Badwater

by Clinton McKinzie

  When he finally looked up, he smiled politely and raised his eyebrows before recognizing me. Then the smile became real.

  “Oh my. Special Agent Burns. I heard you were lurking in the vicinity. Should I be dialing 911?”

  I smiled back. “No. I just wanted to stop by and say hello. I understand Jonah Strasburg got transferred and I wanted to see if he’s doing all right.”

  “Well, this is a surprise. And it’s very decent of you. Particularly since it was due to your arrest that he’s been held for the last three months, beaten and subjected to shocking harassment, and charged with murder.”

  I stopped smiling. Already I could tell that this was a bad idea. I’d expected some gratitude for my career-threatening candor at the bail hearing, but it was plain he felt he owed me none.

  “Look, I’m just trying to see that he’s treated fairly. By everyone involved.”

  He laughed. “Of course. You’re well known for ensuring that suspects and defendants are treated fairly.”

  I didn’t tell him to go fuck himself, but it took some effort. And he was determined to make it even harder.

  Lacing his hands behind his head and leaning back in his chair, he said, “This really is quite a coincidence. Just this morning I was reading about you. Brandy and I have been preparing what we hope will be a very revealing cross-examination.”

  I realized that the papers on his desk included an old photo of me. Some articles, too, downloaded from Lexis. They were the kind of articles that I would never frame and hang on my office walls. If I had an office. But I didn’t let myself be goaded.

  “You aren’t actually going to take this thing to trial, are you?”

  He shrugged. “You and your former partner Luke Endow have left me no choice.”

  “Have you talked to him about a deal?”

  “No. Are you here as his proxy to offer one?”

  I shook my head.

  Brandy Walsh suddenly appeared, squeezing past me through the door. As she had been the day before when I’d run into her at Vedauwoo, she was wearing mountain-biking clothes and shoes, this time with a yellow-and-brown jersey that said “University of Wyoming Cycling Team.” She also had a bad case of helmet-head, but for some reason she was almost painfully attractive to me—I had been celibate too long if I was attracted to a lawyer. I could smell her sweat, and the scent of sun on her skin. She must be something more than a casual rider, just as she’d once been something more than a casual surfer. It didn’t really surprise me. Most trial lawyers are former athletes and intensely competitive—something that drives them to go far beyond truth-finders and presenters of facts.

  She gave me a look but no greeting. I returned the look and said nothing. Except for a small nod in her direction, Bogey ignored her, too.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he continued. “There won’t be any deal. The only ‘deal’ I’ll accept is a dismissal of all charges. And a public apology from both of you.”

  “You know that won’t happen. Look, is a trial really in the best interest of your client? This isn’t about getting back into the limelight, Bogey. It’s not about you. Besides, you lose and you’ll just look like an ass. Jonah will get convicted of something. If not murder, then something close. Unless you manage to get a change of venue, the people in Badwater are going to hammer him.”

  “Oh, I know. That fact’s been made abundantly clear over the last few months. I’ve been wondering if you were responsible for some of it.”

  “For some of what?”

  He stared at me, still smiling, and said, “I expect you know.”

  I didn’t. And I didn’t want to prolong what was obviously an ill-advised conversation by asking what the hell he was talking about.

  Before I could figure out a way to get out of there, Brandy asked Bogey, “We aren’t going to consider any offer?”

  Bogey turned to her and lost his smile. “No,” he said flatly. He looked angry at her for having interrupted our pissing match.

  I suddenly liked her a lot better. Maybe she, at least, could be reasonable. And she hadn’t mentioned my finger-eating wolf.

  “I guess I’ll see you in court,” I told Bogey as I backed out into the hall.

  His smile came back. “I’m looking forward to it. Really.”

  I looked back once and could only see Brandy inside the office. She was looking after me as Bogey said something sharp to her.

  I wasn’t entirely defeated yet. I was determined to give it one more try.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Luke demanded when I walked into his office in Badwater.

  “Climbing.”

  “You’re still trying to kill yourself that way?” He shook his head, probably wishing I had long ago. “Just don’t do it before the trial, okay? And do something about your face. You look like you got slapped with a cheese grater.”

  My old partner was hunched behind his desk, looking more uptight than I’d ever seen him. Gone was the lazy fat man who kicked back in his chair and hefted his boots on a desk cluttered with only fast-food wrappers. He was losing weight, and he sat erect, as if the wound to his posterior was acting up, and the desk was piled high with real work: reports, motions, and law books. More boxes of papers and books were scattered over the floor. He smelled of cigarettes and Binaca, and the white spots on his shoulders showed that he’d been spraying himself to try to hide the odor from his wife.

  I wasn’t all that surprised that he was so stressed. Coming into town, I’d noticed a lot of signs for his opponent in the coming election, but very few for Luke.

  “How’s it going?” I asked carefully.

  “Fucking Bogey. The bastard’s burying me with motions. Motions to change venue, to recuse me and the judge, to suppress all the evidence we’ve got and a lot that we haven’t, all the usual crap and a bunch more. There’re more than a dozen separate motions to dismiss. He’s probably wiped out an acre of the Shoshone with all the paper he’s using up.”

  “Are you handling it okay?”

  “Sure. I can handle him any day of the week,” he said with false good humor. It was obvious from the nasty gleam in his eyes that he was still angry about my betrayal.

  “But I’ve evened things out a little,” he continued. “Hell, he’s getting help, so I figured I’d better get some, too. I’ve been talking to your office, and I’ve been getting some help with all this shit—answering motions, making sure my investigator toes the line. A guy who’s got a lot of experience. He’s gonna come up and ride shotgun during the trial, too.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked, knowing the answer already and not liking it one bit.

  Luke smiled.

  “I think you know him pretty well. He’s about the orneriest bastard on the planet. Your old buddy, Ross McGee. From what I hear, though, you guys aren’t so tight these days.”

  No, we definitely weren’t. The man had once embodied everything I believed in about the law—do the right thing and don’t fuck it up—and now I wasn’t sure who had drifted farther, me or him. Luke had always been way out there. At least he was constant. But it was amazing, and incredibly disappointing, to learn that my mentor would now be collaborating with the man he’d once forced to resign from law enforcement.

  “You heard about the threats?” Luke suddenly asked.

  “I heard something about them.”

  “And not just for our defendant, either, although now that he’s back in our jail for the hearing tomorrow he’d better be watching his ass. Bogey was too busy filing all this shit to demand any special protection for him.”

  Having seen Bogey in action, I bet he didn’t want any special protection for Jonah prior to trial. He probably wanted Jonah showing up battered and bruised to elicit sympathy in the jury box and outrage in the press.

  “Where’s Smit?” I asked, alarmed.

  “The big freak had served his sentence. We kicked him loose. Speaking of checking six and watching asses, you’d better be watching yours. But no, I�
��m talking about his ham lawyer. Supposedly, anyway. It’s probably some kind of media stunt. Bogey claims he’s been getting threatening calls both at the motel he stays at up here and at his office in Laramie.”

  So that was what Bogey had been talking about. And accusing me of.

  “Who’s threatening him?”

  Luke smirked. “They’re anonymous, of course. A muffled voice, he says. Telling him to get the hell out of Badwater or else he’ll be raped to death. Shit like that. Most of the calls we traced were made late at night from a pay phone in that little park near the motel. Nobody saw anything, and the clerk who transferred the calls can’t remember anything other than being told to forward the call to ‘Bill Bogey’s room.’ The sheriff thinks he’s probably making the calls himself—or getting his girl Friday to do it—just so he can crow about it.”

  “Who’s he crowing about it to?”

  Now Luke frowned and then winced and touched his stomach.

  “Local rag.” He burped. “The Casper paper, too. Anyone who’ll listen. Been getting into Denver and Salt Lake City a little bit. You didn’t see it last week? ‘Lawyer Warned to Leave Town’?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been in the mountains for most of the last three months.”

  “He got that one in the city papers because he had ‘evidence’ of the threats. You know what his evidence was? Someone took a big ol’ dump on the hood of his Benz SUV in the Outrider parking lot.”

  I had to return his grin. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. He tried to demand that we bag and tag it and submit it to the FBI for a DNA analysis. I told him he could analyze it himself if he wanted, that for all I knew, the poop came from a vulture that’s been feeding on all the crap he’s been spouting.”

  Luke managed a bigger smile, adding, “Then he accused me of the dirty deed. I told him I just wished I’d thought of it.” He looked at me with renewed sharpness. “I guess you haven’t read what he’s been saying about you, either.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “You should know. It might give you an idea what to expect tomorrow at the suppression hearing.”

  He dug through the pile on his desk until he found a folder full of folded newspapers. He selected one and handed it across to me: “Strasburg Defender Calls Investigation ‘Criminal.’ ”

  I didn’t react, but I’m sure my face colored. It seemed a little harsh for the guy who’d gone into the river after the kid, who had avenged Jonah for the beating he’d gotten in the jail, and who had warned them to get him transferred.

  The lead read: “Jonah Strasburg’s defense attorney had sharp criticism for the investigation performed by state agent Antonio Burns, calling it ‘criminally deficient.’ William Bogey, lead attorney for the man charged in the drowning death of a local 10-year-old child, said Burns’s failure to adequately question witnesses to the event and the subsequent charges that have been filed demonstrate a bias on the part of police and prosecutors against his client. ‘It shows an intentional or reckless unwillingness to consider the possibility that Mr. Strasburg had committed no crime.’ ” Apparently Bogey felt I hadn’t pressed hard enough in questioning Randy and Trey Mann, and insinuated that they would change their story.

  I’d assumed all along they were lying when they denied throwing rocks and that Cody had struck Jonah. I simply wrote in my report what they’d told me. It was an unsurprising defense spin, but also a good one.

  “Have you talked to the Manns lately?” I asked Luke.

  He shook his head.

  “Ed and his wife won’t let me talk to them. Even when I threatened a subpoena. Said they’d show up at trial, but that was it. I got an idea, though, what’s going on.”

  I waited while he shuffled through another stack of folders. This time he came up with a couple of typed pages and gruesome photographs labeled “Autopsy.”

  I ignored the photos. There was nothing in there I wanted to see. I knew they’d be infinitely worse than the memory of the peaceful, cold, and thin young body. Luke directed me to a page that summarized the standard toxicology reports.

  Cody Wallis had had methamphetamine in his blood.

  I felt a momentary surge of anger and sadness. This was what I’d been fighting all along. This was what my office, my state, had been ignoring all along. A ten-year-old kid high on meth.

  It took me a minute to clear my head and to realize what the implications were for Luke. The victim was tweaking. And if Cody was high, his older buddies and cousins Randy and Trey surely were, too. A jury might slam Jonah for killing an innocent kid, but they’d have a much harder time convicting him of killing an aggressive little junkie. And Randy and Trey would probably do anything to keep their parents from learning what they’d been smoking. Even if it meant admitting to the sticks and stones.

  In staring at the page and gathering my thoughts, I noticed something else. There was no stamp on the document indicating that it had been discovered to the defense.

  “Bogey’s seen this?”

  Luke stared back at me, stone-faced now.

  “Nope. Not yet. I’m going to wait awhile. Until after the hearing tomorrow, at least. Then I’m going to see about making a deal for manslaughter and a stipulated ten-year sentence. Hopefully the thought that those kids could have been high has never crossed his mind, and it had better stay that way.”

  The last part was definitely a warning. I stared back, trying to decide just how unethical it was for him to withhold this information. I reminded myself that Luke had always been this way, even when he’d been my training officer and friend and had once gotten shot thinking he was saving my life. But his corruption had obviously gotten worse since becoming a politician.

  I took a deep breath, and said what I’d come here to say. It was time to get it out in the open and hopefully convince him to get rid of this piece of shit.

  “Luke, you’ve never asked me what I thought about this case.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not exactly uncommon for the prosecutor to ask his lead investigator what he thinks the outcome should be. Especially when his lead investigator was a witness to the crime itself, or at least its immediate outcome.”

  He kept on staring.

  “How come you haven’t asked me?” I asked. “Is it because of Cheyenne? All those years ago?”

  He chuckled and said, “That QuickDraw stuff? Nah. Far as I’m concerned, they should have given you a medal. Going in that house all wired up, knowing you’d probably already been burnt. Then wasting those fuckers. That was good work. Rough maybe, but righteous.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I’ve been hearing some rumors about something that went down in Baja.”

  I inhaled and let it out without taking my eyes off him.

  He continued, “That dealer, Hidalgo, who you raided with a bad warrant. The one that the Feds released even after the way he fucked up your brother. People say he’s disappeared. And people say you went down to Baja Norte last year just about the time he disappeared.”

  I did my best to hold his stare.

  “So you think that I’m dirty, and that my opinion means shit.”

  “No, no. I’m not saying that. What I’ve heard is just rumors—hell, not even rumors really. Just whispered innuendo. And I know something about you, too. Now don’t look at me like that, QuickDraw. If it’s easier for you, think of it this way: They give me the charging and prosecuting authority because I’m trained in the law. See, cops are too close to their cases. They need someone with some objectivity. Some exterior judgment. Someone who can see the whole thing—the political ramifications, and all that.”

  I tried to hold on to my cool. I’d come here with a purpose, to defend Jonah, not myself.

  “Okay. You may not want my opinion, but I’m going to give it to you. It was an accident. Jonah Strasburg didn’t mean to kill that kid. He might not even have meant to push him in the river. You’r
e prosecuting the hell out of him because you want to stick it to your old professor, Bogey, and you want to make a name for yourself as a hard-ass. Win the election and all that. But that’s not your job, Luke. You’re a prosecutor. Your job’s to do the right thing.”

  But Luke didn’t look as if he agreed. He was turning a dark red. It was like all the blood in his body was coming into his face and starting to boil.

  “Okay, QuickDraw, now I’m gonna give you my opinion. I want you to go down the hall to the third door on the right. It’s the men’s room. Go on in there and take a good look in the mirror. Then come back and tell me if you should be giving me advice on law and ethics.”

  twenty-four

  I should have taken Luke’s advice and been watching my back, but I was too angry from the way our conversation had ended to be even looking in front of me, much less behind. As a result, I never saw them coming.

  My stomach was roiling with bile by the time I got back to Mungo and the Pig. Mungo’s must have been, too—she was all over me when I climbed in the truck. I drove to a grocery store, restocked my larder with dog food and some bread and peanut butter, and headed out of town. We didn’t make it back to the camp to eat because I was light-headed with hunger and Mungo was drooling down my neck. So I pulled off the highway on a dirt side road and drove a short ways into the Shoshone National Forest.

  I was just getting out when they attacked.

  The high-pitched whine of a four-cylinder engine torqued to red-line came screaming at me. Turning, I faced a little blue Chevette that was barreling down the road. Someone was hanging out the passenger-side window. It took me a half second to recognize him as Zach Mann—Hairlip—and note that he was waving a two-by-four. Hunched behind the wheel was Smit, from the jail. And squeezed into the back was Ned Mann.