Read Online The Edge of Justice by Clinton McKinzie - Free Book Online

forest to, according to Bender's report, “investiget.”
    Once at Vedauwoo, Bradley Karge led the two officers with flashlights to the base of a cliff where a young female lay facedown on the rocks. Deputy Knight found no pulse and determined that she was in fact deceased. Sergeant Bender called for the county coroner's team to come and pick up the body.
    Despite the circumstances, I can't help but smile as I read the last line of Bender's handwritten report: “There was no sign of fowl play.”
    Fortunately, the county's part-time coroner did a somewhat better job once he arrived near dawn with his staff of two local mortuary attendants. Probably because of the recent cross-examination he'd had to endure during the Lee trial, he had the good sense to photograph the body before it was moved to the morgue. Little else is contained in his initial report from the scene other than that he'd taken some photos, determined that the girl was dead, and that she had apparently fallen from a height of more than one hundred feet down a sheer cliff.
    The next section of the file is the notes from the autopsy, which had been conducted that same afternoon. The deceased is described in them as a healthy nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, sixty-four inches in height and weighing 110 pounds. I only skim the descriptions of her injuries, which appear to be numerous contusions to the entire front of her body, burst organs, and broken bones from her face to her feet. There is a note of a preliminary blood test that revealed the presence of both methamphetamine and marijuana in her system.
    I skip ahead to the coroner's determination of the “Cause of Death” at the bottom of the page and read that it was blunt-force trauma to the torso and head. The more interesting part of any coroner's report is the section entitled “Manner of Death,” of which the coroner has only five choices: Homicide, Suicide, Accidental, Natural, and Undetermined—Pending Investigation. The sheriff had been correct in telling me that the coroner found Kate Danning's death to be accidental with no further need for any inquiry.
    “More coffee, honey?” the waitress asks.
    “Please.” I smile at her and hold out my cup so as not to risk having any spill on the documents open before me.
    “You or your dog need anything else?”
    Oso raises his head and looks at her hopefully, but I tell her no.
    “That guy's a monster. What kind of dog is he anyway?” she says, studying Oso's black coat, his flat, blunt head, and his enormous size.
    “No one really knows exactly, but I think he's some sort of mastiff. They have dogs in Tibet that look a lot like him. My mother just calls him the Beast.”
    The waitress laughs as she leaves a check for me, then goes back inside.
    I look back down at the page in front of me as I sip my coffee, my mind settling for a moment upon my parents' forced retirement to my grandfather's ranch in Argentina. My father had been on the verge of becoming a general when my brother was charged with manslaughter. Shortly after that I killed the three gangbangers in Cheyenne. My parents now lived in near-isolation on the ranch, wondering what they'd done to turn their boys into killers. Each in some quiet way blames the other, I know. My mother believes the games my father taught us as children and his career with its ever present possibility of violence nudged us in the wrong direction. My father worries it has something to do with our blood—the intermingling of three violent and warring cultures: Scots, Spaniards, and Pampas Indios. The last time I talked to them they were cool with each other, considering the prospect of divorce after nearly thirty-five years of marriage.
    Willing myself back to work, I focus on the page again. My eyes fall upon the descriptions of the injuries sustained. The coroner had noted that there was a contusion to the rear of her head and a hairline fracture of her skull, again caused by blunt-force trauma. After