Drifted

by Jeff Carson

Wolf listened to the phone rustle and heard a car door opening and closing. “Okay. My first session from the road overlooking Rocky Points. Not a bad view, I must say.”

  “Where are you?”

  “McCall Mountain Road.”

  Wolf knew the spot. When he’d returned from his six tours, he and Sarah had dreamed of buying a house up there, but it had been way beyond their budget.

  “You live up there?” Wolf asked.

  “Yeah. A townhome a couple miles up the canyon.”

  Wolf stared out the window toward where he pictured the doctor standing, thought it was impossible to see from the angle.

  “What’s bothering you, David?”

  Wolf rubbed his fingers into his eyes. “Everyone knows the truth about my episode on the mountain.”

  Hawkwood took a loud breath. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I don’t care,” Wolf said. He paced the room. “It was bound to come out.”

  Hawkwood said nothing.

  “I killed a boy once.”

  Hawkwood remained silent.

  “I’ve never told anyone that in my life, except for right now. Not even my wife, when I came home from the army.”

  The line hissed.

  “You there?”

  “Yes. Sorry. What happened?”

  Wolf told the story of Sri Lanka and the boy with the backpack full of explosives, and Wolf’s quick decision. When he’d finished, he stared through glassy eyes out the window, sweat beading on his forehead.

  “Thanks for telling me that, David. I know that must have been hard.”

  “I’ve already dealt with that,” Wolf said. “I mean … I thought I had.”

  “Seems like it would be hard to completely deal with that, no matter how many years passed.”

  “And then there was Ella.”

  “Lauren’s eight-year-old daughter,” Hawkwood said.

  Wolf nodded. “Yes.”

  Someone knocked on Wolf’s door. He turned around, walked to the knob and twisted the lock.

  They left.

  “So … how do you think Ella is triggering your memory of this boy?”

  “I let her down.”

  “How?”

  “I told her I would marry her. Marry her and her mother. And then I left her.”

  “It was my understanding that Lauren left you. She was unable to take the stress of being the wife of a law-enforcement officer.”

  Wolf said nothing.

  “Am I right?”

  “It didn’t make it any less difficult for Ella.”

  Hawkwood let the silence sit for a while. “Have you ever heard of a samskara?”

  “No.”

  “The word has several meanings in Indian philosophy. I like to think of them as trapped energy stored in our hearts.”

  Wolf frowned. “I’m not sure I believe in this type of thing.”

  “When you had your episode, where was the pain?”

  Wolf rubbed a hand over his chest. “Point taken.”

  “A samskara starts with an event. Of course, events happen to us, around us, all the time. Most events pass through us harmlessly. We walk down the hallway, hit our foot on a chair, and we stub our toe. We hiss in pain, and we move on with our lives. We might have a slight limp for a day or two, but other than that, we move on, unaffected. But what if somebody had pushed that chair in front of us and we stubbed our toe? Did Sally mean to do that? Was she trying to hurt me?”

  “Sounds like it. Sally pushed a chair in front of you.”

  Hawkwood sighed. “The point is, the first event passed through you. You never even thought of it again. The second event? Well, now you’re wondering about Sally all day. What did you say to her? What pissed her off to the point she’s acting psycho around the office, trying to trip you up with a chair? Or … maybe she accidentally knocked it, just like she told you. But, then again, maybe she meant it. Maybe she wants your job. Maybe she’s always had it in for you? Or wait a minute—maybe she’s pissed about that time you went out with her boyfriend in high school. Could she still be angry about something that happened twenty-five years ago?”

  Wolf said nothing.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes. I’m a woman who stole Sally’s boyfriend.”

  “Right. You stole Sally’s boyfriend. Or she accidentally kicked the damn chair in front of you. That’s a samskara. That swirling energy inside of you. Those emotions. Now it’s stuck there, sometimes forever. Every single time you think about it, it flares with the same intensity as it did during the actual event that created it. Your body goes into that state. It releases chemicals, hormones, and puts you right back into that place. Unless you let it out of you, every time you kick a chair from now on you could trigger this thing. Hell, it could get so bad that the sight of a chair sets it off.”

  “Okay. I’ll buy it. It exists. So how do I get rid of it?”

  “By letting it go.”

  Wolf sat down and scratched his head. “By letting it go.”

  “I can’t complicate it any more than that.”

  Wolf looked at the clock on the wall—four minutes to the sit-room meeting. The sound of Hawkwood’s footsteps stopped in the background.

  “Listen. Thanks for taking my call, Doc. I really do have—”

  “—to go. Yeah, I know. Have a good day. And you’re welcome to call me anytime.”

  Wolf hung up and stared at the phone. He dropped it on the desktop, then picked it up again.

  Without thinking, he scrolled to Lauren’s text and tapped a reply into the bubble.

  That’s terrible to hear. Of course I’ll agree to do that. When?

  He stood up fast. His chair crashed into the wall behind him.

  He expected an hour or two wait for a response, but the phone chimed immediately.

  Thank you. How about tomorrow?

  The world stopped. Tomorrow. He turned to the window and replied.

  Sure. What time?

  How about 4 p.m.?

  See you then.

  Bye.

  Wolf considered a response, but he’d already said goodbye to her once.

  He pocketed his phone, feeling a rush of adrenaline spiking his veins. The fuse was lit.

  He unlocked the door and walked to the sit room.

  Chapter 21

  Patterson was used to getting up in front of the squad room and speaking in front of a bunch of male deputies and personnel by now. But it always irked her to see only men staring back at her whenever she conducted the situation-room meetings.

  The department, and the county building they were in, employed plenty of females, but where were they now when the fire was getting hot? Of course, she was the one they turned to, to make sure these meetings ran with purpose and precision. She guessed that was something.

  As she bent over her computer and opened her presentation, whispers of Wolf’s name bounced off the ceiling and walls. It seemed to be the only topic of conversation in the building this morning. She could only imagine how Wolf felt right now. She’d left the department before it had gotten to this point. She’d been a coward and run.

  The room was smothered in a blanket of silence, and she didn’t have to look up to know he’d entered the room.

  He walked down the center aisle.

  She cringed as everyone looked, like he was a bride.

  ADA Hanson said something to him that sounded cordial. Wolf nodded and took his seat quickly next to Rachette.

  She pried her eyes from the spectacle. It was her duty to pull the heat off him.

  “All right, looks like everyone’s here. Let’s get started.”

  MacLean cleared his throat and stood. “Uh, before we do, I’d like to say a few words.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  MacLean walked to the front and center. “I want to address the situation at hand, right now, with everyone in the room, before this turns into a wildfire spread by a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors.”

  Wolf
was like a statue.

  She averted her eyes and sat on the edge of the table.

  “If anyone says a word to the media about what’s going on with any of our fellow deputies, either with any current situation that may or may not be happening, or any future situations that might occur, I will personally shove my fist so far up their ass I’ll be combing their hair through their nostrils. Thanks, Patty.” He sat down.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A tiny ripple of laughter washed over the room.

  “I am not joking!”

  The room went still.

  She took a breath and began. “This meeting will consist of Dr. Lorber sharing his findings from yesterday’s crime scene. Our detective team has uncovered some major details, and we’re still waiting on some others. We’ll go over that, too. Dr. Lorber?”

  Lorber stood up and Patterson took a seat in the front row next to MacLean.

  The ME clicked the laser pointer and three side-by-side graphs came up onscreen.

  “This left graph is a representative average emission spectrum of a positive gunshot-residue test. You can see our spikes of barium and lead.” He circled the laser. “This next graph is from a subject known to have not fired a weapon for more than ten days prior to testing and has recently washed their hands with soap and water.” He circled the laser again. “You can see the spikes in calcium, sodium, and potassium, but the spikes of barium and lead are absent.”

  Lorber circled the third graph. His point was clear—the heading above read Chris Alamy, and the GSR graph looked exactly like the hand-washer next to it, but he said it anyway.

  “Chris Alamy has no gunshot residue on his hands.”

  The room murmured.

  “We also found a number of prints that didn’t belong to Alamy on beer bottles found in his recycling bin, on the toilet seat, and on the living-room coffee table. These suggest that Alamy was friends with this person and had spent time with him recently.”

  “Him?” MacLean asked.

  Lorber raised an eyebrow. “Judging by the size of the prints and number of beer bottles with the prints on them, the person was a heavy drinker. And …” Lorber turned and scrolled through a few images, landing on a partial next to a full print. “I’ll just skip to the good stuff here. We have a match for our partial print on Warren Preston’s door handle.”

  Lorber nodded at Patterson.

  She stood up and took the clicker. “Thank you, Dr. Lorber.”

  “You got it.”

  She went to the laptop and clicked open the next presentation. A picture of a blue Ford pickup truck showed up onscreen. “Yesterday afternoon, we spoke to three construction workers across the street from Chris Alamy’s house. All said they’d witnessed some commotion happening up at Alamy’s house two days ago—the same day we were uncovering Warren Preston’s body up on Huerfano Pass.

  “They said a man was parked out front of Chris Alamy’s in a truck exactly like this. They reported that the truck honked repeatedly, and then drove off quickly down the hill and back toward town on County 18.”

  Rachette raised his hand.

  Patterson nodded to him.

  “One of the guys was adamant that the driver had been parked there for thirty minutes,” Rachette said. “So it’s not like he was there to pick him up—you know, drive up and honk, and Chris comes out and hops in. I asked that, and they said, no. He was there for a half-hour, laid on his horn a few times, then peeled off down the hill.”

  The room flicked their eyes back to Patterson.

  “Dr. Lorber and his team took casts of the tire treads,” she said. “Moving on.”

  She clicked the pointer and a list came up. “We compiled Chris Alamy’s call history, and a single person comes up repeatedly.”

  She walked to the computer and called up the web browser. A business website, Hood Rock Quarry, glowed onscreen. Pictures of rocks slid by in rhythm.

  “This is a flagstone rock quarry up in Brushing.” She clicked on the Employees link and circled her pointer around the first picture. “This is Zack Hood, the president of the company.”

  She stood and paced the front of the room. “We went to Preston Rock and Supply yesterday, and learned that a month after Warren Preston’s disappearance, Chris Alamy changed suppliers of their flagstone to Zack Hood’s company.”

  “Flagstone,” MacLean said. “That was the rock found in Preston’s skull.”

  Patterson nodded and clicked to the next slide. Two more graphs shone onscreen.

  Lorber took his cue and stood up. “On the left is our spectrophotometer reading of the microscopic rock fragments found in Warren Preston’s skull. On the right is the rock found at Preston Rock and Supply yesterday by Patterson, Yates, and Wilson.”

  “And Rachette,” Rachette said.

  “You can see that the two samples match,” Lorber continued.

  “Aren’t there many rock quarries selling flagstone throughout Colorado?” Wolf asked. “Could this sample in Preston’s skull match the quarry, say, down in Lyons, or somewhere else?”

  “No,” Lorber said. “That front range quarry is a completely different geologic formation, with a different spectral signature.”

  “So you checked?” Wolf asked.

  Wolf seemed so calm and collected. So … normal, even after a public humiliation not thirty minutes in his past.

  “Patterson.”

  She blinked and saw Lorber staring at her with wide eyes. “The next slide.”

  “Sorry. Yes.” She clicked the button.

  A matrix of eight spectral graphs lit up the screen.

  “I checked,” Lorber said. “And you can see here that the peaks and valleys of the mineral-composition graph do not match in intensity with the others.” Lorber pointed at the screen. “This is an analysis found on the USGS website of all the flagstone deposits within the state. Back one slide, Patty.”

  She clicked back, and the two graphs came back up.

  Lorber pointed. “The flagstone found at Preston Rock and Supply was the stone used to kill Warren Preston. Furthermore, the rock was quarried at the Hood flagstone quarry in Brushing.”

  Lorber sat down.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Wilson raised a finger. “But we know Preston Rock and Supply only started carrying this version of flagstone a month ago. Which means somebody brought that rock down three months ago and smacked Warren Preston over the head with it.”

  “Could Preston have been up in Brushing?” MacLean asked.

  “Not likely,” Patterson said. “His phone was down here the whole day, on his person. I say he was killed that night with Chris Alamy. Zack Hood. He fits the bill.”

  DA White leaned into MacLean’s ear and whispered something.

  “Here’s some more,” she said.

  “More?” MacLean scoffed. “Looks like we have ourselves a layup of a lead.”

  “Well, let’s make it a slam dunk, shall we?” She clicked back over to Alamy’s phone information again. “This is the last five days’ activity on Alamy’s phone. Alamy’s all over the place, speaking to different suppliers spanning the western US.” She circled the laser around the final number. “But guess who that last number belongs to.”

  “Zack Hood,” Yates said.

  “Yep.”

  MacLean leaned forward. “So, what are we saying here? Zack Hood comes down, meets with Alamy and Preston, brings down his flagstone. Then bashes Preston over the head it. Then he and Alamy do their dance, dropping off Alamy’s phone at his house, dropping Preston’s vehicle at his house with all his personal pocket belongings, bury Preston, and then Hood drives back to Brushing.”

  She nodded. “That’s what we’re suggesting.”

  “We need Zack Hood’s phone records. Financials.”

  “That we do,” she said.

  Rachette stood up and handed some papers to the DA. “Here’re the warrants for financials, phone records, murder weapon in the form of rock from his quarry
, and arrest.”

  DA White straightened in his chair and perused the papers. He eyed MacLean.

  MacLean flicked a glance toward Wolf.

  Wolf looked at Patterson.

  MacLean walked to Patterson and turned his back on the room. “You think this is solid?”

  “I’d like to see his cell records for yesterday, and for back in March. Financials, too,” she said.

  “But he’s the guy.”

  She looked at Wolf. He was staring back at her without expression. “He’s the guy.”

  “All right.” MacLean turned to face the room. “First things first. Let’s go get Hood. Bring him in and make him talk before he lawyers up. Patterson, Rachette, Yates, bring Wilson.” MacLean looked at Wolf. “Everyone’s dismissed but those I just mentioned. Wolf, I need to talk to you up here.”

  The room erupted as people stood and streamed out.

  Wolf joined his team, Wilson, and MacLean at the front of the room.

  MacLean stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the floor until the room had cleared. His eyes flicked up and landed on Wolf.

  Wolf stared back, unblinking.

  “I want you with them when you talk to Hood” he said. “But I want you to let Rachette, Yates, and Wilson take care of bringing him in.” He pointed at Patterson. “You got that? I don’t want you in there either. You’re to keep yourself and that baby of yours well away from any action. You and Wolf will talk to him.” He pointed at Wilson. “And I want you guys picking up some muscle from Brushing PD. I’ll arrange a meet before you go.”

  “Go where? The quarry?” Rachette asked.

  “We could call, see if he’s there,” MacLean said.

  “He knows we found Warren Preston’s body. He just killed Alamy. He sees us there, he’ll be jumpy,” Wolf said. “I think it’s best to show up unannounced. We’ll start at the quarry, then go to his house or elsewhere to find him if need be.”

  “We, meaning Rachette, Yates, and Wilson, and the Brushing units, who will take him into custody,” said MacLean.

  “Got it.”

  MacLean narrowed one eye. “Rachette, Yates, and Wilson take him.”

  “You just said that. Twice,” Wolf said.

  “And I meant it.” MacLean looked at Patterson and then back to Wolf. “Both times.”