The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

“The ranger checked. There's a William Heller and Lynn White with ‘King of Swords' written after it. Do you know what that means? The ranger said it was the name of a climb.”

  I curse again, out loud this time. King of Swords is a legend. Not only is it known as one of the hardest alpine routes in North America, it's also one of the longest and at the highest altitude. Thousands of years ago a glacier cut away half the 14,255-foot mountain now called Longs Peak. The grinding tear resulted in a vertical to overhanging 2,000-foot face of granite that rises to the highest point on the mountain. The face is called the Diamond because of its vague resemblance to a square turned on one corner. And King of Swords, I recall from photos I have seen, leads straight up the middle. I had shaken my head at the audacity and grade of the route.

  “Yeah, I know what it means. I've heard of it.” For a moment I wonder why Heller would've signed the guidebook, but then realize he'd signed it so if there were questions about Lynn's death he could just call it an accident. I shake the camping gear out of my pack and begin shoving climbing gear into it. A rope. A helmet. A pair of ice tools. Crampons. A small rack of cams, nuts, and a harness. “Listen, get the ranger to call out the park's search-and-rescue team. Get them to the trailhead. Get them there now, tonight.”

  “Why search-and-rescue? Is someone hurt?”

  “Not yet, if we're lucky. But someone's going to get hurt.”

  The big Land Cruiser rocks on its axles as I take the canyon turns far too fast. Racing up Big Thompson Canyon toward Estes, I keep my hazard lights on and my finger poised on the switch that controls the high beams. Again and again I come up on motor homes creeping up the inclines at far below the speed limit. I angrily flip the beams on and off, honking the horn. I grind my teeth when the campers reluctantly pull over, their drivers displaying annoyance, moving out of the way as slowly as possible. I have to struggle to keep my free hand from beating the steering wheel in frustration.

  I curse anew when I roar past a local police car concealed beyond a bend with its lights out. My headlights catch a surprised patrolman in mid-sip from a paper coffee cup, and then I'm past. A few moments later I see the inevitable revolving red and blue lights in my rearview mirror but I keep my foot on the accelerator.

  With one hand I lift the cell phone off the console and punch in the numbers to the twenty-four-hour desk at DCI. Unexpectedly the call goes through, the digital connection somehow being made over the canyon walls.

  The same voice answers brusquely, “DCI.”

  “Ted, this is Agent Burns. I'm in Colorado now. Larimer County, I think. Call the Sheriff's Office here, tell them to get the patrolman off my ass in Big Thompson Canyon. I'm in my personal car, a red Land Cruiser, Wyoming plates.” I pause, trying to remember what the numbers are, but can't. “Tell them it's an emergency. I'm meeting Colorado law enforcement and a park search-and-rescue team on Highway 7 at the Longs Peak trailhead.”

  “Gotcha, Burns. Do you want to hold?”

  I hit the end button and toss the phone onto the passenger seat.

  The patrol car pulls within feet of the Land Cruiser's rear bumper. The flashing lights seem to be all around me, reflecting off the canyon walls. Then a spot beam comes on, lighting up the interior of my truck with a ten-thousand-watt beam. It's a blinding ray. Furiously, I swipe at my rearview mirror to turn it away from the beam. Instead I knock it off its windshield mount. I can hear over the rumble of my burdened eight cylinders a voice shouting into the night through a loudspeaker. Not slowing, I fish in my fleece jacket's pocket and come up with my badge wallet. I hold it open up where the mirror had been and see it illuminated by the beam. It blazes gold. Switching it to the other hand, I roll down the window and hold it out there too, into the wind.

  The spotlight abruptly goes out. Relieved, I can see the police car backing off a little. Then it swings wide out into the left-hand lane and leaps forward like a startled deer. Within seconds it roars past me, engine pitched high, and abruptly cuts back into my lane. “Shit,” I almost shout, anticipating that the patrol car will hit its brakes to stop me. But instead the car keeps on accelerating with its red and blue lights flashing. I feel a rush of gratitude as the patrol car sets out to clear a path for me.

  I'm almost to the town of Estes when my phone chimes the Mexican Hat Dance from the seat beside me.

  “Burns,” I say sharply as I swing too fast into another curve.

  “This is Captain Tobias of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. What the hell do you think you're doing?”

  “Trying to stop a murder. And catch a killer. Guess what, Captain, I need your help.” I need to placate him, to get him to help expedite the search-and-rescue team.

  There is a laugh on the other end of the line. It isn't a pleasant laugh. “You bet your ass you do. Remember what I told you about coming into my state? What you're going to do right now is stop whatever it is you're doing. I know where you are, Burns, and you better pull over and stop right now.”

  “Captain, there's a man who's killed four people in Wyoming. Now he's about to kill another up on Longs Peak, if he hasn't done it al—”

  “Stop right now! And shut your goddamn mouth!” Tobias interrupts. “You don't come down here out of your jurisdiction without official permission—”

  The man isn't listening. And he isn't going to listen. I hit the end button and try to focus on the road.

  After a few minutes the patrol car that's been escorting me suddenly begins to slow. In the glow of my headlights I can see the patrolman in the car raising both hands into the air in a dramatic shrug or “what-the-hell” gesture. Tobias must have reached him on his radio. I slow with him for a moment, then shove my foot on the gas pedal and spin the wheel to the left as I shoot by the confused patrolman. Past him, I flick my own lights on and off once, knowing the brake lights would flicker on and off too, in the trucker's gesture of “thank you.” The phone next to me keeps playing the Mexican Hat Dance until I find the thumbnail button that shuts it off.

  Another patrol car, this one a U.S. Park Services SUV, is lighting up the night at the entrance to the trailhead parking lot. Parked behind it is a Larimer County sheriff's car. I skid past both and don't slow until I reach the small ranger's cabin at the end of the lot. My headlights reveal six or seven men and women standing in the darkness around a camper that has a Search and Rescue insignia on its side. The S & R team is dressed like I am, in Gore-Tex and fleece. They have aluminum mugs of coffee in their hands. Loose leaves blow among them and I notice the pine trees beyond are bending. The storm is picking up.

  I get out of the Land Cruiser, pull my climbing pack from the rear, and step through the informally assembled group, nodding at them in a rushed greeting. They are a random assortment of climbers, long-haired and short-, doctors, lawyers, construction workers, and bums. They train many hours a week, several weekends a month, for the unpaid privilege of rescuing one of their own. The positive energy of that radiates from their concerned faces and makes me feel embarrassed when I return to my truck and slip Cecelia's gun into my pocket.

  Several of them ask me questions that I barely hear over the wind.

  “Two climbers on the Diamond,” I say quickly, moving toward the cabin, “on a route called King of Swords.”

  “In this fucking storm? Lunatics!” one says. But he grins like the others. The idea of going on up the highest alpine wall in the continental United States in the middle of a gale appeals to them. They are amped.

  I walk quickly to the door of the ranger's cabin, rap it twice with my knuckles, and push it open.

  Three men turn to stare at me from inside the small building. Tobias is there, a phone to his ear, his face immediately coloring at the sight of me. Even his ridiculously outdated military haircut seems to bristle. One of the other two is a man I've never met but I've seen before in climbing magazines, honored for the rescues he performs. I remember his position as that of the highest-ranking ranger in one of the country's busiest national parks.
The third man is a total stranger.

  The one from the magazines is older, probably in his early sixties, and wearing a Park Service uniform below a lean, weatherworn face. His lantern jaw reaches far over the collar of the stiff, green uniform, and the look in his eyes is as strong as the jaw and the starch.

  The other man, the stranger, is almost the ranger's opposite. He is small and thick with a chin that recesses instead of jutting. He wears a cheap blue suit, much of its polyester lining hanging below the hem of the jacket. The fat jowls of his sweaty face rise above his version of a uniform. Despite his obvious dishevelment, his small dark eyes are probing, assessing. Cop's eyes. The small man looks from me to Tobias as if awaiting a command. I peg him as Tobias's toady.

  I nod at the ranger. Before either of us can speak, Tobias starts in.

  “I warned you, Burns. I warned you not to come into my state. Now I'm going to have you up on charges. Reckless driving, eluding a police officer, even accessory to escape, if I can make it stick. You're not going to—”

  I ignore him and speak to the ranger, holding out my no-longer-official badge and hoping Tobias hasn't heard of my suspension. “As you've probably heard, my name's Antonio Burns. A man I believe is responsible for several recent murders in Wyoming is on the Diamond with an essential witness. He's going to drop her. He's done it before.”

  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.