David Wolf series Box Set 2

by Jeff Carson

  “He’ll call soon,” Burton said, apparently reading Rachette’s thoughts.

  Rachette looked up and nodded. “I hope so.”

  Munford smiled at Rachette through the billowing smoke.

  Rachette wanted to gaze at her, to smile and walk over and give her a hug, but he also wanted to keep his dignity. He wanted to know what this woman was thinking about when she looked at him. She was the only Byron deputy here, and Byron was the enemy.

  And what if she could be trusted? What next? Was he supposed to ask her out on a date? Is that the vibe she was giving him? Then he’d have to talk to her over dinner, shove his foot in his mouth a few times, then drop her off at her house in awkward silence, and then work with her at the department with her snickering about him with other women, probably with other men, too.

  “We’ve got activity down here.” Nate’s voice scratched through Burton’s Motorola radio. Nate and Fabian had taken up surveillance posts at the intersection of the private house drive and the county road a quarter-mile away.

  Everyone stood and grasped their firearms. Coffee cups tumbled onto the ground. They stared at Burton with held breath.

  “What’s happening?” Burton asked.

  “A convoy of FBI vehicles.”

  They could hear the rumble of tires all the way from the campfire.

  “There’s five of them. They just drove by, heading east.”

  Burton frowned. “Copy that.”

  “They’re gone.”

  They looked at one another.

  Burton made a show of looking at his cell phone. His facial expression said, Come on, Wolf. Let us know what’s going on.

  Chapter 34

  Wolf hovered his finger over the plunger of MacLean’s desk phone.

  “Please.” MacLean shook his head. “I think we’ve established we’re on the same side, haven’t we?”

  Wolf kept still.

  MacLean pressed the phone receiver to his ear and straightened. “Deputy Jackson, this is Sheriff MacLean. I need to speak to the booked-in cell F … I don’t care … now. On the phone … just do it or I’ll get someone down there who will.”

  MacLean sighed, as if it had been painful to talk to one of his deputies that way.

  Wolf pushed the speaker-phone button and they waited.

  Six minutes passed and a tired-sounding Margaret Hitchens came on. “Hello?”

  “Margaret, it’s Sheriff MacLean.”

  She kept silent.

  Wolf suppressed a smile. Margaret had hated MacLean with a passion ever since the picture-blackmailing tactic he’d pulled. She still blamed MacLean for Wolf not being sheriff.

  MacLean cleared his throat. “I have someone here with me who wants to talk to you. Please don’t say his name. Got that?”

  “Hey, Margaret. It’s me, Dave.”

  “Da … hi. What?” She lowered her voice. “What’s going on? Are you … are they no longer—”

  “We need to get access to Sarah’s real-estate transaction records. How do we do that?”

  “You and I already looked at them. I thought you said nothing stood out.”

  “That was then.”

  Bonnie stepped near the phone and spoke up. “Margaret, it’s Bonnie MacLean. I’ve been telling them they just need to get into your intranet. If you give me the username and password, I’ll navigate everything for them.”

  Margaret blew into the phone and it sounded like the county building had exploded on the other end. “And have you snooping around my figures?”

  “Margaret,” Wolf said.

  “You can go into the office, grab all her files. I have them all there. Just ask Jeb.”

  “I can’t. I’m still on the run.”

  “And you’re with MacLean?”

  Wolf rubbed his temples. “Margaret.”

  She exhaled into the phone. “All right, fine. Margothegreat.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Username is Margothegreat, no spaces. Password is”—she hesitated—“Booboo45.”

  Bonnie smirked and jotted down the information on a pad of paper. “Thanks, Margaret,” she said in a sing-song voice.

  “When am I getting out of here?”

  “We’re working on it,” Wolf said.

  “Make sure that bitch doesn’t snoop around any more than—”

  “Bye bye, Margo.” Bonnie reached over and pressed the phone plunger and settled in behind the computer.

  Fingers flying on the keyboard, she pulled up a website, logged in, and after a few seconds had Sarah’s profile on screen.

  Wolf, MacLean, and Luke crowded behind her and watched her navigate.

  “What time frame are we looking at?” Bonnie asked.

  Wolf stared at Sarah’s headshot in the upper corner of the screen.

  “Wolf?” Luke asked.

  “I think we should start from the beginning. I mean, how many transactions can she have since she started three years ago?”

  “One hundred and eighty-four.” Bonnie whistled. “Christ, that’s like five deals a month. I would’ve liked to have this girl on my team.” She covered her mouth. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, David. I’m such a heel talking about her like that.”

  “Let’s just start from the beginning.”

  She clicked the mouse and a list from three years ago came up. She scrolled down slowly, and, just like the last time he’d seen the list, nothing seemed unusual.

  They seemed to all be single-family homes, purchased by individuals. Once in a while there were batches of properties labeled with the same date, purchased by the same person or business entity.

  “There.” Luke pointed at the bottom of the screen.

  Scrolling into view came five properties in a row, all purchased by the same company.

  “WCB Incorporated,” Luke said. “WCB. Weren’t those the initials on the insurance card in that guy’s truck?”

  Wolf nodded. “Yeah, WCB Holdings, I think.”

  “Quite a coincidence.”

  “Yes it is.”

  Wolf leaned forward. “These properties are all to the south. They were in Byron County before the merger. Is that normal? For an agent to go out of the county to sell homes to someone like that?”

  Bonnie shrugged. “If she’s good, she goes where the sale takes her.”

  “Is there a way to look at those houses?” Wolf asked.

  She nodded and opened another internet browser tab. “I’ll just look up the MLS numbers on Google.” She cut and pasted the first number and then clicked the result.

  A website listing of a house came up.

  “What a dump,” MacLean said.

  And it was. A low house that measured 2,340 square feet according to the statistics listed, its white siding was stained with streaks of brown, the roof sagging in the middle, two holes gaping. Windows were punched out, and a pair of breasts were scrawled in spray paint on the garage door, which itself hung askew behind six-foot-high weeds. It looked like the kind of place a serial murderer went to hatch plans.

  “Maybe they were interested in the land,” Bonnie said. “Look here. Forty-one acres. But … hmmm … it’s out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no well. Electricity, but no well water? They’d have to haul in the water in truck loads. No gas service. Pretty useless piece of land, if you ask me. Way too remote. I’m sure the roads out there are a mess, too.”

  Wolf nodded. “And the other properties?”

  She looked up the next one.

  It was similar in every way: run-down, in the middle of nowhere, a big lot of land.

  All five of them fit the same bill.

  “Look for more transactions by this same company, please.”

  Bonnie scrolled fast, and they all watched the column, waiting for the initials WCB.

  They appeared again near the top of the list.

  “Here you go.” Bonnie leaned back. “Two transactions, looks like five months ago. This last spring.”

  Wolf pointed. “But these two
were in Sluice County.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, looks like they were.” She looked up the MLS numbers on Google and once again the two properties were run-down, on large plots of land, and in the middle of nowhere.

  “Let’s pull back on that map,” Wolf said.

  Bonnie pulled back.

  “Can you do directions from here?” Wolf said.

  She pushed the directions button from their current location and pointed. “That one’s just a few minutes from our house.”

  Wolf turned to MacLean.

  MacLean leaned back. “What?”

  “You have any guns in this house?”

  MacLean raised his eyebrows. “No, I don’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Get your guns.”

  MacLean left the room. “Do I have guns? Ha!”

  Chapter 35

  Patterson sipped her coffee and squinted against the sun blazing through the windshield.

  Lancaster bounced in his seat as they drove from the asphalt to unpaved road, his mirrored glasses reflecting the mountainous landscape ahead.

  They were traveling upward along the winding dirt road, past expensive homes built out of large tracts of forest, on the way to Dennis and Angela Muller’s house.

  Sarah’s parents themselves were back in town from Vail because of the news that Jack had gone missing. They’d been brought into the station for questioning on the FBI’s orders. At least that was the official reason. Patterson now knew they were being held for protection as much as anything else.

  And now Patterson and Lancaster were out here playing a game of charades, though only she was aware of it. At least she hoped that was the case. She was acting like there was still a chance to find Jack Wolf, though she knew he was no longer missing.

  Rachette, Wilson, Munford, Burton, and who knew who else were with him. She was certain of that. Maybe even Wolf himself.

  For the third time, she picked up her coffee from the cup holder and put her phone down in its place.

  She needed to establish a pattern, showing Lancaster that this was going to be how she handled her phone today: leaving it out in the open repeatedly.

  Once again, she picked it up and pushed the button, as if anxious to see whether any news had come in since the last time she’d looked at it. Seconds ago.

  Lancaster kept his mirror shades forward, but she knew he was looking. He was an observant man. Hopefully just not so observant that he suspected she was pulling off an act.

  She swallowed another bitter sip of coffee. The third strong cup was not helping her nerves any. At least the caffeine-induced fidgeting was helping her play the part of concerned family friend of Jack Wolf, wondering where the hell he’d gone missing to.

  She had to calm down.

  She was thinking about it too much. She thought about her mother, and wondered how her night’s sleep had been on a hard jail-cell cot. Poor Mom. This was a woman who used two Thermarest pads underneath her sleeping bag when she went camping. Those jail-cell cots were like concrete.

  She wished she could tell her to not worry, that they were keeping her there for her own safety now.

  Lancaster braked and pulled to the side of the dirt road.

  “What’s going on?” Her heart leaped and she looked down at her phone. Still nothing.

  He skidded to a stop and pulled out his own cell phone. Careful to keep it angled away from her, he stepped out of the SUV and walked to the rear, the phone to his cheek.

  Turning an ear, she listened hard, but only heard the grumblings of his deep voice.

  Keeping one eye out the window, she pressed the button and woke the screen to make sure she hadn’t missed a text.

  Damn it. She opened the window and poured out the rest of her coffee.

  Lancaster got in without a word and drove.

  “Who was that?”

  “A friend.”

  Patterson raised an eyebrow. “You have friends?”

  She put her phone down in the cup holder again and resumed her silent brooding.

  Chapter 36

  “Stop here.” Wolf studied the map printout. “It’s going to be within view after that corner up there. Pull into the trees.”

  MacLean turned off the road and bounced through a dip, then revved the diesel engine as they climbed up a rise, slaloming between the trunks of ponderosa pines.

  At the top of the rise Wolf, MacLean, and Luke got out.

  The wind howled over the ridge, bringing on it the scent of pinesap and an unmistakable odor.

  “If that’s not the Mary Jane, then there’s a family of skunks who got murdered on the other side of this hill,” Luke said.

  They walked to the top of the hill and ducked down. Below them on the valley floor was a house squatting in the trees, surrounded by a cluster of pickup trucks.

  “Down,” Wolf said.

  He recognized the house from the listing on the computer earlier, but it looked to have been renovated on the outside. Four men with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders paced out front between six pickup trucks—all full-sized, all decked out with lift kits and roll bars with halogen lights mounted on top.

  “Looks like we found our cartel,” MacLean said, pressing his binoculars to his eyes. “M4 rifles on their shoulders and pistols on their hips.”

  He handed the binoculars to Wolf.

  The image bobbed into view. Four men pacing out front. There was a water tank on stilts in the rear with an insulated pipe leading from it into the back of the house, and two trap doors on the ground with exhaust pipes that spewed blue smoke.

  “Grow house,” Wolf said. “Water comes in from that tank, and electricity from the generators in the ground out back.”

  Wolf pulled the binoculars away and ducked down.

  “That’s a solid motive for killing Sarah,” Luke said gently. “If the cartel converted all those houses she sold them into grow houses, that means that, after all was said and done, she was a liability.”

  MacLean ducked down. “There’s an SUV pulling up. Shit, it must have been right behind us on the way in.” MacLean surveyed the hillside behind them.

  Wolf watched as a black SUV pulled in front of the house and three men stepped out. “That was the SUV parked across the valley from my house.”

  “That’s definitely not FBI,” Luke said. “Too much aftermarket crap on it.”

  Three other men streamed out of the house to meet the new arrivals.

  Wolf recognized the last man who exited the building. “It’s our guy from the storage locker.”

  “What?” Luke reached out. “Give me those.”

  Wolf handed over the binoculars.

  “These guys look pretty well armed,” she said, handing them back. “I don’t like this.”

  Wolf pulled the eyepieces back to his face, and he saw even more men streaming outside. “Ten of them. Could be more inside. Looks like our albino guy with the tattoo is the leader, the way everyone’s acting toward him. I knew we should’ve killed him.”

  “Can I see?” MacLean asked.

  Wolf ignored him. “He looks pissed.” Albino was pointing at the driver of the SUV. His raised voice drifted up to them on the breeze.

  Wolf raked the magnified image from man to man and then froze. For the first time, he noticed a German shepherd lying down. Its ears were perked and it was staring right at him.

  “Everyone down.”

  A bark echoed up the hill just as they ducked. The dog started going crazy until a man yelled for it to shut up.

  They slid backwards on their stomachs.

  “Time to go anyway,” Wolf said.

  “Are we going to finally hear about this plan of yours?” Luke asked.

  “Yes.”

  MacLean and Luke looked at each other.

  “And is part of your plan informing the FBI about all of this?” MacLean asked.

  “And then what?” Wolf opened the passenger door. “Sit in some interrogation room in Denver while these
guys carry out whatever they’ve got planned? No. The safety of my son’s not up for grabs. We’ll turn ourselves in after these guys are neutralized.”

  Wolf climbed in the passenger side and closed the door.

  MacLean and Luke followed in silence.

  “Where to?” MacLean asked, climbing up behind the wheel.

  “Back the way we came.”

  Chapter 37

  “Wolf is here,” Fabian’s voice said through Burton’s radio. “Wolf is here.”

  Those who were sitting on their camp chairs stood. Those who were standing gravitated to Burton and his blaring radio.

  Rachette’s pulse jumped, because he knew action followed Wolf closely, and at the same time he felt the comfort of knowing that the quarterback was here.

  Munford stepped close. “Holy crap, is that MacLean? What’s going on?”

  Rachette shook his head as he watched the big diesel pickup lumber toward them. “I have no idea.”

  They parked and Wolf, Luke, and MacLean stepped out.

  “There he is,” Burton’s voice boomed.

  Wolf smiled sheepishly and shook hands all around.

  MacLean ignored the cold reception from Burton and stepped to Munford and Wilson. “Aren’t you two supposed to be at work?”

  Munford’s face went red.

  “Sorry, sir,” Wilson said. “Duty called.”

  Rachette looked past MacLean to Wolf as he approached Jack. They all knew Wolf and Jack’s relationship had run up on rocky ground, and Jack’s earlier comments had revealed just how unsteady things had become.

  Silence descended as they watched the greeting from the corners of their eyes.

  Munford turned to Rachette and smiled wide when Wolf and Jack embraced.

  “Baine and Yates are here,” Fabian’s voice scratched through the radio.

  A beat-up SUV rocked side to side up the road and parked. Baine and Yates stepped out and hesitated at the sight of MacLean.

  “Christ,” MacLean said, “is anyone even at the station today? Who’s next? Are the cafeteria workers coming too?”