Chapter I

"You'd look up on the hill at about four o'clock of a summer mornin'-the sun wouldn't even be up yet. A decent person wouldn't be out of bed, and there the sonofabitch was, looked down at ya' with a pair of field glasses, just sittin' quiet on his horse, just lookin'. We knew him up here at Lusk," the young lawyer was saying on the telephone, "and we don't believe he's guilty of murder. Ed Cantrell was a range detective up here, a damn good one, a good man, Mr. Spence."

   I'd never heard of Ed Cantrell before he was charged in Sweetwater County with murder. He was the top lawman in the city of Rock Springs, and I'd read about him in all the papers, of course, and Newsweek. They said Cantrell killed Michael Rosa, his own undercover agent, to keep him from talking to the statewide grand jury. They said Rosa was scheduled to testify in just two or three days and that Cantrell picked him up in a police car and took him out and shot him between the eyes, Cantrell and two of his other officers. They found Rosa with his hands cupped around a wineglass between his legs in the back seat of the cop car. Cantrell had tried to say it was self-defense. They all do, that and insanity when there isn't a real defense, but Rosa's gun was still snapped securely in place in his holster on his right hip.

   People, Newsweek, the big papers in Denver and Los Angeles, told about Rosa along with the Casper Star-Tribune, Wyoming's leading newspaper. He was a tough Puerto Rican hero type, a narcotics agent hailed for a series of drug busts in Wyoming. It was the biggest murder case in the state's history, coming on the heels of a two-part expose by "60 Minutes" about Rock Springs, where Cantrell was head of law enforcement. Dan Rather was aghast at this boom town where the mayor and the city fathers were profiting from prostitution and dope; "60 Minutes" had shown the whores, and all, right on camera, and the corruption was supposed to go on up to the governor. Rather thought there should be an investigation; the governor demanded it, and a grand jury had been empanelled and was about to get to the bottom of things when Cantrell pulled his gun out and silenced their key witness with a single bullet between the eyes.

   This young lawyer from Lusk, Bob Pfister, called me in August of 1978, when I was at the ranch trying to get a little rest.

   "He isn't like they say in the newspapers, Mr. Spence," Pfister said.

   "Well, Pfister, I don't represent assassins," I said and hung up. Besides I was trying to lie down and lick my wounds. I felt beat-up. I'd just returned from the longest murder trial in the history of the state at Sundance, Wyoming, and now this? I hadn't wanted the Sundance case either. But Mr. Hancock, the defendant's father, had actually begged me.

   "He's my boy," Mr. Hancock had said. "Albert's a good boy. He does everything I say. He's different from his brother. Never did leave the ranch. You have to help me, Mr. Spence. You're our last chance."

   The father had almost cried. He was a red-faced little man begging for his son. He looked weak, and sick, like he had high blood pressure or diabetes or something. Albert was sitting in the back of my office while his father pleaded with me. The boy was a funny-looking little bird with thick glasses who looked more like a bespectacled sparrow than a murderer. The state wanted his blood for the killing of Beverly Bright, a redheaded vixen of a woman who Albert confessed he stabbed over and over, confessed it three times, as a matter of fact, to the sheriff's men. Albert and Beverly worked together at the State Training School and Albert told the sheriff he had stabbed her, dragged her body down the cement stairs, and left it in the basement.

   "I didn't kill nobody," Albert said in a high, fragile voice. "There was a man there with a knife in his hand and he made me drag her down the stairs and then he chased me and almost caught me." I thought he must be insane.

   "Please, Mr. Spence, he's my boy. I only got a little ranch, a couple hundred acres, and a few cows, but I can go back to work on the oil rigs. I'm a good hand. I'll pay it all over to you, Mr. Spence. I got my health."

   But I didn't think he had his health. He looked worn and sick. Yet how does a man say no to a father who loves his son and who will give you the sweat off his tired aching old body to save him?

   I looked over at Albert. His eyes were as big as blue dollars through his thick glasses and he had a sweet little smile on his face and he tilted his head like an inquisitive bird trying to understand the words I was saying to him.

   "Please, Mr. Spence, he's my boy." I couldn't look at the old man. Besides, I knew a good psychiatrist who could talk to a jury and who could make a scholarly, understandable psychiatric workup and then I'd plead the kid "Not guilty by reason of insanity." In the face of good psychiatric testimony the state probably wouldn't want to fight us, and I'd do the father and the boy a favor, get the kid sent off to the state hospital for help, and save the expense of a trial. But it hadn't worked out that way.

   My psychiatrist friend said Albert was sane, and then he had even gone so far as to say he thought Albert's farfetched story about having come upon this man standing over Beverly with a knife, and the rest of it, was probably true. Albert had been afraid of the sheriff, he said, and would have signed as many confessions as the sheriff wanted. Christ! The damn psychiatrist had gone on and on, and there I was stuck with the defense of this frightened sparrow whose story was the most improbable I had ever heard. To make matters worse I was up against my own former deputy prosecutor, Arnold Tschirgi, whom I had personally, faithfully trained for the best part of eight years when I had been the prosecuting attorney myself, and now he wanted to draw down on me, to show the world who really was boss like all the young courtroom gunslingers do. And so I had gone up to the old town of Sundance with my partner Eddie Moriarity, and we had taken on Tschirgi for about three months in the most exhausting trial I had ever experienced. The jury had freed poor Albert, delivered him back to his daddy on his little ranch, and I had gone back to mine again to breathe in the good mountain air that heals me, to ride over the broad open hills where my cows walk on the blue flowers of late spring, the blue lupine, and higher up, the bluebells, and down by the clean river with its cutthroat trout, the blue wild iris and the blue harebells.

   Now this Pfister kid was on the phone again, a pestering pup wanting to talk about the Cantrell case, calling just at the supper bell, just at the good time of day. The men were rushing to the cookhouse by all manner of conveyances, old irrigation pickup trucks, by foot and horseback. There were the happy noises of joking men and, from the kitchen, busy women setting out their cooking, but I had to take the call from Pfister.

   "Mr. Spence'-his voice was young and plaintive-we know Cantrell down here. He's an honest man. Why, when he was a range detective here you could look up of a mornin' and there he'd be lookin' down at you. Damn near worked himself out of a job . . ."

   "I know," I said impatiently, "but I don't like the case. I'm not in the business of defending cops who kill their own."

   "Mr. Spence, with all due respect for you, and I do respect you, you are the last man on this earth I expected to deprive an accused of his presumption of innocence. You've already tried and convicted him and you haven't even met him," he said. He was right. I felt ashamed for a second. "You've convicted him on what you've read in the papers." It was true. I really knew nothing of the case except what I'd read. I had been repulsed by what seemed like a senseless moblike killing. Pfister had a point.

   "Okay," I said. "You just want me to talk to the bastard, right?"

   "Right, Mr. Spence. I'd sure appreciate it."

   "Well, I got some work to do in the morning," I said. "Have him here at eight sharp, and I'll give him an hour."

   "He'll be there, Mr. Spence," he promised.

   "Don't touch that case with a ten-foot pole, Gerry," Eddie, my partner, had warned. "We don't need to get into that one." I agreed. Rock Springs is a long ways from Dubois. I knew Ed Cantrell would be driving all night. But how much consideration are you supposed to give to an assassin?

   It isn't that assassins and professional thugs and dope dealers aren't entitled to a defense. They, probably more than anyone, need defending. But as for me-I didn't want their cases: It's my life, my bucketful of milk. I had learned early on from my old Grandpa Spence not to spill it along the way. Grandpa lived on a little ranch in Colorado and had struggled there on a few acres, had a couple of milk cows, one Jersey, one Guernsey, and he grew a big garden, planted forty acres of oats, some for the cows and some for the old team of mules he farmed with, Pete and Jim. I remembered how they hunched down their old rumps when they pulled, and I saw that although Grandpa yelled at them he loved them.

   His hands were rough and dry and I used to hold one big finger as we walked down the steep hill through the apple orchard to the milk barn. I carried the empty shining milk pails down, and then after Grandpa had carefully washed their teats, I'd sit down beside him on a one-legged stool just like his, and I'd lean my head up against the cow's warm belly like Grandpa did while he milked, and the sound and rhythm of the milk streaming against the bottom of the empty pail as Grandpa milked was music. He filled a tin cup with warm milk for me to drink, and he squeezed a stream smack into the mouth of each of the barn cats who always gathered there for their breakfast and supper, and not a drop, not a single drop was spilled by Grandpa, or by the cats, or by me. When the cows were milked and the pails full we started the climb back up the long hill to the house, Grandpa hobbling along ever so painfully on his old crooked arthritic legs. It hurt him a lot, I could tell, but he never once spilled a drop of milk.

When we got to the milk separator in the rock-walled cellar under the house that smelled of stored apples and good molds, he would dump in the milk, and I would turn the handle of the old separator, faster and faster, until pretty soon the cream started to come out one nozzle and the skim milk out the other. We took the cream up to my skinny little Grandma for butter and Grandpa poured it into his big coffee mug, which had the pink face of a fat man on it, and there was English script below the face that read, "I'm not greedy, I just like a lot." And then the skim milk went for cottage cheese, which tasted sour to me and I didn't like it, and what was left of the milk went to the chickens and to old Chappy, the part collie dog, but not a drop of the milk was ever wasted.

   I used to wonder at the preciousness of this stuff from the cows. I came to understand at an early age the great respect Grandpa Spence had for the milk. I thought it was like life, that there was only so much of it in any bucket. That was an old-fashioned idea, I suppose, and it is an idea that has been a curse to me, the idea that one ought not spill a single drop out of his bucket. It made me feel guilty sometimes.

   It didn't seem like I was going to get any rest that summer at all. It used to be that this 35,000 acres high up in a valley of the Wind River Mountains had been a good place to hide, like the old "Hole-in-the-wall" gang would hide. I needed to be saved from phones and people and secretaries with problems and partners with cases and from clients, and sometimes I even needed to be saved from friends.

   On the same day that Pfister wanted me to take the Cantrell case the Silkwood people were at the ranch, too, planning for that trial. There were three young lawyers on the "Silkwood team," as they called it. They claimed it was the most important case in the history of nuclear power. It had been all over the national press. It was a case about a young plutonium worker, Karen Silkwood, who supposedly discovered something about photomicrographs being touched up to cover defects in the fuel rods manufactured by Kerr-McGee for a nuclear breeder reactor somewhere. It was also supposed to be about a missing forty pounds of plutonium that Silkwood had discovered, enough to blow up Japan all over again, and there was talk of a possible meltdown, like in the movie China Syndrome. She was on her way to show and tell it all to David Burnham of the New York Times, but she never got there. They found her dead in the ditch in her little Honda. It was supposed to be an accident, but all the papers she was carrying were gone, and some were calling it murder. And Harry Reasoner, then with ABC, had run tests that showed she hadn't just gone to sleep at the wheel as Kerr-McGee and the FBI claimed, and the "Silkwood team" had filed suit for Karen Silkwood's surviving children. Now they were at the ranch pressing me for trial decisions in a case that didn't even make sense to me, that was full of spy stories and the FBI and the CIA and secret submarine bases, for Christ's sake; suddenly this dead little Texas woman had become a martyr in the struggle against nuclear power. They had had rallies with famous singers and movie stars for money-raising, and bearded vacant-eyed people had gathered to chat and play their guitars and to march with placards and to lie prone out in the streets. But there had come a time when somebody had to prove it all in court, and here they were, gathered around the supper table with me and the hands, laying out the wildest, most complicated damn story that went on and on. It was like trying to follow the tracks of a field mouse through a forest.

   "Christ, save me from all of this," I had exploded. Listening to Danny Sheehan, their chief spokesman, was like trying to take a drink out of a firehose. I didn't understand any of the goddamned case.

   I came back to the supper table and they were all still there, waiting like gathered grouse for a summer storm, pecking, anxious. Phil McAuley, editor of the Casper Star-Tribune, and an old friend, had just happened by. They were all there, my wife Imaging, the kids, the hands.

   "I won't be able to meet with you in the morning," I said to Sheehan.

I'm going to have to see a prospective client."

   "Who?" Imaging asked.

   "You don't know him," I said. "A fellow named Cantrell."

   "The hell I don't know him," Imaging said. "Are you going to represent him?"

   "Yeah, Gerry, you can do without that case," my friend McAuley said. I got up and walked out on the porch outside the ranch kitchen. I could hear the old East Fork of the Wind River rolling by, laughing, winding through the cottonwoods no more than twenty yards from my door. The sagebrush along the banks shot eight feet tall and the cottonwoods were like the ones I climbed as a boy, and I had found peace walking along that river.

   Imaging followed me out with snapping blue eyes. She had raven hair. When her eyes were like that I knew she had something to say.

   "I can't believe you'd get mixed up in that Cantrell case," Imaging started. "You know he's guilty."

   "I'm not going to take the case," I said.

   "Oh," she said. "Well, why's he coming here?"

   "I just promised to talk to him."

   "Well, I don't understand how you get into these cases," she said. "First you take the Vehar case-and have to be a prosecutor again, and now you're talking to some damned cop-some damned assassin. You know he's guilty. You read it in the paper yourself." I loved her. She was the best woman I'd ever known, and I'd looked at a lot of them.

   Vince Vehar had been my old lawyer friend of more than twenty-five years and I had loved him too in a way that's hard to explain. He was sixty-seven when they killed him and his good wife Beverly, almost twenty years younger, and their eighteen-year-old son John. They were blown up while they slept in their home. He was a big bear of a man with a thick block of wood for a head and a happy wet smile that stretched across the breadth of his face. He wasn't a great trial lawyer. I had tried many of his important cases from the time I had been a kid fresh out of law school, but he was a rare breed of a man who cut his own right path through the forest and couldn't be dragged off it by a team of good Percheron horses. I had never permitted my mind's eye to see their bodies ripped and torn in that murderous blast. The house had been caved in flat. The three caskets were closed at the funeral. There had been a herd of local, state, and federal cops in on the case. And now almost a year later they weren't any closer to solving the murders than the day of the bombing. They suspected a local ex-con, named Mark Hopkinson, who was also known to have used a bomb to threaten yet another lawyer. But they were only suspicions. Tony, Vince's son, had called and wanted to know if I couldn't help them as a special prosecutor, and I told him I would speak to Judge Brown about it, and I did, and they put on quite an argument, pointing out I had never lost a case in my eight years as a prosecutor. What are you supposed to do? Still I was extremely reluctant. After eight years of putting people in prison I had acquired a great yearning to free them instead, and for almost twenty years since they had heard me answer for the accused. But now they wanted me to represent the state in this case. And old Vince had never turned anybody away in his entire life.

   I listened to the laughing river from the kitchen. A deer had crossed the river at the same place I was watching now, years before, and it had seemed like a sign to me, to me who doesn't believe in signs, and I had bought this big ranch, and had come here again this late summer. But what of old Vince? I am no longer a prosecutor of men. I save men from blind justice, which flogs out against the accused with cold iron hands. Could I send another man to prison, even to that ugly medieval hole, the gas chamber, to die? But old Vince would have taken the case for me, would have taken on the whole state single-handed with his own broadax hands, had they asked him. I knew Vince would have understood had I turned the case down. He wouldn't have held me to any bargain of friendship. I could hear him say, "That's all right, Gerry. I understand. You're a busy man. I never liked to prosecute either." I suppose I could have explained it to Vince, but I would have never been able to explain it to myself. Friendship is an incurable disease. And I hadn't even come close to winning the argument with Imaging. I knew it was a risky case to get into, and I had tried to be honest with her about that. But she had a right to know, I thought.

   "You can risk your life-that's one thing. But ours, too?-for a dead man?"

   "I know," I said. It was hard to look at her.

   "And besides, what about all those young defense lawyers around the country you go talk to all the time? You're their hero. It'll break their hearts for you to be a prosecutor and ask for the death penalty." She was right.

   "I know," I said. Shit. I knew all of that.

   I heard the weeping river of the early night, or was it singing?-murmuring, lapping, laughing through my open bedroom window-I thought passing, merely, on its seaward journey. It was an ignorant river. It knew nothing of me. Or was it innocent?

   I lay with my woman, and there were the softer sounds of her sleeping and in the distance the yap of one crying coyote against the barren hills, or was it laughing? In this world it is hard to tell the sounds of joy from sobbing. I tried to see the course I was on-to chart it in my mind's map. But I was ignorant. In the brief expanse of little more than a year of time three cases would catch me up in their own currents and deposit me in yet another place. Cantrell, swift and deadly; the Vehar case, deep, in the bottom of the murky places in which men move; and the Silkwood case-caught in the rapids of time and prophecy.

   The flow of the river would suck from me, cut away at my crumbling banks and leave me dry and empty, and in the void, as is the way of rivers, would be deposited the new materials of a man.