Drifted

by Jeff Carson

  Chris nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And what happened at that meeting?”

  Chris frowned. “We talked.”

  “About what?”

  “Just work. I was taking over for him while he was out of town. He wanted to discuss some orders. Some specific things I had to take care of while he was gone.” Chris held frozen eye contact with Patterson.

  “And where, exactly, did Mr. Preston say he was going?” she asked.

  “Arizona.”

  “Where in Arizona?”

  “He said the Superstition Mountains.”

  She nodded. “Nothing more specific than that?”

  Chris shook his head. “No.” He shrugged. “He never told me the exact spot. It’s some family gold-mining claim.”

  Silence took over for a beat.

  Wolf raised a finger and looked toward the one-way mirror. “Hey, Rachette!”

  After a brief pause, the door knob rattled and Rachette poked his head inside. “Yes, sir?”

  “Can you please get Mr. Alamy a bottled water?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door shut.

  Wolf turned a kind smile to Chris. “Sorry. Bad manners on our part.”

  Chris crossed his legs and bounced his leather work boot on his knee.

  Wolf said nothing as he waited for Rachette’s return. The lull in conversation seemed to ramp up Chris’s anxiety. He scratched the side of his nose, petted his beard some more.

  Rachette returned in short order and plunked a sweating bottle of water in front of Chris.

  “Thanks,” Chris said. He picked up the bottle, cracked open the lid, and took a sip.

  “What time did you meet with Mr. Preston at work that Saturday night?” Wolf asked.

  Alamy looked at the ceiling. “I was there at like six-ish?”

  “That was your agreed-upon meeting time?” Wolf asked. “Sometime around six?”

  Alamy nodded. “Yeah. Six.”

  “And how did that meeting go?”

  Alamy shrugged.

  “Could you please use words for the audio recording?”

  “It went fine. We just had a discussion about the upcoming workload for that week. Last week’s workload.”

  Wolf nodded. “And what time did you leave the meeting?”

  Alamy looked up again. “Let’s see. It was about seven, seven fifteen. We met for an hour. I remember we met for an hour.”

  Alamy’s face had gone beet red, and the man seemed to know it, which only ramped up his anxiety. A bead of sweat glistened on his forehead.

  Wolf sat patiently, watching the physical reaction sweep through the man’s body.

  “He was still at work when I left,” Alamy said.

  “Where did you go after the meeting?” Patterson asked.

  “I went home.”

  “And where is that?” she asked.

  Alamy gave his address.

  Patterson wrote it down.

  “And then I went to the Pony Tavern at around ten thirty.”

  Patterson wrote that down.

  “Who were you with at the Pony?” Wolf asked.

  He shrugged. “The usual Saturday-night crew. There’s a bunch of them. Vic Brooks, Cameron Tate …” He ticked off some more names on his fingers and Patterson wrote them down, too.

  “So, from seven to ten thirty, what were you doing?” Wolf asked.

  Alamy looked at Wolf with narrowed eyes. “I probably got home from the meeting at like seven thirty.”

  “Okay, yeah. You had to drive home.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, from seven thirty to ten thirty, what were you doing?”

  “I just sat around. You know, watched some television, had a beer or two.”

  “Were you with anyone?”

  “No. I live alone.”

  “And then you went to the Pony.”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “At ten thirty.”

  Alamy nodded. “Yes.”

  “What did you watch?”

  “What?”

  “On the television? What did you watch?”

  Alamy’s eyes glazed over for a second. “I was watching a movie. The new Iron Man.”

  “Which one?”

  Alamy glared at Wolf. “The new Iron Man one. What is this?”

  Wolf put up his hands and pulled at a stray thread coming off his jeans. “And how long did you stay at the Pony?”

  Alamy took his time answering. “Until it closed down. I took an Uber back home. Left my car there. I was too drunk to drive.”

  “That’s good,” Wolf said.

  “Can you tell us more about what happened the day you went to Mr. Warren’s house to check on him?” Patterson asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Like I said, I was concerned that he never came back to work this Monday, but I figured … I don’t know … you know, he’s the boss. He doesn’t really have to answer to anyone at work.”

  “Did you call him that day? On Monday?” Wolf asked.

  “Yes. I’ve already told Detective Rachette. I called Mr. Preston Monday.”

  Wolf nodded. “My mistake. Go on.”

  “Then, when he never showed up on Tuesday morning, I got concerned. That’s when I decided to just drive up to his house. When I got there, I saw his car. And then I kind of freaked out, you know? The vehicle was completely covered inside and out with snow. It hadn’t snowed for over a week. Then I remembered the last time it had snowed was that Saturday we met.

  “I kind of freaked out. Wondered what was going on. I … think I called him again. And then I went to his front door. Knocked. Rang the bell. But nobody answered. I went inside. And I saw that his stuff was lying out on the counter.

  “None of it made any sense. I started wondering if something, you know, bad had happened. Like, if he’d had a heart attack or something and … shit, I don’t know. I wondered if he was dead in there. So I searched the house, went room to room, but I never found him. That’s when I came here and reported him missing.”

  “Why didn’t you feed the cat?” Patterson poised her pen over the paper, waiting for the answer.

  “Feed the cat?”

  “Yes. The cat was starving when we got there later that morning. Meowed at us until we fed it.”

  Alamy blinked rapidly. “Yeah. I don’t know. I must have not noticed.”

  Wolf resisted looking at Patterson.

  She scribbled something in her notes.

  Chris’s breathing accelerated. He volleyed glances between them.

  “What do you do at Preston Rock and Supply, Chris?” Wolf asked.

  He hesitated, looking as if he’d been caught off-guard by the change of subject. “I’m VP of operations.”

  “And the president is?” Wolf asked.

  “Mr. Preston is president and owner.” Alamy opened his mouth to say something else but closed it.

  “Were you going to say something?” Patterson asked.

  “No, well, I’m part owner, too. Twenty-five percent.”

  Wolf nodded. “And if something were to happen to Mr. Preston? Would that make you a hundred-percent owner?”

  Alamy straightened, an affronted look twisting his face. “I can leave, right? I’m not under arrest, am I?”

  “No, you’re not,” Wolf said. “We’re just talking about the—”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have to talk anymore. I’m not liking the direction this is going. I’m gonna get a lawyer.” He stood up. “Can I leave?”

  Patterson and Wolf looked at one another.

  “I asked you if I can leave.”

  “You can leave,” Wolf said.

  Chris walked to the door and twisted the handle. “It’s locked.”

  The doorknob rattled, and the door pushed open.

  Chris backed away and squared off with Rachette.

  Rachette took his time stepping aside, but as soon as the opening was big enough Chris darted through.

  Rachette watched him go. “G
eez. Guy looks like Yates after eating a pound of cheese.”

  Yates came up behind him and they stepped into the room.

  Rachette looked at Wolf. “You wanted us to watch, and I just saw a guilty man get up and dart out of here.”

  “Guilty of what?” Patterson asked.

  “Guilty.”

  Yates stepped to the table and pushed in the chair, then reached over to grab the bottle of water from the table top.

  “Bag that bottle and get it down to Lorber.”

  Yates pulled back his hand. “You brought that in to get his fingerprints?”

  “Are his prints on file?”

  Yates looked at Patterson and Rachette.

  “I don’t know,” Rachette said.

  “There are now.” Wolf left the interrogation room, went through the cramped observation space, and out another door to an office manned by Deputy John Tyler.

  “You get all that?” he asked Tyler.

  Tyler clicked his computer mouse and sat back. “Yep.”

  “Upload the footage,” Patterson told him, referring to some place on or in some cloud unknown to Wolf.

  “You got it.”

  They left for the hallway and walked toward the squad room, passing MacLean’s office. The blinds were closed again, and a bark-like laugh vibrated the windows.

  “How are we doing on Alamy’s cell records? A man’s life could be hanging in the balance.”

  “I’m on it.” Patterson veered into the squad room.

  Wolf stopped and turned around. Yates came up behind him with a plastic bag containing the empty bottle of water.

  “I’ll take that.”

  Yates handed it over.

  “Rachette, you two look into Alamy’s internet presence. Social media, all that.”

  “You going down to see how the Yeti’s doing?” Rachette asked.

  “Yep.”

  Rachette and Yates walked to their desks.

  Wolf sighed, thinking about the couch inside his office.

  Chapter 5

  Wolf rode the elevator to the first floor and walked down the hallway to the hanging sign that read Forensics Department.

  “Hello?” Wolf said into the empty room.

  Electronic scopes, other devices, and accompanying electronic screens hummed under blinding white lights.

  A black knit sweater and a pair of gray slacks were laid out on a metal gurney. Water streamed off them. Wolf deduced the objects had once been inside Warren Preston’s drifted-over vehicle. Unless there were other current cases he was unaware of. He caught a whiff of his breath, still strong enough to kill a deer, and decided that could have been a possibility.

  He walked through a pair of double doors. The next room was small and rectangular with white-tiled floors. Boxes and unused equipment spilled off metal carts.

  A heavy steel door waited on the far side of the wall, opening out into the garage. Wolf pushed through into exhaust-tinged cool air.

  The garage inside had been created for forensic analysis of vehicles and was large enough to house four fire trucks parked side-by-side. It had been dubbed The Bomb Shelter for obvious reasons. In the center stood Warren Preston’s Lexus SUV. The doors were wide open and powerful lights mounted on metal stands illuminated the interior. Water streamed away from the vehicle in dark swaths, burbling as it flowed out of sight into drains in the floor.

  “Hey.” Dr. Lorber stood studying the vehicle with folded arms.

  The Sluice–Byron County medical examiner stood six foot seven, a few inches lower when he stood in round-shouldered contemplation, like now. When he let his arms hang down, they were long as a gorilla’s, like the mythical Yeti, as Rachette had referred to him earlier. The man was skin and bones though. More of an anemic gorilla or Sasquatch.

  “What’s happening?” Wolf asked.

  Lorber pushed a pair of John Lennon-style glasses up his nose and double-took the plastic bag in Wolf’s hand. “What’s that?”

  “We just interviewed Chris Alamy—Warren Preston’s employee. As far as we know, he was the last person to see Warren Preston Saturday night. I have his prints on this bottle in case we need them.”

  Lorber raised an eyebrow. “Funny. I was just going to come up and talk to you about prints.”

  Wolf held up the bag.

  “It’s wet.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn it. If I see another drop of condensation I’m going to piss myself.”

  “Seems counterproductive.”

  Lorber donned a pair of latex gloves and took the bag. He extracted the bottle, brought it to the lights, and set it on the concrete.

  “Prints?” Wolf asked, referring to Lorber’s earlier comment.

  “I found a single partial. Nothing else.”

  “Whose?”

  Lorber shrugged. “No match in the databases. And we should have found way more than just a single, partial print. Doesn’t matter if the vehicle was left out in the snow or a torrential rain storm. Unless Warren Preston drives with gloves on all the time, never touching the interior of the vehicle.”

  “It was wiped.”

  Lorber nodded. “Come here.” He loped to the open vehicle.

  Wolf followed into the hot lights. The leather of the SUV interior was covered in patterns where condensation had evaporated.

  “See this?” Lorber clicked on a black light and pointed it at the bottom of the door. “Turn off those lights.”

  Wolf turned around.

  “Flip the main switch on the side of that stand.”

  Wolf did as he was told and the room went pitch-black.

  He stood blinking, feeling like he’d been transported to the deck of a swaying ship socked in with fog at midnight.

  “Over here.” Lorber waved the black light.

  Wolf shuffled nearer and studied the passenger seat headrest as Lorber swept the light across it.

  “See this? Up here where the snow didn’t reach.” Lorber’s light revealed swipe marks on the leather where someone had wiped it with a rag and cleaner.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s the same all over. No fingerprints. Just this thorough wipe-job.”

  “Where’d you get the partial?”

  Lorber shut the door. “Outer driver’s-side handle. Underneath.”

  “Want to bet that partial belongs to Chris Alamy?” Wolf asked into the darkness.

  “He was with Preston Saturday night?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “That’s when that storm hit, right?” Lorber asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Turn on that light again.”

  Wolf fumbled around for a few moments and found the switch. The light blasted his eyes, and when his eyesight returned to normal he noticed Lorber staring at him.

  “You look like shit today. Again.”

  “How about you get to lifting Alamy’s prints off that bottle, and we can check it against the partial.”

  Lorber failed to hide a faint, amused grin as he picked up the bottle with a thumb and middle finger.

  Wolf followed him back to the interior lab doors and back inside.

  The ME wasted no movements as he gathered the necessary equipment and supplies to process the prints.

  “You want me to come back?”

  “It’ll take me a minute or two.”

  Wolf fantasized about a minute or two on the office couch. He decided that after this he’d sit while the rest of his team accomplished their other tasks.

  “There.” Lorber flicked a switch, displaying a full set of prints on a monitor. “Glad I didn’t bet. Partial’s not Alamy’s.”

  Wolf studied the screen.

  “Alamy’s loops are all ulnar,” Lorber said, pointing.

  Which meant the fingerprints spiraled away from the pinkie side of the hand. Or was it the thumb side?

  “The print on the handle is less than half a complete pattern, but you can see it’s looping the opposite direction. And it’s all wrong, any
way.”

  Wolf nodded. “Okay. And you’re certain that partial’s not Warren Preston’s?”

  “Yep.” Lorber clicked on the keyboard, fingers like an Irish stepdance. A second later another set of prints came up onscreen, replacing the prints from the bottle. “These are Preston’s prints from his phone and all over the house. See?”

  Wolf did. The partial clearly didn’t match any of Preston’s.

  “So we’re looking for a third person,” Wolf said.

  “And our third person wiped the car,” Lorber said. The ME folded his arms and looked Wolf up and down, judgment pinching his forehead. He opened his mouth to say something but Wolf cut him off.

  “What about any other forensic evidence? Hair? Clothing fibers? Blood?”

  “That’s another matter. I’m starting on it now. Daphne’s coming in to give me a hand. I’m not that optimistic, considering the amount of snow swirling around inside that vehicle. But we’ll see.”

  Daphne Pinnifield was Lorber’s new intern. She lived over the pass to the south, where she was pre-med at a branch of Colorado Mountain College in Ashland.

  Wolf let a yawn stretch his face.

  “Looks like you need to go back to sleep,” Lorber said.

  Wolf wished. “Keep me posted.”

  He headed out the doors and down the hall. A group of uniforms were chatting, waiting for the elevator, so he stepped into the stairwell and began the climb.

  His lungs heaved by the second landing, but he pressed on without stopping. By the third floor, an itchy sweat had broken out under his shirt. It beaded his forehead and prickled his scalp.

  He exited the stairs and saw Patterson standing with Rachette and Yates outside his office door.

  Patterson spoke first. “My guy’s not there at Summit Wireless, but they know we’re in a hurry for Alamy’s records. Should be a few hours.”

  Wolf walked inside his office with his squad in tow. He pointedly avoided eye contact with the couch and went to the window. Cool air radiated off the glass. A bank of clouds had rolled in from the north, looking like they might spit a few flakes by the afternoon. He recalled vaguely that the forecast was calling for trace amounts. But when? For the second time of the day he questioned what day it was. Wednesday?

  He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.