David Wolf series Box Set 2

by Jeff Carson

  “Okay. And being rude to me makes you feel better?”

  Patterson rolled her eyes. “I’m about to get married.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I’m going to get some pressure to start a family now.”

  “So? Do you not want kids?”

  “I do.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There. That’s the problem.”

  Munford frowned. “I’m not following.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen how you talk about family—about having a family—and I can’t even imagine doing that and keeping this job. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  Munford shrugged. “Says who?”

  Patterson felt a surge of annoyance. “This is what I’m talking about here. You don’t see the roadblocks standing in front of you. I watched my mother resent us for years because she had to quit her job as a public prosecutor to raise four kids. You think you can keep a career with the department and have a family?”

  Munford shrugged again. “I think I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

  Patterson smiled momentarily and shook her head.

  “I think y—”

  “Period.” Munford glared at her. “My mom kept her job and raised three kids. She had no choice because my dad got coked up and ditched us, and if she’d stopped working we would’ve starved. If she can do it, I can.”

  Patterson blinked.

  “I think that if you have concerns, you should talk to Wolf, not me. But if you want my opinion, life is what you make it.”

  Patterson suddenly felt dumb. She knew what it meant to make a goal and commit until it was accomplished. Her martial arts, her career so far? That had been how she’d lived her entire life.

  “Thanks.”

  Charlotte smiled. “You got it.”

  Chapter 28

  Jet had been trained by the Vail PD as a detection dog. He would ride around with an officer in the pre-legalized-marijuana era and assist on routine traffic stops, often sniffing out weed, magic mushrooms, and other illicit substances that Coloradans tended to carry around in their cars more often than jumper cables.

  It was lights, pull to the shoulder, “Do you know how fast you were going?”, and then Jet had his paws on the trunk, sniffing a hit inside.

  Other specialty dogs included cadaver and search and rescue, both of which spent their days sniffing out human scents. Cadaver dogs were often bloodhounds. SAR K-9 units were German shepherds in Vail. Vail had enough money to fill its back bowls with twenty-dollar bills. If they needed another SAR dog, they’d get one and train it. Same with a cadaver dog. Multi-tasking a dog would be out of the question. Or so Wolf had thought.

  Because now, for the second time that day, Wolf followed Shumway and Boydell up the dry wash and onto the plateau. And for the second time that day, Jet went berserk when they reached Levi’s camp. And now Wolf had the sinking feeling that this dog had some other specialty experience under its collar.

  Wolf endured the air-shaking barks as he pulled up behind Shumway’s truck and parked. He shut off the engine and let Jet out. Once again Jet went to the back of his SUV and stood expectantly.

  “What’s going on?” Shumway asked.

  “I don’t know. Go on, Jet.”

  Jet sprang off the edge of the road and scurried down the side of the hill, weaving his way past bushes and trees, heading in the same general direction as before.

  Wolf followed.

  “Where you going?” Shumway asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I get there.”

  Wolf slid on his heels down the steep dirt road shoulder.

  Jet disappeared among the trees and shrubs, so he stopped and listened. Panting, and paws pattering the dry earth, came from below and to the right.

  Assisted by gravity, Wolf paced at a fast jog, slaloming to avoid sage and cactus, ducking to miss juniper and pinyon boughs, jumping up and over red and white rocks and downed logs.

  As he rounded a large sage, Jet came into view. The dog’s rear was low, his ears standing straight up, head bouncing and jaw snapping as he barked.

  Wolf walked up and put a hand on Jet’s back. He stopped barking and whined.

  “Good boy,” Wolf said.

  Jet sat.

  Wolf stared at a low mound of sandy dirt. The shape unmistakable. He tilted his head. A sand-encrusted patch of grass at his feet had been uncovered by Jet, and Wolf stepped back as he realized it was a tuft of hair.

  “What d’ya got?” Shumway yelled down.

  Shovel marks were gouged into the earth all around—next to the mound, behind Wolf’s feet—and amid those, a flurry of shoe prints with the diamond pattern.

  “Wolf!”

  “You need to come down here. Mr. Boydell needs to stay up there.”

  Chapter 29

  Wolf stood back as Shumway snapped on a pair of gloves and pushed the piled earth away, revealing ghost white skin crusted with maroon dirt.

  There was more hair, this part caked with red mud, and brown eyebrows and then dirt-packed slit eyes. As Shumway continued to remove the fine earth with his rubber-gloved hands, a crooked-looking face emerged.

  “Levi Joseph?” Wolf asked.

  Shumway looked at him and nodded. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “What’s happening down there?” Boydell, who’d been pacing the road on top, now stopped. He was a silhouette against the reddening sky. “What did you find?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Shumway said in a low voice. “Boydell was close to this kid.”

  Wolf was standing and out in the open from Boydell’s vantage. He held up a finger and said, “We’ll let you know when we know, Bradley.”

  Boydell scoffed and resumed pacing.

  “Holy mother of …” Shumway said as he brushed away dirt from the neck area, revealing a slash of dark red across the throat. “Just about cut off his head.”

  Wolf watched as Shumway worked.

  “Chest is slashed to hell,” Shumway said unnecessarily, because the shredded, red-stained clothing and dirt-packed crevices explained it all.

  Wolf grabbed a rock and bent down next to the body. He scraped off some of the caked-on dirt and revealed a wound underneath seven or eight inches from end to end, canoed up on both sides.

  “A shovel,” Wolf said.

  Shumway shook his head. “My God.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, neither needing to point out how many stabs with a shovel it would take to make a body look like it did.

  “Shit,” Shumway said, standing up.

  “What is it?” Boydell called down from up above.

  “Uh, just … hold your horses, Bradley! We’re trying to make sense of this now.”

  “Make sense of this?” Boydell shook his head and started pacing again.

  Shumway turned downhill and lowered his voice. “There’s more to this, Wolf.”

  Wolf stared at him.

  “What the hell is this?” Boydell was yelling at the top of the hill now, pointing down on the ground. “What is this?”

  “What is what?” Shumway yelled back.

  Boydell was further down the road than he’d been before, a good twenty yards behind Wolf’s rear bumper. Boydell bent down, then stood up abruptly and staggered back. “Is this blood? Oh my God, is this blood? What did you find down there, Sheriff?”

  “Shit,” Shumway turned around and hesitated, assessing the climb back up to the road.

  “I’ll go up,” Wolf said.

  “Hell, I’ll come up too. Gonna have to radio everyone. It’s gonna be a long one tonight.”

  Chapter 30

  Wolf climbed back up to the road as fast as he could with legs that ached from so much driving and activity in one day.

  Bradley Boydell was leaning on his elbows against the front of his truck. Head down, tears streamed onto the hood, making a tiny puddle that reflected the orange clouds. “It’s Levi, isn’t it?”

  Wolf stood breathing hard next to hi
s SUV.

  Shumway was grunting his way up the slope behind him and Jet was sniffing over where Boydell had been earlier.

  “Jet, come.”

  Jet came over and sat down.

  Wolf studied a bloody scrape mark that went across the road. He’d driven over it twice without seeing it, and so had Shumway and Boydell, leaving numerous tire tracks running through it. But it was visible now, plain as day.

  It was no wonder they’d missed it. The road was rusty orange, made from the pulverized rock from the area. The blood was a darker shade of the same color. Without the prior discovery of a mutilated corpse, the marks looked like nothing.

  Wolf spotted his elusive set of Converse footprints, sitting right there on the road in plain sight after all. He followed from the camp across the road. There was a gouge in the soft shoulder where the killer had dragged the body off the edge, and then below, drag marks disappeared into the bushes.

  Shumway crunched up next to him, his lungs wheezing. “My deputies are on their way up. They’ll call in the crime-scene techs. They’re on-callers, spread out all over the county, so it’ll take a while.”

  Wolf pointed and lowered his voice. “The Converse tracks go down with the body there, and come back up a few feet over.”

  Shumway nodded, still breathing hard.

  “We need to get Boydell out of here,” Wolf said.

  Shumway coughed. “Yeah, I know. But we don’t want to have him drive over this. Shit.”

  Boydell was standing next to his truck now, staring at them. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet.

  “Mr. Boydell,” Wolf said, walking toward him, “I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like here.”

  Boydell sagged and closed his eyes. “My God.”

  Wolf stopped in front of him and hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets. “I’m sorry, Bradley. We need to get you back to your quarters. This is a crime scene now and we need to restrict access to law enforcement only. I know you understand.”

  Boydell opened his eyes. “Is this why you asked about the Converse shoes? Because I saw those shoe prints just now. Those are the same as you found in Rocky Points, aren’t’ they?”

  Wolf drew his mouth in a line, but said nothing.

  Boydell looked at Shumway. “Was this Steven?”

  Wolf turned and eyed Shumway.

  “Uh … listen, Bradley.” He put his hands on his hips and studied the camp. “I tell you what, let’s walk it back to your quarters. We’ll need to keep this road right here as pristine as possible for evidence gathering.” He raised his hands and dropped them. “I’ll walk you back.”

  Boydell waved the offer away and turned. “I can walk myself.”

  “No, Bradley, I can—”

  Boydell turned around with raised eyebrows. “Sheriff, I said I can walk myself. You stay here and do your job, figure out who did this.”

  “Mr. Boydell,” Wolf said.

  “What?”

  “What were you doing Saturday night?”

  Boydell’s face dropped. “What?”

  Wolf nodded.

  “I was in my quarters. You can ask Megan and Phil.” He looked at Shumway with a pleading look.

  “Okay, thanks Bradley,” Shumway said. “You know we have to cover every base, right?”

  “I was up at my quarters.”

  Wolf nodded. “Okay.”

  Boydell gave Wolf a final resentful look and turned around. He opened his truck door and dropped his car key inside on the seat. “In case you need it.” Then he slammed it, walked up the road, and disappeared over the top.

  Shumway shook his head. “What the hell was that?”

  “And what were you doing Saturday night?” Wolf asked.

  Shumway stared long at Wolf. “Are you serious?”

  “I am. What were you doing?”

  Shumway shook his head.

  Wolf held his gaze. “Just covering every base.”

  “You’re runnin’ the wrong direction around the bases, Detective.”

  “Am I? You have motive, just like the rest of the people I’m meeting.”

  “Motive? What motive do I have?”

  “That land used to be yours. I don’t know, maybe you’ve been resentful of their find all along, wishing you still had the land, so you could make all that money with a fossil sale. Maybe you know a lot more about fossil trade than you’re letting on. Maybe you know exactly where that second skeleton came from—somewhere on your family’s land.

  “Megan told me you lost the land. She didn’t say you sold it. Maybe she was telling the truth. Is she?”

  They stared at one another for a few seconds, and then Shumway stormed away toward his truck.

  The sheriff opened his door and bent inside, searching the floor for something. He looked in the side pocket on his door, then picked a slip of paper out and brandished it at Wolf.

  “Here.” Shumway walked over and handed it to him.

  Wolf took it, and saw it was a credit-card receipt for a place called Chuck’s Grill and Tavern.

  “Look at the address.”

  Wolf did. It said 1823 Garland Street, Windfield, Colorado.

  “And look at the time. The date.”

  10:29 p.m. Saturday, August 11th.

  Wolf shrugged. “So your credit card was at Chuck’s Grill Saturday night. Doesn’t mean you were.”

  Shumway put his hands on his hips. “Okay, fine.” He walked back to his truck and leaned inside. “What does that total say on there?”

  “What?”

  “The total price after tip?”

  Wolf was already convinced now. The man was telling the truth and all it would have taken to verify it was a trip to Chuck’s Grill and Tavern, but he went along with Shumway anyway. “Forty-eight dollars.”

  Shumway scribbled something on a piece of paper, ripped it out of a notebook and walked back to Wolf.

  “Let’s do a little handwriting check, shall we?” Shumway said.

  He held the piece of paper next to the receipt, both showing the number forty-eight with two zeros scrawled on them. The handwriting was identical, written in such terrible chicken scratch that there was little doubt they were both Shumway’s hand.

  “So that puts me at the bar, right? If you want, we can go in there and ask around.”

  Wolf gave him back the receipt. “Okay. I believe you.”

  Wolf rubbed his temples and walked toward the ring of scorched earth Levi had used as a firepit. Nearby, a patch of dry grass was smattered with blood.

  The spatter was barely visible in the oblique light, but it was there, telling a gruesome story. Wolf pictured the killer hauling up and driving the shovel down, then repeating.

  He turned to the final rays of the sun and closed his eyes, trying to erase the movie playing in his mind.

  With a deep breath, he cracked his eyelids and gazed out at the hills and jutting rocks casting long shadows that streaked the dusty air.

  “This is where he was killed.”

  Shumway walked up next to him.

  “We’re missing something.”

  “Yeah, no shit. Who’s killing these people.”

  Wolf shook his head and walked to the edge of the road. “Look at this. The footprints go off the edge of the road here, then come back up the hill …”

  “Yeah, you said that earlier. So what?” Shumway said.

  “If it was Steven, wouldn’t there be a set of tracks from his camp up to this camp and back? Not from this camp, and then back up?”

  “Not if he drove up here, got out and murdered him, then put Levi down there and hiked back up to his truck.”

  Wolf nodded. “In the process leaving a shitpot of evidence, once again. He leaves footprints that everyone knows are his. And, literally, he drags the body in the direction of his own camp?” Wolf pointed down at Steven’s tent and truck in the darkened valley.

  “Yeah. Okay. You’re saying it wasn’t a coyote who stole his shoes. You think someone’s setting
Steven up.”

  Wolf said nothing.

  “Maybe he just let the shoe prints slip,” Shumway said. “Maybe he realized later that he left the prints, so he made his shoes disappear, and he made up the story.”

  “Molly said she corroborates that story,” Wolf said. “She said he hadn’t had the shoes for over a month.”

  “Maybe she’s in on it,” Shumway said. “That’s why she’s the one looking so freaked out all the time.”

  Wolf folded his arms and stared down at Steven’s tent and truck. “And then there’s that pit this morning down at Dig 2 … and my deputies said they found the bones in that burned truck encased in plaster. And there’s chunks of plaster sitting in the back of Steven’s truck down there.”

  “Yeah,” Shumway said. “I saw that stuff in there. So what are you saying? I’m not sure I’m following all your tangents here. Where’s this stream of consciousness coming out of your mouth flowing to?”

  Wolf walked away toward his truck.

  “Hey. Where are you going?”

  “Down to Dig 2.”

  “What just happened? What about this crime scene?”

  “We’re going to find he was killed with a shovel. The shovel’s going to be missing, and the only evidence worth anything will be those shoe prints. I’m done with this crime scene.”

  Chapter 31

  Wolf drove up the road onto the crest of the plateau, leaving Shumway shaking his head in the side-view mirror.

  As he twisted on his headlights, the straight two-track lit up. Then he clicked on his brights and the tents and tarps of Dig 1 reflected back at him.

  Karen Orpia and Mathis stood up from their camp chairs next to a flickering fire and moved steadily toward the road to intercept Wolf as he passed.

  Slowing to a halt, Wolf leaned an elbow out his window.

  “Hello, Detective,” Mathis said. The doctor wore a headlamp, and pointed it downward, averting the beam from Wolf’s eyes. “We were just about to head that way and see what all the commotion was. What’s happening?”

  Wolf sat for a moment in silence, then asked, “When exactly was the last time you two saw Levi?”