by Jeff Carson
When he shut the door, Agent Todd turned to the one-way glass and clasped his hands behind his back. “He’s lying.”
Wolf had watched the interrogation from the beginning. Attakai had said little, which was smart. To say anything in an interrogation, no matter what the circumstances, was as good as a confession of guilt. Words could be twisted. Investigators and lawyers and juries could twist inflections of words. Anything you say can be used against you in the court of law.
“What’s next?” Luke asked.
Agent Todd turned and ran a hand across his face. “We found the phone at his house so he’s ours for now. So we’ll keep him and try again later with his lawyer present. In the meantime, I want to get into this guy’s past with a fine-tooth comb.” He looked at Agent Luke. “We need to talk to Mary Attakai.”
“We already did that two years ago,” she said.
“So talk to her again.”
She looked at her partner and then Wolf. “You ready to take a drive south?”
Chapter 15
H
ighway 50 traveled west across the high flat lands of the Rockies, meandered up and over steep mountain passes, and dumped onto the western slope. There Wolf followed highway 550 through Ridgway and into the jagged mountains to the south.
Luke drove all of it like she was going for Nascar points, passing every single vehicle she came upon at almost twice the speed limit.
Wolf kept up for the first half hour of the three-and-a-half-hour drive, then decided against dying and eased off the gas.
Instead he enjoyed the drive. He was in country he hadn’t visited for years. The mountains here reminded him of those found in Patagonia, South America, with their steep rocky crests that took on all kinds of shapes.
He passed through Ouray, which billed itself “Switzerland of America” because of its location in a narrow head of a valley, surrounded on all sides by steep cliffs. It was a quaint town that he and Sarah had once visited in College, but his destination was twenty-five miles south over Red Mountain Pass.
The section of 550 from Ouray to Silverton was dubbed “The Million Dollar Highway” as it snaked over Red Mountain Pass. It was generally thought to be one of the most dangerous roads in Colorado, with its sharp switchbacks, steep drop-offs, and lack of guardrails, and when Wolf was done with the white-knuckle drive he thought it could use another few million in modern upgrades.
After Red Mountain pass, the road eased down in elevation alongside Mineral Creek, cutting through aspens, and finally dumped out into the bowl valley where Silverton sparkled in the late day sun.
Greene Street, the main thoroughfare that ran through Silverton, was paved and modern feeling, but at the same time felt to be a hundred fifty years ago. The side streets were dirt, the buildings between them squares and rectangles with covered wooden walkways in front just like the pioneer days when miners dug silver out of the surrounding mountains, but with fresh paint jobs of orange, green, red, blue, and yellow—with neon in the windows and motorcycles parked in front.
A row of bicycles lined the wall outside a bar, which was bustling with a happy hour crowd of locals mixed with tourists coming off the steam train in from Durango fifty miles to the south.
Already passing through town, he reached the end of Greene Street within seconds and pulled into the San Juan County Sheriff’s building. He was surprised to find his vehicle the only in the lot besides a beat up Ford Bronco with a San Juan Sheriff’s department logo on it.
For a moment he wondered if Luke had skidded off Red Mountain Pass, landing in a bright explosion in the river below, then decided that would be a manner of death too tame for Kristen Luke.
Wolf stepped out and stretched his arms overhead. The scent of beer and fried food wafting up from blocks down saturated the still air, which was rapidly chilling in the fading daylight.
His work boots crunched on gray gravel as he walked around the front of the building. It was thick and solid construction, built from smooth, gray stone with a bell tower jutting up in front. Silverton was the San Juan County seat, the only municipality within the whole county, which said volumes of how rugged and remote the surrounding terrain was.
Climbing the two stone steps, he grabbed hold of a cold piece of metal history and pushed, and a heavy door creaked inwards.
Dust tickled his nose as he walked in, and each footfall on the old wooden floor sent echoing moans through the building.
A scuffed wooden desk sat unoccupied in the entryway underneath a vaulted ceiling.
“Hello?” He called out.
No answer.
There was an open doorway ahead with two desks inside. A topo map hung on the wall between them, marked with pins and notes dangling from thumbtacks.
Modern office phones sat on the desks, but everything else looked from a half century ago—the desks themselves, the wheeled chairs, the turquoise wall, the faded pictures that hung on them.
An old Motorola police dispatch radio sat on a table underneath a warped glass window. A wooden sign hung on the doorjamb said Sheriff Sue Meal.
A call bell sat on the entryway desk so he tapped a finger. The tiny clang pierced the silence.
There was a rustling, and then a toilet flushing deep in the recesses of the building, then running water and a door slamming.
“I’m coming!” A man’s voice said deep within the building. “Coming. Coming.”
Quick footsteps came closer and a man dressed in jeans and a button up khaki sheriff’s department top appeared at the doorway.
Wolf eyed the stripes on his uniform. “Hello, Sergeant.”
The man craned his neck and looked past him. “You Wolf?”
“Yep. You Vernon?” Wolf held out a hand.
“Yep.” Sergeant Vernon had a champion thumb-wrestler grip. One that was still moist from the bathroom. “I thought the feds were coming, too.”
“They are.” He wiped his hand on his jeans. “They haven’t been here yet?”
Vernon shook his head.
On cue the door clacked and flew open, and Hannigan’s bulky figure poured inside followed by Luke on his heels. They both wore sunglasses for the first five or so steps, like they were following some obscure fed protocol on how to enter a building with maximum intimidation.
Luke stepped around Hannigan and thrust out her hand, pulling off her glasses. “Special Agent Luke.”
“Hi.” Vernon wiped his hand and shook. “Sergeant Vernon.”
“This is Special Agent Hannigan.”
Hannigan was preoccupied with looking up the staircase and the walkway above.
“Hi.” Vernon’s boyish brown eyes were taking in every inch of Luke, his breathing going rapid, his face turning red behind his two-day beard.
“You have what we need?” Luke locked on his eyes.
“Yeah. The report? Yeah.”
“The Jessica Meinhoff report.” A smiled tugged at her lips.
Another man, another piece of putty in Special Agent Kristen Luke’s hands. It was a superpower.
“You got it. It’s … in here.” Vernon waved a hand and walked through the doorway. “Go ahead and follow me.”
Luke followed him and then Wolf. Hannigan took up the rear, and it sounded like a rhinoceros was following them through the narrow wooden hallways of the ancient building.
They passed a closed door and Luke made a show of pinching her nose on the way by while Vernon obliviously led them onward.
“In here.” Vernon unlocked a doorknob with a cartoon-version of a key on an oversized hoop keychain. Flicking on a light inside, he pushed open the door and held out his hand. “There you go. It’s the one on the right.”
Luke stood blinking. “What’s this?”
The room was six by six feet at most. There was a folding card table with two cardboard file boxes atop them. Both were warped and leaning haphazardly, like they’d been hosed down and then tossed inside the room.
“Last year’s flood got to the files. Sno
wed two feet and then rained two inches on top of that. Freak, thousand-year type of thing. Flooded out the whole basement, so we had to move the files up here.”
“And keep them in the same boxes,” Luke said under her breath.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She walked to the box and pulled out a thin manila folder.
“That’s it,” Vernon said.
“It’s the only one in here.”
Vernon hitched his jeans up, eyeing them defensively. “Yeah. Never had many files.”
Luke peeked inside the other box, clearly out of sheer curiosity, made a face, and came back out of the room.
“Can we look at this in your office?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure.” Vernon led them back through the narrow hallway and to the office. He flicked a switch and an overhead yellow light turned the turquoise room green.
Luke slapped down the file and opened it, revealing a stack of water-damaged photographs.
Looking at one in particular proved worthless, because each photo was at least half-damaged by water, but spreading them all out on the desk gave them a clear enough picture.
A grim picture.
Jessica Meinhoff had been a pretty young woman until Fred Wilcox was done with her.
Agent Hannigan looked down at them with a somber look, the muscles of his jaw flexing beneath his smooth facial skin.
“Jessica was twenty-one years old.” Sergeant Vernon stood a few paces away keeping his eyes off the photographs. “Had just come home for the summer from her junior year at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs.”
When Vernon stopped talking, Luke looked up at him. “No, keep going.”
“Right.” Vernon nodded. “Twenty-one. Came home for the summer. She hitched a ride with another guy in town that was also at CMC. They weren’t dating or anything, just friends.”
Wolf listened to the story and studied the photographs closer. Jessica Meinhoff was naked, tossed in the bushes like a discarded dishrag. Her clothing was ripped and strewn in the grass.
It lacked the symmetry of the other seven victims, the thoughtful, artistic touches.
“… found her while she was hiking with her dog up at Boulder Gulch. It’s just right there, you can walk out the front door here and be there in minutes. Anyway, her dog found her body, and she came running and screaming to us. I was just out of the police academy. It was my first year in the department.” Vernon’s Adam’s apple bobbed and his eyes glazed over. “Never seen anything like that, and sure hope I don’t ever again.”
“I know what you mean,” Luke said, studying a photograph closely. “Who did the rape kit?”
“We got help from La Plata County. Guys down in Durango. We don’t really have the means.”
Luke nodded. “Tell me about your investigation.”
“The whole town was crazy for weeks after the killing. You know, like pitch forks and torches out in the middle of the night type stuff.
“We figured out she’d been drinking that night down the street at the Handlebar. She showed up with four men, all around the same age, all transplants from elsewhere who worked at the mountain in the winter.”
“The mountain?” Hannigan asked.
“The ski resort up the valley.”
Hannigan nodded.
“We questioned all of them, and the patrons at the bar. Everyone had the same story that she left by herself that night. The owner of the bar, the waitresses, the patrons, they all corroborated. Even so, we brought in the four men who came into the bar with her. None of them had any defensive wounds.” He shrugged. “We took DNA swabs, and La Plata checked them against the rape kit. No match. We had nothing on them, so we turned our investigation outward. And found shit. Pardon my French.”
“Where are these men now?”
Vernon chuckled humorlessly. “They left town. Ran out in the following months, you could say. It didn’t matter that they were innocent. I mean, they were my friends … anyway, nobody could ever get what happened to Jessica out of their minds, you know? They kept looking at them like they knew something. Fights would break out. And her freakin’ dad. He was stalking them. Pulling them aside on the street, asking questions, basically threatening them.”
“Jessica Meinhoff’s father?” Wolf asked.
“Yeah. Guy was taking the investigation into his own hands. He was always a drunk, and, well, let’s just say that after her death we got calls every other day about Chris Meinhoff. He was in here harassing us once a week too. Asking about DNA tests, whether or not we botched it.” Vernon snorted at the memories.
“Where’s he now?” Luke asked.
“Drank himself to death a couple winters ago. Found his body down by the river next to two handles of Jim Beam.”
They let the silence take over for a beat.
“Anyway, after you guys came in a couple years ago,” Vernon pointed at Luke and Hannigan, “with the new DNA evidence from down south, that put us at ease, that’s for sure. Up until then, you’d be walking around here and wonder how many times you’d seen the killer that day. Wonder if you’d been having a beer with him that night. We were all on edge. And now, what? He’s up in Rocky Points?” Vernon looked at Wolf.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Luke said. “Have you ever heard of a man named Jeremy Attakai?”
Vernon shook his head.
“How about Fred Wilcox?” She produced a pair of photographs from her pocket and showed them to Sergeant Vernon.
He studied them and turned down his mouth. “Hmmm, nope. Can’t remember ever seeing these guys around here.”
She smiled apologetically. “You’ve been a big help. Thank you.”
Vernon looked like a whipped puppy at the prospect of her ending the conversation. “Yeah. No problem.”
“Give Sheriff Sue our regards, and tell her I say hi,” she said.
They shook hands and Luke gave him a wink.
Hannigan and Wolf exchanged a glance, Hannigan rolling his eyes as he stepped out of the San Juan County municipal building.
The sky outside had darkened to a deep blue, the final glow behind the western mountains fading like cooling embers of a campfire.
Gathering in the dirt parking lot outside next to the vehicles, Hannigan looked longingly down the street. “Let’s get down to Durango. I’m hungry and I need a beer.”
Chapter 16
Rachette tried to ignore her, but it was impossible with her incessant talking.
“And she has a guaranteed job when she gets into town.” Patterson raised her eyebrows and turned to him.
He slowed to a stop at the stop sign and shook his head. He shouldn’t have mentioned his sister. “Julie’s a bitch. You don’t know her the way I do. She’ll do something stupid, then I’ll have to clean up her mess.”
Patterson gave him a puzzled look. “Are you describing yourself right now?”
“You know what?” Rachette gunned the engine. “Screw you.”
“I’m sorry, but come on.” She twisted in her seat. “I’m just sick and tired of watching the dance. You watching Charlotte’s every move, still drooling over her like you have been since the day you met her. Her trying to make you jealous with an older guy.”
“You think she’s trying to make me jealous?” he asked. Probably a little too quickly, but he’d been wondering what the hell she was doing with that guy. He was a nerd. Way older than Rachette. The opposite of him in every way. It puzzled him why Charlotte had latched onto Gene so quickly. Now it made sense if she was trying to get back at Rachette.
“Yeah,” she said. “I do. I mean, Gene’s a nice guy, good-looking, smart—”
“Okay.”
Her expression softened. “But she clearly loves you. Don’t you value that? Don’t you want to patch things up with her?”
He shook his head. “I told you. She doesn’t want to hear anything I have to say.”
“Well you hurt her. Badly.”
Ra
chette said nothing.
“Maybe your sister could help. You never know. She comes into town and stays with you, and she could give you some insight as to how to approach it with Munford. This might be a blessing in disguise.”
Yeah right. He knew her mother-in-law was babysitting her son nowadays and Patterson resented it. She’d been in a pissy mood for over a month because of the situation. Patterson was looking for any excuse to get the old lady out of the picture. She must be desperate with pushing such a thinly veiled agenda.
“I know this is hard to believe,” Patterson said, “but your sister is a likable person. Which is so, so hard for me to believe.”
Rachette pinched his eyebrows together. “Thanks.”
“Seriously. She has none of your genetic traits it’s …” she widened her eyes. “Wait. Was Julie adopted?”
Rachette gave her a look that said I’ll murder you if you speak again.
“Is she?”
She didn’t get the hint. His partner was too lost in her thoughts to realize the subject was done. Dead. That his sister was dead to him.
It was infuriating how Julie had somehow won these people over with one quick visit two years ago. Now it was childhood all over again. The way she danced and flaunted in front of everyone, while he was left sitting in the corner by himself. Now she wanted to roll into town and start dancing in front of everyone here.
“How the hell did she turn out like she did, and you turned out like you did?” Patterson asked, a shit-eating smirk on her face.
He jerked the wheel to the side of the road and slid the SUV to a stop, enveloping them in a cloud of dust. “How the hell did she turn out different? Hmm, well, let’s see. Maybe because she didn’t get smacked around when dad got drunk. Or when he was pissed off because his son didn’t hit a homerun in baseball for three years. Maybe because she used to get hugged by her parents, not punched in the fucking nose!”
Patterson’s face dropped and she put a hand over her mouth.
Good. Suck on that, he thought.
His breathing was shallow and before he knew it tears ran down his face. “God damn it. Look what you made …” he stopped talking, because the sound of his voice reminding him of being twelve years old again.
