In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)

by Jeff Carson

  Will MacLean stood inside his office with arms wide, as if presenting the conclusion of a magic trick.

  “You’re here,” Wolf said with a smile, an edge of relief in his voice as he pocketed his phone.

  They hugged one another, MacLean slapping him on the back.

  MacLean now had the body of a different man, and Wolf’s arms easily wrapped around him. Where the former sheriff had once been soft, muscle now rippled beneath his clothing.

  They pushed away from one another and Wolf stared at him. When Wolf had last seen MacLean, the former sheriff had been at least sixty or seventy pounds heavier, with a pasty complexion, sunken eyes, and depressed to the point that Wolf wondered if the man had given up on trying to live. Not that Wolf would have blamed him for riding off into the proverbial sunset. They all had to do it at some point.

  But now MacLean was thin, almost skinny, but his eyes were full of light, his skin tanned and glowing gold.

  “Wow,” Wolf said. “You look…better.”

  “I looked that bad before, huh?”

  Wolf shrugged.

  “I did, I know it.” MacLean gestured to one of the two chairs in front of Wolf’s desk. “May I?”

  “Yes. Go ahead. Sit. Please.” Wolf sat down behind the desk. “I feel a bit awkward sitting here, when you’ll be taking over in…what is it now?” Wolf checked his watch. “Thirteen days?”

  MacLean smiled warmly, looking Wolf in the eyes. “How are things going?”

  Wolf gestured vaguely to the building surrounding them. “Good. But I want to hear about your exploits down in Mexico. Late-stage pancreatic cancer is nothing to thumb your nose at. Seriously. How did you do it?”

  MacLean swiped a hand. “Like I said on the phone before, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Magic?”

  “Vegetables and coffee enemas,” MacLean said with a straight face. “A lot of meditation and silent contemplation.”

  Wolf blinked.

  “I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” MacLean said. “So, how’s it going here? I hear you’re doing a decent job at keeping the fort down. The council seems impressed with you.”

  “They’re impressed with Patterson,” Wolf said. “I’ve done nothing productive since you left.”

  MacLean smiled. “Your proposal with the council made my former self want to puke.”

  Wolf shrugged.

  “But I liked it,” MacLean said. “You guys will do good with that plan going forward.”

  “You’re fine with it? You’ll have to take the training, too.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  Wolf cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m retiring, Dave.”

  The news hit Wolf softly at first, then like a flick in the nose, and then like a drop-kick to the stomach.

  “I’m going to collect my pension and fish for the rest of my life.” MacLean stood up and swiped his hands together. “I can see you’re not exactly thrilled with the news.”

  The future Wolf had been envisioning, counting on, was exploding inside his head, and at that moment Wolf realized it was outgassing through his open mouth. He closed his lips and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Damn right. It’s better than okay. I’m excited to wake up without a care in the world for once.” MacLean walked to the window and looked out. “No offense, but I will not miss this view. And I’ve already informed Margaret of my change of plans, in case you’re wondering.”

  “Okay.”

  MacLean walked over and patted him on the shoulder. “Dave.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s really good to see you.”

  Wolf nodded. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “I’m sorry if I got your hopes up,” MacLean said.

  Wolf said nothing.

  “After I called you in February, you know what? I started feeling shitty again. I could feel the stress building, breaking down my insides, as I thought about coming back to the job.” He looked hard into Wolf’s eyes. “Dave.”

  “What.”

  “Don’t let it happen to you.” MacLean pushed his face close to his. “Don’t let the stress take over. Delegate. Lean on those surrounding you.” He turned around, knocking on Wolf’s desk as he walked out. “Let’s have lunch sometime soon.”

  “Sounds good.” Wolf’s eyes glossed over as he stared through the material universe.

  A moment later, two soft knocks hit his door. “Sir?”

  He looked to see Charlotte Munford-Rachette poking her head inside, holding a packet of papers in her hand.

  “Hi, um, is this a bad time?”

  “No. Please, come in.”

  She entered, narrowing her eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?” He held out his hand and she passed over the papers.

  She said something about a form and his signature, and he nodded, pulling out a pen from his desk.

  “Of course.” He opened the page, signed where Charlotte had marked with sticky notes. “Here you go. Just these three?”

  “Yes, sir. Thanks.” She looked through the windows at MacLean walking through the squad room and down the hall.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Uh, no, sir. Thanks.”

  “Of course.” He handed them back.

  She left the room.

  He stared at the door for what felt like a couple hours, but when he checked the wall clock it read 3:35 p.m.

  He turned to the window again and stood up. The rain had subsided, leaving cloudy skies and a roll of white fog gliding up the center of the valley. People down below on Main Street walked with their shopping bags. Kids rode past on their mountain bikes. A woman who worked for the county swept the debris that had washed onto the sidewalk. Back to life as normal.

  He sat back down, settling in for one last phone call. He dialed and sat rigidly upright.

  “Mayor’s office,” the young male voice said.

  “Hi, Eddie, this is Sheriff Wolf, is Margaret around?”

  “Sorry, sir. She’s in a meeting. Do you want me to forward you to her voicemail?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Wolf cleared his throat and spoke for a good minute. He wondered what she would think about the message he left, but then again, he didn’t care.

  Chapter 22

  Wolf left the office and drove out of town up the eastern side of the valley. Twenty minutes and a few miles later he parked in a dirt lot overlooking Rocky Points.

  Still stewing in thoughts stirred by MacLean’s visit, he got out and stood looking down on the Chautauqua Valley below. This eastern wall of the valley overlooking Rocky Points was known as Sunnyside. Down in the bottom of the valley sunset could happen just past lunchtime during the winter. Up here the wealthy built their expensive homes on pricey pieces of land, where the sun shined as long as possible, affording wide open Rocky Mountain ski resort town views.

  But it wasn’t all expensive housing. There was also plenty of undeveloped forest with hiking trails snaking through the trees, often affording hikers vistas that didn’t come with a mortgage.

  Wolf followed a familiar trail that coiled up steeply through the woods, welcoming the way his chest heaved and his legs ached with exertion. It had been a while since he’d taken a hike. Too long.

  At the top he sat on a rock and looked down, taking a cool drink from his water bottle and letting the heat wick off his body. Only the faintest whisper of the traffic leading in and out of Rocky Points up the Chautauqua Valley to the north reached his ears. The cars were tiny replicas of the real thing. The drivers inside of them, warrants outstanding or not, were inconsequential up here among the swaying pines. He would stop denying himself these types of getaways in the middle of the day, he vowed.

  Taking another sip of water, he thought about Heather Patterson and her knack for paperwork and presentations to the county council. With a clear head, he was even more sure about the voicemail he’d left for the may
or a few minutes ago. The upcoming changes within the department would be good in the long run, better than good. They would be great. A new future rose from the ashes of Wolf’s old fantasies, and he realized he felt at peace for the first time in a long while. And it wasn’t just the hike. Everything was as it should be.

  The sky above skated past quickly, heavy with moisture. The scent of rain hung in the air and he knew he would probably get wet on the way down, but he remained still, breathing gently, letting his eyes hop around the countless miles of terrain ahead.

  A series of worm-like piles of rock snaking next to the Chautauqua River caught his attention. The waved piles sat next to the silver water at various intervals, barely covered in vegetation since they were discarded by the large dredges that mined the river a hundred years ago.

  Even from this high vantage Wolf could see a person moving atop one of the piles, like an ant crawling on a snake’s back.

  A few times growing up Wolf’s father had taken him there to search for gold the old-timers had missed, using a metal detector. Wolf remembered finding an old metal teacup, decayed with rust. It hadn’t been a nugget, and even though he’d never found gold the old-timers had missed, finding the cup had still been exhilarating. One man’s trash was another man’s treasure. Especially a hundred years later.

  Wolf stood up, keeping his eyes on the tailings as a thought hit him hard. He stared, thinking of the decades of time those piles of earth had sat there, undisturbed. There could have been anything under those lumps. But who would have known it? A few solitary dumpster divers with metal detectors a hundred years in the future?

  Without thinking he found himself moving down the trail.

  The raindrops fell sporadically at first, and then more steadily, but he felt none of them. His thoughts were back up in Dredge with those three men digging gold out of the ground. The mine was back open, life going on as normal, as if the last few days could be glossed over and moved past.

  He thought of Rick Hammes lying on the road and his dog whimpering in the back of the truck.

  He thought about tailings.

  He picked up his pace, running down the trail. He had a long drive ahead of him.

  Chapter 23

  Wolf’s SUV bucked like an angry bull as he came off the sloped road leading into the Jackson Mine and coasted into the flat area.

  He parked next to the four trucks, noting Oakley’s was still there.

  The drive from Rocky Points had been nothing short of wet, and it was no different here up at eleven thousand feet. The air was cold as death, drizzle breathing down from the leaden sky. A thin veil of snow covered the ground halfway up the peaks, disappearing in the clouds.

  Wolf ignored the majesty of the surrounding land and kept his eyes on the three men. Kevin Koling, James Sexton, and Eagle McBeth sat in camp chairs under a sagging tarp, all holding beers. Judging by the crumpled pile of cans, in the words of Wayne the concrete worker from Edwards, they were getting it done.

  “Sheriff,” Eagle McBeth said, standing up.

  Wolf nodded. “No need to stand for me.”

  McBeth remained on his feet for a few seconds, then sat down. “I have a lawyer now. He wouldn’t like me talking to you.”

  “I don’t need you three to say anything,” Wolf said. “I’m just here to talk to you. If you guys want to respond, that’s up to you. But I don’t need your involvement.”

  Wolf looked at Koling, Sexton, and then McBeth again in turn.

  “You figure out anything new?” Koling asked.

  McBeth looked at him.

  “What?” Koling asked.

  “We’re not supposed to be talking to this guy.” McBeth turned in his seat. “Anything we say can, and will, be used against us.”

  Sexton sat between Koling and McBeth, staring at Wolf with unblinking, bloodshot eyes. When Wolf nodded at him he took a sip and looked away.

  Raindrops popped on the tarp overhead, slapping the ground around, pinging off the metal beast of a wash plant that loomed in the growing darkness. Piles of dirt lay near the plant, but they were in a different configuration than before.

  “What I keep thinking about,” Wolf said, “is the dirt you guys were feeding into that wash plant when you dumped Chris’s body onto that hopper.”

  McBeth said nothing. Sexton sipped his beer with a slurp.

  Koling lit a cigarette. “What about it?” he said.

  McBeth’s chair creaked as he turned to Koling again. “We have to stop talking to him.”

  “Why? What the hell—”

  “—Don’t you see that he thinks we killed Chris?”

  “I sure as fuck didn’t kill Chris!” Koling stood up, toppling his camp chair. He loomed over his two companions. “I didn’t do anything!”

  Sexton’s eyes clenched shut and he sagged into his chair. McBeth held up a hand. “Would you please relax?”

  Koling pointed at Wolf. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill my best friend.”

  Wolf nodded, otherwise remaining frozen at the edge of the open-sided tent.

  Koling picked up his chair and put it down. “Sorry. I’m just…I get emotional.”

  McBeth nodded understanding, holding out his hand, seemingly determined to calm his friend with a mime routine.

  Sexton cracked his eyes open and raised his shoulders, looking like a turtle coming out of its shell.

  Wolf gave it another moment, and the three men settled into a silent stare out into the rain past Wolf.

  “Like I was saying,” he said, finally. “I’ve been thinking about that dirt that comes out the back of that wash plant. Spent. Used. Devoid of the gold that you extracted from it. So where do you put it?”

  Nobody answered.

  “You put it into a tailings pile, set aside from the other piles of dirt you have. You probably have an area for overburden—the soil scraped off the top before you get down to the paydirt. You put that somewhere.

  “And then you get down to the paydirt, and you start digging that out, and you pile that up in a separate area. Right? That has the gold in it. You put that in a special spot.”

  Sexton sipped his beer. Koling sucked on his cigarette. McBeth stared out into the rain.

  “But you have no use for those tailings, so you make sure that you separate them. Those piles are the kind that will stay there for hundreds of years, waiting for the next generations of men to sift through, maybe with better methods by then, seeing if you missed any gold. That would be the perfect place to bury a body, wouldn’t it?”

  Wolf paused for effect, taking the opportunity to watch their reactions.

  Koling shook his head back and forth, sipping his beer again. Sexton stared out at the rain.

  McBeth’s eyes strayed away from Wolf’s. He seemed lost in thought as his hand went to his jacket where he fingered a black circular hole on the breast.

  “What happened there?” Wolf asked. “Is that where Chris burned you with his cigarette that night?”

  McBeth ignored the question and lowered his hand back to his lap.

  Wolf continued. “It was Mr. McBeth here’s idea to pull all those piles up and run them through the wash plant, right?” Wolf asked. “That’s what you told us. Eagle here was upset about the argument he’d had with Chris.” Wolf looked at McBeth. “He had flown off the handle. He had burned you with a cigarette.”

  McBeth kept his eyes on the rain.

  “But, in the end Chris was right, wasn’t he. You guys weren’t catching any gold. You needed to revamp the wash plant, and re-process that already spent ground to make sure you got everything out of it you could.”

  They were statues.

  “Which leads to the question: if Mr. McBeth here killed Chris, put that gun up against his chin and pulled the trigger, and then buried his body in the tailings … well, that would be just plain dumb to order everyone to rework that dirt, wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t he keep the body buried where it was?”

  Wolf forked two fing
ers, pointing them at Koling and Sexton. “So which one of you two did it?”

  They looked at him.

  Koling’s eyes glazed over and he slowly turned to Sexton.

  This time Sexton grew taller out of the chair. “No. It wasn’t us.”

  “Damn right it wasn’t us,” Koling said. “Sure as hell wasn’t me.”

  “It wasn’t me!” Sexton’s teeth bared. “It was that asshole Hammes. He did it.”

  “We figured out Mr. Hammes couldn’t have done it,” Wolf said. “He was up in Edwards at a construction site Friday night. We have multiple witnesses saying he was there the whole time.” Wolf rubbed his hands together. “So? Which one? Who killed Chris? And then who killed Mary Dimitri and planted Chris’s gun at house to make it look like Hammes did it?”

  “Then it was somebody else making it look like it was us,” Sexton said. He threw his beer out of the tent and stood up. “This is bullshit! We didn’t do anything.” He marched past Wolf, through the rain to his trailer, and went inside.

  Koling and McBeth sat in silence.

  Wolf eyed them both, his gaze landing on Koling. “It makes sense, though, right? It had to have been you or him.”

  Koling stood up, tipping his chair back again. Wolf remained still.

  “It was someone else,” McBeth said in a reasonable voice. He stood up and put a hand on Koling’s chest and stood between the big man and Wolf. “Look, sheriff. I told you before. We’re not going to talk. This right here is exactly why I have a lawyer. To protect our rights against something like this. Now, if you would please leave.”

  Wolf nodded, then glanced back at Sexton’s trailer. He saw fingers pull away from a crack in the blinds. “Okay, Mr. McBeth. You’re the boss.”

  Chapter 24

  It was 7:35 p.m. when Wolf drove down from the mine back into Dredge and parked his SUV in the parking lot of The Picker Bar and Grill. The sun was technically still up somewhere behind the mountains and clouds, but it was almost pitch dark now that the rain had socked in.

  His boots crunched on wet, pebbly soil. Raindrops beaded on a herd of parked cars, reflecting the light streaming out of the windows of the establishment. Music rattled the walls, and occasional raucous laughter echoed outside.