“I need five minutes, Sheriff,” I say as I try to jerk free from the hand on my arm. “Just five minutes, and I’ll start with an apology.”
I keep my eyes on his as more hands grab at me, attempting to pull me back. I try to twist free while being careful not to appear so aggressive that someone will decide to brain me with a nightstick or fill my face with pepper spray.
“Down on the ground!” someone’s yelling from behind me. It’s probably the young cop who has seen too many movies.
The sheriff just stares back at me with his cold gray eyes. They’re the same color and hardness as the pearl buttons on his shirt. The only move he makes is to raise one hand to his chin, where he rubs the stubble of another sleepless night between his thumb and forefinger.
The mass of the deputies, the office staff, and whoever else is joining in the dog-pile on my back is beginning to drag me down. My legs can’t support all the grappling weight. My knees bang onto the thin carpet, and then I catch myself with my palms. I’m embarrassed to realize that I’m now on my knees, like a beggar, and may soon be prostrate. When I barged through the lobby I’d hoped my entrance would be a little more dignified than this. I keep my head arched up so as not to lose the sheriff’s gaze and so that I can implore him with my eyes.
The voices behind and on top of me are a single, shouting clamor. I can barely hear what Munik says when I finally see his lips move.
“Let him up.”
The dog-pile either doesn’t hear or pays no attention. They keep piling on, collapsing me under their weight. I shout to the ears closest to my mouth, “He said to let me up. Now get off!” but to no avail. Their weight and someone’s fist hammering at my locked elbows spills me face-first onto the carpet.
“That’s enough,” the sheriff says, louder this time. “Let him go.”
I twist my head to look up at him from between the legs of a pair of uniform pants. The corners of his mouth are raised in a faint smile.
Once the swarm above me has disentangled themselves, I get to my feet and try to stand up straight. My bruised ribs ache from where someone has been kneeling on them.
“You’ve got five minutes,” Munik tells me, the smile having disappeared. Then he adds, as if I didn’t already know, “I’ve got a murder case to build.” He waves me into his office. At the entry I pause to hold the doorknob. The sheriff, now seated behind his desk, nods his permission for me to shut the door in the faces of my new friends in the hallway. I give them a flat look and resist the urge to mouth Fuck you very much before the latch clicks shut.
“Sit down,” he orders, pointing at a leather visitor’s chair.
His office is about what you would expect of a small-town sheriff. There is a scarred wooden desk that’s fairly clean of papers and other debris (a testament to a low crime rate), a glass-walled gun case full of rifles and shotguns, a coatrack from which a sweat-stained bulletproof vest hangs on a hook next to his white Stetson and tan sport coat, and the two battered leather chairs facing the desk. On the two walls without windows are a couple of dead animal heads. Trophies, like the framed photographs beneath them that show the sheriff with his arm around people I assume are important. There are also two large windows behind the desk. One looks out onto the courthouse lawn and the other looks east. In the distance I can see the pyramid-shaped summit of Wild Fire Peak. Grateful that he hadn’t ordered me to be thrown out into the street, or worse, thrown in jail with my brother, I sink into one of the leather chairs.
Munik is looking at me with what seems to be a forced frown. I suspect that he’s still working to suppress the grin I’d glimpsed on his face just a minute earlier. I recall all his “Special Agent” cracks from earlier in the morning and assume that he had enjoyed watching me be taken to the carpet out in the hallway. I’ve felt a mild animosity between us from the very first day we met, up in the meadow just following the burning of the lodge.
From what I can tell, Sheriff Munik seems like a fairly competent, rigid, by-the-book–type elected official. A plodder. And probably a decent man, but not too bright. In contrast, I tend to project a rebellious, smart-ass attitude. It’s reinforced by the Roberto-like things I can’t help but do, such as forcing my way into the office of the man who had just arrested my brother. This attitude of mine works well when I’m undercover, dealing with drug dealers and other scumbags, but often serves me badly in the eyes of my superiors at the Wyoming AG’s office and with the county law enforcement officers I often work with. What Sheriff Munik and I have is a conflict of personalities. Usually I take a little pleasure in tweaking men and women like him, but right now I can’t afford that kind of fun.
“Let’s hear that apology,” the sheriff says.
I take a deep breath and slowly let it out. This is hard because of my bruised ribs. The words are even harder.
“I’m sorry I got in your face this morning.” As much as it pains me, I also admit, “If I were in your shoes at the time, I would have probably done the same thing. You’ve got a body that’s been beaten to death up in the mountains and you’ve got a, as you said earlier, a ‘violent felon’ up there too that no one can account for, at least for part of the night. And then, when you go to talk to him, you find him with bloody hands and an attitude.”
Across the desk from me, Munik isn’t gloating or even nodding as I say this, but his eyes lose some of their cold flintiness.
“But, Sheriff, with all due respect, that doesn’t mean you’ve got the right man. When you get the blood results back you’re going to see that the blood is all Roberto’s. And while you’re building a case against my brother, trying to think up some reason you can sell to a jury about why he might have killed that boy, the real killer just has more time to cover his tracks.”
“I don’t need a motive, son. Last time I looked, ‘motive’ wasn’t one of the elements of murder.”
“That’s true, but you need one if the DA’s going to get a jury to convict. And he won’t have one. Because not only is there no reason Roberto would have done this, there’s the simple truth that he didn’t do it. Have you talked to the girl yet? Sunny?”
His eyes take on a new alertness when I mention her name. Attempting to conceal it, he turns his wooden chair to one side with a loud creak of unoiled metal-on-metal and glances out the window toward Wild Fire Peak. I wait for him to say something.
But when he speaks it’s not about Sunny.
“I know about you, son,” the sheriff tells me, still looking out the window. “I made another call up to Wyoming this morning and heard you’ve been suspended for assaulting an officer. Before that, it was for shooting some guy in the ass. You and your family seem to have a thing about guns and fighting with cops.”
I close my eyes and will my voice to remain steady. “I’m suspended right now for hitting a cop who was torturing a dog. My dog. Before that, two years ago, I was suspended with pay, pending a standard officer-involved-shooting investigation,” I say, and then add with a sigh, “and that guy was a dealer who shot at me first, Sheriff.” God only knows what he’s heard from my office. There are some people in the senior administration there who would love to make trouble for me.
“Heard you were a smart-ass about it, too. Kind of like you’ve been with me.” He turns back to me with the faint smile back on his mouth.
“Sheriff, I don’t know what you heard, but that shooting was ruled justifiable. And this thing I’m suspended for now will never be charged. If you don’t believe me, call my immediate boss at the AG’s Office. His name is Ross McGee.”
“That’s who I talked to.”
I exhale in relief. While Ross might have taken a great deal of delight in retelling the stories of my suspensions to this Colorado sheriff, I’m sure in the end he would put a positive spin on it.
“He says you’re a good cop,” Munik grudgingly admits. “That’s why I’m talking to you right now. As a professional courtesy and that’s it.”
His admission gives me my chance.
“Then let me help you, Sheriff. I’ll be honest with you about my brother, and I’ll tell you some more reasons why you should be looking at David Fast and his enforcer, a guy named Alf Burgermeister. Sunny must have told you my brother had nothing to do with it.”
The sheriff leans back, causing the chair’s metal springs to screech again in protest. He puts his leathery hands behind his head. “First of all, son, I don’t need you helping me with anything, especially when it’s your brother I’m investigating. And second, you’d better be awfully careful about accusing a man like David Fast in this town. Third, no one’s talked to the girl yet because we can’t find her. What I want to know is where she’s at.”
He says it like I should know. I lean forward, keeping the distance between us even and wanting him to know I’m sincere. “Sheriff, I have no idea where she is. But if you haven’t talked to her, then the first thing I’m going to do is find her.”
He assesses me for a few moments, then apparently decides to give me a little information. “After we got her name and address from your friend Ms. Walsh, we checked her apartment. Someone had kicked her door in.”
Shit. “Was the place trashed?” I want to know if there’d been a struggle or if the place had been ransacked during a search.
“Yep. Someone was looking for something. And we got this”—he holds up a rough tracing of a shoe print—“from her door. Just for fun, Agent Burns, let’s see the soles of your feet.”
Shaking my head in disbelief that he would suspect me of trying to intimidate a witness or worse, I grip the arms of the chair and lift both my feet toward him. The sheriff leans forward again to study the soles. After a moment he lifts his eyes back to mine. His look is so intense, so hard, that I pull one foot over my knee and twist it up so that I can see for myself. The sandal’s sole is worn almost smooth—it’s nothing like the pattern on the paper he’d shown me.
“Got you,” he says, giving me his first real smile.
I’m not amused. “Have you checked where Fast was last night, and early this morning?”
Munik rests his elbows on the desk and gives me another one of his long looks, this one for real, while the smile fades. “Son, you don’t seem to understand the way this town works. You just can’t go around accusing a man like David Fast of things you’ve got no evidence he actually did. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Dave runs this town, but he sure comes close. If you were to look at public records about campaign contributions, you’d see that he’s the number one benefactor for everything from the school board to the mayor. In fact, you’d see that he was also numero uno when it came to ponying up for my last campaign. The DA’s, too.”
Money and politics and justice. The three should never mix but they always do.
The look of distaste I give him causes him to raise his hands in defense. His drawl becomes crisp. “He doesn’t own me—if that’s what you’re thinking, then you can get the hell out of my office right this minute. But I ain’t gonna go accusing him without having me some hard evidence first. I know he made a deal with the devil when he brought in that guy Burgermeister—he’s a hard-time con with a NCIC sheet even longer than your brother’s. I knew that would cause some trouble. But right now all I got is a bunch of stuff all pointing at your brother.”
I slump down in the chair, trying to digest what he’s telling me. I really don’t give a shit if Fast is the town’s most prominent citizen—all I care about is getting my brother out of jail. But it would be awfully nice if I could implicate Fast in Cal’s death. I’d liked Cal, appreciated that he’d talked me up to Kim as a once-famous climber, and know that if it can be shown that Fast had something to do with Cal’s murder it would certainly queer the development of Wild Fire Valley. And that would earn me some bonus points with Kim.
I tell the sheriff about the argument I’d seen Fast and Burgermeister have with Cal before the brawl two days ago in the meadow. With a silent apology to Cal’s ghost, I even go so far as to tell the sheriff that Cal had boasted that he was going to burn down the lodge Fast was building on the peak.
“Would have appreciated you telling me that a couple of days ago,” he responds. “Might have saved us a lot of trouble.”
I agree. “It might have saved Cal’s life.”
“Only if your brother’s not the one who beat him to death.”
I don’t want to argue. The sheriff already knows all the reasons I believe Roberto didn’t have anything to do with Cal’s death. Feeling even guiltier, I also violate Kim’s confidence in order to tell the sheriff about the ruin and the cave Cal had supposedly found and was in the process of revealing in some secretive way to the Forest Service. I explain that according to Kim Walsh, Cal believed the caves were such a valuable resource to the valley that their acknowledged existence would halt the exchange.
“Sounds like a fairy tale, or a joke,” Munik says when I finish. “Cal’s Bad Caverns,” he chuckles, shaking his head.
I think about the fact that someone kicked in the door to Sunny’s apartment and searched the place. And I recall Kim telling me that Sunny said Cal had taken her to see the caves two days before. Even if she hadn’t seen Cal killed, she is the only person alive now who knows just where Cal’s caves are. And someone isn’t taking it as a joke.
“They’re looking for her, Sheriff. She witnessed the murder and she knows where the Indian ruin is. Either one will screw up the whole deal for Fast and Burgermeister.”
“Then why didn’t she come here?” Munik says skeptically, meaning to his office.
“Because she’d helped Cal burn down the lodge. If she came to you, then she’d have to tell you the whole story and get arrested for arson.”
“You got to be kidding me, Burns.”
I ignore his tone. “What are you doing to find her?”
He sighs. “There’s not a lot we can do other than check around town for her and put out a Colorado BOLO on her car.” He means Be On the Lookout. It would only do any good if she were stopped in Colorado for some sort of traffic infraction or other crime. “We found an old address in her apartment. We’re going to follow that up with a call to the locals there.”
“Where?”
“Sorry, son. You don’t need to know that. I’m pretty sure you’re clean, except for being a little naive and imaginative. But I’m not taking any chances.”
I start to get angry again but decide to just let it go. I’ll get nowhere by pushing it. “What about Fast? Will you look into him?”
“I’m going to tell you this only so you aren’t pestering the man. I tried to call him this morning, just as a courtesy, see, to let him know someone’d been whacked up on what’s about to become his land. His secretary said Dave’s out of town and has been since yesterday afternoon. She said he was up on the family property in White River, and that he couldn’t be reached there even by cell phone. She’ll have him call or stop by when he gets back. Now, don’t you worry, Agent, I’ll make sure he had nothing to do with this. And I’ll check on the con, too, that fellow Burgermeister, and I’ll check out any alibi he gives me. Now, stay out of it and let me do my job. All right?”
It would be a waste of time to argue about his assumption that Fast couldn’t be involved. I swallow the words. The sheriff’s not going to help. If anyone’s going to look for evidence against Fast, if anyone’s going to clear Roberto, it’s got to be me.
NINETEEN
COMING OUT OF the courthouse, I jog down the steps and start to cut across the courthouse lawn when I hear my name half shouted from across the broad field of well-tended grass. Kim is stiffly running toward me, her usual fluid runner’s grace absent. She no longer looks like the proud, tough woman I’d first been attracted to. Now she looks more like a frightened young girl. As she comes closer I can see that her single good eye is bloodshot and that her cheeks are swollen from crying. Her hard exterior has cracked; her spirit appears in danger of shattering.
When she’s just a few feet away I start to ask, �
�What’s wrong?” but the words never leave my mouth. So much is wrong for both of us. What else could go wrong?
“I can’t find Sunny!” she blurts out.
After a second’s hesitation, remembering the way she’d stiff-armed me with her eyes when I tried to comfort her once before, I put my hands on her shoulders, then slide them around her neck in a quick platonic hug. “I know,” I tell her. “The police can’t find her either.”
She doesn’t immediately pull away from my embrace. Her torso is small and hot against mine, her fists clenching handfuls of material at the back of my shirt. Despite the circumstances, my attraction to her returns. Magnifies.
“What’s happened to her, Anton? I went to her apartment and there was a cop in the living room. He said someone had broken down her door.”
“I heard.”
Everyone wants to find Sunny. Kim wants to make sure her friend is all right. I need to find her because she’s the only one who can decisively exonerate my brother. The police want her so that she can further implicate him. And David Fast and Alf Burgermeister, if they are Cal’s killers, must find her to shut her up before she can point the finger at them.
And there’s also the fact that she may be the only one who knows where the entrance to Cal’s Bad Cavern is, if it exists at all. I remember what Kim had told me the night of the Tribe’s meeting around the campfire, about how Cal believed that the cave was important enough that it could keep the Forest Service from approving the land swap. Maybe that’s why Cal was beaten to death rather than just shot or stabbed—because he wouldn’t tell them where the entrance is. The developers might have tortured him to get him to talk.
Point of Law Page 15