Death Qualified (17 page)

    "This has nothing to do with us, nothing personal.

    I didn't get sore when you beat me."

    "It has everything to do with us. Why didn't you tell me you were assigned to my case?"

    "Because it didn't make any difference. You work to save them. I work to prosecute. What's the difference? We both know he's guilty as hell. Don't try to ride that unicorn around me."

    "You could have got all four!"

    "Could have, maybe. But I fucking well know I got one. And that's what counts, not could haves or maybes.

    And I got my one without a trial."

    "And next week, next month, tomorrow, are you going to sneak around behind my back again? Is that the only way you can see to get even? Do we need to even the score and then start fresh?"

    "You think I give a shit about those penny-ante cases?

    Get real! This was the big one, the one that got me noticed."

    "Get out! Just get out."

    "Come on, Barbara, calm down. We've got a neat thing going. We make a good bed pair. Let's keep our professional life and personal life in two categories and get on with things."

    "Just get the hell out of my house!"

    "Okay. Okay. I'll look for an apartment. Now calm down, for Christ sake!"

    "Now! Right now!"

    He shook his head and started to walk toward the kitchen. She grabbed his briefcase, a tooled leather case with brass fittings, much more expensive than anything she owned, and she swung it as hard as she could and heaved it through the living room window.

    "Now!"

    His face turned a deep red, a narrow-eyed mean look added sharpness to his already sharp features, his fists clenched. She picked up a bottle of wine he had brought in--to celebrate with, she supposed--and heaved it out after the briefcase. He opened his hands and stared at them, then at her, and he left.

    Until that second she had not fully realized how hard he was working to control his anger, and in that second when he had gazed at his own hands, he had appeared afraid. She also realized when the door slammed that she had wanted him to hit her, to fight with her, because she had wanted so desperately to hit him and hurt him.

    She had sent him a note: I'm taking off for a week. Get your stuff out of my apartment before I get back. And she had gone to the coast to think things through only to find that she was unable to think. She walked, she watched waves roll in, watched sea gulls in flight, ate seafood, and had not a single coherent thought.

    When she told her father good-bye, he had been incredulous.

    "Over one lousy case? Your client turned chicken, and you know it. It had nothing to do with you."

    He had said often that the law was a game and the state had the high cards, had the power; it was their job, his and hers, to bring a little balance to the world. She had believed that. That night she had interrupted him to ask, "Did you ever box? Do any violent sport?"

    He had looked bewildered.

    "You know better than that."

    "Yes, I do. But those games, Christians and lions, two boxers out to destroy each other's brain, war games, nuclear armaments games, they're games only as long as people are willing to play them, other people are willing to watch and finance them. I don't want to play any longer."

    For five years she had not played. And now, sitting thoroughly chilled on the terrace in the dark forest, she did not know why she was in again. Her token was on the board; she was committed. In her head she heard the voice of a judge who had come to lecture her senior class: "The one thing an attorney must not do is use his clients to satisfy his own needs, whether those needs are noble or base, whether they are cloaked in the purest, most pristine robes of justice or wrapped in gutter rags, whether they are the true revelation from the Almighty or issue from the lips of Satan. An attorney's role demands that he put aside his own needs and serve only the needs of his client."

    She had fumed at all the he's and his's, but she had remembered. She had remembered most clearly when Tony had yelled, "You think I did it just to feather my own nest? Is that what you think? Well, honey, I've got news for you. That's what we're all in it for. You, me, your father, every one of us. You think you can twist your own clients into helping you reform the world, and it ain't gonna happen, doll. It doesn't mean a fucking thing to them if you put another little chink in the dam. You want to do good, join the Salvation Army, put on a nun's habit and save souls, go dish out wheat in Ethiopia, set up a storefront counseling service in a slum. Just keep out of the way of those who have a job to do and intend to do it."

    In Vermont that winter, watching the snow pile up, she had come to accept that he had nailed her. She had used people in trouble for her own ends. Victim or victimizer, or bystander, no other roles were available. Yet here she was in again, and she didn't know why.

    It would be comforting, she thought, to believe she was doing it for Nell's sake, to believe that she alone could save her. Nell was like a forest creature, tough and self-sufficient in her own world, and doomed to a merciless death outside it. She tried to imagine Nell under the kind of examination Tony would subject her to, and shook her head. But even thinking this, she had to admit to herself that she was not in it for Nell's sake. Nor for her father's.

    He was right in saying he couldn't handle it, but she was not the only one who could. Not because she feared for his health suddenly, certain now that he must have had a warning sign that made him change his habits completely.

    But not for that. Not for revenge. She had really decided before Tony's name had surfaced, and unless at an unconscious level she had already determined that she had to face him in court, he had not influenced her decision. But something had, and she could not name what it was. She felt that from the moment she had heard her father's voice on her answering machine, she had been committed, exactly as if a line had been cast, and she had been hooked;

    in spite of her denials and twisting and struggling, she had been reeled in inexorably.

    A deep shudder passed through her, and abruptly she stood up. It was too cold, she thought, entering the house, denying to herself that the shudder had started from within.

    THIRTEEN

    on friday barbara talked to Bailey Novell and told him what she wanted--no one, two, three, she said, but all at once, immediately. He grinned. He was a wiry man, five feet six or seven, with prominent sinews and long, snaky muscles--a runner. She was remembering: Everyone in Oregon ran, or hiked, or skied, or cycled, or most likely, did all.

    That afternoon she set up a makeshift office in the dining room. She put a leaf in the table and brought in a gooseneck lamp, arranged her computer and paper, and was ready to start work.

    On the way home from their walk to town on Saturday, Barbara paused at the entrance to the private road to eye the dirt road that looked impassable for a wheeled vehicle.

    "How far up is it to the trail to the waterfall?" she asked Frank.

    "Not half a mile, I'd say."

    "You always say that. Think I'll have a look. Want to come?"

    "Part of the way, then I'll sit and read my paper."

    The road was as bad as it looked, with great rocks strewn about, and deep ruts with cracked dirt in them;

    they would become mud traps after a rain. The road twisted and turned so much that during the half mile or more they walked upon it at no place was there visibility for more than a hundred feet in either direction. The forest was very dense on both sides, with brambles and huckleberries crowding the roadway.

    "Can anyone really drive it?" she muttered after a few minutes.

    "Sure. Four-wheel drive and off you go. Used to be able to go clear over the mountain all the way to Bachelor Butte, but last year or so, it's been getting a bit rough, and last spring there was a washout just about on the county line.

    On this side they say Deschutes County should fix it, and over there they say we should. Or the state. Or someone.

    Hikers say leave it be, let it be an east west foot trail."

    They crossed a narrow one-way bridge and immediately came upon a hairpin turn. She eyed the road with distrust.

    A killer road, she thought. Then Frank stopped and pointed.

    "There's your trail. Down there it branches at the head of the waterfall; left fork's a dead end at the ledge, right fork down to Nell's side of the ledge, and on down to her place. As for me, I'll be around here somewhere." He glanced about, spotted a fallen tree whose diameter was nearly as high as he was, with a great branch that formed a natural seat with backrest. He grinned.

    "Right there.

    See you later."

    "That bad, huh?" she said morosely, gazing at the trail.

    It didn't look so terrible--narrow, but no harder going than the road, it seemed.

    "Getting down's no trouble," Frank said, settling himself comfortably.

    She started. Within a dozen paces, her father was lost from view, and there was no sound, no wind, no scurrying of small creatures, and practically no sunlight. Forest primeval, black forest, impenetrable woods--she remembered descriptions she had read by early explorers of the northwest, remembered how the Europeans had feared the black forests of northern Europe up to modern times al most. She could sympathize; people did not belong in the dense, dark forests that seemed to hold their breath at human intrusion. The trail started to descend, and she knew what her father had meant by saying going down was no trouble. The way became steeper; she found herself holding onto tree trunks, testing for safe footing step by step.

    Never in wet weather, she muttered under her breath; go in on your butt when the trail was mud-slicked.

    For some time she had been hearing the music of the little stream, Halleck Creek, but it was invisible off to her right until she came to a level area, and the stream was there. Although it was not very deep, inches only, and six feet wide, it had cut a gorge, three feet at least and twice as wide as the water. In the spring, with snow melt, the gorge would be filled; even now at the end of summer the stream raced furiously, tumbling, falling, swirling around rocks with white-water sprays. Up ahead there was a rail fence. On the other side of it the trees parted; massive rocks had been uncovered and now sheltered luxuriant ferns. The waterfall.

    Nearer the waterfall a tree had fallen across the creek, a natural bridge. She did not cross it but went to the fence and looked down. The water fell two hundred feet here, straight down into a boiling pot. The trail she had followed continued downward through the woods; on the other side of the bridge she could make out a second trail.

    She frowned. She would have to cover each trail, she knew, and this side was as good a place as the other to start. Doggedly she continued downward. She already knew what she faced in climbing back up, and she might as well finish.

    The trail got no better, but neither did it get worse, she added quickly, almost as if trying to convince herself that getting back up to the road would be possible. Then she reached the wide level area of the rock ledge.

    She looked around it carefully; the trail she had used was the only access from above, and apparently there was no trail down from this side. Dead end. She repeated the words and walked to the edge where she looked down at the creek far below. Then she studied the other side, twenty-five feet away, across the chasm. It appeared to be identical to this side, except for size barren, rocky, a couple of tree trunks, boulders, some straggly vines that looked dead. She backed up to a boulder and sat down, gazing at the opposite side. She had hoped to find a possible alternative to where the killer had been, she realized.

    Or, if not that, a route the killer could have taken to the ledge. She discarded both hopes. Not from over here. Nell would have seen anyone on this side; there was no place to hide, no way to cross the gorge.

    She could not see the trail Nell had used to climb up to the clearing, or the one that came down from the waterfall, but from where she sat in deep gloom, it didn't seem plausible that someone could have come down that trail at exactly the right time to catch Lucas in a gunsight. And at exactly the same moment that Nell had taken the last step up.

    "Ah, Tony," she breathed at last, "is it going to be your game again?"

    She would have to go over to the other side, but not today, and not from the top down. She would go up from Nell's. From where she sat brooding there really did not seem much point in it. She did not see how she could convince a jury that coincidentally three different people had appeared at this one isolated place at the same moment: victim, killer, and innocent bystander. Always the same division, she thought then. It always came back to the same division.

    She heaved herself upright and took a deep breath, then started back up the trail.

    By the time she reached the top again, she was drenched, her legs throbbed and burned, and she felt that every breath was too difficult to complete. She stopped in the woods for several minutes to rest before she emerged to see Frank leaning against the tree trunk where she had left him.