The Edge of Justice (4 page)

I meet his eyes in the mirror for a moment and glance away. Then I look at my own. They seem to have recessed back in my head over the past year and a half, as if my withdrawal from the things I loved has withdrawn my ability to see the world. The sockets around them are tight and dark. People used to comment on my eyes, tell me what a surprisingly dark color they are, almost like coffee, against my lighter skin and hair. But no one's said that in a long time. Not since things started to go wrong.

A voice beside me says, “You climb solo and drink solo, huh?” She speaks with a Dead Head's lilt.

I turn and try to give her a smile. “Thanks for the flowers. My dog felt like a prince.”

“I thought he'd either like it or eat me, man, when I put them around his neck. But he just ignored me the whole time.”

“That's because he was busy, giving me a spot.”

She laughs at that, her eyes wrinkling slightly at the corners where, like mine, too much exposure to the sun and wind has prematurely carved thin lines. “He's big enough to spot. Falling on him wouldn't hurt either one of you much.”

The mirror shows me that the ponytailed man from the booth is approaching. I can almost feel the air around us becoming denser. He moves up close behind the girl and me, looming over us.

“I know you from somewhere, dude. Where's it at?” he asks.

I'm enormously tired of the infamy that resulted from the shooting. And just hours before, on the rock again at Vedauwoo, I'd thought that maybe I was finally learning to deal with it. With great reluctance I turn to look up at him and try to think of how to answer his question.

The man is huge in every way. He's at least several inches over six feet tall, nearly half a foot taller than me, and at a minimum of 220 pounds he outweighs me by 40. His powerful jaw muscles are barely contained by taut, tan skin. He wears his glossy black hair pulled back so tight that it looks like a helmet. Ropes of thick brawn bulge down his neck and disappear into his shirt. The hand he lays on the bar between the girl and me is scabbed and callused. It's also the size of a boxing glove. Seeing his paw, I realize that this guy, who I now recognize as an almost-famous climber, probably doesn't know me from that notorious Cheyenne event. The hands don't look like the type that regularly turn the pages of a newspaper.

“I don't know. But you're Billy Heller, right?” I hope that saying his name, establishing his identity, might make him forget about mine and appease his obvious hostility.

Heller's fame is limited to hard-core climbing circles. He was first noticed when he developed super-gymnastic routes at Tahquiz and Suicide. Then he spent a couple of decades as a wall rat in Yosemite before coming to Vedauwoo a few years ago in search of new material. I've heard he is the master of off-width cracks—the recesses in granite too wide to jam with a clenched fist and too narrow to crawl in and chimney with feet and hands on one side and one's back braced against the other. He developed intensely powerful techniques known as the arm bar, chicken wing, knee jam, and the kick-through. People say that he knows the physiology of musculature, joints, and bones better than a medical student. I've heard about how he can lead a rope up the blank roofs that jut sometimes more than fifty feet from cliff faces, roofs that contain only a single, wide fissure like a jagged earthquake fracture across a high-beamed ceiling. He will hang with his elbows and palms wedged in the crack and with his feet dangling over dead space, then fold his entire body like a jackknife to shove his feet into the tight space. And he will release his hands, so that he is suspended by just his feet jammed heel and toe into the crack, batlike and sometimes hundreds of feet off the ground, and do it all over again, inching along until he can pull himself over the lip.

The irritation emanating from him is probably due to the fact that his far younger girlfriend appears to be flirting with me, and maybe also because his recognition isn't more widespread. The multitalented, high-altitude climbers are the ones who receive the adoration of the broad population of armchair climbing enthusiasts. Like Messner, Beckey, Bridwell, and Viesturs. The specialists are largely ignored. And Heller, nearing forty, has to be in decline from the height of his powers.

The girl interrupts before he has a chance to answer. “Wait a sec—I've seen
you
somewhere—you're Something Burns, right? There was some article 'bout you in a climbing mag a few years back. Alaska?”

I smile, pathetically pleased myself to be recognized for something other than the deaths of three gang members. It was another life entirely and a good one. An article was published after I summitted an unclimbed alpine face with two close friends in Alaska. The trip was terrifying at the time, it seemed like an epic of ancient Greek proportions, but like most alpine trips it improved with time and hindsight. Whenever I look closely in the mirror I remember it. My cheekbone was smashed by a chunk of weather-loosened granite the size of a dinner plate, forever marking me with the pale scar that runs from under one eye to my upper lip. And a day later one of my friends took a long dive and broke his ankle when the rope finally caught him, slamming him against the wall. I rappelled off the mountain with him, cut two leg-holes in the bottom of my pack, and staggered out across the glacier with him on my back, his arms wrapped around my neck. It earned me minor hero status in the climbing community for a short time. The magazine expressed it as a self-sufficient contrast to the usual European tactic of calling for a rescue after the slightest injury, like a hangnail. The magazine published a feature article with photographs.

“My first name's Antonio, but everyone calls me Anton. For some reason Tony never stuck.”

Heller sort of grins at me, his mouth twisting with what I guess is bitterness or envy, and says, “I remember that. Haven't heard about you doing anything new since then, though.”

When I look at his face I see the jaw muscles still flexed under his tight skin. The words are too pointed to be friendly, the smile too mocking. I'm disconcerted by his apparent and immediate dislike for me; likability and a sense of cool are what have made me successful as an undercover investigator.

“I'm Lynn White,” the girl says, squeezing my upper arm with her own small, tough hand. “And over at the table are Chris and Brad, and some other guys on a road trip through here.”

I turn and give them a small wave. None of them gets up or acknowledges me with anything other than a brief look. The wiry one she pointed out as Brad resembles the County Attorney, Nathan Karge, although Brad wears blond dreadlocks. He has the same coldly handsome features. I figure he must be the son, the one who was with the girl four nights ago when she fell off the cliff and died. The funeral was just yesterday but it looks like he has finished mourning—I watch as he laughs and sprays beer from his mouth.

Lynn says to Billy, “Saw this guy up at Vedauwoo today. He was soloing on Crankenstine.” Then to me, somewhat proudly, “Billy climbed that once with a broken ankle. Did the whole damned thing with just one foot.”

I'm impressed and say so. “It scared the hell out of me today. With both feet.”

Billy doesn't say anything, so Lynn goes on, “Billy's been here for just three years but he's already put up more than twenty routes that are 5.12 or harder.”

I try again to be polite and say, “I think I'll stick to easier stuff unless I've got a top rope. You really got to be honed to lead up cracks like that.”

Again, Billy doesn't reply. He just keeps his eyes on me, the challenge and the warning obvious. I read the message and look blankly back. Fuck him. I'm done with speaking the necessary platitudes to establish his dominance and reassure his ego.

Heller gives off a palpable sense of violence like an odor as we stare at one another. Unconsciously, I tense my legs on the rungs of the stool. Heller's bitterness seems so great that I wouldn't be surprised if he were to hit me without warning. For the second time in just a few hours, a juvenile urge warms my blood. I'm tempted to find out if I can take him. Machismo—my father says I inherited
that
from my mother's mestizo ancestors, even though it could just as easily be the result of the military upbringing he subjected our family to. I try to douse the fire with a long draw from my beer.

Lynn squeezes both our arms. “C'mon, guys. Cut the testosterone bullshit. Anton, you should come climbing with us sometime this week. We're out at the 'Voo pretty much every morning.”

“I'd like that,” I say, as much wanting to annoy Heller as wanting to spend time with her. “I don't know where anything is. I don't even have a guidebook.”

“How about coming with us to smoke some blunts? We're going back to Billy's place.”

Billy's eyes cut at her.

I shake my head and almost laugh. “No, I've got to sleep. I have to work tomorrow.”

“What do you do?” Heller asks, finally speaking again.

“Pest control,” I say quickly. “But I'll look for you guys up at Vedauwoo this week.” In order to pay for my beer I have to open my wallet carefully so that my badge doesn't show.

FOUR

I
WAKE UP EARLY
and drive to a local park. There I find a set of monkey bars from which I can do my usual training: sets of pull-ups, push-ups, and leaps while wearing a pack weighted with climbing gear. It's a routine I have maintained even over the eighteen months of self-imposed exile from the rocks. Oso sniffs about the sand that surrounds the playground's equipment with his gray muzzle and shambling gait. For just a moment it makes me melancholy to see him looking so tired and old; when I'd first taken possession of him, he moved with the quick, explosive grace of a true carnivore.

The first time I saw him he was chained to the back porch of a house operating as a methamphetamine lab up in Rawlins. When I executed a no-knock warrant there with the local police, we found him half-starved and ferocious as a wounded bear. Patches of hair were missing from his pelt and raw sores blew with flies. Rather than just shoot him, we called in Animal Control officers. Only with great difficulty were they able to wrestle him into a cage using long poles with wire nooses looped at one end. There he tore at the bars until blood dripped from his teeth.

Animal Control said they would have to put him down. They laughed at the thought of anyone adopting him. I walked away to write my reports feeling sadder for this dog that had never had a chance than I did for the pathetic and violent young drug addicts I dealt with every day. After an hour I returned to the meth lab to find an officer poking him with a sharp-bladed shovel, seeing just how crazy he could make him before the Animal Control officers standing by put a bullet through his heavy, flat skull.

The charges against me for assaulting a fellow peace officer were deferred and later dropped. But on the spot I accepted a sentence that has now run five years by deciding to adopt the snarling creature as my own. I took him home.

Twenty-four stitches later and after two visits to the emergency room, I finally had him installed in my backyard, chained to an elm. It took six weeks of determined care and attention before he would even let me stroke him. After six months he was accompanying me nearly everywhere I went. In the places where dogs weren't allowed, he would sit hunched massively in the passenger seat of my rusty Land Cruiser and stare out the windshield until I returned, no matter how many hours it took. When I went away on climbing trips and left him in the care of friends, he would refuse to eat or drink until I returned. My love and devotion for the abused beast quenched his rage and mellowed him until the love was reflected back at me, magnified a hundred times. Instead of a raging brute he morphed into a gentle, playful giant. I named him after the animal he most resembled.

Between sets of pull-ups, I hang by my fingertips and watch a children's soccer game on a field nearby. The cold morning air, the laughter of the kids, the cheers of the parents, they all have me feeling so unusually good that for a moment I lose track of the beast. Just when I start looking around for him he appears. He barrels onto the soccer field moving faster than he's moved in years. A part of me admires that his creaking bones and ancient muscles can still carry him that fast; the rest of me begins running, calling his name.

Children scatter, their screams mixing with their parents' outraged shouts. Oso powers through them like they're a pile of leaves. With a youthful lunge he tackles the soccer ball, then crushes it in his jaws. I catch up to him and grab his collar just as he gives the ball a death-shake that flings drool into the sunlight. Angry fathers and mothers encircle me, yelling. I apologize repeatedly but to no avail. They aren't interested in anything but giving me a sound cursing.

“That's the most irresponsible . . .”

“A child could have been killed . . .”

“Keep that goddamn monster on a leash . . .”

“Someone should call the police . . .”

Finally I just drop a twenty-dollar bill on the deflated corpse of the ball and tug the dog across the field. We're almost past the chalked sideline when he squats his hind legs and defecates on the grass.

I try to berate him and drag him off but can't stop laughing. Coming back to Laramie and Vedauwoo is doing something to us both, making us younger and more carefree again. Every now and then, like on the rocks yesterday, I feel as if my emotional wounds are finally scabbing over.

Although the morning air is still cold, I eat my bagels with lox outside on the café's patio. Oso lies near my feet, relishing the occasional bite that I drop by his head.

The file that's open on the table before me is in disarray. I wonder if the sheriff did that on purpose. After carefully wiping my hands, I rearrange it in chronological order beginning with the reports of the responding officers and finishing with the county coroner's findings and opinions. The envelope that holds a stack of what I assume are eight-by-ten photographs of the scene, the body in situ, and the autopsy I leave unopened. Rather than risk upsetting the waitress who periodically checks on me, I save it for a more private viewing.

The initial report and investigation was done by Sergeant Leroy Bender, I'm unhappy to see. I read it skeptically and am not disappointed to conclude that it was a half-assed job. Despite handwriting that borders on a kindergartner's scrawl and numerous misspellings, I learn that Bender had been called into the station at nearly three in the morning to meet with Bradley Karge, who was reporting a climbing accident in a part of the Medicine Bow National Forest known as Vedauwoo. The Sheriff's Department apparently shares jurisdiction there with the federal government.

Bradley informed the sergeant that a girl named Kate Danning had fallen from a cliff during a late-night outdoor party and was believed to be dead. He gave the names of four other people who were present at the party on the rocks, and I'm interested to see Billy Heller's name among them. Lynn's name is not. Bender had called in another officer, named Knight, who is a certified Emergency Medical Technician, and the three drove up to the forest to, according to Bender's report, “investiget.”

Once at Vedauwoo, Bradley Karge led the two officers with flashlights to the base of a cliff where a young female lay facedown on the rocks. Deputy Knight found no pulse and determined that she was in fact deceased. Sergeant Bender called for the county coroner's team to come and pick up the body.

Despite the circumstances, I can't help but smile as I read the last line of Bender's handwritten report: “There was no sign of fowl play.”

Fortunately, the county's part-time coroner did a somewhat better job once he arrived near dawn with his staff of two local mortuary attendants. Probably because of the recent cross-examination he'd had to endure during the Lee trial, he had the good sense to photograph the body before it was moved to the morgue. Little else is contained in his initial report from the scene other than that he'd taken some photos, determined that the girl was dead, and that she had apparently fallen from a height of more than one hundred feet down a sheer cliff.

The next section of the file is the notes from the autopsy, which had been conducted that same afternoon. The deceased is described in them as a healthy nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, sixty-four inches in height and weighing 110 pounds. I only skim the descriptions of her injuries, which appear to be numerous contusions to the entire front of her body, burst organs, and broken bones from her face to her feet. There is a note of a preliminary blood test that revealed the presence of both methamphetamine and marijuana in her system.

I skip ahead to the coroner's determination of the “Cause of Death” at the bottom of the page and read that it was blunt-force trauma to the torso and head. The more interesting part of any coroner's report is the section entitled “Manner of Death,” of which the coroner has only five choices: Homicide, Suicide, Accidental, Natural, and Undetermined—Pending Investigation. The sheriff had been correct in telling me that the coroner found Kate Danning's death to be accidental with no further need for any inquiry.

“More coffee, honey?” the waitress asks.

“Please.” I smile at her and hold out my cup so as not to risk having any spill on the documents open before me.

“You or your dog need anything else?”

Oso raises his head and looks at her hopefully, but I tell her no.

“That guy's a monster. What kind of dog is he anyway?” she says, studying Oso's black coat, his flat, blunt head, and his enormous size.

“No one really knows exactly, but I think he's some sort of mastiff. They have dogs in Tibet that look a lot like him. My mother just calls him the Beast.”

The waitress laughs as she leaves a check for me, then goes back inside.

I look back down at the page in front of me as I sip my coffee, my mind settling for a moment upon my parents' forced retirement to my grandfather's ranch in Argentina. My father had been on the verge of becoming a general when my brother was charged with manslaughter. Shortly after that I killed the three gangbangers in Cheyenne. My parents now lived in near-isolation on the ranch, wondering what they'd done to turn their boys into killers. Each in some quiet way blames the other, I know. My mother believes the games my father taught us as children and his career with its ever present possibility of violence nudged us in the wrong direction. My father worries it has something to do with our blood—the intermingling of three violent and warring cultures: Scots, Spaniards, and Pampas Indios. The last time I talked to them they were cool with each other, considering the prospect of divorce after nearly thirty-five years of marriage.

Willing myself back to work, I focus on the page again. My eyes fall upon the descriptions of the injuries sustained. The coroner had noted that there was a contusion to the rear of her head and a hairline fracture of her skull, again caused by blunt-force trauma. After that begins the description of the injuries to her face. I put down my coffee and flip back to Bender's report. He'd written that Kate Danning was found facedown. Then how did she get an injury to the back of her head? I wonder.

By the time I return to my room at the Holiday Inn, the day is already warming and even the perpetual wind off the glaciated peaks feels like an idle car's blower just starting to heat. I open the curtains to watch a few reporters sitting by the pool, some of them working on laptop computers and others talking on cell phones. I'm disappointed that Rebecca Hersh is not among them. At the small table by the bed I pull out the envelope of photographs.

During my six years as a state investigator I've seen a lot of bodies. Fresh corpses, old corpses, and worst of all, corpses during autopsies. Physically, the fresh ones aren't so bad. They're simply pieces of meat after they've lost their souls. The only really disturbing thing about them are the cloudy, sad eyes that always seem to be open. You can't help but think of the future that they'll miss seeing. Old corpses are certainly more disturbing, but it's a physical agitation rather than an emotional one. Bugs and animals enter first through the soft flesh of the eyes, mouth, and anus and drag out what belongs inside and unseen. Then there are the autopsies. They give me nightmares. There's something about a naked man, woman, or child being clinically cut apart on a stainless-steel table that is bad for the soul. The grinding of the electric saw on a skull, the crisp snap of bolt cutters on ribs. To me it's the ultimate desecration even though I understand the obvious necessity. I've never left one without immediately taking a long, hot shower and wanting several stiff drinks. But the shower and alcohol can only remove the taste and the stench, not the memory.

And so I feel an all-too-familiar reluctance when I slide the photographs from the stiff envelope. Working quickly and averting my eyes as much as possible, I sort out the pictures that document the autopsy from the stack and place them facedown on the bed. The unfocused glances at them alone bring the fresh-meat stink into my mind. I'm determined not to look at them at all unless it becomes necessary. Instead I study only the pictures of the girl as she'd been found.

The first photo of Kate Danning's corpse was taken from a short distance away. The photographer had stood high on something, probably a rock. It shows a young woman lying facedown on top of several large boulders. Part of the picture shows the base of the cliff just a few feet away from her. I don't quite recognize it although it appears somewhat familiar. Which isn't surprising as it has been almost twenty years since I've spent much time at Vedauwoo.

The girl wears tight black leggings and what looks like a heavy fleece jacket. Her legs are lean and athletic but one is sprawled at an impossible angle. Her brown hair is straight, just long enough to hide her ears. I'm relieved that there is no evident gore and that her eyes face the earth. The next photos were taken closer and show just the body as it was found. I hold the pictures close to my face and can see where her hair is slightly matted with blood on the back of her head.

Then there are more photos of the entire scene, this time taken from a greater distance and facing the cliff. The first of these shows the body and the base of the rock. A second focuses higher on the cliff and shows it in its entirety. The granite looks perfectly vertical and sheer. It's also vaguely familiar, but doesn't appear to be anywhere near where I soloed yesterday. The final photo from the scene was apparently taken from over the body, looking up the wall. I instinctively look for a way to climb it and see only a fist-size crack that leads almost all the way to the top. There are no photos of the top, where the party had taken place.

I call the hotel operator, who connects me to McGee's room.

“What?” His voice is thick with sleep and his general orneriness is conveyed in just that one word.

“It's me. I want to talk to you about this Danning thing, if you ever get your
gordo orto
out of bed.”

“Impertinent youth. Don't speak to your betters that way. . . . Come over in fifteen minutes. Room 136 . . . And bring some goddamn coffee.”