Trial by Ice and Fire

by Clinton McKinzie

  Parked in front of Jim is Cali's black Volkswagen Jetta. She is already somewhere inside, preparing for her trial tomorrow. I figure that the courthouse is a good, safe place for her to be. Until I can nail down enough probable cause for a warrant with Charles Wokowski's name on it anyway. The only place safer would be somewhere far out of town—a subject I need to raise with her.

  After leaving her in Jim's care at her house on Colter Street, I'd driven back out to the cabin to see if either my suspect or my brother was lurking around. No one had been there. I'd called the number Roberto had scratched in the dirt but there'd been no answer. No greeting either. Just the sound of a beep, after which I'd left a terse message—“Call me”—and my own cell-phone number. Then I'd met with McGee and told him almost everything about last night.

  Mrs. Grayson, now happily trading barbs with my boss, leads us to a room stuffed with files on floor-to-ceiling shelves. I set my father's cast-off briefcase on the room's only table and take out a legal pad. McGee rolls up on his walker, huffing over it, while Mrs. Grayson begins pulling manila folders from the shelves. When she's done she places a six-inch-high stack of these on the table in front of me.

  “These, Mr. Burns, are all the criminal cases our Miss Morrow has prosecuted since starting work with us. I assume you aren't interested in traffic violations. Now, would you gentlemen like coffee? Milk or sugar?”

  When she leaves us alone and closes the door behind her, I say, “I don't know how you do it, Ross.”

  “I'm so goddamn irresistible . . . it gives me goose bumps sometimes,” he growls as he collapses into a chair on the far side of the table. “Now tell me why we're here on a sacred Sunday morning. . . . I should be drinking whiskey in a grogshop somewhere . . . not violating the Sabbath with a degenerate such as yourself.”

  I examine the stack of slender folders. “It's probably a waste of time, but I want to see if anybody Cali's prosecuted could have fixated on her.”

  “Why's it a waste of time? I thought finding the guy was your job.”

  “Because I'm pretty sure Wokowski's the guy. He was cruising by my place this morning when I left to take Cali home.”

  McGee's grizzled eyebrows leap up high on his forehead. “Oh ho!” he barks. “So the lass spent the night with you!”

  I'm not sure if McGee is shocked or amused. With him it's hard to tell. Despite all his swaggering lechery, I've never known him to follow through on it. I suspect he'd been entirely faithful to his wife of forty years before she'd died the previous winter.

  “I slept on the couch,” I add too quickly. I'm glad Cali's somewhere out of sight and hearing in the building, where McGee's bright eyes and hairy ears will be unable to pick up any vibe or tension flowing between us. I don't want him thinking I'm screwing around on his beloved goddaughter.

  “Sure you did . . . and I'm the Queen of Siam.”

  The sarcasm is a good sign. If he didn't believe me it wouldn't be there.

  “Like I said, I'm pretty sure Wook's the guy. But I want to check out other possibilities, too, so that a defense lawyer can't say we didn't look at all the angles and pop us in front of the jury with an alternative suspect.” It's a common defense strategy. All they need is the tiniest bit of doubt to get a jury to kick their client loose, and an alternative suspect, no matter how unlikely, can often do the trick. Juries, at a defense attorney's prompting, too often mistake beyond a reasonable doubt for beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  McGee grunts and nods his approval, still showing me a lot of teeth. In other circumstances I would take it as high praise. “Besides, until I can talk to the local pawn and gun shops, I won't know if he's bought a stun gun in town lately. And the stores don't open until noon.”

  McGee now lowers his eyebrows to give me a suspicious look. “I thought Guinness was going to do that.”

  I look down at the files. “I'm going to do it while he watches her.” McGee is regarding me closely now but he doesn't comment on why I, the agent in charge of the investigation, would pick up on the boring scut work.

  The stack in front of me is arranged in chronological order with the oldest cases on top. On the cover of each is colored tape spelling out the name of the defendant. Below that are the charges alleged and their statutory codes. On the backs of the files are handwritten notes regarding the disposition of each case.

  Flipping through them, I see that most of the cases are simple drunk-driving charges. A couple of bar fights, a few charges of Narcotics Possession, three cases of Misdemeanor Domestic Violence, and one case alleging five counts of “Abuse of a Corpse,” a crime I've never heard of, to add some spice. There have not yet been any serious felonies in the young prosecutor's caseload. I read Cali's handwritten notes on the backs of the folders and see that most of the defendants chose to accept a plea to a lesser charge rather than face the uncertainties of a trial. In one year as an assistant county attorney she'd only gone to trial four times.

  The suspect in the Abuse of a Corpse case seems to have the most potential for a wacko stalker, so I read that file first. A booking photo clipped to the inside cover shows a young man with messy brown hair almost as long as my brother's. Other than that he is very normal-looking for someone charged with such a ghoulish-sounding crime.

  The defendant, a twenty-one-year-old seasonal ski patrolman named Myron Armalli, had worked summers as a driver for the local coroner's office. One of his duties was to transport corpses from accident scenes to the morgue, and then from there to local mortuaries. His address was a number on the highway running over the mountains between Jackson Hole and Lander. Next to it is a handwritten comment about the property, “Condemned.”

  According to the file, someone had sent an anonymous note to the Sheriff's Office, advising them to check out Armalli's website, where he sold a personalized line of greeting cards. It turned out that the cards were grotesque photographs—like of naked corpses seated before birthday cakes. Apparently Armalli had been hijacking the bodies and taking them home, where he posed them for pictures and did God knows what else. It was never discovered for sure if he was abusing them sexually because the County Attorney's Office was unwilling to disinter the dead victims. But the photographs were enough. Cali had taken the case to trial three months ago—just about the time when the letters began coming, I realize—after a final plea bargain was refused.

  McGee pulls the state's copies of the evidence from the folder—five sample greeting cards—and studies them carefully.

  “The AG's birthday is next week. . . . You think he'd like one of these?”

  “Only if it were a picture of you, Ross. Or me.”

  McGee chuckles, the scowl momentarily fading, and slips a card into his coat pocket. I do nothing but shake my head at him. My boss's boss is in for a surprise.

  I decipher some of what Cali has written on the file's backside. It reads: D takes stand despite atty's reluctance. D argues frame, claims personal vendetta by P. Claims 1st Am. rights. Jury out less than five minutes. Guilty x 5. Sentenced to two years probation with a mental-health eval and treatment. Add'l condition: No use of Internet.

  D is shorthand for defendant and P is for the state, or the prosecutor. I wonder if Armalli's belief of a “personal vendetta by P” refers to Cali or to the County Attorney's Office as a whole. This is exactly what I was hoping I wouldn't find—an alternative suspect to keep me from focusing all the way on Wokowski. Just the kind of guy who would write filthy letters, too.

  Inside the folder is a pretrial competency evaluation that had been stipulated to by both parties and ordered by the judge. It is a five-page single-spaced document written by a local psychiatrist after several interviews with Myron Armalli. It finds him competent to stand trial—he can understand what is taking place around him and is capable of assisting in his own defense—yet the shrink also felt compelled to add that Mr. Armalli exhibits all the signs and symptoms of someone suffering from schizophrenia. He cites but doesn't describe episodes of bizarre behavi
or, irrational statements, the admitted hearing of voices, inappropriate laughter, “unusual” sensitivity to stimuli, and staring without blinking as evidence of the disease.

  I also learn from this report that schizophrenia most often develops in young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and that it's a common disease, affecting one in a hundred youths. The sickness generally doesn't involve violent behavior but it's hinted that Armalli might be an exception, as phrases like antisocial behavior and potentially violent psychosis pepper the report. The doctor recommends various antipsychotic medications, including Thorazine and Haldol. With counseling and these drugs, the shrink believes, there is a good chance Armalli will be able to function positively in society.

  With some alarm I also realize that Armalli's address, at the time of the trial and marked “Condemned,” is not far from Alana Reese's ranch in Jackson Hole.

  “We've got a monkey in the works,” McGee says after reading the file.

  “This guy looks pretty good,” I admit, feeling the weight of disappointment settle on my shoulders. “I'll talk to Cali about him, see if he seemed to be fixated on her during his trial.”

  I look at the photo again. He looks perfectly normal except for the messy long hair, but even that is the fashion on young men in Jackson. His face is plain and ordinary, maybe a little anemic. His eyes look right at the camera and there is the barest hint of a smile on his thin lips.

  All the other cases are more or less innocuous, standard fare for a small-town prosecutor. The three domestic-violence cases are of the usual drunken spouse-beating variety. The DUIs are ordinary, too, as are the bar fights and the drug arrests. There are no more indications on the file notes of anyone else taking a dislike to or a particular interest in the young woman who had prosecuted them. At least there are no more monkeys.

  “What's the plan now, QuickDraw?”

  “Wokowski's still the focus. We check out his internal file with the sheriff, find out if the SWAT team members have access to stun guns and whether or not one might be missing, and get customers' names from the stores around here that might sell them. But we'll still have to check this wacko out.”

  I get up and study the jackets on the walls, trying to figure out how they've been filed. With relief I discover it's alphabetically. I'm able to search for other cases in which Armalli had been a defendant in the past without calling Mrs. Grayson back into the room and risking Cali wandering in to see what's going on. I don't want to talk to her in front of McGee.

  There are no more jackets with Armalli typed on them. Apparently the corpse-abuse had been his one and only adult offense in Teton County. But I realize I'll need to run his name on NCIC, the FBI's database, and make sure there aren't other offenses in other jurisdictions. Then some shelves off by themselves catch my eye—the manila file jackets stored there are all marked in pink. They're the juvenile files, which technically should be sealed after the subject's eighteenth birthday, and only opened with a court order.

  Checking to see that the door's still shut, I scan the files for Armalli's name. Three are together on the highest shelf and are bound together with a rubber band. I pull them down.

  “I'm not seeing this,” McGee says. He's a stickler when it comes to the law and following it to the letter. I'm a little surprised when he doesn't indignantly order me to put them back.

  One of the cases is for cruelty to animals. Apparently Armalli had been charged with setting a horse on fire when he was fifteen years old. He was given a deferred judgment—meaning eventual dismissal—provided he seek and receive psychological counseling and pay restitution to the damaged horse's owner. The statutory violation on the cover of the second jacket is for the crime of harassment, and this time he had been adjudicated a delinquent. A quick read of the statement of probable cause tells me that seventeen-year-old Myron had groped and fondled a high-school classmate during gym class. His sentence was a term of probation and more counseling. The third folder makes me groan out load. On the cover it says, “Wy. Statute 16-2-506—STALKING.”

  The victim had been the same girl as in the harassment case. Armalli was charged with a pattern of conduct that amounted to the crime of stalking: leaving her letters, following her around, and telephoning constantly. But then the charge had been dismissed when the girl moved out of state with her parents and was unavailable to testify.

  All the files give the same address for Armalli: the highway address I recognize as being not far from Alana Reese's property in the valley. A brief psychologist's report states that Myron appears “very disturbed,” that he was abandoned by his mother at the age of five, and that his father was going bankrupt and had recently sold the family's home to the government.

  “This guy isn't a monkey. He's a gorilla,” I say, slipping the files into my briefcase. Motive, means, and opportunity, even a prior. It's all there.

  My hopes for arresting Wokowski on charges of stalking, burglary, assault, and attempted kidnapping are drifting away.

  Something buzzes in the pocket of my painter's jeans like an angry wasp. Then the “Mexican Hat Dance” begins playing from the vicinity of my crotch. McGee shows me his big yellow teeth as I dig the phone out, his grin leaving me with no doubt as to who had programmed the irritating jingle. I'm not going to answer it in front of him if it's either Rebecca or my brother. But the urgently flashing text on the screen says JIM GUINNESS, so I press the TALK button.

  The voice on the other end sounds near panic.

  “You better get out here, man.”

  FIFTEEN

  HOT SUNLIGHT is pouring in the windows at the front of the courthouse from high above Gros Ventre Butte. Squinting against the light as I come into the lobby, I can see Jim's back through the glass doors. He's standing in front of them with his skinny arms outspread. It looks as if his hands might be shaking. Beyond him, facing in, is Sergeant Charles Wokowski.

  He's out of uniform now, dressed in a pair of crisp khaki pants and a white polo shirt that's all-the-way unbuttoned to make room for his treetrunk of a neck. The shirt is a little too small, tight over the swollen muscles of his chest and showing off the bare skin of his arms. Mirrored sunglasses hide his eyes, which surely must be bloodshot after a long night on duty. His tan face is freshly shaven. In his left hand he holds a black nylon gym bag.

  I slow down and push open the door gently, using it to move Jim out of the way and to one side.

  Wokowski's jaw flexes as he catches sight of me.

  “What's going on?” I ask Jim but keep my eyes on my own twin reflections in the big cop's lenses. Maybe it's him after all.

  “He wants—” Jim starts to say.

  Wokowski's deep voice is calm but anger vibrates through it when he says, “What I want is none of your business. Get out of my way. Both of you.”

  Jim steps back against the railing that stands to one side of the door at my back. I don't have to look at him to sense his enormous relief that I'm here to take over. But I'm proud of him—he'd stood his ground as long as he needed to. And while I'm as scared as he surely is, the thrill of fear is as welcome as Rebecca's touch. For some reason I feel more like my brother at these times than like myself.

  “The courthouse is closed. It's Sunday,” I tell Wokowski.

  He doesn't reply. His sunglasses remain unwaveringly directed at me.

  “Shouldn't you be sleeping, Sergeant? You must have had a long night, and I thought your shift ended about the time you were cruising by my cabin this morning.”

  The staring continues. The sun is so bright in my eyes that I can't keep it up any longer. Glancing down, I look at the small gym bag in his hand and see that the knuckles gripping the strap are white. What the hell's in it? I wonder. Another stun gun? More duct tape? Would he be reckless enough—sick enough—to go after Cali in broad daylight, here in the center of town? Would he make it that easy?

  When he still doesn't say anything I decide to prod him some more. “Cali doesn't want to see you.”


  Red splotches materialize on his cheeks. The jaw bulges even bigger, the muscles there and in his neck flaring like a cobra's. Without consciously being commanded, my right hand brushes my pants and slips toward the gun holstered beneath my shirt high on my hip.

  “Then let her tell me that,” he says.

  I shake my head, not letting my eyes leave his glasses now no matter how bright the sun burns. If I even blink it might be too late. It's like I'm on top of that cornice again, the fear curdling in my stomach while the Rat happily laps it up.

  “No. I'm telling you.”

  “This is my town, QuickDraw. My courthouse. Get the fuck out of my way.” He's starting to swing the gym bag now. Back and forth at his side. We're at the very edge now—I can feel it. Both of us teetering there. Wondering if we're going to grab each other and throw ourselves off.

  “You make a move in any direction but toward the street and you're going to be arrested right here, where everyone can see,” I tell him.

  A smile twitches at the corner of his lips. It alarms me more than anything else. My hand literally aches with the need to touch my gun's beveled grip. My fingers are curled just above the butt.

  “You've got a restraining order?”

  “Not yet, partner, but it's in the works. Along with a warrant for stalking, burglary, assault, and attempted kidnapping.”

  It's out in the open now—and I hope it will spur him into doing something rash, going over. It's a gamble—I could go with him—but I think it's worth it. Wokowski keeps swinging the bag with his smile taking shape now, growing broader. The lips are pale and the red splotches are draining from his face.

  “You really think I—”

  “I know,” I interrupt. “I know you're the guy. You tried to break into her house two days ago. You tried to grab her last night. You've been writing her nasty letters. Cali dumped you and now you want her no matter what it takes. Even if it's against her will. And that's sick, man. Really sick. You got a problem and you need to get it straightened out.”