The Edge of Justice (27 page)

“I don't know your background—I don't know if you had a brother who got hooked or a relative who was murdered. But I'd be willing to bet that one and three apply to you too. I bet you like the power and authority and I bet you want to do the right thing. And so when you and the others found Kimberly Lee dead, then the Knapps opened fire on you in the middle of the night and there was a pretty good chance they were the perps, you thought the right thing was to make sure there was enough evidence to put them away permanently. You've seen that the courts all too often let bad guys go on technicalities, or just because a jury has their heads up their asses, so you think you'll improve the odds a little with some manufactured evidence.

“But David, I think you can see now that it was the
wrong
thing. The wrong guys are going to be put to death just so no one's embarrassed and Nathan Karge gets to move on to the governor's mansion, taking your sheriff with him. I'm asking you now to do the right thing.”

I let him sit. I'm confident the decision the young deputy will make will be the right one. I can read it on his face. I can see it in his distressed eyes. After a while, Knight finally speaks.

“Let's go for a walk.”

I nod and we both get out of the car.

“Are you recording this?”

I shake my head and say no.

Knight looks at me skeptically. So I peel off my suit jacket and lay it on the seat. Then I untuck my shirt and lift it high on my chest. I drop my pants to my knees and turn slowly around before tucking my shirt back into my pants.

“C'mon,” I say, and we walk up the dirt trail.

“When Kimberly's body was found, I was one of the first ones there. I didn't see any crank pipe. Then, after the shoot-out with those fucking Knapp brothers, I went back as they were bagging up her body. The pipe was there, broken on the floor, almost underneath a couch. It was bright blue glass with a stem that looked like a flower. I realized I'd seen it before. I took it off one of the brothers when I arrested him a few months earlier, on a possession charge. I placed it into evidence. That case was eventually plea-bargained down to ten days plus probation, but the pipe stayed in evidence—to be destroyed, far as I knew. I told the sheriff I'd seen that pipe before. I told him as they were putting that girl in the bag. He didn't say anything, he just winked at me. After a little while that Nazi Sergeant Bender came over to me and told me I'd never seen that pipe before, to forget it.”

“What about the girl's breast, found in the cab of the Knapps' truck? And the supposed confession?”

“I don't know about that. All I can tell you is that somebody had cut it off her when they killed her. But anyone could have put it in the truck.”

“And the statement, that one of the Knapps supposedly made to Bender, that the chink bitch had it coming, that rape's all they're good for?”

“I don't know about that either. It might be bullshit, it might not. Those guys are racists. Someone could have told them the girl was dead and what happened to her. It was the sort of thing those fuckers would say. But I wasn't there for that.”

That supposed confession was the cornerstone of Karge's case. It was the only piece of evidence that wasn't considered “circumstantial.” Even though scientific proof such as fingerprints and DNA evidence is the most trustworthy and damning evidence there is, juries have been conditioned to treat it as suspect and instead weigh more heavily words people claim to have heard and things they claim to have seen.

“So you never considered that someone might be setting those boys up?”

Knight looks away, pained. “No,” he says. “All I knew about for sure was the pipe. But there was enough evidence even without it, as far as I knew. It was just the cherry on top. That shit they wrote in blood on the walls, the racist stuff we found in their trailer, that they started shooting when cops just knocked on their door to question them. I thought they probably did it. I was sure they did it.”

I stop and look at the young cop. I don't believe him. And Knight knows it too, the way he won't meet my eyes. He suspected all along there was a frame taking place, but he had said nothing. He was a part of it. By his silence, he played a role of sorts in the killings of another three young people. I feel sick again. It wasn't an intent to do harm that kept Knight silent. It was worse. Cowardice. Complacency. That resulted in three more murders.

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

A
N 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.