The Edge of Justice (32 page)

THIRTY-THREE

T
HE CROWD THAT
swarms on the grass outside the sandstone courthouse has multiplied over the last week, as if it were reproducing with a rabbitlike intensity while awaiting this day. It swells out onto the sidewalk, and even into the street at certain places. The people huddle together against the incoming storm's cold wind. The blow is finally reaching Laramie, after dropping seven thousand vertical feet from the Rocky Mountains' highest peaks onto the plain. Grim-faced sheriff's deputies are posted on the curb every ten yards. Oddly, they're not scanning the impassioned crowd but the street.

“Looking for you,” Jones says from the driver's seat.

He pulls the car into the only available spot—in front of a fire hydrant between two satellite-roofed media vans, and cracks his darkly tinted window a few inches. A human roar fills the car. Listening, I can discern some of the shouts. ACLU protesters, anti–death penalty advocates, Catholic nuns, and bizarrely, the pathetic Klansmen, all chanting that the state has no right to do God's work. Concurrently, some church groups, Asian activists, and victims' rights zealots scream for blood.

“How you plannin' to get through
that
?” Jones asks.

“We need a diversion. Some sort of commotion,” I tell him, thinking. I glimpse patches of browning grass among the crowd. “That grass is looking a little dry. Do you know how to turn on the sprinklers?”

Jones gives me an evil flash of white teeth from beneath his sunglasses before unfolding himself from the low-slung Corvette. Some of the watchful deputies look at him, surprised to see him, as he gets out. He merely nods at them, then disappears into the crowd toward the courthouse.

While we wait, Lynn asks from her cramped position in the tiny rear space, “Why not just go in? This car is getting way too tight and my ass is asleep. What are they gonna do, man, shoot us?”

“They just might.”

Jones's cell phone rings. I stab the talk button and say, “Burns.”

A whispered voice, barely audible, says, “Where are you?”

“We're outside the courthouse, Rebecca, trying to figure out how to get in. There are Albany County deputies all around, looking for me.”

“Get in here now, Anton!” she hisses. “The jury's taking their seats!” We had called her from the car an hour earlier as we sped out of Estes, having left the hospital through an emergency exit with the alarm blaring behind us, and learned that the attorneys' arguments were finished. The jury had retired to deliberate their two options—life or death. Everyone knew the decision was preordained.

A minute later Jones is jogging down the middle of the street, weaving through barely moving traffic. He looks at his watch as he runs, then lifts a finger above his head and circles it in the air.

“Get ready!” I say to Lynn.

Just as the words leave my lips there's a surprised cry from the crowd. And in a sudden, mass movement the throng of people propels itself forward, overrunning the deputies' positions and flooding into the street. The cars that have been creeping along begin honking, adding to the swelling din. The crowd keeps spilling off the lawn, until the angry, wet mass surrounds even Jones's car across the street from the courthouse.

I shove my door open, striking demonstrators' legs and hips, just as Jones yanks open the driver's side and plucks Lynn from the backseat. With her tucked under one arm, he half carries her as he charges across the street like the football star he once was. I put my forehead between his massive shoulder blades and churn my legs behind him.

We're up the steps and almost to the courthouse doors before there is a shout from the deputies that penetrates the mayhem. I turn my head and see several brown uniforms pointing in our direction, fighting their way toward us.

Jones crashes the door open into the faces of startled security officers. One of them actually slaps his holster before Jones freezes his hand with a cold glance.

“Don't fuck with me right now, Sam,” Jones tells him, then jerks his head at Lynn and me and says, “they're with me.”

We're running down the empty hallway, past the metal detectors and the guards with their mouths hanging slack.

“Touchdown!” Jones says, finally releasing Lynn outside the courtroom's entrance. There's a clattering of footsteps and gun belts behind us in the hallway, but the deputies are too late. I grab Lynn's sinewy arm and pull her through the swinging doors.

“Your honor,” I shout, “my name is Special Agent Antonio Burns. I have information for the court!” A roar of whispered voices swells and a hundred faces turn to stare at me in my bloodstained jacket. The judge's bulldog jaw juts forward as she beats her gavel on the bench.

Willis and Bender are already on their feet, coming down the aisle toward us. Almost in unison, they reach behind them and unclip handcuffs from their belts. I see Deputy Knight off to one side, standing near the defendants' tables. His head is turned, staring at me. He is stone-faced.

They're almost to me when the door at my back bursts open, striking me hard in my battered ribs. Jones steps through it, arguing with the deputies in the hallway. He pauses for just a second and takes stock of the judge's angry stare and the determined approach of Willis and Bender. “I can vouch for this man,” he says quietly, his deep bass penetrating through the shocked murmurs in the courtroom. He looms over me from behind. Some of the determination leaves Willis's face. Both his and Bender's strides falter a little.

“Stop, Sheriff,” the judge says. “Jefferson Jones, you've served this court well for several years now. For the life of me I cannot imagine why you would interrupt these proceedings in such a dramatic manner as this, but based on your good service, I'm going to grant you and this young man a brief audience of five minutes. All of you, come back into my chambers. The court will be in recess until then.”

We march past the stunned reporters and jurors, down the aisle, through the well and through a small door to one side of the bench. The judge sits behind her desk. Lynn and I stand before it. Bender moves until he is just behind me and to one side, his face menacingly close to mine. I feel his tobacco-flavored breath on my cheek and neck. Within seconds the oak-paneled room is packed with people. Nathan Karge and the defendants' puzzled lawyers have followed, along with Jones and Sheriff Willis and the court reporter and all the judge's curious staff.

I can smell the sweat from the hours on the wall emanating from my ragged clothes. Along with the coppery smell of blood. “I'd like to have Deputy David Knight and Rebecca Hersh of the
Denver Post
join us, your honor.”

“Deputy Knight may, but I won't have a reporter in here,” she says, glaring at me.

Jones struggles through us toward the door. “I'll get him.”

“So just what information do you have that's worth disturbing these proceedings, Agent Burns?”

Before I can say a word, Nathan Karge is speaking. “Judge, I object—” His face is white, striped with the same red streaks I saw the day I interviewed Brad at the hotel. But his voice is calm, as if he's tranquilized by the fact that he's staring into the pit. “Mr. Burns is a rogue agent and a murderer, your honor. He is currently under suspension from the AG's Office pending the investigation of murder charges—”

“Because of you,” I remind him.

“This is a violent man with no credibility, your honor. He's even believed to have helped his brother, also a murderer, escape from a prison in Colorado—”

I look back to the judge, my voice hoarse as I try to speak over Karge. “There's a lot of political shit, excuse me, maneuvering, going on right now, Judge. Ross McGee was supposed to be here, but he had a heart attack last night just as I was suspended to keep me from investigating further into—”

“Be quiet, both of you!” she shouts at us. Her eyes pierce first me, then Karge. “Mr. Karge, your objection is noted. What do you want to tell me, Mr. Burns? Make it fast.”

“Your honor!” Karge shouts, outraged. “You cannot—”

The fierce little woman in the black robes fixes him with a stare. I can almost see icy darts shooting from her eyes. “Mr. Karge, you aren't governor yet. And until you are, hell, even when you are, don't you ever try to tell me what to do in my own chambers! Now Mr. Burns . . . speak.”

Karge slumps back against the wall, his eyes wide with indignation and fear. When I start to speak he slowly closes them.

And so I begin my tale, starting with the murder of Kimberly Lee and the pipe planted by Sheriff Willis and Sergeant Bender to make the case stronger against the Knapps. I tell her about Kate Danning and the strange contusion on the back of her head and the rope burns on her neck and wrists. About how it led me to find the bottle smeared with her blood up at Vedauwoo. About how the DCI crime lab found both Brad and Nathan Karge's fingerprints on it. About how the Surenos were sicced on me when I started looking into it. About Chris Braddock's fatal fall in the Big Horns. About the shooting of my dog. About my false arrest and beating in the Albany County jail. About Sierra Calloway's murder and the pink cords that bound her tortured body. And finally, about both Brad's and Heller's admissions the night before. Lynn is surprisingly docile at my side, but she nods her affirmation when it is required, as does David Knight.

“Your honor,” I finish, my voice raw and scratchy, “the Knapps didn't kill Kimberly Lee. Nathan Karge learned that his son was one of the real killers sometime during the trial and went looking for him up at Vedauwoo. During the scuffle Kate Danning was knocked off a cliff. To save his career and his son, he tried to cover it up. All the rest of it, the murders of Chris Braddock and Sierra Calloway, was an attempt by Billy Heller and Brad Karge, with the possible collusion of the sheriff and the County Attorney, to cover up evidence that could exculpate the Knapps. They were trying to save their asses, excuse me, their political futures, your honor.”

I turn my head for a moment and see Karge and Willis standing together against the wall by the door. Bender has moved away from me at some point in my narrative and edged toward them, so the three stand together in a guilty row. For a moment I fear they'll try to slip out of the room. But then Jones smiles at me and steps back to plant his broad back firmly against the door.

When I turn back to the judge, her lean jaw is jutting out farther than ever. I'm reminded of how I once thought it resembled the brush guard on my truck. Now it looks like the pick of my ice ax. She stares at me with hard eyes for a long, silent moment. I meet her gaze, summoning up all the integrity in my heart and trying to wear it on my face.

“Can you prove all of this, Mr. Burns?”

I answer slowly, for the first time trying to put it all together in my head as an investigator should. “I can prove Heller and Bradley Karge were the real killers of Kimberly Lee, as well as Chris Braddock and Sierra Calloway.” I can testify that both of them confessed to me. In addition, I have Lynn's corroboration and the cord the police will find when they search Heller's basement.

“I can prove Nathan Karge was up at Vedauwoo the night Kate Danning fell and that it was his swing with the bottle that knocked her to her death.” Again, I have the confessions of Brad and Heller, along with Lynn's corroboration, and the bottle with the fingerprints.

“I can prove Sheriff Willis manufactured evidence against the Knapps in this trial.” Deputy Knight nods again beside me. He looks stronger now, more sure of himself since everything's come out in the open. He must realize he's done the right thing in talking to me. I feel a moment's guilt for having wrecked his bike and then left him on the plains to walk back to Laramie.

“And I can prove Nathan Karge and Sheriff Willis knew of some exculpatory evidence in this trial and failed to share it with the Knapps' attorneys.” McGee, if he survives, will back me up.

After a moment's thought I add lamely, “And I may be able to prove a lot more, your honor, once I've had the time to sort this all out.”

She keeps staring. I'm reminded of the way McGee analyzed me after my run-in with the Surenos, as if he were trying to weigh what was in my mind and in my heart. The thought of McGee makes me stand straighter. But I still worry I'll collapse under the judge's gaze if she keeps this up.

Slowly she turns her head and looks at the Knapps' lawyers. “Gentlemen, do you have a motion for me?” Her voice is almost sad.

The lead attorney quickly says, with a broad, twitching smile on his lips that it looks like he's trying hard to contain, “We move for a mistrial, your honor!”

“So granted. Mr. Jones, I believe you have probable cause to make some arrests.”

THIRTY-FOUR

A
LL AFTERNOON AND
evening I'm interrogated by a swarm of attorneys from the AG's Office, as well as some federal prosecutors whom the judge had notified of the potential civil rights violations committed by Albany County's elected officials. It's after eight o'clock at night when I finally sneak out past the reporters who have besieged both the courthouse and the Sheriff's Office. I'm exhausted to the point of near-unconsciousness. It has been more than forty-eight hours since I last had any serious sleep. My battered body and psyche are shutting down. Two federal agents, the same ones who were in the hospital in Estes that morning, escort me back to the hotel.

News of the arrests of County Attorney Nathan Karge and Sheriff Daniel Willis has created a sensation that eclipses anything the state of Wyoming has ever seen. Between meetings I caught part of a newscast, one that had interrupted the afternoon's regular programming. A reporter whose carefully coiffed hair had been spoiled by the wind shouted out the publicly known details into the camera from amid the turmoil of the courthouse lawn. The Knapp brothers were expected to be released within hours, he yelled, the charges against them dismissed.

Someone told me that the Albany County Commissioners had convened an emergency session, during which they appointed Jefferson Jones as interim sheriff. Apparently he had put his plans for Quantico on hold. He's now Wyoming's first black sheriff, temporarily at least. I had to smile at that—my friend's ambition has been fulfilled.

Back in my room at the hotel, I strip off my filthy clothes, shower, and collapse into my bed. The lights are off and my body desperately craves rest, but my pulse still races. In the faint light from the corridor that penetrates the heavy curtains, Oso's water bowl gleams at me from against the wall. I lie with my head propped on a pillow and stare at it. My heart and my body ache unremittingly, despite having swallowed the four remaining pills in my old bottle of Tylenol-codeine. I long for sleep to embrace me, to pull me down into the mattress and anesthetize me. Just when the exhaustion and the gentle numbness of the pills finally begin to overtake me, I hear the delicate snick of a key sliding into my door's lock.

With that slight noise, my mind accelerates out of its stupor. I twitch in the bed as if I've been shocked. A sudden realization grips me. I am the only one who can put it all together. Although the state prosecutors I spoke with today have granted Lynn White, Leroy Bender, and David Knight immunity in return for their testimony against Nathan Karge and Daniel Willis, I am the only one who wasn't involved to some degree. Even Lynn, a victim herself and the least culpable, will not be much use. The corruption of her spirit is too obvious whenever she opens her mouth. Only I can put it all together and lock the County Attorney and Sheriff Willis in prison for a long, long time. If I am dead, they will be released from the holding cells and walk out, their reputations irreversibly tarnished but their bodies free.

The key is turning in the lock when I lunge halfway off the bed; the door is starting to swing open. I dive naked onto the floor. My hands skim the carpet and the rumpled clothes I discarded there, trying to find the jacket pocket and Cecelia's small pistol. Then I remember. I remember it falling; falling soundlessly into the void beneath the Diamond. I'm defenseless.

Overpowering the terror is a feeling of humiliation. I'm going to die, I think, slapping uselessly at the filthy clothes on the hotel's carpet, my bare ass in the air. Shot through the butt. I twist my body toward the doorway with dread.

Rebecca stands framed in the corridor's lights. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are bright and wide. She starts to smile.

“Sorry, Anton,” she says, her smile broadening into a laugh. “I probably should have knocked.”

I collapse on the carpet, roll onto my back, and groan. As the adrenaline subsides, the pain returns. Still laughing, she kneels beside me. For a moment I think she's going to give me CPR. Her hair sweeps across my bare chest and neck as she lowers her lips to mine. A kind of CPR, anyway. The Breath of Life.

Within minutes, with barely another word, she's naked in my arms and tangled in the sheets, her white skin like silk, her lips locked cool and smooth against my mouth. I gasp in delight rather than pain when her thin weight presses against my hips and her arms encircle my back. While the moment lasts, the bruises, sprains, and twinges are all magically healed.

The phone rings. Even though the hotel's voice-mail system keeps cutting it off, a few seconds later it starts again. Finally I scoop it up off the nightstand and answer with a breathless grunt of “Burns.”

“Caught you with your knickers down, eh?”

“Ross! How are you feeling?”

“Better, lad. They might let me out . . . of this hellhole tomorrow. I just had a visit from the AG . . . things are wild at the office . . . the Torres suit has settled . . . the murder investigation's been dropped. . . . You're reinstated, God help us all.”

“That's great! Whatever you did, thank you.”

“It's not my work, it's the frigging media . . . they're all over the place trying to figure out . . . just how deep the shit's piled. . . . The office is going to be kissing your ass for a long time . . . hoping like hell you won't point your finger at them. . . . Now where's my girl Rebecca? . . . Is that young vixen with you?”

“Yeah, but she's indisposed at the moment.” With her palm Rebecca smacks me gently on the back. I gasp as the bruises there flare for a few seconds. Rebecca murmurs an apology.

“Ah well . . . to the victor . . . go the spoils,” he says, chuckling. “And good job, lad. . . . Sorry I let you down.”

I hang up the phone. Rebecca and I slowly begin to finish what we started.

A little later she's still pressed against me but her breath is finally slowing. There's a sensation as if love is blowing gently on my skin. Feeling like Oso, a wounded and abused animal suddenly in the presence of kindness and affection, I magnify it and reflect it back a hundred times. I lie with my head deep in the pillow, letting her warmth envelop me and carry me on. Like this I drift away.

Two days later I'm allowed by the office's attorneys and the federal authorities to return to my former office-of-exile in Cody. Rather than suspended, I'm now merely “on leave.” It's standard procedure after any duty-related shooting.

“Consider it a paid vacation,” the Assistant Attorney General told me with an oily smile, the same sort of grin I had seen on his face when McGee collapsed. “Take as long as you like.”

“I will,” I told him, stepping close. “And by the way, go fuck yourself.”

His smile never faltered. The office is now willing to do anything to keep me happy, to keep me from talking about their complicity in the attempts to silence me prior to the sentencing. Apparently my suspension was never official. An administrative mistake, one of the junior attorneys there told me. It happens sometimes. The office is anxious to get me out of town and away from the swarming reporters.

Rebecca has been as busy as me. Her articles have been picked up by papers across the country. She told me she's received job offers from New York, Chicago, and Washington. Already there's talk about the possibility of a journalistic award. Pulitzer, she mouthed to me one evening with her face just inches above mine, not speaking the word for fear of jinxing herself. I see her only late at night, when she slips through my room's door without knocking.

I will be seeing a lot more of her, though. She's going to take a vacation too, once the developments on what is known as the Laramie Scandal have died down and she's milked it for all she can. In anticipation, I liberated a small portion of my grandfather's trust from a bank in Argentina and bought two first-class tickets to South America.

We're going to Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. There I plan to introduce her to mountains of ice and granite that dwarf even Cloud Peak, which had impressed her so much. Maybe I'll be able to interest her in putting on a rope. Like any true addict, I would like nothing better than to hook another on the adrenaline surge that comes from having a thousand feet of empty space beneath your heels.

I drive back up over the plains, where the chaparral is still dusted with the storm's debris, to my rented cabin and my office in Cody. There's an enormous hole in my heart because no beast is grinning and drooling out the backseat window. I picture him at Vedauwoo, that afternoon ten days ago when I first arrived, hunched beneath a cliff and gazing up at me. His gold eyes glisten with devotion. As my tires hum across the asphalt that cuts through the prairie like an open vein, I finally cry for him.

I'm going twenty or thirty miles an hour faster than the bullet-holed, near-invisible sign states is allowable as I enter Cody's city limits. I blow right through the speed trap, one that anyone who has been through Cody before knows is always manned. It's the town's way of generating revenue from midwestern tourists in their motor homes. Racing past the screen of pines concealing the ever present patrol car, I turn my head and observe the deputy there relieving himself on one tire. My speed visibly startles him. Then he recognizes my truck in time to release himself and pantomime the gunslinger's move of drawing a pistol from each hip. QuickDraw. Despite having lived in Cody for eighteen months, I hadn't realized before that people here might like me. My depression made me entirely too self-absorbed.

I drive down the main street, past the ramshackle buildings, looking at the ranchers in their cowboy hats and pointed boots intermingling with the hippies and climbers wearing shorts and Tevas. Everyone nods politely to one another as they pass on the street. This is a nice town, I think, a lot like Laramie. A good place. At the top of a small hill, I park outside the small post office to retrieve my mail.

The florid matron behind the counter smiles when I walk in. “Been reading about you,” she says with a wink. “Good stuff, these days. What're you going to do for an encore, Agent?”

“I think I'm done fighting crime. I'm going back to fighting gravity,” I tell her.

My words surprise me. Up until this very second I hadn't thought much about the future. Just the trip south with Rebecca, and then the inevitable weeks of testimony that will be required to convict both the Karges and Sheriff Willis. But I'm done with law enforcement, I realize. I'm done playing the Game. The decision feels invigorating, as if I kicked over the table, declared the other players cheats, and walked away with all the cash.

I unlock my box and take out the tight sheaf of mail stuffed into the small metal compartment. I sit in my truck and let the wind gently rock it as I sort through the junk. A bent postcard slips out from the pages of a climbing catalog that I'd tossed on the passenger seat to be thrown away.

The picture on the wrinkled front is of Los Angeles International Airport. It's a photograph of a plane roaring off the runway and into a sunset swirling with color. Flipping the card over, I see there's no text other than my name and address spelled in block letters. There is simply a drawing. It's well done, as if the artist had spent a lot of time practicing and dreaming. What else is there to do in prison? The picture is of a sleek and well-muscled rat. The creature is fitting sharp teeth around a hunk of what appears to be Swiss cheese in the shape of a jagged peak. Smiling, I tuck the card back into the catalog and toss it in the first trash can I drive by. But the wind tugs the card free before the catalog drops. I watch the wind suck it straight up into the sky, then send it soaring over the stores and pine trees toward the mountains.

Maybe I will take Rebecca by the ranch for Christmas. To see my parents and whoever else is there.