The Edge of Justice Read online

  Once the brothers are seated with their attorneys, the deputies back off and slump in chairs strategically located for interception. Like nearly everyone else in the room, I look at the two defendants with contempt and disgust. From the televised reports of the case, I know the basic facts of the sadistic rape and murder they committed. And although they haven't yet been convicted, the evidence I heard about sounds overwhelming. I have no trouble myself finding them responsible for the killing. Innocent until proven guilty is only a concept for a jury to apply in a court of law; it has no application to the truth.

  Every head in the place, except the defendants', turns and watches sympathetically as more deputies lead an Asian family to a cordoned-off row in the front of the courtroom. A bent old man who I assume is the victim's father, his spine apparently warped from months of sorrow and anger, leads the family. Behind him trails a woman who's crying quietly and three sullen-faced teenaged boys. At the front of the courtroom Nathan Karge, the County Attorney, stands like a solemn usher and bows his head to the family as they take their seats.

  Within moments of the family's entrance, a bailiff scurries out of a concealed door behind the bench and shouts, “All rise!” A gavel cracks against wood as loud as a rifle shot. The scribbling and murmuring cease. The people in the room lurch to their feet.

  Into the sudden silence, from a second, larger door, the judge emerges. I think she looks like a frail old woman being engulfed by her own black robes until I focus on her face. There's nothing frail about that face. Her lean jaw juts out like the brush guard mounted on the front of my truck. Thick gray hair is pulled severely into a tight bun. She glares out at the reporters crowding her courtroom and says not a word as the jury, a mix of twelve local men and women, is led into the court. All the jurors keep their eyes fixed on the floor as they take their seats. The enormity of the decision they will soon have to make seems to be a great weight upon their heads.

  “Be seated,” the judge tells the rest of the room once the jurors have found their chairs. She addresses them and says something I always appreciate hearing from a judge in a trial, before the defense makes their attempt to muddy the waters or spread a web of lies: “Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that what you are about to hear is merely argument, not evidence.” I only wish it were said right before the defense speaks, which I believe is really the point. But of course then it would be too obvious, too prejudicial, and too true for this truth-finding process. Without further preamble she announces, “Closing argument, Mr. Karge.”

  “Thank you,” Karge says as he strides into the well.

  He stands still before the jury members and moves his eyes across theirs, patiently waiting until he establishes contact with each man and woman in the box. Even all the way in the back of the courtroom, I can feel the charisma of the man. His face is earnest but tired, his eyes dark-rimmed from long nights of trial prep, and his rigid posture itself speaks of the anger he personally feels at the spectacular crime committed on his watch. Wearing a dark blue suit as his combat uniform, he looks like a courageous yet weary warrior fighting a losing battle on behalf of civilization. It's easy for me to believe he will be the next governor as the media is predicting.

  When Karge begins to speak, even in this electric atmosphere, his words are soft and slow.

  “Over the last four days you've heard about a killing,” he tells the jury. “And all killings are terrible, but this kind of killing is worse beyond all others. A girl was raped. She was tortured. She was strangled. Then her body was mutilated. After a murder like this, we always ask ourselves why and try to understand. In this case, John and Dan Knapp made it quite easy for us. They spelled it out in Kimberly Lee's blood on the wall above her body. ‘Chink bitch,' they wrote.” Karge spits those two words out like pieces of bad meat. “That's why. Just because of the color of her skin, the shape of her eyes. And, ladies and gentlemen”—now his voice rises, and he turns and looks right at the two defendants—“the evidence has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that these two men committed that most heinous of crimes, for the most wicked of reasons.”

  Karge starts describing the specifics of what those two animals did to Kimberly Lee, proving himself skillful at summoning up ghastly images in his audience's minds. As magnetic as the prosecutor's voice and words are, I don't want to listen as he begins a detailed analysis of the evidence as he'd presented it to the jury during the People's case. I try to shut it out by studying the rapt faces of the reporters around me. I'm not interested; my years as a state cop and the horrors I've seen have suppressed any morbid curiosity. Besides, I already know enough of the facts because the media has endlessly discussed them for months with the usual intent of titillation.

  A young Chinese-American girl, a student at the university, was murdered in her rented house just south of town. Her naked, bound, and desecrated body was discovered by her Narcotics Anonymous counselor, who was also her boyfriend, at one in the morning when he stopped by to check on her. He had been worried about her, as she told him she was going to talk to the police about where and how she used to buy her drugs before getting clean.

  When the Albany County sheriff's deputies came on the scene, they found racist slurs written on a wall, finger-painted in blood by a gloved hand. The blood came from where one of her breasts had been sliced off. At two in the morning the police went to the door of a trailer just a few hundred yards away to see if the residents had heard anything. Their knocks were answered by a shotgun blast. Two young men, the Knapp brothers, engaged in a brief, drunken firefight with the police before surrendering. Lightly wounded and handcuffed, one of the brothers slurred to the sheriff himself, “Bitch had it coming.”

  The evidence was quickly amassed. Inside the Knapp trailer was found a large quantity of methamphetamine, firearms, and racist propaganda. In the cab of their pickup was a bloody work glove along with the missing flesh of Kimberly Lee's breast. Both of the young men were known tweakers—users of crystal meth, also called crank—with lengthy criminal histories. A search of the crime scene in Kimberly Lee's home revealed a broken crank pipe with one of their fingerprints on it. The foul words written in blood on the wall were similar to the propaganda found in the Knapps' trailer. The evidence was irrefutable, according to the media and now the County Attorney.

  In a town that had been sickened and vilified so recently by the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard, this second killing must have stung like a slap in the face. Shepard's killers were not sentenced to death due only to a merciful plea by Shepard's own parents. But it's unlikely such clemency will be extended to the Knapps. Matthew Shepard's killers acted impetuously, in an act of supreme narcissism, while Kimberly Lee's violators were more outwardly motivated. The killers of Kimberly Lee wanted attention. They begged for it when they wrote those foul words upon her wall, above her corpse, in her own blood. It worked for Charlie Manson and it's working for the Knapps.

  The citizens of Wyoming and the nation want their blood now. Only the death penalty, it's believed, will send a message to the town's youth that this butchery will not be tolerated and will proclaim to the nation that the people of Laramie will not condone it. So Nathan Karge has rushed this case to trial and valiantly fought off the Knapps' attorneys' pleas for continuances and venue changes. It has been less than a year since Kimberly Lee was placed in the ground under the scrutiny of television camera lenses from around the country.

  There is one reporter who's not frantically scribbling like the rest. She sits across the room, four or five rows in front of me, not far behind where McGee slouches forward with his hands resting on the gold head of his cane. It isn't her spellbound attention that draws my stare, but something else and something obvious. Her long brown hair, her smooth white skin, her fashion model's profile. Her delicate beauty contrasts sharply with the images of rape, death, and hate that Nathan Karge is conjuring with his words. I watch her for a while, until she somehow senses my stare and irritably glances around her.


  My attention is drawn back to Karge when I hear his voice again go low and angry like it did at the start. Cynical as I've become of attorneys, I can't help but be moved to vengeful thoughts by the man's words. I forget about that beautiful profile as I listen.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, these two men you are about to judge have rights. This state and this nation give the defendants a right to a trial. They've got that. They have a right to be judged on the evidence. They've got that. They have a right to be judged by you, their peers. They've got that. They have a right to have their guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They've got that.” Then his voice again starts to rise. “And just as they have these rights, Kimberly Lee and the rest of our community have rights too. The right to be vindicated. The right to be protected from cold-blooded animals. The right not to live in fear because of the color of your skin. Above all, the right to see justice done.”

  His voice drops to almost a whisper. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, in Kimberly Lee's name, I ask that you enforce those rights. I stand before you seeking justice for her. And the community.” He steps close to the Knapp brothers and points a steady finger at each in turn as he says, “I ask that you find John and Dan Knapp guilty of the terrible crimes they committed.”

  When he finishes, the only sound in the courtroom is that of his own footsteps on the pine floor as he walks back to his seat, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the jury the entire time. Even after Nathan Karge sits, a silence hangs clear and brilliant in the courtroom as if some great truth has been revealed. Finally the lead defense attorney comes to his senses. He scrapes back his chair and rises to face twelve angry pairs of eyes. They are no longer meek, those faces. It doesn't matter what the lawyer says, the verdict is all but delivered.

  I look at the back of his clients' heads and wonder if they will regret what they did to that girl when they themselves are bound, not by thin cords like they bound her, but by the fear-scented heavy leather straps of a particular hospital gurney. When the worm-sized intravenous lines are inserted in each arm. It will probably take five years for them to reap what they've sown. Five years of endless appeals and crushed hopes. Five years of taunting by other inmates and guards. Five years of lockdown on death row. And at the final moment, when an unknown and unnamed executioner thumbs the plunger of a syringe and the poison begins its awesome surge toward their hearts, will they scream as Kimberly Lee surely did? Will they finally feel some empathy? I hope so. That scream as the solution of mortality is injected into their veins might make them human again.

  At this moment, thinking these uncharitable thoughts in the back of the courtroom, I have no way of knowing that my investigation into a climber's death at Vedauwoo will lead me to discover the Knapps are innocent of Kimberly Lee's murder.

  TWO

  I NEVER GET A chance to speak with McGee. After the jury retires to deliberate, I swim forward against a strong, outgoing tide of reporters scrambling for telephones and their cameramen. I make it all the way to the front where McGee is leaving with the prosecution team. But before I can speak he whacks me hard on the ankle with his cane and barks, “Dinner at the First Story. Eight o'clock.” Then he swaggers off while talking animatedly with Nathan Karge.

  Outside, I find that the wind has waned a little and the sun is still relatively high over the twelve-thousand-foot summit of Medicine Bow Peak. I have nearly four hours to kill. With Oso panting excitedly from the rear seat, I drive fifteen miles east on Interstate 80 toward Cheyenne until I come to the soaring granite pillars, beaver ponds, and stands of pines and turning aspens of the region called Vedauwoo. Heeding faint memories from my childhood, I weave the Land Cruiser through the narrow dirt roads far into the backcountry.

  This place, so magical in my youth, has changed for the worse. Near the highway the state has installed toilets and fire pits in an attempt to tame the wild ground for tourists with motor homes. But they've been unable to destroy Vedauwoo's savage beauty. My father said Vedauwoo, pronounced Veed-a-voo, was the Arapaho word for earthborn spirit. And despite the man-made additions of picnic tables and the indecipherable graffiti on the rocks near the road, it still retains its primitive and untamed spirit, born of the earth. I stop close to the base of a granite formation that looks as though its towers were made by an infant god dripping wet sand.

  I didn't come up here today to investigate. I haven't yet received the file on Kate Danning's accident, and I don't even know exactly where she fell. I came up for myself. This place is the reason I'd been almost happy when I received McGee's summons to return early to the southeast part of the state. It was here that my father held a rope in his strong, callused hands and taught my brother and me to climb vertical cliffs of stone. In my memory our mother, a descendant of poor Pampas Indios and Spanish aristocracy, looked on disapprovingly as she fried freshly caught trout over the dead wood she'd gathered. My brother Roberto and I were always laughing in those days, always competing on the rock and everywhere else.

  In the years since we left Laramie our father had moved us all over the world, assigned to Air Force bases from Okinawa to Saudi Arabia. Each year he would take his entire vacation allotment of thirty days in one lump and drag us with him to even more exotic places that held a single attraction for the career officer—nearby alpine walls and peaks. And when I grew older, I traveled alone and with friends pursuing the passion he first taught us at Vedauwoo among the jagged peaks of the Tetons, the Sierras, the Bugaboos, the Alps, and the greater ranges of Alaska and Patagonia. But the memory of those early days at Vedauwoo remains on a special altar in my mind: the place where my passion was conceived.

  I quit climbing following the shooting of the gangbangers in Cheyenne. The events of that night, a year and a half ago, resulted in my being semipermanently posted, exiled really, all the way across the state from the place where I first learned the art of scaling stone. It was a form of penance, maybe, giving up the thing I loved the most. Somehow I thought it would be wrong for me to live too intensely, the way climbing caused you to do, when because of me others didn't have the chance to live at all. And I knew that I'd used up all my luck that night—the karmic consequences would be a bitch. But I never stopped training for it, believing someday I'd be able to rationalize that I've paid enough for the three lives I took. And today is the day. Fuck it, I've finally managed to convince myself, they're dead and I'm not.

  There's something else too. Through eighteen months of adrenaline deprivation, a pressure has built in my chest like some overwhelming hunger. It's as strong as rage but not as angry. A sort of junkie's desperate need for a fix. If I don't feed it, I will surely die.

  So my mood rides higher than it has in eighteen months as I hurriedly shed my court clothes and pull on worn canvas shorts while Oso sniffs and shambles among the trees. The clean mountain air is a salve for my soul. All sorts of old memories, good memories, spin through my head as I change, stashing my gun and badge under the seat. I can hear my brother's reckless laughter ringing off the rocks, the way it sounded before the drugs warped it, pitching it higher so that it always seemed in danger of shattering on the ground. Shirtless in the sun and tugging my climbing slippers onto bare feet, I feel the bittersweet excitement of coming home.

  A half hour later the sticky rubber of my slippers is smeared on tiny crystals of quartz and my fingers are twisted, thumbs down, wedged only up to the knuckles in the vertical crack over my head. The ground is fifty feet below and strewn with jagged boulders. My breath is coming in rapid, shallow pants and I can taste the acidic flavor of fear in my mouth. Free-soloing without a belay, without a rope, I'm in way over my head. But it feels so good. It's been too long.

  I chose this climb at random, my excitement overtaking my caution. Oso had followed me as I stalked up a short trail to the base of the nearest tower. It has an almost featureless seventy-foot face that overhangs slightly. The only irregularity on the rock wall is the thin seam of a crack that diagonals up it and broadens near the top. I sw
ung my arms in circles a few times, dusted my fingers with chalk from the bag clipped to the back of my pants, and started up without looking for a gentler and wiser warm-up.

  Now I torque my fingers deeper into the crack above me, then lean far back until my elbows are straight and the lactic acid that is screaming in my shoulders begins to dissipate. I force myself to take several slow, deep breaths. After a few lungfuls my heels stop their panicked quivering and my calm returns. With sweat stinging my eyes, I study the narrow crack that leads just twenty feet higher to the top of the cliff.

  By contracting my biceps and the parallel bands of muscle that swell across the rear of my shoulders, I haul my chest back close to the granite. Releasing one hand, I shake it out beneath my hips, allowing the flow of blood to return, then place it higher in the crack where the fissure broadens. With relief I feel my whole hand slip in. I fold my thumb across my palm, flexing the fat muscles there, expanding my hand and letting it fill the crack. It's a solid jam. My other hand follows higher still. The sharp quartz crystals embedded in the granite bite through the protective tape I'd wrapped around my palms and knuckles. Hauling myself higher off the jams, I'm finally able to twist my toes deep into the fracture.

  Soon I drag myself over the top, where I lie belly-down on the cool stone and pant like a tired dog. Everything that has gone wrong in my life over the past two years is momentarily forgotten: the imprisonment of my brother for manslaughter, then just six months later the deaths of the three young men I shot and the media uproar that resulted, the civil suit it sparked. My mind feels perfectly clean. The evening breeze blows over my bare, sweating back, seeming to sweep right through me.