Point of Law

by Clinton McKinzie

  Kim’s standing in the middle of the Forest Service road now, one hand still half raised toward the sound of the engine. It’s more than a mile back to the meadow, back to our cars, so there’s no point in trying to go after Sunny. I put a hand on Kim’s arm and gently pull it down to her side.

  “Come on. Let’s see what she was running from.”

  We hike up the old logging road. It runs almost straight up the steep, forested hillside. We walk slowly, not using our flashlights at my insistence and letting our vision get used to the dark again. I don’t have to tell her to avoid making noise. Oso keeps a shoulder against my hip, for once obeying my command to heel.

  “I think their camp is somewhere up there,” Kim whispers, and points ahead.

  As we’ve climbed, the track has turned into little more than an overgrown trail that’s been almost entirely reclaimed by the wilderness. At various places diseased or lightning-struck trees have fallen across it, rotted to mushy kindling, then crushed under the recent passage of wheels. Heavy bushes press against the sides, fighting for the light the narrow track provides in the daytime. Young aspen saplings rise right in the very center of the road to take advantage of the same light and one day soon block it out. Splintered bark is as white as bone in the night where the undercarriage of a car has bent the saplings until they snapped.

  The forest here seems denser than that which surrounds the meadow. The trees are closer together and, weirdly, the underbrush too is thicker. It takes me a moment to realize that the hillside probably faces south, therefore getting a lot of light to justify the heavy growth. The smell of decaying vegetation is also stronger here. It smells a little like the mushroom bin at the health food store.

  “Why would she be driving like that? And the screaming earlier . . .” Kim talks quietly, more to herself than me. She sounds worried but not necessarily scared. It seems like the forest is a comfortable place for her. I like that—that she could be out in these cloying woods so late at night, with a stranger, and still not be too frightened. So many people I’ve known find the woods menacing. If it hadn’t been for the scream earlier, and if it hadn’t been for the wild-eyed girl behind the wheel of an out-of-control car, I’d probably be trying to figure out a way to kiss her.

  “Maybe she and Cal got high or drunk or something . . . every time I came up here to visit them they were baked out of their minds. I never should have introduced her to Cal. But he wouldn’t hurt her—he’s not that kind.”

  Up ahead in the dark I see some yellow fabric. Part of a tent? Laundry? I touch Kim’s arm to make her stop. Then I touch her lips with a finger to keep her quiet. I push Oso’s collar into her hand and whisper for him to sit, to stay.

  As I move very slowly, trying to avoid the worst of the twigs and the leaves in the dark, I think of the possibilities. Maybe Sunny and Cal had a fight and she split. That seems most likely. Maybe I’ll just find Cal drunk and pissed. Still, some sixth sense makes me stealthy and causes me to once again take the gun out of my pocket. I don’t want a surprised and stoned ecoterrorist to split my head with an ax.

  The yellow is a part of a tent. The nylon rain fly. It looks like someone’s half wadded it and tossed it over a leaning tree. And as I get closer I can see clothing and pots and sleeping bags messily scattered about a small clearing. There’s an unpleasant odor, too. I’m still for a minute, sniffing the air, and thinking that I’m spending too much time around that dog. Then I recognize the faint, coppery smell of blood. It’s laced with the heavier scent of voided bowels. That’s when I see the foot.

  I’m almost tempted to ignore it because it seems so out of place in the cool, quiet night. So ugly, bare and extending from under a bush. I stare at it long enough to be sure that it’s what I think it is and to be sure it’s not going anywhere. My eyes make out the whiteness of a calf through the thin broken branches, then a thigh, and another foot to one side. Cal must be really wasted to crash naked under a bush, I think wishfully, already knowing that’s not the case.

  I scan around the dark woods three hundred and sixty degrees, listening for any sound other than Oso’s panting thirty or forty feet behind me. Nothing. With my free hand I take the headlamp out of a pocket and hold it in my palm. I take a deep breath. Then I turn the switch.

  The body under the bush is chest-down. One leg straight, the other folded. As best as I can tell through the leaves, the hands are wrapped loosely around the bush’s knotty trunk. It’s a skinny young man’s frame, naked and tattooed and streaked with blood. There’s no doubt in my mind it’s Cal when I angle the light to illuminate a patch of short, bleached hair and the light reflects off the metal studs he’d pierced through his ears and face. His head appears swollen and lumpy, like a rotten fruit. It’s turned to the side. His jaw looks as if it’s come unhinged. His lips are pulled back in a surprisingly gentle smile. Even violent death will do that to you, make you look as if you might have enjoyed it. It’s one of the Grim Reaper’s dirtiest tricks. Thankfully, the one eye that’s visible is puffed shut.

  As I reach my hand into the bush to touch the carotid artery on his neck, I can’t help but feel an unreasonable fear that the corpse might suddenly turn and bite me. I consider for a moment reaching for the wrist instead. I shake my head, willing away the irrational fear. With two fingers I finally touch the lukewarm skin of his throat and the sticky blood that covers it. As I press just a little for a pulse, Cal’s skin sinks beneath my touch like warm wax. No muscular resistance. And no pulse.

  “Did you find anything?” Kim hisses in my direction.

  “No. Stay there. Don’t move.”

  I switch off the headlamp in my palm and put it back in my pocket. I put away the gun, too. Standing still, now blind in the night, I wonder if I should say a prayer over Cal’s corpse. I hope he believed in more than I do. I hope he was expecting something to follow this instead of just rotting away under a bush. The problem for me is that I don’t have faith in much. People never seem to get what they have coming—good or bad—and there’s an ungodly amount of cruelty and pain in the world. But at times like this it would be nice to believe in something.

  “Anton?” Kim says. She sounds far away.

  I walk back to where she waits on the narrow track. Oso is straining at his collar and she’s having trouble holding him. The beast is still wild enough to get excited at the smell of death.

  Kim’s good eye is wide in the night. I can see the white all the way around her single dark sphere. She senses something, too. I take Oso’s collar with one hand and take her arm with the other. “Come on,” I tell her, pulling her back down the track.

  She tries to tear free of my grip. “Let go of me! What is it? What did you find?”

  I don’t let go. “A crime scene. Cal’s dead.”

  FOURTEEN

  KIM 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 r
ed. 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.”