A DRY WIND BLOWS hard out of the Medicine Bow Mountains onto the high plateau of the Laramie River, just as it does every fall in the southeast part of the state. It's a steady pressure, as unrelenting as gravity, but also a force that seems to have a mischievous intent. The wind is regularly fed by the curses of the fifty thousand enduring souls who inhabit the high plains and mountains here. On this day its fuel is further charged by the oaths of people who have never before had the opportunity to feel its power. The multitudes of television reporters gathered outside on the courthouse lawn offer up foul maledictions. The wind is blowing their carefully brushed and stiffened hair out of place. Propelled by it, the occasional tumbleweed playfully interrupts their broadcasts as it bounces between the commentators and cameras. The few forlorn Klansmen isolated even amid the crowd across the street curse the wind too. It threatens to blow their pointed hoods right off their heads and reveal their true identities. Worse than that, it raises their robes like women's skirts, causing them to drop their placards and hold their arms straight down at their sides.

On the drive in this morning I'd been struck by just how much the prairie fauna surrounding Laramie is like my maternal grandfather's ranch in Argentina. There's the same sagebrush and chaparral bent by the wind toward the east, as if yearning for the sun to rise each dawn and exposing their backsides' naked roots to the fading night. There are the same surrounding high peaks capped with ice. But the town itself is nothing like my grandfather's nearest village, where idle gauchos squat on crooked, unpaved streets, and children play half-dressed in rags. This Wyoming town is even more exotic. Today Laramie probably appears strange to its longest-surviving residents. Over the past week strangers from across the nation have descended on the town with their cameras and microphones like a buzzing horde of bright-colored locusts.

Upon entering Laramie, I drive along past the courthouse with the other rubbernecking traffic and feel something on my face that has become unfamiliar -- a smile lifting the corners of my lips. It isn't really a happy smile. It's more of a head-shaking what the hell? smirk. The thick torso of my mastiff-mix leans far out the backseat passenger-side window of the ancient Land Cruiser, and he seems to be grinning too. The crowd that's gathered on the sidewalk leans away from the approaching dog's head with his great yellow teeth and ropes of saliva that hang from black lips.

I'm lucky to find a parking spot five blocks from the courthouse despite the extraordinary traffic. There I roll up the windows just enough so the beast can't reach out and cause heart attacks by licking passersby. I dust the animal's dark hair from the white shirt and khaki pants that I wear for this occasion instead of my usual tired jeans, sandals, and untucked flannel shirts. Before walking away from the truck, I pull on a navy sport coat to hide the gun that's clipped to the belt at the back of my pants. I speak softly to the dog as I cinch the tie close around my throat.

"Stay, Oso. Watch the car."

I have never seen anything like the crowd that's swarming on the well-watered lawn outside Albany County's four-story sandstone courthouse. As I wind my way through the masses toward the low steps, I can't stop looking about and feeling that same sardonic turn of my lips. It seems that all the world is here in this small, usually quiet Wyoming city of only twenty-six thousand full-time residents. I have spent time in Laramie twice before: first as a child, more than two decades ago, when my father was assigned to the nearby Air Force base, and again as a cop, just two years ago, when I performed a brief investigation here. In both my recent and distant memories the town was as colorful as any university town but generally peaceful, nothing at all like the scene that affronts me today.

From around the country there are civil rights demonstrators, victims' groups representatives, the NAACP, print reporters, television journalists, ACLU protesters, church groups, titillated tourists, and members of the Ku Klux Klan and various other absurd militias. All are talking or shouting excitedly. I can see that someone has somehow partitioned them, as uniformed deputies allow some on the court side of the street and keep others across from it. Grand Avenue, which lies in between, is lined with double-parked media vans with dish-shaped antennas that extend from their roofs. They have all come for the excitement that can only be born of a true media sensation -- the trial of Kimberly Lee's killers.

Two years ago the murderers of Matthew Shepard were spared the death penalty here in a trial that was broadcast around the globe. Just a year after the pair was sentenced to life in prison for the beating death of the gay university student, while the nation was still focused on the town and the horrors its youth could commit, a new bias-inspired murder swept the headlines like a whirlwind. Another minority student, this one Asian, was raped and strangled, and then further denigrated by racist words written in her own blood. The Shepard killing had seemed an anomaly, but the Lee murder had the national press wondering if something more sinister lurked behind the facade of the state's only liberal college town. The focus on Laramie couldn't be more intense if it were viewed from one of the University of Wyoming's high-powered microscopes.

Everyone is here, I guess, but the citizens of Laramie. I imagine them at home, hiding with their curtains drawn and their shotguns loaded, praying for the wind to blow this circus away across the plains.

A disorderly mob of spectators is queued from the courthouse doors at the top of the steps, down onto the sidewalk, and around the corner. Each one holds a slip of paper that I assume gives him or her a seating pass for the big event. More people gather around those lucky enough to have a place in the line, arguing and pleading for a spot. Amid the crowd at the top of the steps stands one of the largest men I've ever seen, even in a state like Wyoming that breeds big men.

His shaved ebony head rises well above the throng. Those near give him space in deference to both his size and the brown county sheriff's uniform he wears. With his face tilted slightly to one side as he speaks into the radio mounted on his broad shoulder, he watches my approach.

I jostle my way up the steps toward the deputy, pardoning and excusing myself among the turmoil, with one arm extended to guide my way through. The bodies before me give way grudgingly, moving aside only after giving my face a second look. With my courtroom clothes, all-American features, and longish hair, I could be just another pushy reporter cutting in line, or a young attorney or staff member of one of the parties. But my skin is a little too prematurely weathered, and there's the jagged white scar that runs from left eye to upper lip on my otherwise tan skin. They turn aside while speculating as to just what role I perform in this extravaganza.

"Special Agent Antonio Burns," the big man says when I'm near, enunciating each syllable of my title and name, "or should I call you QuickDraw? What are you doing here, man? You're just in time. Closing arguments start in fifteen minutes."

"I really hate being called that, Jones. If I see the columnist who made that up, I'm going to punch him in the nose."

He chuckles, not realizing I'm serious, and I pump the sweaty hand that swallows my own.

"Can you get me inside? I'm supposed to meet my boss, Ross McGee, in there."

The giant nods and then uses his bulk to part the crowd toward the courthouse doors. I'm pulled along in his wake. He beats his fist on the glass to draw the attention of the security officers within. When the door is cracked open by one, Jones barks, "Let him in. He's DCI." Then he grabs my arm and pushes me through.

I slip inside the building, away from the impassioned crowd and into the quiet of the cleared hallway, where there are only a few overwhelmed security guards standing anxiously by the metal detectors. I realize that these rent-a-cops probably don't know what DCI means.

"Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation," I explain to the nearest one and flash my gold shield as the detector registers my gun and shrieks in alarm.

"The courtroom's that way, sir," the guard says, pointing down the hall. I thank him and follow the point.

Inside the courtroom the bench and jury box are empty. But the front of the courtroom is bustling with activity. Where the single defense table should be there are two, one for each of the Knapp brothers' legal teams. The prosecution has only one table, which is next to the jury box. Because the County Attorney represents all the people of the state and the jurors too, he is allowed to sit closest to their box. And you don't want the defendants sitting anywhere near the men and women who will be judging them.

The courtroom itself is a surprisingly small venue for a case that has people across the nation eagerly scanning headlines and watching evening newscasts. There are only about twelve rows of churchlike hard wooden pews for the gallery. Simple white paint adorns the walls, and the only decorations are an American flag and a Wyoming flag, one on each side of the judge's bench, and the gold state seal mounted before it. A short oak wall divides the gallery from the participants.

Secretaries and paralegals gather around the lawyers in the well like cheerleaders. It's easy for me to distinguish the county's attorney from the defendants', even without the location of the tables. The prosecutor is dressed in an expensive dark suit, while the defense attorneys, in the forlorn hope of connecting with the working people on the jury, wear khaki pants, ill-matched ties, and Western-cut sport coats.

My boss at DCI, Ross McGee, stands near the prosecution's table. He is also a lawyer but he's not one of the combatants in this trial. I've been told he's here simply to advise the County Attorney on the more complex legal issues that will doubtless be brought up on appeal, and at which time will become McGee's and the state's responsibility. The local police and prosecutor did not seek our assistance on this case; they wanted to keep the media attention for themselves.

Ross McGee is a striking man. He's very short and very thick, but his blue eyes blaze with the force of a far bigger man. Even without the harsh forward arc of his spine, he would barely reach five feet four inches in height. A white beard tinted the color of rust hangs all the way down to his hard little belly. His hairless scalp is the size and shape of a bowling ball, and it is marked with old scars and freckles. With a crimson Christmas hat, he would look a lot like an evil Santa Claus. Or with a horned helmet, a degenerate dwarf out of J.R.R. Tolkien's imagination. A former Army drill sergeant who had broken the spirits of thousands of boot camp recruits, there still emanates from him an aura of authority and potency despite his age, obesity, and poor health. His voice booms out above the murmurs from the front of the courtroom as he cracks a leg of the prosecution's table with his cane.

"Now don't you step in any shit, Karge," he tells the prosecutor. "I'm getting tired of cleaning your shoes."

The man he addresses smiles politely. I recognize him too. His austere image appears nightly on national newscasts as Nathan Karge, the current Albany County Attorney and likely the next governor of Wyoming. He has already won the primary in a decidedly one-party state. A former civil attorney who is known and respected throughout the Rocky Mountain region, he's finishing the term of the prior County Attorney, who had decided to take a breather after the Shepard trial.

Not wanting to interrupt, I lean against the wall in the back of the courtroom and watch the two men talk. From what I can hear, they are discussing the legal limitations of a closing argument.

McGee is the Deputy Attorney General of the Criminal Division, which is primarily responsible for handling the inevitable appeals to the state supreme court following criminal convictions. I work in an offshoot of that office that assists local police agencies in complex cases, investigates statewide drug distribution, spearheads multijurisdictional task forces, and sticks its nose into local corruption and conflicts of interest. McGee just yesterday ordered me down to this part of the state a week before I'm due at a civil hearing nearby in Cheyenne's federal courthouse. Along with the AG's office as a whole, I'm a defendant, accused of inflicting wrongful death upon three gang members there.

The order to come south a week early was delivered in the form of a phone message with McGee's usual labored breathing and terse, profane language. "Get your ass down to Laramie tomorrow! . . . Some girl, a cretin rock climber like yourself . . . she fell on her head and croaked. . . . The fucking governor wants us to look into it." Vintage McGee.

Two days earlier I'd read about the accident in the newspaper. The girl's name was Kate Danning and she fell off a cliff at a place called Vedauwoo during a late-night climbers' party.

After a few minutes I see the cane pointed my way. "Get your hands out of your pockets," McGee barks across the courtroom. "You look like a goddamn pervert!"

I withdraw one hand to scratch my cheek with my middle finger extending toward him just as the courtroom's doors burst open. Spectators and reporters scramble for prime seats among the rows of wooden pews. I quickly drop into one near where I'd been standing at the rear of the chamber.

The journalists balance legal pads on their knees while clutching pens in their hands. Many are already taking notes, despite the fact that absolutely nothing is happening other than their own entrance. They gaze around them as they scribble, trying to catch and describe the atmosphere, I guess. I don't see Don Bradshaw, the Cheyenne Observer columnist who gave me my unfortunate nickname after the shoot-out with the gangbangers in Cheyenne, so I'm saved from giving the reporters an assault on one of their own to write about. The room had seemed cavernous to me just moments before, but now it feels like a pressure cooker. The faces around me are excited. They've come for a spectacle. People jostle one another for more room on the benches.

The pressure increases when the two defendants are led in by a handful of jailhouse deputies. The Knapp brothers look small and mean next to their Wyoming-size guards. They are clearly related, with the same slicked-back greasy blond hair, low foreheads, carefully tended wisps of facial hair, thin lips, and recessed chins. Their features and postures make them look like some less-evolved breed of humanity. Or maybe more evolved, the way things are going these days. Both wear cheap polyester suits, courtesy of the Public Defenders' Office. They walk stiffly in a sort of awkward shuffle, their knees slightly bent, and with exaggerated caution although neither wears shackles around his ankles. The law dictates that they cannot appear before the jury in any sort of restraints until a verdict is reached. But I can see through their pants the sharp outlines of the bracelike device on each of their legs. Called a stilt, it consists of stiff Velcro cuffs above and below each knee connected with a hinged metal rod. The rods will snap straight if the wearer fully extends his legs by running, slowing him considerably and causing him to look ridiculous, like a man trying to trot while wearing stilts.

Once the brothers are seated with their attorneys, the deputies back off and slump in chairs strategically located for interception. Like nearly everyone else in the room, I look at the two defendants with contempt and disgust. From the televised reports of the case, I know the basic facts of the sadistic rape and murder they committed. And although they haven't yet been convicted, the evidence I heard about sounds overwhelming. I have no trouble myself finding them responsible for the killing. Innocent until proven guilty is only a concept for a jury to apply in a court of law; it has no application to the truth.

Every head in the place, except the defendants', turns and watches sympathetically as more deputies lead an Asian family to a cordoned-off row in the front of the courtroom. A bent old man who I assume is the victim's father, his spine apparently warped from months of sorrow and anger, leads the family. Behind him trails a woman who's crying quietly and three sullen-faced teenaged boys. At the front of the courtroom Nathan Karge, the County Attorney, stands like a solemn usher and bows his head to the family as they take their seats.

Within moments of the family's entrance, a bailiff scurries out of a concealed door behind the bench and shouts, "All rise!" A gavel cracks against wood as loud as a rifle shot. The scribbling and murmuring cease. The people in the room lurch to their feet.

Into the sudden silence, from a second, larger door, the judge emerges. I think she looks like a frail old woman being engulfed by her own black robes until I focus on her face. There's nothing frail about that face. Her lean jaw juts out like the brush guard mounted on the front of my truck. Thick gray hair is pulled severely into a tight bun. She glares out at the reporters crowding her courtroom and says not a word as the jury, a mix of twelve local men and women, is led into the court. All the jurors keep their eyes fixed on the floor as they take their seats. The enormity of the decision they will soon have to make seems to be a great weight upon their heads.

"Be seated," the judge tells the rest of the room once the jurors have found their chairs. She addresses them and says something I always appreciate hearing from a judge in a trial, before the defense makes their attempt to muddy the waters or spread a web of lies: "Let me remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that what you are about to hear is merely argument, not evidence." I only wish it were said right before the defense speaks, which I believe is really the point. But of course then it would be too obvious, too prejudicial, and too true for this truth-finding process. Without further preamble she announces, "Closing argument, Mr. Karge."

"Thank you," Karge says as he strides into the well.

He stands still before the jury members and moves his eyes across theirs, patiently waiting until he establishes contact with each man and woman in the box. Even all the way in the back of the courtroom, I can feel the charisma of the man. His face is earnest but tired, his eyes dark-rimmed from long nights of trial prep, and his rigid posture itself speaks of the anger he personally feels at the spectacular crime committed on his watch. Wearing a dark blue suit as his combat uniform, he looks like a courageous yet weary warrior fighting a losing battle on behalf of civilization. It's easy for me to believe he will be the next governor as the media is predicting.

When Karge begins to speak, even in this electric atmosphere, his words are soft and slow.

"Over the last four days you've heard about a killing," he tells the jury. "And all killings are terrible, but this kind of killing is worse beyond all others. A girl was raped. She was tortured. She was strangled. Then her body was mutilated. After a murder like this, we always ask ourselves why and try to understand. In this case, John and Dan Knapp made it quite easy for us. They spelled it out in Kimberly Lee's blood on the wall above her body. 'Chink bitch,' they wrote." Karge spits those two words out like pieces of bad meat. "That's why. Just because of the color of her skin, the shape of her eyes. And, ladies and gentlemen" -- now his voice rises, and he turns and looks right at the two defendants -- "the evidence has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that these two men committed that most heinous of crimes, for the most wicked of reasons."

Karge starts describing the specifics of what those two animals did to Kimberly Lee, proving himself skillful at summoning up ghastly images in his audience's minds. As magnetic as the prosecutor's voice and words are, I don't want to listen as he begins a detailed analysis of the evidence as he'd presented it to the jury during the People's case. I try to shut it out by studying the rapt faces of the reporters around me. I'm not interested; my years as a state cop and the horrors I've seen have suppressed any morbid curiosity. Besides, I already know enough of the facts because the media has endlessly discussed them for months with the usual intent of titillation.

A young Chinese-American girl, a student at the university, was murdered in her rented house just south of town. Her naked, bound, and desecrated body was discovered by her Narcotics Anonymous counselor, who was also her boyfriend, at one in the morning when he stopped by to check on her. He had been worried about her, as she told him she was going to talk to the police about where and how she used to buy her drugs before getting clean.

When the Albany County sheriff's deputies came on the scene, they found racist slurs written on a wall, finger-painted in blood by a gloved hand. The blood came from where one of her breasts had been sliced off. At two in the morning the police went to the door of a trailer just a few hundred yards away to see if the residents had heard anything. Their knocks were answered by a shotgun blast. Two young men, the Knapp brothers, engaged in a brief, drunken firefight with the police before surrendering. Lightly wounded and handcuffed, one of the brothers slurred to the sheriff himself, "Bitch had it coming."

The evidence was quickly amassed. Inside the Knapp trailer was found a large quantity of methamphetamine, firearms, and racist propaganda. In the cab of their pickup was a bloody work glove along with the missing flesh of Kimberly Lee's breast. Both of the young men were known tweakers -- users of crystal meth, also called crank -- with lengthy criminal histories. A search of the crime scene in Kimberly Lee's home revealed a broken crank pipe with one of their fingerprints on it. The foul words written in blood on the wall were similar to the propaganda found in the Knapps' trailer. The evidence was irrefutable, according to the media and now the County Attorney.

In a town that had been sickened and vilified so recently by the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard, this second killing must have stung like a slap in the face. Shepard's killers were not sentenced to death due only to a merciful plea by Shepard's own parents. But it's unlikely such clemency will be extended to the Knapps. Matthew Shepard's killers acted impetuously, in an act of supreme narcissism, while Kimberly Lee's violators were more outwardly motivated. The killers of Kimberly Lee wanted attention. They begged for it when they wrote those foul words upon her wall, above her corpse, in her own blood. It worked for Charlie Manson and it's working for the Knapps.

The citizens of Wyoming and the nation want their blood now. Only the death penalty, it's believed, will send a message to the town's youth that this butchery will not be tolerated and will proclaim to the nation that the people of Laramie will not condone it. So Nathan Karge has rushed this case to trial and valiantly fought off the Knapps' attorneys' pleas for continuances and venue changes. It has been less than a year since Kimberly Lee was placed in the ground under the scrutiny of television camera lenses from around the country.

There is one reporter who's not frantically scribbling like the rest. She sits across the room, four or five rows in front of me, not far behind where McGee slouches forward with his hands resting on the gold head of his cane. It isn't her spellbound attention that draws my stare, but something else and something obvious. Her long brown hair, her smooth white skin, her fashion model's profile. Her delicate beauty contrasts sharply with the images of rape, death, and hate that Nathan Karge is conjuring with his words. I watch her for a while, until she somehow senses my stare and irritably glances around her.

My attention is drawn back to Karge when I hear his voice again go low and angry like it did at the start. Cynical as I've become of attorneys, I can't help but be moved to vengeful thoughts by the man's words. I forget about that beautiful profile as I listen.

"Ladies and gentlemen, these two men you are about to judge have rights. This state and this nation give the defendants a right to a trial. They've got that. They have a right to be judged on the evidence. They've got that. They have a right to be judged by you, their peers. They've got that. They have a right to have their guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They've got that." Then his voice again starts to rise. "And just as they have these rights, Kimberly Lee and the rest of our community have rights too. The right to be vindicated. The right to be protected from cold-blooded animals. The right not to live in fear because of the color of your skin. Above all, the right to see justice done."

His voice drops to almost a whisper. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, in Kimberly Lee's name, I ask that you enforce those rights. I stand before you seeking justice for her. And the community." He steps close to the Knapp brothers and points a steady finger at each in turn as he says, "I ask that you find John and Dan Knapp guilty of the terrible crimes they committed."

When he finishes, the only sound in the courtroom is that of his own footsteps on the pine floor as he walks back to his seat, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the jury the entire time. Even after Nathan Karge sits, a silence hangs clear and brilliant in the courtroom as if some great truth has been revealed. Finally the lead defense attorney comes to his senses. He scrapes back his chair and rises to face twelve angry pairs of eyes. They are no longer meek, those faces. It doesn't matter what the lawyer says, the verdict is all but delivered.

I look at the back of his clients' heads and wonder if they will regret what they did to that girl when they themselves are bound, not by thin cords like they bound her, but by the fear-scented heavy leather straps of a particular hospital gurney. When the worm-sized intravenous lines are inserted in each arm. It will probably take five years for them to reap what they've sown. Five years of endless appeals and crushed hopes. Five years of taunting by other inmates and guards. Five years of lockdown on death row. And at the final moment, when an unknown and unnamed executioner thumbs the plunger of a syringe and the poison begins its awesome surge toward their hearts, will they scream as Kimberly Lee surely did? Will they finally feel some empathy? I hope so. That scream as the solution of mortality is injected into their veins might make them human again.

At this moment, thinking these uncharitable thoughts in the back of the courtroom, I have no way of knowing that my investigation into a climber's death at Vedauwoo will lead me to discover the Knapps are innocent of Kimberly Lee's murder.

Copyright © 2002 by Clinton McKinzie