Trial by Ice and Fire (15 page)

NINETEEN

T
HE PLAN FOR THE NIGHT
is that Cali will stay with me again at my place while Jim attempts to discreetly trail Charles Wokowski. The Teton County Sheriff's and the Jackson Police Department have BOLO instructions—Be On the Lookout—regarding Myron Armalli and his Ford truck, as do the Highway Patrol and the park rangers. They'll hold him for questioning if they come across him. Tomorrow I'll go exploring around Armalli's place with someone to watch my back other than my cowering wolf. With luck I'll find both him and enough evidence to arrest him. For the time being, I think, I have all the bases covered.

At seven o'clock Cali answers the door with an overnight bag in her hand. She doesn't look particularly happy to see me. When I'd called ahead I initially told her she should go to her mother's, where there was an FBI agent in addition to her mother's regular bodyguards. Cali refused, which really wasn't such a bad idea because that would have just put her that much closer to where I suspect Armalli is hanging out. She counterproposed spending the night at her uncle Bill's in town, but I couldn't trust a dying old man—even one who is a legendary hardman—to protect her. So we settled on the unhappy compromise of her staying another night in my rented cabin.

Initially there's not a lot for us to say to each other. She no longer looks hurt like she had in the afternoon. Instead she looks a little angry. And I'm still carrying the guilt from kissing her last night.
God, what a stupid thing to do. What the hell had possessed me?
But thinking about that quickly leads down a black path to even gloomier thoughts about Rebecca.

Cali gets in the Pig and slams the door shut behind her, shaking the truck's rusty frame. I wince. I'm in for a fun night. Mungo grins painfully as she gets a quick, unwanted pat when Cali twists around in her seat to greet her. “I'm glad to see
you,
at least,” she tells the wolf.

We stop by a health-food store and pick up pasta and jarred sauce for dinner. Some fresh vegetables, too. Cali speaks to me for the first time, saying she's hungry, that she should carbo-load before her trial in the morning anyway. “I get so nervous during those things that I burn calories like a blowtorch,” she adds, momentarily, it appears, forgetting to be angry. Remembering then, she looks at me with suspicion. “I just hope you don't expect
me
to do the cooking.”

I only shake my head.

By the time we get inside the cabin, Cali is addressing me through Mungo again.

“How can you live with this guy?” Cali murmurs loud enough so that I can hear. “He doesn't know how to treat a girl, does he? I don't think he knows what he wants. What do you think, wolfy?” Mungo lets out a low groan of assent before slumping down on her sleeping bag.

They're both wrong. I know what I want—I'm just afraid that I can't have it.

To keep from thinking I try to keep busy. I go into the second bedroom to drag the pile of cams, ropes, and carabiners off the bed. I throw it all into a corner, making a jangling racket. I'd picked up a set of twin sheets in town earlier and I toss them on the bed for Cali to use. I don't intend to make it up. Out in the main room my portable stereo/CD player comes to life. She's selected Train's first album from the small stack of CDs. Maybe the music will mellow us both. Assuage my guilt and lessen her anger. After a moment of further straightening—kicking at the gear to get it out of the way—I find myself ripping open the plastic-wrapped packages and stretching the sheets over the bed. I should listen to music more often.

When I go back out, Cali is already in the kitchen. The sounds from the CD player appear to be having an effect on her, too—her prior irritability appears to have dissipated somewhat. She helps me with dinner. My elbows occasionally touch her upper arms as I chop broccoli and once she bumps me away from the sink with her hip. The intimacy is disconcerting, but pleasant. As we work together without speaking I think of good times with Rebecca. How cooking in the kitchen would often lead to us lying naked on the cold tile floor. A little voice in my head disrupts my reverie by wondering if we'll ever do that again.

Sitting at the big table, we slurp our pasta. The only other noise is the music. Mungo watches us eat with wet eyes and drool spilling from her mouth but is too shy to beg. I try to avoid looking at Cali but she still manages to catch my eye.

“Tell me something, Anton. Are you stringing me along?” Her green eyes bore into mine like she's trying to look past them. Through them, into my brain.

I put down my fork and spoon. “No,” I say flatly. Then with less certainty but more honesty, “Yes. Shit, maybe.”

Cali looks amused at my equivocation. I find it hard to hold her gaze but I force myself to do it.

“What's going on with the girlfriend?”

“She's coming up tomorrow. To dump me, I'm pretty sure. Things have been kind of rough lately. I don't know.”

“If she's going to dump you, why doesn't she just call then? Or write a letter?”

“That's not her style.”

“So I'm the bench warmer, huh?” she asks with a small smile. “Second string?” And it hits me that I
am
stringing her along, keeping her ready and willing so that if Rebecca does finally cut our ties then I'll have somewhere to go for comfort. The realization makes me feel like an ass. I resolve to keep things more professional from now on.

So instead of answering her question, I ask, “Tell me about Myron Armalli.”

The smile fades away. “
That
guy,” she says with distaste. “He's a freak, a real loony. I prosecuted him about three months ago for dressing up corpses he was transporting for the coroner's office and taking pictures of them. Maybe doing more. Why do you ask?”

“I was reading about him today. His files. Did you know Armalli had a prior for stalking a girl in high school? Right here in Teton County?”

“No. It must have been a juvie case—this is the first I've heard of it. Where did you learn about that?”

I don't mention taking the sealed files. Having already told her about my brother, she has more than enough information to get me in trouble if she wants to. Instead I ask, “Did he give you any weird vibes during the trial?”

“Sure. But he gave everybody weird vibes. The guy's weird, really weird. He yelled in court—in front of the judge—about how I would regret taking away his liberties or something like that. A lot of other strange stuff, too. Are you thinking that he might be the guy? Not Wook?”

“I'm starting to think there's a pretty good chance,” I admit.

I'm still having a hard time with the fact that it's not Wook. Nothing would make me happier than to have him be the stalker, to link his wrists behind his back and put him in a cage. After all, I know he's following her around. I know he hates my guts. And what did he have in that gym bag this morning? But I resolve again to follow the evidence, not my impulses. I'm still carrying a cold spot in the center of my back from my afternoon visit to the old homestead.

Cali tells me more about Armalli, and on my mental notepad I can see the evidence mounting. When he'd taken the witness stand he'd blabbed on and on about his “art” and his First Amendment right to make it. About how Hollywood and the modern art establishment were trying to stop him. Oppressing him. He apparently believed his greeting cards were revolutionary, that they would remove the boundaries between life and death, break down the barriers, or some bullshit like that. I think I can begin to see a little into the head of this young madman I've never met but whose presence I'd felt earlier in the afternoon. Does he think of his prosecutor—his persecutor—as a future piece of performance art? Hadn't Angela Hernandez with her master's in psych talked of the stalker maybe wanting to do something symbolic?

“Did you ever talk to him alone?”

“Just once. When we were in the courtroom before his attorney and the judge and jury came in. He said in a real quiet voice, not looking at me, that he'd known me when I was a kid. That was it. I ignored him when he said it, his attorney not being there and all.”

“Did you know him?”

She looks a little bit uneasy. “In the file I saw his address. He grew up practically next door to Mom's ranch. I remember sometimes seeing a kid in the woods by the meadow where I rode horses. A shy kid who never came out and said hello or anything. Now I think it might have been him. And it makes me feel bad, because I never made any effort to talk to him. I was a pretty self-involved little girl. Mom's influence, you know.”

“Then, when he was on the witness stand, he said you were going to regret charging him?”

“Yeah. That's what he said. I didn't think anything of it. I thought he meant because he was such a great artist or something like that.”

I don't say anything.

“You know what?” Cali asks, looking down at her hands. “I do regret it. Not talking to him when he was a kid. Ignoring him when he spoke to me in the courtroom. I should have reached out to him. He's a messed-up kid, that's all.”

“One who's trying to kidnap you. And do who knows what after that.”

There's nothing more to say about it. Wook's name is off my suspect list for the stalker. At least off the list for the guy who's trying to kidnap her. But I can't help feeling that although I've erased his name, I can still see it lingering faintly on the page in my head. I still believe that he's a danger. To both of us.
What the hell did he have in that gym bag?

After a few minutes' silence I ask her, “Are you going to put Wook on the witness stand tomorrow?”

Cali sounds eager to talk about something else. “He'll be my second witness. First I want to put on the good cop, the guy who initially made the stop. I know everyone thinks I'm just taking this thing to trial to punish Wook—embarrass him for what he did—but I really want to win. I want to get this old guy off the streets for a while. But the defense will argue—or imply—that the jury should walk him because of the police misconduct.”

I know that this bit of misdirection will probably be effective. The jury won't be told about the defendant's prior history of drunk driving and running over small children. Wook won't even be able to explain
why
he did
what
he did on the witness stand because it would be prejudicial to the defense. All the jury will know about is that he punched an old man for a relatively minor offense. Justice and criminal law are incidental, I remember McGee once telling me.

“Are you going to play the tape?”

“I've got to,” she says, as if there weren't any choice. And it's true that now that she's shown it to the defense attorney there is no other choice, but she never had to give it to the defense attorney in the first place. That was an uncommon act of bravery and integrity for a new prosecutor who will have to work with the local police. Especially when she was implicating her boyfriend in a crime that could cost him his career.

After we eat, Cali puts Counting Crows on the stereo. This, too, is a good choice. I busy myself doing the dishes after she helps me carry them to the sink. The chair creaks when she sits back down at the table and begins flipping through the pages of her case file, reviewing witness statements and the law regarding the admissibility of Intoxilyzer results. I wash out the pot and scrub the dishes. Then I go upstairs and bring down from the loft the copy of
Smoke Jump
. This time Cali sees it in my hand.

“Do you mind me reading this here?” I ask her. “I can go back upstairs.”

She looks down at her legal pad and blows air out of her cheeks. “No. I have a copy of it, too, but I've never been able to read it. It's supposed to be a good book, all about Dad and Bill and Mom and what happened on Elation Peak before I was born.”

“From what I've read so far, they were pretty ballsy guys. Parachuting into forest fires and all that. Getting their kicks, but doing something with a real purpose, too. Your dad sounds like someone I would have liked to have known.”

Cali nods a couple of times. She starts to say something then clears her throat. I wait, but she doesn't try to speak again. Instead she goes back to work. I lie on the couch and read.

It's good book. Like Norman MacLean's
Young Men and Fire,
which is referred to many times, the author gives more than technical information about fire fighting and what went wrong on Elation Peak. He provides details about the men who do this for a poorly paid career, talking about their backgrounds, training, and the off-season hobbies that the job supports. Much of it centers on Bill Laughlin and Patrick Morrow, Cali's father, and much is made about their friendship. They'd known each other since childhood. Patrick had been handsome and sensitive, a terrific skier but not good enough to win races; Bill, a kind of good-natured bully and sometimes a practical joker who was addicted to putting up hard routes on alpine walls. Together they made an unlikely but extremely close pair.

Salacious details and a complication in the friendship are added when young actress Alana Reese buys a ranch in the valley and meets Patrick and Bill one night in the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Both men pursued her keenly, but after a time her affections were won by the skier rather than the climber. The author, citing Bill as his source, speculates that perhaps this was because Patrick's passion was more accessible to the actress. She could fly him off to a luxurious chalet in St. Moritz, but she couldn't sleep on an icy ledge with Bill. I remember Cali telling me in the bar about how Bill's always been in love with her mother. Again I have to push away thoughts about Rebecca.

I'm just getting to the part where a fire is building outside Lander, Wyoming, when my phone rings. Jim's name is flashing on the screen.

“What's up?” I ask.

“Sorry, man. He got away from me.”

“What happened?”

Jim explains that he'd followed Wokowski to a house south of town earlier in the evening. The sergeant was inside for about fifteen minutes, then came out carrying a little boy in his arms. He put the boy in the front seat of the department SUV, then he and a woman—the boy's mother, probably—loaded a wheelchair in the back. They drove to a baseball field in town where a Little League game was being played and parked next to the field. The only time Wokowski got out of the car was to go and buy hot dogs and Cokes. “I thought they were there for the duration, man. So in the third inning I went to get myself something to eat. When I came back, they were gone.”