through the tiny streams of icy water and remember this place from the ranger's map. I look for and spot the small, deserted rescue cabin that crouches under a boulder-strewn slope.

I lose the trail amid the shallow water, but know it lies somewhere above the cabin. Scrambling up the slope, I pull myself over the walls of irregular truck-size blocks until I reach another plateau. Here, in a wide depression, the moonlight streaks crazy yellow shapes over the surface of a glacial lake. Small waves sweep up and over the ice that rims the water's edge. I find the trail again and follow it at a run around the lake. The vast black shape looms up above me, leaning over, ready to crash down on the lake and everything around it.

The foot of the dark wall is shod in white. The hard glacial snow runs hundreds of feet down from the Diamond's lower reaches. I pause again to study it, my hands on my knees, my breath coming in harsh gasps, my head arched all the way back. The glacier resembles a white hand pushing against the base of the wall. There are two ways to reach Broadway Ledge a third of the way up the face, where the King of Swords begins. One way I can see to my left; a low-angled couloir called Lamb's Slide rising diagonally left, up, and slightly away from the face. If the snowfield is a right hand, then the couloir looks like the outstretched thumb. A slow, safe, circuitous route. The other, more difficult but more direct, route is the North Chimney. Far steeper, its narrow line of snow leads up directly above me, like an extended middle finger, until it disappears in darkness a few hundred feet up the wall.

Speed is my priority, I decide. If it were safety, I wouldn't be here in the first place. I dump my pack in the scree at the edge of the snowfield, tug on my harness, and snap the crampons onto my boots. I tie one end of the skinny, eight-millimeter rope to the harness and drape the rest in coils over my head and one shoulder. Over the other shoulder, I lift a small rack of cams and wired chocks. I jam the second ax through a harness loop and with the other I prod the firm snow. Like a magician's trick, my now unweighted pack is stolen by the wind and vanishes into the night.

At first the glacier isn't steep enough to force me onto my crampon's front points. I'm able to place my feet flat on the snow, sideways, so that all the lower points in the crampons are engaged. This is painful on my bent ankles, which are flexed to the side 30 degrees or more to keep me upright, but it saves my tired calves from the exertion of front pointing. I traverse in this awkward manner, known as the French Technique, for twenty steps up and to the right, turn, then twenty up and in the other direction. I grip my long ice tool in my uphill hand and firmly plant the spike in the snow with each step.

Within twenty minutes I reach the top of the glacier and the beginning of what had looked like an extended middle finger from the glacier below. Up close, it looks to me more like a narrow white tongue lolling out of some dark recess. The North Chimney. The tongue is much steeper than the slope below. I move up it without hesitation, front-pointing now. I pull my second tool from my harness as I climb and use the two in tandem, my gloved palms wrapped around their steel heads. After every two steps, I pull the axes out of the snow one at a time and replant them into the snow ahead, shoving them in the way one would plunge a dagger into another man's belly.

Close to the top of the tongue, I pause to look up at a starless expanse of darkness. The sky has turned to black stone. Despite the fear that expands within me, I feel a familiar thrill.

The hard snow drools out of the chimney's three-sided space. The opening is as broad as an elevator shaft, but its concave walls close in tighter farther back. The rear of the chimney is just two and a half feet wide. The temperature drops at least twenty degrees in the dark, high chamber. The wind rumbles down the shaft like a train. Without having touched the stone walls yet, I can feel their chill through my gloves. I feel it on my skin, in my muscles, down to my tired bones. The cold seems to grip at my chest, choking me.

I lift the coil of rope off my shoulder and drop it on a small depression I stamp out at the very top of the snow tongue. Gently passing it through my gloves, I uncoil it and feel for any knots that could catch on the chimney's many cracks and edges. I let my leashed tools dangle free from my wrists as I press myself into the shaft and begin stemming upward, the line trailing out beneath me from where one end is tied to my harness.

It takes a half hour of hard climbing, the sort that would be easy without the cold and darkness, before I reach the Broadway Ledge. Up the entire North Chimney route the rope hung loosely from my harness. I never felt unsteady enough to need to slow my progress by placing protection in the rock or ice and tying in. But standing on the narrow ledge, when the wind staggers me slightly, I'm glad I brought the rope. I look up at the dank wall that leans over me and know I will need it.

The ledge slopes disturbingly down toward the edge. But as I move north, the bench broadens until it is almost ten feet wide. Rock debris litters its surface. At one point I have to move gingerly around the base of a massive buttress that projects from the wall. In the recess on the pillar's far side, I remember from the ranger's map, begins the route known as the King of Swords. If Lynn and Billy are somewhere on it, I hope they are riding out the storm on some higher ledge. I hope that at least Lynn is still alive.

I find a wide, vertical crack in a corner of the recess that must be the route's start. I'm tempted to turn on my headlamp to inspect the fissure for chalk marks, any sign of recent passage, but am afraid the light could be seen from above. Hesitating, I pull off my gloves and stare upward, trying to recall a Catholic prayer my mother taught my brother and me. Something about being weak, cold, and scared, asking the Lord to give me strength and courage as I strap on my sword and shield to go into battle. But my mind can't find it, or God isn't with me on this wall.

Instead other images rise within me: Billy Heller raging at me on his porch; Oso's snarling and shattered muzzle as his blood drains out on the snow; Sierra Calloway's bound corpse and the faint burn marks on her back from the broken lamp; and Ross McGee collapsing on the marble floor as the Assistant AG asks for my badge. I open the pressure valve all the way, letting the fury out in an enormous torrent. Then I put my hands in the crack and start climbing.

An hour later there is no way to tell how much higher the wall reaches above my position clinging flat against it. The blackness beneath me is also impossible to measure. I'm almost overcome by doubts—maybe Heller has already thrown Lynn off, then finished the route or rapped off. Maybe the Jeep at the trailhead and the note in the climber's log were just decoys, and they are really somewhere else, on another route.

At a small stance I set two mechanical cams in a crack and wearily tie the rope to them. For the sixth time I rappel the skinny 50-meter line, picking out the pieces of protection I left when I climbed up the rock, remove the anchor I built at the lowest point, then knot slings into ascension knots and jug back up the rope while swinging free in the wind. In this cumbersome way, having to climb each pitch twice, I have progressed six rope lengths above Broadway Ledge.

Back at the stance where I tied the highest anchor, I feel for the crack to reach higher but can't find it. My frozen hands slide across the dark, vertical surface and find nothing but small edges. Then I remember the topo map in the ranger's cabin. I must be at the pitch below Table Ledge, not too far from the summit. The drawing showed the crack I've followed for over six hundred feet ending and the hundred feet above devoid of all but the smallest holds.

I slot another cam into the very top of the crack and secure it to the other pieces of protection that provide my anchor. I know this is just a pretense of greater security—there's unlikely to be much in the way of further placements until Table Ledge, which I guess is a hundred feet higher. The act of strengthening the anchor is futile. I know my single skinny rope won't hold much of a fall if I come off.

After what feels like eighty feet of crimping and edging on tiny holds, I find a small, horizontal crack into which I can fit a small cam. I punch it in frantically, finally achieving some protection when I snap the rope through its carabiner. I risk hanging off the single piece to rest for a minute, spinning on the rope and seeing a pink glow on the horizon at my back. The first blush of dawn. The Knapps' sentencing will be starting just hours from now in Laramie, a hundred miles to the north. The thought of it gets me started again.

After only a few moves beyond the cam I pause again, listening.

Not far above, over the bay of the wind that roars in my ears, I hear the soft flapping of nylon. There's a voice somewhere too, a man's monotone, and then a chuckle and a slap. Reaching up, I grip a solid edge. I pull myself up on it with both my torn, frozen hands and discover Table Ledge just as the sun's first curving rays paint the wall from black to a dark gray.

The ledge is a small, cavelike platform that extends back into the face only five feet or so. The length is no more than fifteen feet from where I cling at the left-most end. To the right of me a tiny blue bivouac tent snaps in the wind, nestled back against the rock. From it comes the man's low voice.

Hesitating before crawling up, I look into the grayness beneath me and try to remember where I placed my last piece of protection—that insignificant little cam. Twenty feet below? There's no way to tell. I note with a mixture of relief and wariness the safety cord that the tent's occupants have stretched low across the back of the ledge.

I slide up and stand on the first real horizontal surface I have felt in what seems like forever. As I do, the gear and axes that hang from me jingle against the rock. The voice I heard from the tent is suddenly silent. Hurrying now, I take a long piece of webbing that's attached to my harness and clip it to the safety line. When the carabiner snaps shut, the tent's door rips open with a zipper's shriek.

“Heller! Billy Heller!” I call over the howl of a sudden gust that staggers me on the ledge.

A ponytailed head shoves through the opening in the faint predawn light. The face splits into a grin as easily as the tent's fly had parted. He looks absolutely satanic.

“My, my. I wasn't expecting company,” he shouts to me. There's laughter in his voice. “You gonna serve a warrant on me, Agent Burns? Here?”

“I just want Lynn.”

“The little bitch who ran off and banged you, then came crawling back to me? Sure, hang on a sec.” He says it casually, as if I'd knocked on his screen door and Lynn was watching TV somewhere inside.

Heller's face disappears for a moment. Then it returns and he parts the opening with his massive shoulders and crawls halfway out of the tent. With a meaty fist he pulls a handful of blonde hair after him, onto the small space between us. It's Lynn. She's only wearing polypropylene underwear, the bottoms pushed down around her knees. There's a harness still around her waist with the leg loops undone but I can't see any rope or cord attached to it. Her eyes are swollen almost shut by deep bruises, her mouth is open, and her head is lolling on the cold stone.

“Anton?” I think I hear her say. But the wind's too loud and her voice barely a whisper. I can't be sure if she spoke at all.

“This little darling was just fixing to see if she could fly. You might give it a try yourself, Agent,” Heller shouts, the laughter still in his voice. He's squatting next to her now by the tent's entrance. In the early-morning light I can see that he's wearing a harness too. A long, loose length of cord snakes to the safety line.

I take a step toward them but stop when he nudges Lynn so that she's almost at the edge.

“Don't do it, Billy! Even if she's not around to testify, there's more than enough evidence to nail you for the murders of Kimberly, Kate, Chris, and Sierra. You don't need to hurt her.”