FOURTEEN
K
IM AND
I hurry up the road back toward the meadow. The night is totally different now. Before it had been comforting in its starlit silence. Now it feels oppressive, full of ominous shadows. The crickets’ rhythm sounds mocking and evil, like the heavy breathing of a horror movie killer. I can’t get the image of Cal’s bloody smile out of my mind. I find myself looking back over my shoulder on several occasions. Oso trudges along beside us and I’m glad I brought him. He can handle any murderous phantoms hiding in the black trees.
Kim speaks just once. The two words are plaintive, almost desperate, coming from her dazed-looking face. “How? Who?”
“I don’t know. But I’m guessing Fast or his friend. Maybe both of them.”
Sometime during the rapid march in the dark Kim takes my hand. Or maybe I take hers. Her grip is tight and sweaty. Despite the circumstances, the touch of her skin gives me that almost electric tingle once again.
It takes us ten or fifteen minutes to return to the meadow. Some of Kim’s friends are still awake, huddled in a small group near the tents and cars. They shine their flashlights in our faces. Our night vision destroyed, both Kim and I immediately stumble over clumps of grass. I snap, “Turn those things off.” The lights go out.
One of them calls out to Kim, “Was it Sunny? Is she all right?”
Kim says nothing. She doesn’t even look over at her friends.
I say, “We’ll be over in a few minutes. We’ll talk about it then.” I don’t want anyone messing with what will shortly be an official crime scene, and I don’t want anyone driving to town to look for Sunny. Tire treads on the logging track or the Forest Service road might be obscured. The local police need to check it out first.
My father is waiting for us in the dark across the meadow at my family’s camp. He sits as still as a Buddha on a camp chair, watching us kick through the dew-wet grass. His sleeping bag is pulled up over his legs and lap. Next to him is the long black shape of my brother on the ground in his own bag.
“Someone’s been killed,” I tell my father.
Roberto sits up. “Holy shit,
che.
What the fuck happened?”
“Was it one of your friends?” Dad asks Kim. His voice is surprisingly gentle.
Kim lets go of my hand, and then she puts both hands to her face. Her silhouette begins to shudder with soundless sobs. The numbness she’d exhibited with me on our panicked hike back up the road is finally shaking loose. Sometimes it takes something unexpected, like a small kindness from a stranger, to make the reality and grief really sink in.
“Yeah,” I answer for her, speaking fast. “A guy named Cal. We saw his girlfriend tearing down the road, looking like she might have been beaten too. We don’t know what happened, but I doubt she killed him. I might’ve heard some other car going down the road ahead of her. I can’t say for sure.”
While I punch my car key into my truck’s glove box, my father stands and lets his sleeping bag spill into a black puddle at his feet. He puts an arm around Kim. “I’m sorry,” he tells her quietly. Kim folds into him. I’m astounded that anyone would look to my brusque father for comfort. After all, he’d been rude to her the two times they’d met. I guess that makes the gentleness on his behalf all the more touching. My brother is watching, too. It’s too dark to make out the expression on his face.
I get my cell phone out of the glove box and turn it on. I’m relieved that the batteries are fine, but the lit-up screen tells me that there’s no signal. To the west the broad massif of Wild Fire Peak blots out the stars. I consider a run to the summit with the phone and wonder how long it would take. Forty-five minutes? Then I look at the hill to the north, the one with the crumbly red cliff in its center that I’d seen Cal and Sunny rappelling just a few days ago, and consider it too. It’s much closer and might be high enough to catch a signal. Just before I leave to jog up it, I remember my dad’s satellite phone. I borrow it without asking.
I dial 911. The Sheriff’s Department in a county to the north answers and then transfers me to Tomichi County. A sleepy dispatcher says the same thing as Roberto when I tell him someone has been murdered up in Wild Fire Valley. “Holy shit!” Tomichi County must not have many murders. For some reason, I picture how that will sound at the killer’s trial, when the tape is played—my own voice oddly calm, stating that I want to report a murder in the valley, then the dispatcher half shouting a “Holy shit!” The jury will probably chuckle. The dispatcher puts me on hold; he excitedly explains that he’d better wake up and then patch in Sheriff Munik.
“Burns, right?” the sheriff drawls when he comes on the line. His voice isn’t particularly sleepy for a man who had been up most of the previous night dealing with an arson investigation.
“Yes, sir,” I say, knowing we’re still being recorded.
“They call you Wyoming guys special agents or something, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought only those FBI assholes did that. What does ‘special’ mean? That you guys are retarded or something?” The jury will laugh at that, too. The sheriff must only be half-awake.
“Sheriff,” I say officially, “about an hour ago I heard what sounded like a scream down-valley from where I’m camping near the base of Wild Fire Peak in the San Juan National Forest. I hiked down there with a woman named Kim Walsh, who knew a couple who were camping in that direction. She saw a female with what might have been blood on her face driving toward town in a small white car, like a Ford Escort—I couldn’t read the plates. Then up at their camp we found the body of a young male. He looked like he’d been beaten to death.” I want to add that I don’t think the girl could have done it, but don’t say that. My cop instincts tell me that if it turns out Sunny really had killed Cal, then my recorded opinion would be something her defense attorneys would jump all over.
The sheriff is quiet on the other end. I wonder if he’s gone back to sleep. But then over the hiss of the satellite connection I hear what sounds like a zipper shutting. “I’m on my way,
Special Agent.
This better not be bullshit. I’m getting tired of running up into that valley in the middle of the night.”
“I’ll meet you at the turnoff to the camp,” I say. “You’ll want to park down the road a little when you see my headlights, so you don’t drive over any evidence.”
There’s another long silence. “You special agents are just like the Feds. Always trying to tell us ignorant country cornpones how to do our jobs.” He hangs up. The defense lawyers will have a lot of fun with that. I can picture the sheriff being cross-examined:
“So you admit to being an ignorant country cornpone?”
Once my father has released Kim from that odd, comforting embrace, I drive her across the meadow to the activists’ camp. Dad rides uncomfortably in the backseat with Oso while Roberto stays behind, sleeping off whatever he’d smoked or injected earlier in the night. We leave Kim in the hands of her friends. Before we drive down the Forest Service road, I ask them all to stay in the meadow. There’s nothing they can do. Someone wants to drive down to look for Sunny, but I explain about tire tracks and that they would just be turned around by the sheriff anyway. Someone else asks if I’m sure Cal is dead. I think about the mangled face, the naked body sticky with blood, and the placid skin. “Pretty damned sure,” I tell them. My tone leaves no opening for argument.
Dad and I wait for the sheriff in my truck down near the turnoff for the old logging track. Neither of us says much, but I can guess what my father is thinking:
I told you not to get involved.
While we wait I think about Sunny, how she’d looked so at home the day I’d met her when she bravely rubbed Oso’s chest. She’d been like a forest sprite, a part of the meadow. I think about Cal, trying to be so cool, embarrassed that I’d seen him rappelling off a rotten cliff instead of climbing in the canyon. I think about the feel of Kim’s hand in mine on our hurried return to the meadow. I think about what she’d said to me before she’d gotten out of the car at the activists’ camp.
“It’s my fault. My fault, Anton. I got them both into this.”
I told her the obvious. That it’s no one’s fault but the killer’s. That no one could foresee something like this. But she shook her head and bent forward as if she’d been punched in the stomach.
“No. You don’t understand. I got them into this. This whole thing with the valley . . . I pushed Fast too hard . . . made him have to go and hire that goddamned pit bull. . . . And then Cal found that cave he says is such a secret.” Her breath and words came in short bursts. “Sunny just told me that he’d taken her there . . . and that it was unreal, like something out of a dream. . . . Cal was going to send some photos of it to the Forest Service manager . . . to try and get them to reconsider approving the land exchange. . . . But he didn’t want to tell anyone where it was . . . because he was worried Fast would get there first and dynamite it or something. . . . Or that the Forest Service would keep him from exploring it . . . send in their own people . . . turn it into a tourist trap.”
She covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth. “I started all of it. . . . And then I let it happen.”
The lights that come flashing up the valley on the Forest Service road are blue and red. They reflect off the forest and up the slope on each side of the road. I can hear the drone of several engines, not unlike what I thought I’d heard earlier in the evening just before we’d found Cal’s corpse. Only the rumble grows closer rather than the other way around. It’s weird, seeing those flashing lights approach but without the screams of their sirens. As they get closer I can hear their axles scraping over the deep ruts.
There are two cars from the Tomichi County Sheriff’s Office, one a regular patrol car and the other the sheriff’s big SUV, plus an ambulance that follows a moment behind. Their tires crunch on the dirt and rocks. When the caravan is about a hundred feet from us, I flash my brights at them twice, then flick my headlights off. The first car, the SUV, stops in the middle of the road. The tall figure of Sheriff Munik gets out. In the headlights of the cars behind him, I see him wave for them to park and come on.
The short, fat silhouette of Deputy B. J. Timms is unpleasantly obvious.
“Special Agent Burns,” the sheriff says to me as I squint into the blaze of light, “I hope you approve of where we parked. If you have any other suggestions, please keep them to yourself. Now, where’s this body?”
I point at the narrow cutoff to the side of the road. “Up there, about two hundred yards.”
Munik sweeps his long Maglite at the trees as three deputies come up behind him. “Do you know the deceased?”
“I met him the other day. His name’s Cal something. And the girl we saw tearing out of here is named Sunny. She is . . . was his girlfriend.”
“You know anything about their relationship? Or where they’re from?”
I shake my head. “No. I’d just met them three nights ago. Then Cal was the one who got busted in the nose by one of David Fast’s men the next day. The woman who found the body with me, Kim Walsh, I think she knows them both pretty well. She should be able to tell you their full names and all that.”
The sheriff plays the light over the ground at our feet. It looks like a hard-packed mixture of dirt, rock, and pine needles. It’s unlikely they’ll find much in the way of tread marks or footprints unless the ground is softer up the logging track. Then he shines the light through the windshield of my truck.
“Who’s that?”
“My father.”
“Ah, the colonel. And where’s the rest of the family this evening?”
“My brother’s up at our camp. The woman who found the body with me is camped up there, too.”
Sheriff Munik gives me a long look, but I can’t see his eyes because of the headlights blinding me. “Tell me, Burns, what are an Air Force colonel, a felon, and a Wyoming cop doing hanging out with a bunch of ecoterrorists?” Obviously he’d taken the time to run my brother’s name through the computers.
“We came here to climb and that’s it. And I think most of those people up there would resent you calling them terrorists. From what I’ve seen of your friend Fast and his men, they’re the ones trying to cause a little terror.”
Neither of us speaks for a moment. Then Munik calls for one of his deputies to bring the crime scene equipment. “If you’d be so kind,
Special Agent
. . .” He gestures at the narrow track.
I lead them through the thick forest foliage to one side of the track so we don’t walk over any evidence. And I take a small pleasure in letting branches snap back in the sheriff’s face. It’s not that I don’t like him—from what little I’ve seen he seems competent enough at his job—but I want to pay him back for all the mocking “Special Agent” stuff. I’m actually sort of impressed that he hadn’t arrested anyone or busted any heads in the meadow yesterday just to satisfy his town’s leading citizen, who’d been watching from his Suburban. Too many small-town sheriffs in Wyoming would do just that.
Behind me the flashlights cut back and forth through the trees. When I spot the yellow rain fly, I say, “He’s right up there. Under a bush, just past the yellow.” I have no desire to take a second look.
I wait behind while the sheriff and the two deputies who must be his crime scene technicians push their way forward through the brush.
I hear the sheriff’s voice, which is for once very quiet. “Damn” is all he says.
Back down on the road, I wait in my Land Cruiser with my father and Oso. Sheriff Munik confers with his men a little ways away. They’re probably deciding to wait for dawn, I explain to my father. They don’t want to risk missing or contaminating anything. Beside me my father grunts.
Just as I make a jaw-popping yawn, realizing how hungry and tired I am, the sheriff walks up flanked by a deputy on each side. His face is grim.
“Agent Burns, come with me please.” He gestures for me to follow him back to his SUV. Maybe he’s changed his mind about getting my opinion after all. In my mind I try to put together my suspicions about Fast and Burgermeister. The sheriff gets in the driver’s side, I get in the passenger seat, and the short deputy slides into the rear with a notepad and pen in his tiny hands.