Trial by Ice and Fire (4 page)

One of the other five officers lets out a low groan. “Oooh.” It's the sound you heard in high school when someone made the final, fatal insult about another's mother and a fight was imminent. It has come to this so fast—just minutes ago I'd begun to believe that everything was going so well.

Wokowski's still watching me without any discernible expression. His wide-set eyes don't even seem to blink. It's hard to see what Cali could ever have seen in him, but then he does have a powerful, almost animalistic aura. He opens his mouth to respond.

A crack sounds like a gunshot, cutting him off before he has the chance to speak. McGee has shoved his walker into a table leg.

“All right, gentlemen, that's enough for today,” he says.

I have no doubt that there will be a tomorrow for Sergeant Wokowski and me.

FOUR

I
WAIT FOR
M
C
G
EE
on the parking lot's asphalt under a hot sun while he takes his time hobbling outside. I focus on my breathing, attempting with deep breaths to center myself the way Rebecca had tried to teach me.
Close your eyes and think good thoughts,
she'd said while she showed me how to pretzel my legs before her. Then she'd laughed.
Not those kinds of thoughts, you pervert. Calm thoughts. Pure thoughts.

As I inhale all the way down to my belly and let it out slowly, I picture her in what had once been our bedroom. Facing me, just two feet away, her legs are folded and her spine is straight. Pale eyelids sealing off the windows to her soul. This is the way we'd started the day for almost one hundred mornings as the sunlight lit up the snowy peaks of the Front Range beyond on the loft's big windows. With her naked except for a pair of my oversized boxers. Her breasts firm and high, the nipples very pink against white skin. The pine floor very cold beneath our bottoms.

The meditation never worked for me—I never quite felt its soothing effect—but then the attempt never failed to make me feel good. Cheating, my eyes open and staring, I would wait for her lids to slowly rise, the brown orbs descend, before I would gently pull her onto me, laughing and struggling.

But now the memory doesn't work. My hands are still trembling with the aftereffects of the confrontation.

I was once so amiable, so cool—it's what made me successful when I was working undercover. Even my high-school class at Lackland Air Force Base had voted me Most Likable. But now I am someone else. Or at least I'm perceived as someone else. A cold-blooded killer. And a voice in my head worries that it's what I will become. From the simple and overwhelming force of public opinion.

“That went well,” McGee says when he clanks up, huffing over his walker. “We're going to have a fun time here in Jackson. . . . You've got a way with people, QuickDraw.”

This time I don't bother asking him to stop calling me that. By protecting me from the criminal investigation the office administration had been pressured to mount, he'd earned the right.

“Assholes,” I say instead. “You'd think cops would be smarter. Those yahoos in there actually believe Mo Cash and that fucking columnist in Cheyenne.”

Morris Cash was the lead defense attorney who had cross-examined me during the governor-elect's trial. He did everything he could to ridicule the idea that I survived a shoot-out with three armed men. The purpose of the unrelated incident was to impeach my credibility with the jury. The result, I hate to admit to myself, is that I'm no longer effective as a peace officer—at least not on the witness stand. McGee and I are going to have to work at plea-bargaining my old cases. Using Mo Cash's transcript as a road map, any half-assed defense attorney can tear me apart. And none of it can be brought out on direct examination so that I will at least have a chance to explain. Criminal law is funny that way. It's considered bolstering, and it's therefore inadmissible on direct. But the defense is free to go into it on cross, make my past look like some horrible secret the prosecution has been trying to hide. They can force me to answer with only a “Yes” or “No.” Questions like “Isn't it true, Agent Burns, that you shot to death three men, who you claim were armed, during this so-called ambush?” “And you walked away without so much as a scratch?” A disbelieving chuckle. “Don't you agree that such an outcome is highly unlikely, to say the least? Implausible, even?” “Isn't it true that you killed another man, your fourth, I believe, during
this
so-called investigation?” “Isn't it true that you've been investigated by your own office for the crime of murder?” “Isn't it true that you've been suspended from duty on three separate occasions?” I have to wait for redirect in order to try and explain about self-defense, unlikely outcomes often being true, standard officer-involved-shooting investigations, and mandatory suspensions following the use of a firearm. In the last trial I'd been red-faced with fury by that time and the jury looked away from me while the reporters in the gallery smacked their lips, mistaking outrage and righteous indignation for a guilty conscience.

This is why now all I'm suited for is ferreting out clan labs and this new assignment of basic bodyguarding. My face is too well-known for undercover work and my background is too dubious for serious investigations requiring lengthy testimony. The only reason I hadn't quit months ago is that I don't want to go out as a loser, a chump. Too many people would be happy to see me go.

McGee starts to growl, “If you're looking for sympathy—”

But I interrupt. “Screw you, Ross. I'm not in the mood.”

He gives me a glare that feels like the burn of twin laser beams and the snarled white hair of his beard seems to bristle. Then he whacks me on the back with his hoary hand.

“Suck it up, lad. You know the truth. That's all that matters.”

It's the same thing Cali said just two hours ago. The same thing Rebecca said when I'd come home that day with clenched fists and a mouth raw from spitting obscenities. And it's bullshit.

But even so, the words are pretty surprising, coming from McGee's lips. It's even more surprising when he adds, “Come on. I'm going to buy you lunch.”

He leads me two blocks west to the town square, his wheels rattling on the wooden sidewalks, to where a hot-dog vendor is taking advantage of the unseasonably warm spring air. He's set up his umbrella and metal cart beneath one of the arches of piled elk antlers that frame the four entrances into the small park. There isn't much business for him today—Jackson's rich and healthy residents probably don't eat many hot dogs, and the full-blown tourist season is still a few weeks away.

A menu is bolted to the side of the greasy cart. I look at it skeptically.

“Know what's in 'em?” McGee asks, reading my mind.

“What, Ross?”

“Cow lips and butt holes.” He turns to the vendor. “Give me three with everything . . . jalapenos, too.”

Although I know I need nourishment, I'm not going to touch one of those things. My stomach already burbles with enough acid, and it's been years since I've even touched a good steak. The sight of too many bodies torn by bullets or ruined by needles can do that to you. I order a pretzel and lemonade instead. McGee grunts disapprovingly as he bares yellowed teeth and rips out a bite. We eat a silent meal—silent but for McGee's gnashing and satisfied groans—on a park bench while watching a group of youths in a circle kick a Hacky Sack on the grass.

Although they're only a few years younger than me, it seems like they live in a different world. The men are bare chested in the sun, and the women wear little more than thin cloth above their baggy shorts and sandals. Tattoos, bracelets, anklets, and facial piercings flash in the light along with quick, bronzed limbs and the sound of laughter. When they shout at one another, their accents range from West Coast surfer to Appalachian hick. I hear them talking about “heinous rapids” and “sick rock pitches” and “steep-ass chutes.”

They are the mountain freaks. The happy, obscenely healthy fringe dwellers. They'd once been my people. My tribe. But my job and my badge have long since made me an outcast.

“Look at those bouncers,” McGee says. “Haven't those girls heard of brassieres? . . . Ahh, it does an old man's heart good.”

“Let's get on with it, Ross.”

We walk back toward the Sheriff's Office where his sedan—he ranks a new Chrysler New Yorker—is parked in a tow-away zone. A business card similar to mine is prominently displayed on his dashboard.

The car is hot inside. It reeks from the odor of his foul cigars. We sit with the engine idling and the air conditioner turned on high, which I hope will remove the stench of tobacco and hot-dog breath as well as my own dried sweat. McGee's leaning over me, his mustard-stained beard almost in my face, as he struggles for a minute or so trying to get his briefcase out from behind my seat.

His problem is that there isn't enough room between his big belly and the steering wheel for him to turn. He grunts and wheezes, too proud to ask for help, until I begin to fear that I'll either asphyxiate on the fumes coming from his mouth or that he'll have a heart attack and I'll have to give him mouth-to-mouth. I twist around and yank the big leather case onto my lap.

“Open it,” he orders, annoyed that I've helped him.

Inside are twenty pounds of statute books, his old service automatic from his Korean War days, and a single slender folder. The folder contains the photocopied pages of an incident report completed by the Jackson Police Department.

“Read it.”

The first two pages are an officer's report handwritten in capital letters. Two nights ago, at 11:36
P
.
M
., Jackson officers responded to a 911 call at 452 Colter Street within the Jackson city limits. According to the dispatcher, the caller was an assistant county attorney named Cali Morrow who claimed that someone was coming through her kitchen window. The officers wheeled up to the address five minutes later with lights blazing but no siren. They found an elderly man sitting on the front steps with his arm around a young woman. Both were recognized by the responding officers, and later formally identified as Cali Morrow and William “Bill” Laughlin.

After speaking to the witnesses, the officers observed a broken window on the first floor/southeast side of the house, a half-empty roll of duct tape on the ground beneath a bush, a stun gun beside it, and boot prints around them in earth that was wet from being freshly watered.

The house was searched but no suspect was found. The garages and exteriors of the homes around Ms. Morrow's were also searched by additional officers with flashlights. Again, no one was found.

The next two pages are the witness statements. Cali's is brief, no more than two paragraphs. It states that she had walked home late from the courthouse and entered her kitchen in order to feed her cat. The window over the sink had broken inward as she was standing before it, showering her with glass. She grabbed the cordless phone and ran to an upstairs bathroom that had a lock on the door. There she called 911. She could not identify the perpetrator—it appeared that he was wearing a dark-colored jacket and hood.

An afterword adds that she has been receiving odd letters over the last few months. She thinks she still has two of them, which she will turn over to the investigating officer. The writer of these letters is unknown to her.

Despite the straightforward language of the statement, through the neat but shaky handwriting I can sense a little of the terror she must have been feeling that night.

The second witness statement is even briefer. Bill Laughlin writes that he was taking a late-night walk through the neighborhood when he heard the sound of glass breaking from the side of Cali Morrow's house. A dark-clad figure was trying to crawl through the kitchen window. He shouted, and the man dropped from the window and ran west toward Main Street. No, he cannot identify the man.

The final page in the file is from a crime-scene technician. What he reports is a big zero. No fingerprints on the sill, the shards of glass, or on the side of the house around the window. No prints on the stun gun or the tape—they'd recently been wiped by a cotton cloth. The ground below the window was too soft and spongy with wood chips to hold a usable shoe tread or outline.

“Jesus, Ross. There's nothing here. We're going to need a friggin' confession to get this guy.”

“Then we'll get it. We can't write this one off as a bungled burglary attempt . . . by a tweaked-out meth-head. . . . Not with a stun gun and restraining tape lying in the dirt. . . . Not with
these
letters.”

He reaches across my lap and slaps the folder shut. Stapled to the back are three photocopied pages.

The first is a letter that's unsigned and undated. It's handwritten in block letters on a regular-sized piece of paper. The writing shows an element of cunning—squared-off capital letters such as these are hard to match to any one person's handwriting. It's the sort of thing a cop would know. All capital letters is also the way cops write their reports.

“CALI, CALI, CALI,” it begins. “GODDESS OF ALL DESTRUCTION. YOU ARE MEANT TO BE MINE, YOU CRUEL BITCH. YOU ARE MY BRIDE, MY PRETTY HIDE, MY CUNT TO OPEN WIDE.” Other than some crude pornographic drawings, there's nothing more but the closing. It reads “CALIFORNIA DREAMING,” but those two words have been crossed out with an X. Underneath it says “CALI-FORNICATING DREAMING.”

“Is this the first?”

“No, she'd gotten some earlier over a period of months . . . threw them away without even reading most of 'em. . . . It was only when our boy tried to come through the window . . . that she got concerned enough to tell someone. . . . She was able to save these two and the envelopes out of the trash.”

I read it again. “This is sick stuff. There's definitely an imminent threat here. Especially when you combine it with the attempted break-in and the dropped stun gun and tape.”

“No shit, QuickDraw.”

“Where were these sent to?”

“Her home in town. . . . She bought the place two months ago. . . . Before that she was staying at her mama's. . . . Most of the ones she threw away were mailed there.”

That means the letter writer knows her pretty well. He knows where she's been living. Cali had said she and Wook were dating until about a month ago, so he certainly knew where to find her. But it doesn't make sense that he would be sending her obscene, threatening letters while they were dating. Unless maybe he hoped it was a way to cause her to cling to him—the physically powerful cop—when he felt her drifting, sort of scare her into staying with him.

The second letter is a bad attempt at poetry. It says:

YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE ME, BITCH

YOU'RE GOING TO PAY FOR MY FEVER AND ITCH

YOUR DEVIL EYES WON'T BE ABLE TO HIDE

WHAT'S ALWAYS BEEN BURIED DEEP INSIDE.

At the bottom he'd written, “I'M COMING. I'M CUMMING. SPREAD YOUR LEGS AND PREPARE TO MEET ME.” This one, too, is signed “CALI-FORNICATING DREAMING.”