Above the Law (10 page)

The agents herded their prisoners into the heavily armed vans, preparing to caravan out. Everyone was bone-tired, more so emotionally than physically; this had been a hellish experience. Jerome came out of the command center momentarily to confer with his seconds-in-command about final preparations for their leave-taking. The men discussed the fastest route out. Jerome would ride with his star prisoner in an isolated van. He wasn’t about to let Juarez out of his sight.

How it happened, nobody knew. Not then, not later, when they desperately tried to reconstruct it. Juarez had been handcuffed—everyone involved would testify to that. There was a slight noise to their rear, like a tree falling to the ground. As Jerome and the others reflexively turned their heads to look, the door to the trailer burst open and Juarez, miraculously un-manacled, came flying out, taking off like a bat out of hell for the cover of the nearby forest.

His break, so surreal and unexpected, froze everyone just enough to give the prisoner a few precious seconds to a good fifty yards between himself and his captors.

Jerome found his voice. “Don’t let him get away from us,” he screamed. He started running, stopped, turned back, almost tripping over his own feet, he was so out of control. “Some of you stay here, guard the prisoners! Come on, everyone, the rest of you!” He was already running in Juarez’s direction.

It took a moment for the confusion to end—men running, then stopping, trying to make sense of this, whom to go, whom to stay; then half of them started chasing after Juarez, yelling unintelligibly at each other.

Jerome, leading the pack, was bellowing the loudest of all. “How the fuck did he get loose?” be screamed, charging into the darkness after Juarez.

Miller, hanging around on the periphery, heard Jerome’s shouts, then saw Juarez fleeing. He began running after the escapee himself. He knew this territory better than anyone else, but this was like chasing a rabbit in a thicket.

It was too dark to see with any clarity. Men crashed through the woods, tripping and falling over rocks and tree roots, cursing.

Then a single shot rang out, echoing like distant cannon fire.

Everyone ran in the direction of the sound.

There were more than thirty men in the chase, and they had more than thirty stories. Not one of them saw who fired the shot. But when they came upon Juarez’s body, they saw that it had been a clean kill, through the head and out.

They formed a circle around him. For a moment everything—the men, their breathing, the wind in the trees, even the movement of the clouds in the sky—was frozen. Then. Jerome knelt down and shook the lifeless figure, yelling, “Don’t die, don’t die on me, you fuck, don’t!”

He was shaking a rag doll. He dropped the body back onto the dark ground, looking around wildly, frantic with anger, panic, and fear. “Who shot him?” he screamed almost tearfully. “What stupid fuck…who the fuck…who the fuck…
did this?”

His men watched him slump to his knees, his head buried in his hands. They knew he had won the prize of his life—lucked into it, to be cold about it—but still, he had done the deed; capturing Juarez was going to be his career-maker, and then, without warning, it had been taken away from him. Not just taken away, ripped away. Deliberately. Someone had wanted this man dead. And got him dead.

He was fucked, fucked, fucked. How was he going to explain this to his bosses?

All their weapons, their 9mm Sig Sauers and Glocks, had tremendous velocity—no skull and handful of brains was going to stop the bullet, a clean in and out, which was later found lodged in a tree by the body, stripped of its casing so ballistics couldn’t match it to any particular gun. An incredibly important federal prisoner had been murdered, and not one of the men there had a clue as to who had done it.

T
HE TELEPHONE RANG. RIVA
answered it. “Luke,” she called. “It’s for you.”

She said this in the distracted tone of a woman who has more important things to do than answer the telephone, especially when the call isn’t for her. The important thing of this particular moment was that she had her hands full with our son, getting him ready for his bath. He likes them fine, splashing around and playing with his rubber duckies, but there’s a ritual involved. You don’t just say, “It’s bath-time,” and he plops right in. There are steps along the way that must be strictly adhered to: undressing steps, drawing-the-bathwater steps, placing the toys in the tub, etc. Each in its own time and sequence. If a step gets out of sequence, it’s back to the beginning.

Naturally, these things can take time. You learn to adjust to his clock—you have to, he won’t and can’t fit into yours. I have discovered, over the past year and a half, since Buck motored his first crawls across the living-room rug, that his life revolves around rituals such as this one. Everything in his existence has a ritual, some quite elaborate and complex. They keep his parents hopping. I’m fond of them all, but I go to bed earlier now and sleep like a felled log. If Riva and I lay each other once a week, we feel we’re doing pretty up-and-walkin’ good.

I took the receiver. It was wet and soap-filmy. I dried it on my T-shirt. “Hello?”

“Luke?” It was a woman’s voice. Not one I recognized. It sounded like someone who, even knowing who was on the other end of the line, was still surprised. “Garrison?” There was a hesitancy in her pause beyond the mere saying of my name. The hesitancy, I realized, had personal rubbing up against it.

“Yes.”

“It’s Nora Sherman. Nora Sherman Ray.”

I almost fell over. Literally.

Some history. Nora Sherman was the Hillary Rodham of our Stanford Law School class. She was the smart, driven, motivated hotshot woman/feminist law student, top five percent of the class—
Law Review
coeditor, etc.—who fell in love with and married Dennis Ray, the smart, driven, even more highly motivated hotshot male law student:
first
in our class,
Law Review editor,
etc., etc., etc.

Unlike most of us, who came from cities and suburbs, Dennis was an old-fashioned country boy. Born and raised in Blue River—the main town, if you’re charitable in your designating, of Muir County, a three-traffic-light bump on one of those county roads up at the top of northern California that goes from nowhere to nowhere. The kind of place that defines itself by those who have left it, which is anyone who has any ambitions and dreams.

Dennis had dreams, and ambition to burn. A hardscrabble kid from the remote sticks, he joined the marines the day after high school graduation, because that’s what you did if you wanted to get out. Even before he was sent to Vietnam, which was a successful tour of duty in that he survived the experience intact, he soon figured out that he had more brains than any of the people his path crossed, including his officers. He was counseled by a savvy major he served under to go to college; in short order he applied to Berkeley, won a Regents scholarship, graduated magna cum laude. Phi Beta Kappa, you name the honor, he won it. Then on to Stanford Law, where he met his future wife.

There was a kind of wild, old-fashioned American-style romanticism to Dennis’s life—the poor rural background that evoked Steinbeck, the up-by-the-bootstraps saga he’d lived thus far. He was older than most of us—he’d been to Vietnam, an experience those of us who hadn’t seen war, which was almost all of us, couldn’t begin to understand—and he had this great, empathetic charisma. Everyone was attracted to him.

The man was lightning in a bottle. He could go days without sleep and be as coherent and original and brilliant at the end as he’d been in the first hour. You can, of course, pay a price for that kind of intensity—it’s called crash-and-burn. Which he would do, but then he’d be up and at ’em again. Nora didn’t have that kind of energy, but she had almost as many smarts.

Even though I was considered the real deal myself, I was far behind Dennis and Nora, those two shining constellations. We all were. In a school where everyone was expected to make it—however you define that—they stood out.

Dennis got the plum job out of our class: a clerkship for Justice Rehnquist (himself a Stanford Law grad) on the Supreme Court. During his two-year stint he impressed the hell out of everybody—his fingerprints were all over his most important writings, despite his being politically and philosophically in the opposite corner from the justice. He was able to park his own impulses and open a door to his brain, it seemed, ferret out his thoughts, then elucidate them in lovely, precise, muscular language. Many watchers of the court felt that his writing was at its most vibrant and important during the time when Dennis Ray was his chief clerk.

Nora followed him to Washington, of course. His career would always come first. She taught at Georgetown and did pro bono work for Legal Aid.

They were primed to go. They moved west to Denver—her hometown, where her family was well-connected—ready to take the world by storm. The master plan was that Dennis would work for a few years in the D.A.’s office (starting at a very high level, as befitting his credentials), getting practical, hands-on experience, particularly in trial work, the glamour post, then either go into private practice with some big firm, making more money than he’d ever dreamed of, or go into politics.

Dennis was received like a returning prodigal. It was as if Denver had been waiting for his arrival—six months after he and Nora moved there, he was a native son. Those in the local know figured he was the one who would make the world forget Gary Hart; that’s how highly esteemed he was, starting out.

Nora joined Johnson, Pitcher, & Gross, Denver’s biggest firm. She was on the partner track from the start. If, as was likely, her husband did go the political route, she’d be making more than enough money to support them in the style to which she was accustomed and he aspired to. They bought an old Victorian downtown, cherried it out, acquired a female golden retriever puppy from a reputable breeder, and started living good.

And then, the unimaginable happened. Dennis failed. He tanked, utterly, completely. A genius in the classroom or in an appellate judge’s chambers, a theoretical wizard who could dissect any case and cut to the heart of the matter with unfailing precision and incisiveness, he was a very different person in the hurly-burly, gritty, smelly world of courtrooms and backrooms and corridors where the real, nasty, harsh decisions are made—the world where not only his brain but his wits and ass were on the line, not under some senior’s protection.

He left the D.A.’s office without fanfare. He’d been there fourteen months and never won a case that went to trial; after three losses, at least two of which he should arguably have won—the prosecution’s overall success rate was over ninety percent—they moved him into another division. Which he was good in, particularly with analysis, as he’d always been, but this obviously wasn’t where he belonged.

So he moved. To a hot, relatively new, medium-size firm that was on the upswing. One of their founding partners was a former U.S. senator, another an ex-member of President Ford’s cabinet. Twenty-five lawyers, all sharks and bright in the firmament—you could camp out under their collective light. Dennis would be the backroom brain, the wizard who pulled the invisible strings.

But again, something went wrong. Or, more accurately, it never went right. He couldn’t cut it, even with all these heavies pulling for him, supporting him, covering for him. Something had gone wrong with Dennis. He was a classic case—a man who shone under certain circumstances that were nurturing and protective, but couldn’t transfer his talent elsewhere. Like the class president whose destiny is the stars and winds up teaching junior high school history.

Looking back, it was predictable, if almost inexplicable. The manic depression, which had been misdiagnosed as the inevitable fruits of genius, the impossible expectations—he had fought mightily to overcome his hard-wiring and his background, but blood will out. Blood and generations. Underneath the gorgeous facade there was a heartbreaking fragility—an eagle’s body on a sparrow’s frame.

Some people, notably his in-laws, trying to be charitable and at the same time to salvage some honor from this Olympian fall, implied that Vietnam had done him in—a delayed reaction to the horrors of war. But that wasn’t true, and Dennis didn’t like being labeled a burned-out war casualty. To his credit, he wouldn’t use it as an excuse.

The firm let him go. He was devastated, even though he and Nora had seen it coming for months. His failures, as crushing as they could be, were doubly hard to take because by then Nora had become a star in her own right. Their paths were moving in completely opposite directions. By the time Dennis was out on the street, she was a full partner in her firm, the youngest they’d ever had.

He had nowhere to go in Denver. He was a marked man, a public failure. His life became a daily series of encounters that played out, in his increasingly suspicious mind, as intentional humiliations. He had to leave, try to make it fresh somewhere else. If such a place existed.

Nora was his wife. She had married him for better or worse; she took those vows seriously. Her parents and other family, her blooming career, it didn’t matter. She loved Dennis, way more passionately than anyone could understand. She left with him.

At that point they dropped off the face of the earth, as far as their friends and colleagues were concerned. By the time our tenth class reunion rolled around, not one of us had heard from them in years, although several of their friends, including me, had tried to find out what had happened to them. They had pulled a full-on B. Traven—vanished without a trace.

Until this moment.

All this flashed through my mind in about two seconds. “Hello, Nora,” I said. “How are you?” This was a banal response, I knew, but I’d been thrown off-balance.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”

Her tone of voice seemed, to my ear, to belie her words, but it had been a long time. I couldn’t recall exactly what she did sound like under various circumstances, such as happy or sad.