David Wolf series Box Set 2

by Jeff Carson

  They looked at one another.

  “Shit, is that why you’re there?” Mathis asked. “He still hasn’t shown up?”

  Karen leaned her head on Mathis’s shoulder.

  “Is that true?” Mathis asked.

  Wolf nodded. “When was it?”

  “Uh, I guess it must have been … I hardly know what day it is when we’re out here.”

  “It’s Monday,” Karen said. “We saw him Saturday. Saturday morning he came in and had coffee with us, then went back to his camp. We haven’t seen him since.”

  Mathis nodded, his beam of light bouncing up and down. “Yes. And he never mentioned where he was going that day. Not once. Never even said he was going hiking.”

  Wolf nodded. “Can I ask you two for a favor?”

  They nodded.

  “Can you come down with me to Dig 2? I have some questions I need answered and the Dig 2 team is no longer there.”

  Mathis’s light beam twisted to Karen. Her eyebrows were raised high.

  In unison they said, “Yeah.”

  Chapter 32

  Wolf parked at Dig 2 and kept the headlights pointed toward the camp. They got out and walked through the dust swirling in the beams of light, down the hill toward the cluster of tents.

  “Where are they?” Karen asked quietly.

  Wolf flipped on his flashlight beam. “They’re in jail at the moment.”

  “Jail?” Mathis stopped and swiveled his headlamp beam in Wolf’s face. “You’re kidding, right? They’re your murder suspects?”

  “This way.” Wolf led them between the tents, past the uneaten sandwiches the team had been eating when Wolf and Shumway had first visited, which were now swarmed with insects.

  “Shit,” Karen said, focusing her beam on a hairy spider walking on a piece of bread.

  Jet sniffed close and the spider raised its front legs.

  “Jet, no.”

  Jet whined and followed.

  “Where are you taking us?” Mathis asked. “To the pit, I hope.”

  Wolf stepped to the open pit and stopped.

  Mathis had beaten him there and had all but skidded to a stop, kicking some dirt into the hole.

  “My heck.” Mathis swept his headlamp beam up and down the length of the spine of the fossilized skeleton. “My ... heck …”

  The doctor methodically probed the bones with his headlamp beam, inhaling sharply while staring at a leg bone, then turning and studying the claws, then gasping as he stared at the skull.

  “This is the most complete Allosaurus specimen I’ve ever seen. And the condition … it’s spectacular. Female … you can tell by the pelvic structure and the lacrimal crest.”

  Karen gripped Mathis’s arm, following the beam of light with wide eyes.

  “What a bunch of assholes, keeping this a secret,” she said. “Why? It’s so spectacular.”

  “Look at the skull,” Mathis said. “It’s larger than Omega by at least ten centimeters. Look at the quality of fossilization.”

  “What’s Omega?” Wolf asked.

  “Oh, the replica in the visitors’ center,” Karen said.

  Wolf put his hands on his hips. “How do you go about finding a skeleton like this? Do you use that GPR you were talking about earlier today and search a grid pattern or something?”

  Mathis laughed. “A lot of people think exactly what you just said—that in this day and age we can head out into the wilds of Colorado, or Utah, or Siberia, or Australia with our ground-penetrating radar and just start scanning until we find the mother lode, like the one we’re looking at right now. Sure, that’s the hope one day. In fact, there are some people working on scanning by aircraft … but that technology is farther in the future than we’d like. In reality, finding a fossil is akin to the old-time prospectors looking for a vein of gold.

  “Firstly, we seek out a place where known dinosaur fossils have been found. Like, say, Dinosaur National Monument and surrounding areas. Check. Secondly, we seek out places where erosion is taking place year-round, doing the unearthing of the bones for us.” Mathis twisted with his arms out. “This dry riverbed in this ancient valley for instance. Check. Thirdly, we walk up and down the bottom of the valley with our foreheads inches from the ground, searching for tiny fragments of fossilized bone. When we find them, we move upstream, looking for larger chunks. When the fossils peter out to nothing, we know we’ve passed the potential mother lode and move our way up the sides of the hills and look for the larger bones.

  “More often than not we find absolutely nothing. Sometimes we find a large fossil specimen, say, a leg bone or an arm bone, or a rib, and the rest of the skeleton sat in the wrong material for millions of years and simply decayed away into nothing.

  “But in the rarest of cases, we find something as magnificent as this. The animal died, and before scavengers could devour it, it was buried rapidly, say, by a mud or landslide event. Perhaps the catastrophic event that killed the animal in the first place. Then, over thousands of years, the organic material decomposed, the minerals seeped in to replace the decomposing bone, and now here we are. We’re left with rock in the shape of the original bones. And in this case, rock curved and hardened into a magnificent three-dimensional picture of exactly how the animal existed underneath its skin at that very moment of death almost a hundred million years ago.”

  Mathis’s chest heaved.

  “And that’s what they did here?” Wolf asked. “They found a piece of bone, followed the other pieces upstream, came a few yards up this hill, and excavated this?”

  Mathis nodded, knelt in the pit, and wrapped both hands around a huge bone. “Green liked to tell the story to anyone who’d listen. They found a claw, then some smaller fragments, then came upon a femur sticking out of the ground. And voila.”

  “Isn’t that a femur you’re grasping in your hands right now?” Wolf asked.

  Mathis froze for a few seconds then let go, like he’d just realized he was holding a hunk of plutonium.

  “And how about that other bone right next to it,” Wolf asked.

  Mathis stood up. “What in the heck? What’s going on?” He twisted in a circle. His light swiveled wildly in the hole.

  “Which leads me to my next question,” Wolf said. “What are the odds of pulling out two complete fossil specimens like this from the same hole?”

  Chapter 33

  “Two skeletons?” Karen asked with a chuckle. “Not likely at all.”

  Mathis shined his light on Wolf and held up a finger. “Karen,” Mathis nodded at her, “remember the first time we saw the progress of this dig? It was two years ago. We’d been here for two months, flipping dust off partial caudal vertebrae, and here comes Green and his students finding an Allosaurus femur poking out of the ground. And less than a mile away from us.”

  Karen said nothing.

  “Are you listening to me? It was that femur he wouldn’t shut up about it.”

  Karen shook her head, then nodded. “Yeah, okay. It was. So what?”

  “Yes, it was. Do you remember the disgust we had with them for being so stupidly lucky?” Mathis asked with a chuckle. “The anguish?”

  Karen rolled her eyes and wiped her nose. “Whatever.”

  “And do you remember the location of it?” Mathis tilted his head.

  Karen nodded, and then her eyes widened in comprehension as she took in the huge hole in front of her. “It was right on the surface.”

  Mathis looked at Wolf. “So you’re right—they must have found bones from two dinosaurs. There’s no other explanation. These bones are almost three meters below the surface. I’m looking at two femurs right now, and we saw a femur sticking out of the ground. Heck, look at the amount of earth they’ve removed. But you asked if they pulled a second, complete skeleton out of this same hole. No. No way. The odds would be astronomical.”

  “We found a second skeleton,” Wolf said. “Allosaurus. Female. Thought to be almost eighty percent complete.”

  Math
is stepped toward Wolf. “What do you mean, ‘We found a second skeleton’?”

  Wolf nodded. “At one of our crime scenes.”

  Mathis looked down. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?” He went to the edge of the pit and dug a chunk off the side. “Sandy, but very dense. I guess it could be.”

  “And now it makes sense why they were hiding the pit for a year and a half,” Karen said. “All this time, they were keeping their two-skeleton find secret.”

  “They excavated the top bones, encased them in field casting, and transported them out to store somewhere, off-site,” Wolf said. “But how would they hide this kind of thing from your boss? You talked about using ground-penetrating radar on your dig up there. Wouldn’t they be able to see a second skeleton underneath it from the beginning readouts?”

  Mathis bent down and picked some more soil off the edge of the hole. “Not necessarily. We do GPR readings for initial funding. This soil is pretty dense, and we use a 1,000 MHz antenna for fossil detection. With the second skeleton this low? Could have gone undetected until they found the second one with their bare hands. Or maybe it was … yeah …” He walked to the end of the hole and on into the dark. “This specimen ends here, and there’s another pit to the side of it. This over here must be where the first skeleton was found. So they weren’t exactly on top of one another. They were side by side, this one being a little deeper.

  “You can check it all for certain. They’ll have the funding package on file at the university—you can bet on that. And, really, you couldn’t hide a second skeleton if it came up on the readout. Smart people write those funding checks.”

  Mathis shook his head. “Okay, all this is making sense now. Green was going to sell one of the skeletons. His whole team was in on it. That’s why they kept it all so secretive all this time. The conniving bastards.” He chuckled and then stopped and looked at Wolf. “What happened down in Colorado? Did he kill a fossil dealer or something? Was he selling the bones and decided to … or wait a minute … did Professor Green die?”

  Karen’s and Mathis’s faces dropped.

  When they turned their eyes on Wolf, he pulled his lips into a line.

  “He did.” Karen covered her mouth. “That’s why he’s suddenly gone.”

  “Or he killed someone,” Mathis said. “Is that it?”

  Wolf waved a hand. “I’m sorry. I really can’t discuss the details. But I can say thanks. You’ve really helped.”

  “Psh. He changes the subject again.” Mathis chuckled. “It is a good question, though: How did he hide this from Dr. Talbot? That’s what I want to know. Must have crapped himself the last time Talbot came into town. What if they’d been caught? ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, we found a second skeleton and have been excavating it for months. We were going to tell you, I swear.’”

  Wolf turned to leave.

  “Mr. Wolf?” Karen called after him. “Are you leaving?”

  Wolf kept walking. “I’m headed into town. You guys don’t mind walking back up to your camp, do you?”

  Wolf heard an answer but didn’t listen. He and Jet climbed into the SUV and drove away from the main camp toward Steven’s truck. He passed the pickup and Steven’s tent, and then underneath a swarm of lights on the side of the mountain, some of which pointed his way. As he followed the tracks through the Colorado desert, he thought he heard a shout through the open windows say, “Wolf! Where are you going?”

  He switched on his radio and it auto-tuned to the Sheriff’s Department’s active frequency.

  Thumbing the button, he said, “Sheriff Shumway, this is Detective Wolf. Come in.”

  “Wolf!” Shumway’s voice was crisp and clear. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the station. I need to speak to you.”

  There was a long hesitation. “Negative, I’m too busy here.”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “Then stop and come back up here and tell me about it.”

  Wolf kept his foot on the gas. “I need to speak to the students again.”

  Another hesitation. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Wolf pressed the button. “I’ll tell you at the station. Over and out.”

  “Shhhhhhhhit. I’ll see you there.”

  He switched off the radio and spun the wheel to avoid a clump of cacti.

  Chapter 34

  Fatigue had taken hold, and Wolf rubbed an eye as he descended the high country toward Windfield. Jet snored in back.

  The dash clock said 9:04 and he was looking forward to joining Jet in dreamland, but he knew it might still be a long time coming.

  He picked up his phone again and checked for cell service. Still nothing.

  He felt the pressure mounting to get the job done—for Cassidy, and Keegan, and Trudy Frost. He wondered what they were doing right now. Probably wondering how Wolf was getting along in the investigation.

  He knew how it felt when someone took away a person you loved with all your heart. After the initial shock and longing for ridiculous things like time reversal, or a miraculous resurrection, next came an insatiable desire for justice. There was no way of moving forward until that justice had been served.

  The Frosts were stuck in a kind of mourning purgatory, and it was up to Wolf to help them out. And for once he felt like he was close.

  His phone buzzed and he picked it up. He’d missed calls from Jack, MacLean, and Patterson.

  He pushed Jack’s number and listened to it ring.

  “Hello?” Jack’s voice was barely audible over the rumbling of Wolf’s SUV.

  “Hey, it’s me. How’s it going?”

  “What’s going on? Are you all right?” Jack asked. “I’ve been calling you.”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Bad cell service up here. How about you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How are Cassidy and her family doing?”

  A long pause. “Not too well. They keep crying and they don’t talk. They’re sleeping now, though. I guess that’s good.”

  They sat silently with one another for a few seconds.

  “Everyone still at Nate’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what are you doing?”

  “Sitting out on his deck, worrying about you.”

  Wolf half-smiled.

  “Are you finding anything out?”

  Two pinprick headlights shone in Wolf’s rear-view mirror—Shumway finally catching up. “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah. Listen, get some sleep. You need it. It’s been a long day.”

  “I will,” Jack said. “How’s Jet?”

  “He’s fine. Get your ass to bed.”

  “I will. I love you.”

  Jack rarely expressed such sentiment, and the words hit him hard. “I love you, too.”

  He hung up and opted to dial Patterson next.

  “Hello?” Patterson answered in a weak voice.

  “Hey, I saw you called. Crap, I guess it was a few hours ago. Sorry, you asleep?”

  She cleared her throat. “Don’t worry. I was just resting. Yeah, I called. Did you listen to my message?”

  “No.”

  “I went through the footage … actually Deputy Munford helped … anyway, the guy at the gas station was careful. He stooped as he left, so the height strip’s pretty useless. But we noticed he was wearing Converse All Stars. And his feet were enormous. If you’ve met a guy with clown feet up there, then he’s your man. But, otherwise, I think he was wearing shoes that were too big for him. In fact, I went back to the crime scene for confirmation—the pressure exerted onto the front of the shoe was conspicuously low. Like, either someone never put their full weight on their toes, or they were wearing huge shoes. I’m going with huge shoes by the looks of the video.”

  The headlights grew in his mirrors.

  “Sir?”

  “Yeah, okay. You got a color on those shoes?”

  “Black-and-white footage, so no. But they’re a dark color. Like a b
lue or black.”

  “Or purple.”

  “Yeah, or purple.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “A cowboy hat, Carhartt jacket, jeans … I can make a video snippet and send it to your phone.”

  “Good idea.”

  She paused. “I’m … um …”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m at home now. I don’t have the footage on my laptop. I left it on a flash drive in the station.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Tomorrow morning’s fine. Get some rest and I’ll talk to you then. Anything else?”

  “Not really. We went back to the gas station and couldn’t get any prints off the gas terminal. Let’s see … they found a .38 slug lodged in Green’s skull. Matched the other two in Frost.”

  “Okay.”

  “And that’s about all we’ve got here. MacLean’s on pins and needles, waiting to hear from you. I hope that shoe thing helps.”

  “It does.”

  “What’s going on up there?”

  Wolf had slowed to a crawl and now Shumway was on his bumper, his headlights lighting up the cab through his rear window.

  “I gotta go. Talk to you later.” He ended the call and dropped the phone in the center console.

  He pulled over and Shumway pulled up next to him with a rolled-down window. “What the hell’s going on with you?”

  “You find anything else up at the scene?” Wolf asked.

  “No.”

  “I went down to Dig 2 with Dr. Mathis and Karen Orpia.”

  “Yeah?”

  Wolf told him about the second skeleton.

  “Two skeletons … that’s not possible, is it? What, two dinos were doin’ the nasty and got hit by a comet?”

  Wolf told him about the location of the bones the team had initially found, the way it was supposedly sticking out of the ground, and the second skeleton being much deeper, and how the university would have pictures of the first skeleton find on file in something Mathis referred to as a “fund package.”

  “All right. So we go to Utah tomorrow.”

  Wolf nodded.

  Shumway rubbed his chin. “The case against these kids is more solid than the rocks up at that dig. The two-skeleton thing means all three of them are lying. Which means we go back to the original motive we talked about on day one: They were in on the deal to sell one of the skeletons, split four ways. They figured out Green was going to take all the proceeds of the sale and run off to Argentina, so they killed him. They felt betrayed and pissed off, and wanted their cut of the money.”