Trial by Ice and Fire (2 page)

Her face is almost a perfect oval, rising from a pointed chin, and curving around prominent cheekbones. Her eyes are emerald green. Short blonde hair lifts from beneath the headband in a single curl.

On flat earth she might be considered a little plain because of a broad nose and too pointy a chin. But up on a mountain like this, with her eyes bright in the dawn and the smile on her lips, she could be modeling for a brand of expensive vodka. She'd sell a lot of it. I have to admit that my wariness toward her is thawing.

“Do you want to go all the way?” I point at the granite spire above us and to the right. It makes me feel a little strange, stopping short of the actual summit. My brother likes to say that the best place to be is
where the only way to get higher is to fall.

“Hell no, Anton. Not unless we can ski down it. I'm a skier, remember, not a rock jock like you.”

To follow the spiny ridge up to the apex would take a lot more time and the use of the rope and other gear. I have all that in my pack but I'm relieved she doesn't want to continue. The rising sun is already starting to heat the couloir. Soon rocks will start screaming down and ripping through the snow.

I take out a bottle of sugary tea, drink some, then offer it to her.

“How are we going to do this?” she asks. At first I think she means the descent, but she continues, “How are you going to look after me and find this guy at the same time?”

“My partner and I will work the case when you're in your office or in court. You should be safe enough in both places. After work, I'll follow you around. Basically, I'll stalk you myself.”

She makes a wry face. “Great.”

“Don't worry about your privacy. I'll keep my distance as best I can.”

She drinks half my tea. “No, that's all right. I don't have much to keep private these days. No boyfriend or anything. Not anymore. Besides, I want to hear firsthand about that wild shoot-out in Cheyenne.”

I smile back but without any pleasure and don't respond.

After a minute she asks, “Do you have any idea who's doing this?”

“I heard there's a possible suspect. Your ex-boyfriend. Wokowski or Wookie or something like that.”

She shrugs. “Wook. Sergeant Charles Wokowski. I don't know if it's him or not. I probably shouldn't have mentioned his name to my boss—I only did because everyone knows we haven't been getting along. A month ago, before we broke up, I would have said there's no way it could be him. Now, I don't know . . . Wook's been acting pretty weird around me lately. And the County Attorney's pissed off at him because of an excessive-force case.”

Most stalkers I've dealt with were ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands, so it makes sense to give him a very hard look. Although with her being a celebrity, some random freak who would be tougher to find could have easily fixated on her. I hope that isn't the case because it will require a lot more work. But I don't want it to be a cop either. Arresting fellow officers is dangerous—I should know. At DCI we frequently have to investigate cops for a variety of allegations. They are always armed and know the rules of the game too well. And arresting a cop never fails to stir up a political maelstrom. But I also know that cops all too often become infatuated with their former lovers. Cops are so accustomed to being dominant and in control that sometimes they can't take it when they're rejected.

I push away a thought about Rebecca and ask, “Tell me a little more about him.”

She shrugs again. “He's with the Teton County Sheriff's Office. He's a big deal in the department. A leader, kind of. Maybe the next sheriff. Everybody looks up to him. They would protect him. But I just can't believe it's him. It's not his style. He's an in-your-face guy, not some sicko who'd write sick letters or try to crawl in my window with a stun gun.” As she says this she shivers.

Then she drinks some more from my bottle, fixing me with those green eyes. “He can be a mean bastard, though. He never touched me in anger or anything, but he looked like he wanted to a couple of times. When we broke up last month he said he wished we were both dead. Is that a threat or what? A guy I dated in law school said the same thing once. What do you think?”

I hesitate for a moment. Despite her saying it isn't his style, this Wokowski is already looking pretty good for it. “It sounds like you have lousy taste in men.”

She hands me back the now-empty bottle and laughs. “I'm sorry to hear you say that, Anton. I was beginning to like you.”

I smile, too. “I guess that proves it.”

I'm not sure if she's flirting or just screwing around. Either way, it makes me think of Rebecca again. We've been living together in Denver for the last six months, the first three of which I was on mandatory leave and the second three when I was the primary witness in the high-profile trial of the state's governor-elect.

Like the trial, our time in her downtown loft started out great. We visited my parents in Argentina for Christmas. Back in Denver I climbed and skied the Front Range while she worked at the paper. Every night we slept naked, limbs entangled, beneath her down comforter. Then, just a few weeks ago, everything began to come apart. The manslaughter charge against the governor-elect was summarily dismissed for lack of evidence, leaving only an accusation of obstruction of justice to go to the jury, and thereby causing me to doubt the last flimsy strands of faith I had in the law as an instrument of justice. Day after day I came home—angry and getting angrier—to find Rebecca growing more distant. She no longer slept with her head on my chest and with one hand cupping the back of my neck. She began turning away from me, curling into a tight ball, not touching me at all. There were sudden and uncharacteristic crying jags as well as questions of my long-term intentions, asked with searching eyes. And I was too mad and too preoccupied to launch an investigation into the cause of the change.

I feel like I don't know her anymore. She'd once been the most stable woman I'd ever known. So poised and confident. She'd been my life preserver when I was tumbling down rapids. Now we've become cautiously formal with each other, where a few months earlier we were as happy and exuberant together as a couple of puppies.

I tried to call her late last night only to discover that she wasn't answering the phone. And reporters always answer the phone, no matter what the hour. It wasn't until after I'd left a message—probably not concealing my irritation very well—that I realized my name had been taken off her answering machine.

Screw it. Focus on where you are now, Ant. Look around. There's no better place than this.

“Are you going to confront Wook?” Cali asks, bringing me back.

“Maybe. First I want to talk to some people, see the report on the attempted break-in, and find out more about what's going on. Then I'll see about talking to him.”

She puts on a pair of amber-tinted glasses that only half hide her eyes. “I know everyone says you're a badass, Anton. But take my word for it—you'll want some backup around if you get in his face.”

I don't bother trying to refute the undeserved reputation. I'd done enough of that on the witness stand. Instead I just nod and say, “Okay.”

After a few minutes' rest we unstrap the skis from our packs. I walk out onto the rocks to one side of the cornice and study the chute below, trying to fix the dangerous gray patches of ice in my mind. I don't want to make a mistake today. It isn't just because of McGee's warning about not screwing it up, but also because it's been a long time since I've skied anything this steep. The first few hundred feet of the couloir are about ten degrees steeper than anything I've done in years. A fall here could easily be fatal. I would slide faster and faster, bouncing off the couloir's stony walls that stand like the brown-stained teeth lining some great beast's mouth. There would be no way to self-arrest on something this steep. The rock and ice and snow would chew me up until it vomited out what was left in the forest twenty-five hundred feet below.

Fear wraps its arms around me, embracing me with a cold but familiar hug.

As I stare down I hear a faint whispering. It doesn't come from the rising wind beginning to rush over this high notch in the ridge but from somewhere deep inside my chest. The Rat is calling. He's hungry for a meal, that surge of adrenaline required to calm and sate him. He's starting to feed.

“How are we going to do this?” This time Cali means the descent. Her voice is sharper, her face a little paler with excitement. “I haven't done much off-piste, you know. Nothing like
this
.”

“Jump turns. Don't even think about pointing your skis downhill.” I say this more to myself than to her. She'd been the captain of her college ski team so she's probably a far better skier than I. But because I'm supposed to be the former big mountain guide as well as the state cop who's protecting her, I add, “I'll go first.” It seems like the gentlemanly thing to do. Maybe I'll somehow be able to stop her if she falls.

My heart rate is starting to accelerate. The thought of flying from the cornice's lip, of my stomach floating up into my throat, of the thirty-foot free fall through space and then leaping down the steep chute below, makes the Rat begin to sing with something approaching delirium.

“I hope your edges are sharp,” I tell her as I finger my own.

Looking me in the eye, she picks up one of her skis and holds it before her face. She grins then sticks out her tongue.

“Don't—” I start to say, realizing what she's about to do.

But she ignores me. Her pink tongue touches the ski's metal edge and she licks a short distance along it. Then she spits in the snow at her feet. A red stain appears. “Okay?” she says. “They're sharp.”

I shake my head. This girl is full of surprises. She's going to be a lot of trouble. But she's not at all reserved, not at all like Rebecca in recent weeks. The Rat is delighted—he thinks he's found a new friend.

I check my bindings to be sure the pressure indicators are maxed out. A prerelease here would be fatal. Then we both click in and slide out, snowplowing, onto the wave of wind-packed snow. Leaning over our quivering poles, we try one more time to examine the couloir below. But it's hard to see from this angle on top of the cornice. There's just the sloping forest far below. And beyond that, more than a vertical mile down, is the blue water of Jenny Lake. It feels like with a powerful enough leap I might be able to splash into it. Cannonball among the white shapes of the small fishing boats that are already starting to dot the lake.

I look over at Cali and she's staring back at me. Still grinning with a bit of blood rouging her lower lip. Despite her sunglasses, I see white all the way around the jade irises. I can almost hear her heart beating over the pounding bass drum of my own. The adrenal glands are squeezing out their sweet juice. The sky has turned Wyoming blue—the kind of blue that's neon through my own colored lenses.

“Still want to do this?” I ask, smiling back now.

“Hell yes!” she shouts.

The Rat is howling some frantic, mad chant. Enticing me to
Jump! Jump! Jump!
And I do it, too scared to scream, too ecstatic to whoop, trying to just focus on leaning forward and fighting the instinctive reaction to slump back. If I hit the snow with anything but my skis springing beneath my hips, I will bounce out into space. Into the forest. Into the lake. I stretch out my arms and the poles that are clenched in my fists like frail wings.

Suddenly, in midflight and with the wind tearing at my clothes, the fear blows away. It's replaced by absolute rapture. The adrenaline shoots through my veins as if it's being plunged there by an enormous syringe. I'm truly flying, like an eagle in the heavens, soaring far out above the dry earth.

But somewhere buried deep beneath the thrill and the rush is a sense of foreboding. If I could see just a week into the future, I might imagine my wings being plucked clean off. I might imagine falling hard and fast then crashing—breaking right through the planet's crust. Right into the fire that some people say burns below.

TWO

S
EVERAL HUNDRED FEET DOWN
, the angle eases off and makes it safe to finally stop. I wait for Cali in a dripping, icicle-fanged alcove alongside one bronze wall. God, she's good. She skis with the sort of grace I wish I had. My twisting leaps felt jerky and panicked but hers are smooth, polished, and graceful. She's having way too much fun to stop beside me. I hear her scream something before she pelts me with a shower of hard crystals and then she's past. I watch her all the way down.

The angle continues to relax as the slope broadens and she soon changes her jump turns into quick, carving arcs. Her skis remain perfectly parallel as she shifts her weight from one foot to the other without apparent effort, picking up speed, until it appears she will shoot over the bare talus below and crash into the trees. I take a short breath, readying to shout some useless warning.

But before I can she arcs a final time and a great wave of spray rises up from her skis. Even though I'm almost a thousand feet above her, a wide grin is plainly visible when she looks up at me and waves a pole.

“You're insane,” I say when I catch up.

“You aren't so normal yourself,” she laughs. “I've heard about some of the crazy climbs you used to do.”

With her cheeks still flushed from the rush of adrenaline, Cali chatters at me all the way down the trail. “That was unbelievable, Anton! It reminds me of—” She talks about other steep runs she'd skied on holidays in Austria, France, and Switzerland. It sounds like she has done just about everything there is to do on skis. All that's left are the big mountain chutes like this one. She talks about some others here in the Tetons she has her eye on. The Skillet Glacier on Moran. The Middle Teton Glacier. Even, more ambitiously, the Ford Couloir on the Grand.

“I've got plans for you, my friend,” she says, whacking my stomach with the side of her pole.

I'm too amped myself to really listen. The thrill of making those flying turns on the steep snow lingers like helium in my heart and brain. It has lifted me above the fatigue of an almost sleepless night and the general weariness with which I've lately been regarding my life. I feel truly alive for the first time in a long while.

With nylon skins stuck to the bottom of our skis and the heels of our bindings released, Cali and I pole over shaded white drifts in the dense forest until the trees begin to widen and the snow becomes patchy. The sun beats down through the spruce branches with an intense heat. It's far warmer than it should be at this time of the year. Ahead are some brown meadows where weeks ago the bright spring sunlight already has melted off the winter's accumulation. Although the leaves on the cottonwoods near the road are new and green, the young grass beneath them is dry in the morning heat. We pause where the snow turns to dirt and unclip from our skis.

I'm peeling off the skins and slotting the skis through the straps on my pack when I realize she's asked me a question. She's watching me, her eyes still lit with a little fever, but there's something else in them, too. Maybe a bit of fear.

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“You aren't even listening to me, are you? Kind of spacey for a bodyguard, Anton. I was just asking if you think the creep will try again.”

“There's no way to know. Not for sure.” I don't want her overly scared, but remembering what McGee had said about the duct tape and the stun gun, maybe she should be scared. “But yeah, we need to be watching our backs.”

She looks at the trees around us then, catching herself, lets out a nervous laugh.

“Who's with me tonight? You or your partner?”

“Tonight I'm on.”

“Good. My mother's coming into town today and there's a party at Molly's Steakhouse. She's rented out the whole place for her
entourage
.” She says the last word with an exaggerated French accent.

I feel my mouth drop into an involuntary grimace. I'd been expecting that watching out for her in the evenings would be easy, like sitting in front of her house in my truck and listening to a book on tape, while during the day I could work on finding her stalker as well as my original assignment—the reason I'd been sent up here in the first place—of hunting meth labs in the woods for the local SWAT team to dismantle. I never thought that there would be parties, especially not Hollywood-type parties. Jackson is full of celebrities and it's a crowd I have no desire to play with.

It's too bad Rebecca's not here, though. She would deny it, but I suspect she might like the idea of being close to a little
Vanity Fair
–type glamour. In Denver there aren't too many opportunities for her to hang out with and maybe even interview real West Coast movie stars.

Cali looks hurt. That frown I'd made has cooled the light in her eyes and has apparently brought her high crashing down. I'm beginning to realize that despite her background, she's surprisingly insecure.

“You don't have to. I'll be safe enough there. My mother has her own bodyguards. Real ones.”

“Sorry, Cali. I didn't mean—”

But she interrupts me. “A lot of guys would be happy to be my date, you know. You could have just said no—you don't need to make that agonized face. You don't need to be a jerk about it.”

Sighing, I let my pack and skis tip over in the dirt. I stand upright and look at her. “Listen, Cali, it's not you. So far you're the best victim I've ever baby-sat. No one else has taken me to do something like that,” I say, nodding up at the couloir. “I'm just not real big on parties and crowds. I've been a sort of hermit lately.”

She pulls off her jacket while looking back at me. “Is it because of all that ‘QuickDraw' stuff that's been in the news?”

“Pretty much. Yeah.”

Cali nods, looking somewhat mollified as she stoops to pick up her pack.

The hated nickname refers to a shooting that occurred more than two years ago. I was working undercover at the time, infiltrating a small Hispanic gang in Cheyenne called Sureno 13. One night when the wind was blasting snow down from the Medicine Bow, I found myself standing outside a decrepit ranch house at three in the morning. I'd refused to admit it when being cross-examined a few weeks later, but as I shivered in the storm I had death on my mind. The men inside, the men I'd spent months monitoring and befriending, had hours earlier abused a child in front of her tied-up parents during a home invasion. If I'd built my case faster it wouldn't have happened. I walked into a darkness far blacker than the snowy night to find the three young gangbangers pointing guns at me. I'd been burned, but I knew that before I stepped through the door. What happened next I can barely remember much less explain, but I walked out and somehow, through the last bit of luck I could expect in this life, the three bangers didn't.

A skeptical media accused me of killing the three men in cold blood. The epithets QuickDraw and the Butcher of Cheyenne were the creation of a local columnist whose son I'd once arrested for selling ecstasy. At the columnist's prompting, the dead men's families sued both the state and me. They claimed I acted outrageously and with excessive force, and that I caused their loved ones' wrongful deaths. Rather than try the case and have a jury exonerate me, my cowardly superiors at the Attorney General's Office preferred to pay out a hefty settlement. And the nickname QuickDraw stuck.

I'd thought all that was finally behind me when the civil case settled the previous fall. But then this spring it all came up again. Bigger than ever, and for the sole purpose of impeaching my credibility in the unrelated trial of the state's governor-elect. It was the defense attorney's way of casting a reasonable doubt onto everything I said.

“You shouldn't let it bother you,” Cali is saying, her pack balanced on her back now and the belt buckled around her slim waist. “You know you did the right thing. That's all that matters. Besides, no one tonight will know anything about it. Or care. These people think Wyoming's just a big cowboy-movie set. They're all flying in from California today, to start preproduction on Mom's next project. The only local who's going to be there is my uncle Bill—I call him uncle, anyway. Bill Laughlin. He used to be a hotshot climber, too. You guys can talk ropes and routes.”

I recognize the name. “How do you know him?”

“He was my dad's best friend. He took care of me when I was a kid, when I used to spend my summers out here.”

The party suddenly sounds less painful. At least there will be someone there I can relate to. “Okay, Cali. I'm your date. What does one wear to a Hollywood party?”

“It's a Western theme. Get some sleep today, because it could be a late night.”

That isn't likely to happen. I'm due to lecture the SWAT team on raiding meth labs in a half hour, and after that I have to go over the threatening letters and other evidence with my boss. God only knows how long it will take.

We finish strapping the skis to our packs and continue clumping down the trail on the rockered soles of our boots. She walks ahead of me, seeming happy once again. Her arms swing high and she moves with an athlete's loose-jointed saunter.

I'm your date—that was a stupid thing to say, Ant.

But I can't help admiring the way her thighs and calves look so strong beneath the backpack. Catching myself, I think of my girlfriend instead. Rebecca's legs are even more spectacular, although ballerina-thin and not as suited for strenuous mountain life. But then she won't ski and climb with me anyway—I'd tried to infect her with my addiction during our winter vacation to see my family in Argentina and I'd failed miserably. Maybe it was that, what was supposed to be a beginning, that had been the start of the end.

The trip started out fine. Rebecca practiced her high-school Spanish with my mother and the vaqueros on the
estancia
while I hiked and climbed the nearby crags with Dad. My brother, Roberto, was away in the Torres del Paine, whose peaks were as dangerous a lure to him as the needle. After three days I loaded packs onto a mule and led Rebecca on horseback to the base of a small unnamed spire across the Chilean border.

I thought its south ridge would be the perfect way to introduce her to my world. The hardest moves weren't much tougher than climbing a ladder but the exposure—nearly two thousand feet of it near the summit—would give her a good pump. Rebecca was wide-eyed and grinning as I belayed her up pitch after pitch. It was the first time I'd ever seen her truly spontaneous—she was talking and laughing without her usual contemplative pause and dark-eyed stare. Her curly brown hair swirled around her head in an enormous, tangled halo after she lost the rubber band that held it back. When she laughed at something I said she blew strands of it from her mouth. She was learning to trust me and the rope. To like being tied to me and anchored to the mountains I loved.

It went well until we were within two pitches of the top.

That was when Roberto showed up, climbing after us.

The sudden appearance of my fugitive brother—ropeless and with eighteen hundred feet of empty space beneath him—nearly made Rebecca sick. The slightest mistake, or even a rotten hand- or foothold, and Death would grab him by the ankle and yank him off the rock.

“Do you do that?” she'd demanded, her mouth twisting into an expression I'd never seen on her face before.

“Not often. Not like him,” I'd answered admiringly, awed as usual by my brother's audacity. Watching him recklessly rushing to greet me.

“Take me down, Anton.” It was the last time Rebecca tried climbing.

Rebecca is a city girl. And that fact, as well as the five hundred miles between Denver and Jackson and whatever else it is that's going on in her head, is pulling us apart.