I walk back to the Land Cruiser and Knight follows me, staring at the ground. I take Knight's broken bike out of the back of the truck and toss it in the dirt.
“I'm not going to drive you back to town. You can walk. Maybe someone will come along. It wouldn't be safe for you to be seen with me anyway.”
Knight just nods without looking up.
“And watch your ass, Deputy Knight. Witnesses are getting whacked. You could be next.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
AN HOUR LATER it is dark. With my headlights off, I drive slowly by Heller's dilapidated ranch house. The moon is bright enough that the droopy cottonwoods in his yard cast dark shadows beneath them. The unkempt lawn looks the same as when I saw it almost a week before. The broken-down pickup without wheels still rests on its axles. But the other car is gone. It takes me a few minutes of visualization to remember what kind of car it was. A Jeep Wrangler—I think I remember—dents, brown paint, and climbing stickers on the bumper.
There are no lights on in the house. For a moment I fantasize that Billy and Brad are hungry and cold, still trying to repair the damage I inflicted to Heller's van up at that remote trailhead in the Big Horns. Realistically, though, it would only have taken them a day or so to hike out and get a tow truck in. They could be anywhere by now.
My Land Cruiser's fat tires crunch up what once had been a gravel driveway, and I park in the moon-shade of a cottonwood. I take off my tie and tuck it in my pocket but leave on my navy wool suit jacket to hide my white shirt. Unfolding the jacket collar, I turn it up to cover the white cloth V that is bright beneath my neck. After a few minutes of sitting in the dark with the windows down, listening to the crickets and the wind in the leaves, I walk past the open garage that has been converted into a climbing gym and onto the sagging porch. No one answers my knock.
I feel a pang, something my mother calls espirita. A stab of conscience. But then I decide I'm not cheating since I'm no longer a cop. At least not one on active duty. I'm about to commit my first crime, and I'm going to do it as a private citizen. I'll accept the consequences.
With my penlight I quickly examine the lock and decide it would take me too long to try to pick it. I have never been very good at what some police officers consider an essential skill. There is a single-pane window next to the door that I'm tempted to simply kick my foot through. But a broken window might spawn allegations of planted evidence if what I hope to find inside is really there. So instead I circle the house, looking in all the likely spots for a hidden key and trying windows.
Illuminated by the moon is a second-floor window that I can see is obviously warped. Its stays look rotten and twisted, impossible to close properly. In the debris littering the yard I find the remains of a homemade pine ladder. I place it softly against the side of the house. The ladder is made of ancient gray wood and is missing several rungs. I shake it before I start up. The wood feels as if it is planting splinters in my palms with each grasp.
At the top of the dangerously creaking ladder I see that I was right in believing the window is warped. Seeing it up close, I find it is not entirely shut on one side, while the other has more than a two-inch gap. I try to push it up and open and it gives just a little as the ladder groans beneath my feet. Pushing harder, it gives a little more. Then with a sharp snap the rung beneath my feet breaks away.
Somehow I slap at the sill with both palms and hold it. I hear the ladder collapse in the grass and leaves below. I hang with my face, hips, and toes pressed against the peeling paint of the side of the house. This is not going well. I always assumed that with my climbing skills I would make an excellent cat burglar. But I'm acting more like a clumsy heroin addict.
Just a few feet to the left of me a drainpipe runs down the side of the house. It looks as flimsy as the old ladder. With no other choice, I hook the toe of my left shoe into the gap between the pipe and the wall and torque it in tight. The pipe flexes outward, but holds. Fortunately someone has done a good job of bolting it to the wall. Still holding the sill with one hand, I work the other into the opening. Pushing up from my torqued toe, I'm able to generate enough upward thrust to rattle the window open. Breathing hard but relieved, I pull up on the sill and slide inside headfirst.
Being alone in a stranger's house at night, wrongfully, illegally, and desperately, especially when it is the house of a killer, brings back forgotten childhood fears. The closed closet door, the dark space under the bed, the imagined shape behind the curtains. The cold sweat of those young, irrational fears oozes up out of my skin.
The high-plains stars cast a dim glow in the room. The door on the opposite wall is closed. Partially crumpled boxes litter the floor along with careless stacks of musty-smelling clothes. I crouch on the floor for a long minute, listening for any creaking of the pine floorboards. There isn't any.
Using my penlight, I begin to inspect the contents of the boxes. Several hold piles of papers that appear to be everything from ancient bills to out-of-date catalogs. A couple are full of empty Sudafed containers, a prime ingredient in the cooking of methamphetamine. The clothes appear to be ratty castoffs. No matter how softly I try to move, my leather-soled courtroom shoes scrape and clunk on the rotting floor.
Outside the room a hallway runs across the upstairs portion of the house. I find another bedroom in similar disarray, the bed just a mattress on the floor covered with funky sheets. Pictures torn from magazines are taped to the walls. Most are of naked women exposing their breasts, genitals, and buttocks. Others have been ripped out of climbing magazines. Looking at them closely using the penlight, I recognize Billy as the star. The floor of this bedroom too is littered with Hustler, Climbing, Rock and Ice, and assorted catalogs.
The other upstairs bedroom is both neater and cleaner. Its walls are unadorned. Not a single picture or poster is tacked to the white walls. A cinderblock-and-pine-board bookshelf is the only furniture other than the bed. The shelves are lined with a library full of climbing books and guides. Billy's room, I'm sure. I check the four corner posts of the bed for marks that could have been made by cords, hoping for at least a small indication of his preference for rough, controlling sex, but find none.
The small bathroom hasn't been cleaned in a long time. Empty toilet paper rolls cover the floor and there is an ashtray near the toilet filled with the dead ends of joints. Roaches, they are called, and that is just what they resemble. I make myself sniff them and smell the sweet odor of burnt marijuana along with a slightly harsher chemical smell. Cocoa puffs. Marijuana cigarettes dipped in liquid cocaine or meth.
The stairs leading down to the first floor creak in agony as I move across them. I try to walk with one shoulder brushing the wall, hoping they'll be steadier there. They aren't. They end in a small entryway opposite the front door. I can see more than a few days' worth of mail in a pile beneath the slot.
With the exception of Heller's bedroom, the downstairs is as dirty as the floor above. Everywhere is climbing gear, strewn across the floor. An old TV with a lop-eared antenna perches precariously on a pile of old phone books. The kitchen is the worst. Just standing inside it makes me want to throw a bucket of bleach across the counters.
I find a half-door to the cellar stairs concealed inside a small coat-closet off the kitchen. The door is locked with a large padlock. I study the lock's mounting with my penlight. Someone simply screwed a cheap aluminum mount to both the door and the wood siding on the wall. Two screws out of the eight have fallen out and the others are poorly driven. I make a mental note not to ever hire Heller for his carpentry skills. With the screwdriver on the utility tool attached to my key chain, I have the mounting off in about two minutes.
I push the short door open and initially see little but blackness. When I probe it with the tiny flashlight I see that half of the stairs seem to be broken or missing. Looking into the depths I feel an ominous presence. I don't know where it comes from, whether it is a lingering odor in the air down there or an electric current of fear that travels
out of that darkness. The hairs on my arms rise, though.
Using the penlight, which is growing dimmer by the minute as the batteries wear down, I navigate the stairs as carefully as if I'm descending an avalanche-prone couloir. Both my arms are raised, fingers just below my eyes, like a boxer in a defensive pose, the miniature light clenched in one fist. I left Cecelia's gun in the car—if I'm caught in here with a weapon, the sentence I will receive for burglary will only be aggravated. The broken stairs squeal beneath my feet.
A large pale shape lies just beyond the fading beam of light. Trying hard to control my breathing and heart rate, I move down and closer, jiggling the flashlight and hoping for a resurgence of power. The shape is a bare, semen-stained mattress on the dirt floor. Rotted two-by-fours cross the area above and around the mattress. Numerous limp cords hang from them. I try to look at them closely in the tiny beam of light. The light dies like a candle being snuffed. The darkness closes in, pushing the air out of my chest.
I shake the pen hard and a little of its beam returns. Pink cord, woven through with purple thread. I run my unsteady fingers over it. This is all the evidence I need, once I figure out a way to get it properly retrieved by officers with warrants. With this and what Deputy Knight has admitted, there is no longer any doubt that Heller and Brad Karge killed Kimberly Lee.
At the edge of my field of vision a small glint in the dark draws my attention. At first I assume it's just the tiny flashlight's reflection off an exposed nail. But the flashlight dims again and the reflection is still there. I don't turn to face it right away. I try to control my breath and study the glint without moving my head or the diminishing beam of my flashlight toward it. There are really two glints, I can tell, close together. Like eyes in the dark. Like the red eyes of people in photographs, surprised by a flashbulb. My breath begins to come shallow and fast, my lungs accelerating their rhythm. Someone is crouching there, my senses shout.
The eyes come from down low near the floor in the expanse of darkness to my left. I try to slow my own breathing so that I can listen for another's, but I can hear nothing over my own rising panic, the blood beginning to roar through my veins. I'm afraid to point the light, afraid of what's there watching me.
Fight or flight, I think. Finally I move. I spin to the left, take two quick steps, and kick hard with my shoe. I thrust my leg, toe first, right between those two small lights. I feel it crunch through something and strike a firmness beyond. The flashlight flickers brighter with the motion, and I see a head of dark hair and skin, but that is all there is. A crushed mannequin's head on a low shelf, turned toward whatever depravity might have happened on the bed. Around its neck the renewed beam of the torch reveals more pink cords.
TWENTY-NINE
RATTLING ALONG THE back roads of Vedauwoo, I have never felt so tired and alone. I have only missed one full night of sleep, but the tension, exertion, and bruises make it feel like a week.
Around the turns my headlights sweep across the white trunks of nearly leafless aspens and random granite boulders. They all remind me of headstones, and the place looks like a cemetery. I feel as if I'm just another spirit in the night moving through it, lonely and unable to communicate with mortals but desperately needing to.
After leaving Heller's house I again called the hospital from my cell phone. The duty nurse told me there had been no change in McGee's condition. I decided to not have her wake up Rebecca, who according to the nurse was sleeping on a waiting room couch. Then I drove to the address Kristi had given me for Lynn White. The decrepit cottage was dark and still. Her pickup truck was gone.
I drove around Laramie for half an hour, checking the bars and coffee shops, remembering the furious look on Lynn's face when she saw Rebecca in the hotel room's bed. She would be going back to Heller, I knew. Sierra Calloway had told me she was Billy's frolicsome Titania who used other men as pawns in some private game they played. From the look Lynn gave me, I can bet she isn't used to having her pawns defect to take another queen into their beds. So she would go back to her king—a dangerous emperor who is in the process of eliminating his entire court.
It was at ten o'clock when I decided to look for her at Vedauwoo. I remembered thinking on the day I had climbed with her that the place seemed like her backyard, like her spiritual home. She is the Fairy Queen who rules the stone and trees there. Although I haven't admitted it to myself before, it is obvious she knows more than she has said about what happened to Kate Danning up there. Maybe about Kimberly Lee too. If I can find her, tell her what has happened to Sierra Calloway and Chris Braddock, convince her that she and Cindy Topper are surely next, maybe I can get her to open up. Besides, I have nothing else to do.
Because of my suspension I don't have the authority to make arrests or write affidavits for others to make the arrests. I can't even get a warrant to enter Heller's house, because I found the cords there illegally. I would be charged with breaking and entering, and worse, the evidence that he was a killer would never see the light of a courtroom. It would be suppressed due to the illegal search.
If I can find Lynn, I think maybe she can tell Sheriff McKittrick in Laramie County about the night Kate Danning died. And there is every chance she knows something about Kimberly Lee's murder. As Heller's sometime girlfriend, maybe she has seen the cords in the basement and around the mannequin's head. Maybe she has even been a participant in whatever games were played there. Her testimony, if I can bring her before the court, along with the evidence I have gathered so far, might be enough to convince the judge to delay the sentencing.
Only one thing is certain: if I don't find some way of halting the Knapps' sentencing in the morning, there's a fair chance they will die for a crime they didn't commit.
I hit the brakes and skid in the dirt. Throwing my truck into reverse, I spin the tires backward, cranking the wheel, letting the headlights cut across a section of the forest. There, alone in a small hollow of trees and rocks, is Lynn's beat-up truck. I bounce over the rough trail behind it and park.
The hood is cool when I put my hand on its flaking paint, as is the rusty exhaust pipe. When I look through the windows of the cab all I see in the moonlight are littered papers and coffee cups. So I stand in the night listening to the wind in the trees and the clicks of my own engine cooling, trying to figure out where I am and where she could be.
The hollow seems vaguely familiar—there is the white trunk of a fallen aspen lying on the ground near my truck. I remember sitting on that trunk, studying the guidebook while Jones talked sarcastically about starving in the wilderness. This is where we turned around after I got us lost just a week ago.
I start moving along a trail. My courtroom shoes skitter on small stones and sharp branches tug at my suit. The trail crosses a dirt road, near where I parked that day with Jones, and begins winding its way toward the base of the formation where Kate Danning died. Several times I stop to listen but hear only the increasing wind. Finally, I hop awkwardly up the last few boulders to the rocks beneath the wall, where Danning's blood soaked the ground.
There is no way I'm going to climb the cliff in my battered condition without at least my climbing slippers and preferably a rope. Some internal warning keeps me from calling out—it is a feeling so strong that I can't imagine breaking the night with a shout. So I start circling the tower, remembering the narrow ledges and granite slabs I saw before that looked as if they led up the back side.
On the other side the formation begins with a steep slab, about fifty feet high, which looks as though it rises up to a series of parallel ledges high on the formation. In the moon's light the ledges appear to be separated by only short walls ten feet high or so that are broken with cracks and shadows. The slab will be the tricky part. It is shaped like a great rising wave, scooped out in the middle. The initial twenty feet are low-angled before the slab steadily steepens to near vertical.
I try to smear my dress shoes on the granite, but the smooth leather soles just slide off its hard surface. Pulli
ng them off along with my socks, I lay them at the slab's base where I hope I can find them again in the dark if I don't find an easier way down. If Lynn is up there in the cave she will surely have a rope, and we can rappel off the other side. Just climbing up this untested slab will be hard enough in the dark.
Before starting up, I kick my feet in the dust to dry the sweat. My bare soles stick well enough to the stone until it begins to steepen. Then I'm forced to feel for small edges with my fingers and toes. I'm so exhausted that I climb without thinking and without fear, totally absorbed by the search for holds and the tearing pain I feel in my ribs when I'm forced to suspend much weight from my hands.
Abruptly it all changes. I'm nearly to the top of the slab, fifty feet off a forest floor that is strewn with sharp-edged boulders, when my feet slip out from under me. My right forefoot had been smeared on an edge no larger than a quarter and my left foot reaching for a small toehold when it happened. All my weight suddenly came onto the fingertips of both my hands where they are crimping small quartz crystals protruding from the granite. I almost yelp from the sharp pain that feels as if it is separating my ribs. I make the mistake of looking down to frantically try and spot the footholds again.
The dark ground seems to swell at me and for a moment I'm sure I'm falling. But then the agony in my fingers' tendons alerts me that I'm not—yet. With my bare feet I pedal at the rock while fear soaks my suit with sweat. Somehow I find marginal toeholds and am able to relieve some of the pain in my fingers and ribs. A small rain of pebbles rattles past as I startle a bird or a mouse somewhere above.
I finally pull over the top of the slab, gasping for air and shaking with fright. Several minutes go by before I come to the realization that someone is standing on the ledge with me.
Brad Karge is grinning at me from where he stands in the moon-shadow of an overhang just fifteen feet away. “Never seen a dude climb in a monkey suit before,” he says quietly. His blond dreadlocks look like light-colored snakes in the night, and they are writhing in the wind. There is something squat and heavy in his hand, pointed at me.
The Edge of Justice Page 30
