Badwater

by Clinton McKinzie

  I hit the rock wall like some large, stupid bird smacking into a plate-glass window. A retarded pelican, perhaps. A long aaaahhhhh came from my mouth, and it didn’t want to stop. It seemed like minutes before I could actually inhale a new breath. And by that time, of course, the phone in my pack in the cave had stopped ringing.

  When the stars stopped dancing and I looked up to see where I’d fallen from, there was a surprise. The Number 5 Camalot swung there prettily, maybe twenty-five feet out under the roof. I’d somehow slapped it in before cutting loose. Next time, if I could clip the rope to it, I’d be protected. No more crashing into the wall. And only fifteen feet more to the lip!

  I wanted to shout in premature triumph, but I was hurting too bad for that. I hollered in my mind, though—I was getting closer to climbing what had to be the hardest wide crack in the world. This realized, I began to wonder if Moriah, when older, would really appreciate having the world’s hardest fat crack named after her. Maybe, I thought, I needed to think up a new name.

  Then the phone began ringing shrilly again.

  I grabbed at holds on the merely vertical face and hauled my battered carcass up into the cave. If my life were anywhere approaching normal, I would have left the damn thing in the truck. But when you’ve got an ex-fiancée you’re still half in love with, a six-month-old daughter, and a handicapped, drug-addicted brother, you tend to want to stay in touch. Staring at the screen, though, I saw that it wasn’t any of these reasons I had for carrying the phone.

  “What the hell, Luke?” I asked after reluctantly hitting the button.

  “The defense has arrived. And you aren’t going to believe who they got to represent this scumbag.” He sounded genuinely alarmed. “Get your ass over here and talk to them. Pronto. I don’t want them to have any reason to try and continue this thing. I don’t want them complaining to the judge that our lead investigator dragged his feet on this.”

  And then he hung up.

  “The stakes have gone up,” Luke announced when I walked into his office an hour later.

  He was grinning, but it wasn’t the shit-eating grin he’d worn at the arraignment the day before. This one looked strained. And a little sick.

  “What happened? Who is this guy?”

  He shook his head and stretched the shallow grin further.

  “You’ll see, Burns. You’ll see. Just try not to piss your pants, okay?”

  Walking stiffly in his well-worn boots, he escorted me down the hall to a closed door. Here he paused, forcibly settling his features into what was probably meant to be a friendly, slightly bored expression. I noticed he was wearing a suit even though it was Saturday morning.

  The man and the woman in the conference room were wearing suits, too. They sat on the other side of a big table, with file folders and laptop computers laid out in front of them. Evidently they’d been working while waiting for me. The room reeked from an overdose of someone’s cologne. The scent of chemicals, spice, and leather was too heavy for a woman, so it had to be the man’s.

  The woman—who I couldn’t help but notice first—was more than a little bit attractive. She had blue eyes, blond hair, and a spray of freckles across her nose and cheekbones. Wearing no jewelry or makeup, and with her pulled-back hair cut prudently above her shoulders, she looked like an athlete. A hard-core athlete. A runner or a biker, I guessed. Maybe even a climber. We might have something in common. The way she looked up at me, though, was far from friendly.

  The man was good-looking, too. He was probably twenty years older, in his mid-forties. He had a lantern jaw and gray-black hair sculpted back from a high forehead. His dark green suit was probably the most expensive I’d ever seen. And he was wearing it on a hot Saturday morning in Badwater, Wyoming.

  They were staring at me, not Luke; the man smiling, the woman most definitely not. Other than for the blonde’s glower, I saw no reason to wet myself as Luke had suggested I might.

  “This is Antonio Burns. He’s acting as my lead investigator on this,” he said. “Burns, meet William J. Bogey.”

  He said it like he was announcing the presence of royalty. Or introducing me to my executioner. The man’s name was vaguely familiar—I knew I’d heard of him somewhere before.

  I leaned across the table and held out my hand.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  He rose halfway out of his chair to take my hand, then hesitated. I followed his eyes down to my outstretched paw and saw why. Dried blood caked my knuckles and the sticky residue of athletic tape made my hand look none too clean. Certainly not the kind of hand he’d want brushing his bright white French cuffs. But he swallowed and shook anyway.

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” he said in a smooth baritone. “Let me introduce you to a former student of mine, Brandy Walsh. She just graduated last month and has agreed to act as my co-counsel in this matter.”

  “Hi.” I smiled at her.

  She didn’t smile back or offer her hand.

  Feeling persecuted by her gaze, I irritably wondered why Luke had agreed to meet with these people on a Saturday morning. Luke was, after all, fat and lazy. It would have been more his style to insist on office hours. But I figured it was a good thing that someone who so obviously made him nervous was taking Jonah’s case. Maybe it would bring him to his senses, or at least pressure him to offer a reasonable plea deal. Maybe it would make this whole thing just go away.

  “I was a student of Boogie’s at UWyo, too,” Luke said to me. “That’s what they call him: Boogie. Has to do with his seventies-style hippie politics or something. He was a pretty good professor, though.”

  “And Luke was a very good student. But I’m afraid any attempts to pass on my political or legal views utterly failed.”

  Both men laughed. Brandy Walsh didn’t—she was too busy giving me the stink eye. For a few more minutes Luke and Bogey sparred with fake good humor, remembering old classroom debates, until Luke finally pulled out chairs for both of us.

  “So, you ready to talk a deal?” he asked. “I’m not really sure what I can do for a guy who murdered a little kid. Not even for you, Boogie.”

  “Maybe we can talk about that after we exercise our due diligence, Luke,” Bogey said with polite condescension. “I think perhaps we should try and discover a little more about what happened on the river.”

  Luke smirked.

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. A big shot like you needs to do a lot of research, then bill the county at your hourly rate. I forgot—but hey, I’m just a dumb hick prosecutor.”

  I was beginning to sense that the animosity between them was more than knee-deep.

  Still smiling nicely, Bogey said, “We’d like to begin by asking Mr. Burns some questions. Brandy prepared a preliminary list last night.”

  Brandy flipped open her computer.

  I looked at Luke, who shrugged.

  “Sure, he’ll answer your questions. But you could just wait and read his reports.”

  “I expect we’ll want more detail than what will likely be in his reports,” Bogey said diplomatically.

  Brandy was still watching me. She gave me a grim, unpleasant smile. When she spoke her voice was fake-sweet.

  “You don’t mind, do you? We just want to make sure we get the same answers from you on the witness stand.”

  I did mind. What a bitch. I’d met her only two minutes earlier and she was already implying that I was a liar. In fairness, though, I’d already decided that she was a liar. She was a defense lawyer, after all, or at least training to be one. And most likely a True Believer like her professor. Luke’s comment about Bogey’s “seventies-style hippie politics” was something he’d often complained about in the old days when we’d be called to the stand and dragged over the coals by public defenders. They were often True Believers—attorneys who believed that anything, from misdirecting the jury to outright lying to slandering cops and prosecutors, was justified in the cause of getting their clients off. Over beers after one grueling trial, a PD who
belatedly decided that I wasn’t, as a cop, necessarily an emissary of Satan told me, “It has nothing to do with the search for the truth. Not for your side, and not for mine. A trial is war. Once it’s declared, when the county attorney files charges against my client, all questions about right and wrong, the truth, and the reasons for the war in the first place get thrown out the window. There’s only one thing both sides are focused on and that’s to win. At all costs. Using whatever tactics are necessary. You challenge the arrest. You indoctrinate the jury. You annihilate the witnesses. Hell, you firebomb Dresden if you have to, you nuke Hiroshima.”

  “I don’t mind answering your questions,” I told Brandy Walsh.

  “Good.”

  She plucked a mini tape recorder from where she’d apparently been hiding it in her lap and thumbed it on. Then she posed her fingers above her keyboard. She was going to record this two ways, just to be doubly sure she could prove any lies and to let me know that she expected nothing less of me.

  “First, we need to know how to reach you in case we have later questions.”

  I gave her my cell-phone number.

  “And your address?”

  I recited the office’s address in Cheyenne.

  She looked up. “No, your address here in Badwater.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Then where are you staying?”

  “Here and there. Camping out, mostly,” I admitted.

  “Don’t be evasive, Agent Burns. We have a right to know.”

  I looked at Luke, wanting to roll my eyes. He was slouched back in his chair, pretending to be bored again. I looked at Bogey, but he was watching his protégé with apparent pleasure. And she was still staring rudely at me, waiting for my answer.

  “I’m not being evasive. I live out of my truck. I sleep wherever I want.”

  I’d always thought it was kind of cool, not having a fixed address. I liked sleeping under the stars far more than I did under a ton of beams, plaster, and injected-foam insulation. But the way she was looking at me made me feel like a homeless person. And homeless not by choice—a person no one would tolerate in their home.

  “They don’t pay these DCI fellows as much as they do us lawyers,” Luke joked.

  The questioning went on. I held back my annoyance and told them what I’d seen and heard and exactly what their client had said. I kept my opinion that the whole thing was a stupid accident to myself, as well as the fact that I thought their client was a pretty good guy. My opinions had nothing to do with the legal case; stating them would serve no purpose but to piss Luke off and get me in deeper shit with my own office.

  It wasn’t until we were past all my dealings with Jonah that she switched to leading questions. Lawyers love these, particularly with witnesses they deem hostile. They’re a great weapon—with them it’s so easy for a lawyer to trip a witness up, or make him look bad, or twist his words into something he never intended. Their sole purpose is to nail you in a tricky way, and trying to avoid them is like trying to dodge hurled knives while strapped to a revolving wheel.

  “You never read him his Miranda rights, did you?”

  “No. I never asked him anything incriminating once he was in custody.”

  That seemed to make her mad.

  “You didn’t read him his rights when you interrogated him at the river?”

  “Nope. I wasn’t interrogating him. I was just trying to find out what had happened. He wasn’t in custody yet.”

  “Oh? So he was free to get up and leave?”

  “No, but he didn’t know that.”

  “So you admit to tricking him.”

  “Lady,” Luke finally interrupted, “we’re about done here. Those are suppression issues, and you can save ’em for the suppression hearing. And you probably don’t know this, but it isn’t real polite to ask leading questions like this in a courtesy interview. You’d better save that stuff for when you’re putting on a big show for the jury. If you’re foolish enough to take this thing that far.”

  While Brandy Walsh’s tan turned a little pink and she let Luke feel her blue-eyed glare, Bogey spoke up.

  “Actually, we intend to ask the judge to allow us to depose Agent Burns under oath. Prior to the suppression hearing.”

  Luke chuckled. “It must have been a while since you’ve done a criminal case, Professor. Depositions are for civil matters.”

  The professor chuckled, too. He responded to Luke’s mockery by taking a poke at me.

  “They’re not unheard of in criminal cases, Luke. We’ll be asking the judge to allow one. Due to Mr. Burns’s reputation, of course. I think the fact that you’ve chosen him as your lead investigator in this matter will allow us considerable latitude in questioning him.”

  My face got hot. The only appropriate way to respond to a comment like that would be to leap over the table and grab him by the throat, but I held on to that impulse.

  “And we’ll need copies of all Mr. Burns’s notes about this. And any other notes or reports that you’ve received. Can you give us copies right now?”

  Luke shook his head. “I’m no copy jockey. Don’t even know how to turn the damn machine on.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Burns can handle it?”

  Luke laughed.

  “No. He’s a DCI agent. Not in his job description. You can get your copies Monday or Tuesday, whenever my secretary can get to it.”

  Luke was keeping his cool. I was a little bit proud of him, tweaking the professor and his attack poodle right back, but I also knew that there was no good reason not to turn over everything now. The defense would get it all sooner or later—they had a right to it under the rules of discovery. But still, I could definitely understand his desire to screw around with these people.

  “Luke, you aren’t going to make me have to talk with the judge about this, are you?” Bogey asked in an amused but slightly scolding tone.

  “You can talk to the judge until you’re blue in the face. Only it had better be in open court, and the discovery hearing won’t be scheduled until at least Thursday. You see, Boogie, this is just another case on my docket. It wouldn’t be fair for me to treat it any different than anything else I’ve got on my plate. I can’t give you priority just because you used to be a big shot.”

  Bogey went on smiling, but it was with his mouth only, not his eyes.

  “Luke,” he said slowly, “I think you’re going to find that this is like no case you’ve ever seen before.”

  Now that threats were being made openly, it was pretty clear that the “courtesy interview” was over. We all stood up. Very reluctantly, I again shook hands with Bogey, who was still smiling. At me. Like I was some delicious meal he was about to eat. I turned toward Brandy, but she was ignoring all of us. She was bent over, packing away her computer in a briefcase on the floor. If she hadn’t been so unpleasant, and if I weren’t such a gentleman, I might have admired the way her navy skirt was pulled tight across lean buttocks. Instead I looked at Luke, who wasn’t being such a gentleman, and Bogey, who was now taking the opportunity to look down her shirt.

  When she stood, she caught Luke’s ogle. The look of disgust she gave him made me want to laugh and wince at the same time. With a wrinkling of her nose that was almost a snarl, she hefted the briefcase off the floor and marched out of the room.

  Bogey followed, still smiling tightly, saying, “We’ll be in touch, gentlemen.”

  I noticed that he, too, was wearing cowboy boots. They seemed to be de rigueur for lawyers in this state. Unlike Luke’s, though, Bogey’s were expensive ostrich skin.

  When they were gone, Luke started to laugh.

  “Woowee, that was fun. That little girl had your number, QuickDraw!”

  “Yeah,” I had to agree. “She did.”

  “What a hard-ass! And you can take that any way you want. Hell, she could crack walnuts with that ass. And bust balls with the rest of what she’s got. Do you think Bogey’s banging her yet?”

  “I don’t know, Lu
ke.”

  “If he’s not already, he will be, the bastard. When he was famous he was always banging his students.”

  “Including you?”

  Luke laughed so hard he started coughing.

  He seemed pretty pleased with the way things had gone, especially given how things had started. I could tell he felt good for having stood up to his former professor, a man who obviously intimidated him. They must have had some good arguments back in law school, and I imagined that Bogey had got the best of him each time. Bogey was so smooth, while even in the old days Luke had a hard time disguising his emotions and not letting them overwhelm him. Obviously, Luke was eager for a rematch on his home court.

  “That guy’s so damn arrogant,” he said, still chuckling. “Dear God, I just love getting to jerk his chain. He was once a serious big shot, getting prime-time cases, and when he didn’t get them, he was on TV to analyze them. But he’s been a loser ever since some victim in a rape trial he was doing killed herself. People said he went after her too hard on cross. After that, no one would touch him. And it’s still kicking his ass—you can see it. Let me say it again, QuickDraw; we’re going to have us some fun on this thing.”

  sixteen

  I did the math, and then felt ambivalent about the sum.

  It would take nine hours to drive to Denver—even a gold special-agent’s badge couldn’t push the Pig more than ten miles an hour over the speed limit of sixty-five. That pace would put me at Rebecca’s loft long after Moriah had gone to bed. And since Luke had ordered me to be present at Cody Wallis’s funeral at two the next afternoon, I would have to leave Denver before Moriah even woke up. If I was lucky, I might get to do the midnight bottle-feeding in return for eighteen hours on the road—a feeding in which she would probably cry and punch and kick from the moment I picked her up until Rebecca took her from me. On top of that dismal prospect, Rebecca wouldn’t be too thrilled about me showing up so late and bailing so early. It was very doubtful I’d be invited to share her bed.

  So I opted to stay in Wyoming. There was plenty to do, even though my body was too burnt from the morning’s exertions to crawl up into the world’s hardest fat crack.