by Jeff Carson
Contents
Foreign Deceit 2nd Edition
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
FOREIGN DECEIT
Second Edition
By Jeff Carson
Copyright © 2013 Jeff Carson
All rights reserved.
David Wolf Books In Order
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Wolf #5 —COMING SUMMER 2014
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Chapter 1
“I don’t know where the hell she is.” The woman’s tone suggested a mother would be the last person to know where her teenage child was. “Julie don’t spend much time here. I assume she’s off with Jerry doing something.” She waved a dismissive hand to the forest behind the two police officers standing in front of her.
Sergeant David Wolf shifted his weight, sagging the gray wood under his boot with a loud creak, and took a quick look around. The siding of the house was brown, though Wolf suspected the house was at one time white. Wide spaces yawned between cracked and warped boards of the deck, which were jam packed with tubular spider webs. They must have been well fed by the cloud of flies that swarmed the stinking place. On the porch next to the front door was a small crumbling flowerpot overflowing with cigarette butts. A weathered compact disc case lay askew near it. The liner notes had long been taken out, and the back cover was wavy and unreadable under the plastic.
“Jerry’s parents reported him missing this morning, Vicky,” Wolf said. “Been missing for two days. That’s why we’re here. We know they’ve been spending a lot of time together lately. We understand they’re dating.”
Vicky Mulroy just stared with half-closed eyes.
She is stoned, Wolf thought.
Officer Tom Rachette huffed impatiently, seeming to come to the same realization as Wolf. “Do your daughter and Jerry Wheatman often go to a specific place, ma’am?” Rachette’s voice was loud, as if talking to a deaf person. For good measure, he expanded his chest and hooked his thumb conspicuously near his pistol, as if he was trying to wake her up to the fact that two police officers were on her doorstep and they meant business.
Vicky appeared to snap out of her daze at Rachette’s puffery. She smiled appraisingly at Rachette, revealing brown teeth and black windows where teeth used to be. “I ain’t seen Julie in at least three days.” She paused and squinted at Rachette’s name badge. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before, Officer . . . Rachette.” She pronounced it Ra-shay with a flourish of her hand.
Wolf sighed inwardly. He knew Vicky had hit a nerve, because Rachette hated this pronunciation. The young second year officer, Tom Rachette, preferred his last name to rhyme with the sharp handheld chopping tool, not “some la-de-da French lord’s namesake”, as he had once put it. Wolf had seen this exchange between Rachette and dozens of people before, usually ending in Rachette losing his grip.
Wolf put a hand on Rachette’s shoulder and Rachette reluctantly stepped back a half step.
She dismissed Rachette with a small smile and turned to Wolf. She studied him up and down with hunger in her eyes and not a hint of shame about it. “You still lookin’ good,” she said.
Wolf didn’t blink. He may have been looking good to her, but Vicky Mulroy, on the other hand, looked like shit.
Wolf knew she must be thirty-eight years old, give or take one or two years, because they’d been in the same classes throughout school. But she looked older than her years. A hell of a lot older.
The last time Wolf had seen Vicky Mulroy, it had been during a raid of this very house. Wolf remembered being shocked at the sight of her that day, the way the drugs had destroyed her once pretty face he knew from school. And now, a year later, Vicky looked even worse. Her body was bone thin. Pocked with open sores, her sunken face now looked like someone had flung a meat chili at her and she hadn’t yet bothered to wipe it off. Her dark brown hair was stringy, slick with grease and sweat, clinging to her forehead. Her eyelids drooped like they were made of lead, and it was taking all her strength to keep her pale blue, bloodshot eyes open.
Then there was the smell. Wolf breathed through his mouth and moved a little to his left, hoping to sidestep the cat urine stench of crystal meth mixed with the musky scent of humans who had given up on hygiene billowing out the door. He saw Rachette turn his head and wipe his mouth with his sleeve, apparently taking the same onslaught to his senses as Wolf.
“Jerry Wheatman’s parents are pretty worried. Aren’t you worried that Julie hasn’t been home for days?” Wolf asked.
Vicky’s eyes darkened. “I guess that’s why she stays over there so much. Those Wheatmans are sure a nice, loving bunch of people. That family of fairies turned my girl vegetarian, you know. Pansies.”
“How about Bill?” Wolf asked with growing impatience. “Has he seen Julie lately?”
“I don’t know,” she said, as if knowing anything about her husband’s thoughts was as incredulous as knowing where her teenage daughter was.
“Is he working at the station right now?” Wolf, just like everyone in town, knew that Bill Mulroy was a life-long employee of the Mackery gas station at the end of Main Street.
“Far as I know,” she said.
Wolf suspected they weren’t going to get anything from this lead other than sick to their stomach. “Please just let us know immediately if you see or hear from either one of them. It may be normal for Julie to be gone for days, but Jerry’s folks are pretty spooked. And … ” Wolf paused. He wanted to tell her to shape up and quit smoking the meth. That he was going to come bust her and Bill if they kept it up. That she wasn’t being a good mother to her daughter. That she needed to pull her head out of her ass, and how he remembered her as the cute girl he’d kissed in sixth grade. But Wolf had been intimately close to people on drugs and had witnessed the effect of drugs on them. And speeches never
worked. So, instead, he said with genuine concern, “Take care, Vicky.”
She eyed Wolf up and down once more, her eyes turning dark. “Sure thing, honey. Say hi to Sarah for me, okay?”
Wolf stared at her.
Vicky Mulroy read his expression and looked satisfied. Then she laughed and turned back into the darkness. The torn up screen door squeaked and slapped against the doorjamb, blowing a fresh waft of rank air into their faces.
Rachette wasted no time getting off the porch, leaping down over all three of the rotted steps. As Rachette landed on the gravel, he sucked air into his lungs and coughed. “Good Lord. Something’s dead in that house.”
“Just a steady diet of meth and alcohol,” Wolf said walking down the steps after him, “and all the fun, fragrant stuff that brings.”
Uncomfortable silence enveloped them as they walked back to the road, and Wolf thought about Vicky’s last few words.
It was common knowledge around town, as juicy tidbits about people’s personal lives often are, especially the unfortunate ones, that Sarah Wolf, known as Sarah Muller now, was a pill-popper. It was also common knowledge that she had recently completed another attempt at kicking the habit. In fact, Sarah would be back today from her stay at the rehab facility in Vail.
Since Vicky Mulroy had been aware of this fact, her words were laden with meaning. Wolf was trying to figure out what that meaning was. Say hi to Sarah for me? Was that to say that this meth-head, Vicky, had a recent relationship of some sort with his ex-wife? Wolf was pretty sure his Sarah hadn’t ventured into trying any harder drugs than Oxycontin. Wolf had seen the distant look in Sarah’s eyes, dilated pupils, lethargy, aggressive language and slurred speech. But he hadn’t seen any sign of her doing any of the hard stuff – the smoke, snort, or injection kind of stuff.
Maybe Vicky was just trying to say, worry about the drug addicts in your own life and get off my case. Wolf hoped that’s what she meant. Suddenly, he was keener to see Sarah than ever. He needed to look in her eyes. He hoped it would be different this time around. Maybe the fourth time was the charm for her.
“Well, looks like we’ve got two missing kids now.” Rachette looked back at the tiny run down shack in the pines. “Do you think Jerry and Julie just ran away? I know I would if I lived there. Jesus.”
They reached the Ford Explorer and got in. Wolf buckled his seatbelt and stared out the dusty windshield toward the couple hundred square foot building where Vicky Mulroy and her husband confined themselves in a hazy vat of noxious chemicals for most of the day.
The shame was that the piece of land their house stood on was a perfect place to raise a family. It was hugged on all sides by virgin forest. There was an open grass field to the south. Just a few miles from town, but in the boonies—far enough so you could feel like you were really roughing it.
But this place was too rough, Wolf thought. Too rough for sixteen-year-old Julie, that’s for sure. Too rough for a kid of any age.
“I don’t know, but it definitely looks like Jerry and Julie are together, wherever they are,” Wolf said.
It was common knowledge around town that Jerry Wheatman and Julie Mulroy were sweethearts as of the last year or so. They were attached at the hip, figuratively, and probably literally at sixteen years old. Had Jerry and Julie come up with a plan to up and leave? To run away to a better place?
For Julie Mulroy, that theory would make perfect sense. How could anyone live in this godforsaken place and not either fall into a life of drugs or make serious plans to leave? Word was around town that the coming-of-age daughter was kind of a rebel, but didn’t do drugs. If that was true, how could she bring herself to stay here?
Jerry Wheatman’s life was a different story altogether. Similar to Julie, he wasn’t known around town as someone who experimented with drugs, but the similarities ended there. He wasn’t considered rebellious in any way. He came from a loving family environment. He came from a stable home, with stable parents, who had stable jobs, which earned stable incomes.
Wolf knew the Wheatmans well, and he thought Jerry wasn’t the type of kid that would run away. Jerry Wheatman was more the type of kid that would simply ask his parents to let Julie live with them. He would probably explain her hard situation, and they would take pity on her and open their home to a teenage girl in need.
No. Running away would have been a big deal for Jerry, Wolf thought. Not a realistic decision he would have made. All indications from the Wheatman family had been that everything was perfectly fine. There were no fights at home with either of his sisters or with his mother and father. In fact, his parents reported Jerry was in a very happy mood as of late.
Was that very happy mood of Jerry Wheatman’s an indication of his blossoming love with Julie Mulroy? Perhaps it was a state of giddy anticipation, knowing he and his young love were about to run away together? Or maybe the happy situation Jerry’s parents had described at home was all a lie.
“What do you think?” Rachette asked, breaking Wolf from his thoughts. “Do we go talk to Bill Mulroy? See what he has to say?”
Wolf looked at his watch. 9:34 a.m. Bill Mulroy would be manning the cash register at the Mackery gas station. “I think he might know something. Maybe Julie confides in her dad more than her mom. Let’s go.”
Wolf fired up the Explorer and headed down the forested road toward town.
Chapter 2
Wolf and Rachette rode without talking. They were just as comfortable in silence as in idle conversation, and it was one of the many reasons Wolf liked having the young second-year officer in the car with him.
The sun was warm streaming in through the windshield, and the windows were cracked open to let the chilled late summer breeze in the cab, which also carried the sweet scent of pinesap.
Wolf eyed the clouds swelling behind the southwest peaks. They would billow high and mash into large thunderstorms within a few hours. Late summer was the time of year when the monsoonal flow brought moisture from Mexico, up through Arizona, and finally into the Colorado Rocky Mountains, unleashing huge torrents of rain all along the way.
After the dry and smoky fire season, Rocky Points, and the rugged land surrounding it, was turning verdant once again. They had dodged a bullet this year getting through the dry months without seeing any major fires nearby, and Wolf now welcomed the danger of the town going down with floods versus up in flames. Wolf knew the day the gray and brittle beetle-kill pines that blanketed the valley caught fire, it would be hell unleashed.
They passed aspens with pockets of gold among the green leaves, a sign that autumn was near at 8,500 feet, despite the steamy weather they were having.
The radio crackled, breaking Wolf’s meditative state. “Calling all available officers.” It was the voice of Tammy Granger, receptionist, dispatcher, and wearer of a thousand other hats at the Rocky Points police station. “We just got a call from a hiker. She has seen a body on the lower Pine Cliffs Trail at the base of one of the cliffs. She says the victim was not moving. The hiker will stay in the trailhead parking lot until we get there.”
Wolf and Rachette eyed each other. Wolf flipped the lights, gunned the engine, and picked up the radio. “Wolf here, we’re on our way. We’re in town, and we’ll be there in a few minutes.” Wolf left it at that and hung the radio back on the dash, knowing the other officers would be lining up to chime in their positions and ETAs.
Wolf also knew Tammy would be alerting the fire department, and Summit County Search and Rescue, telling them to stand by in case they needed the helicopter. Those actions were standard procedure that fell on her, and Wolf had learned over the years that Tammy neither needed nor welcomed being reminded of her duties.
“All right everyone,” the radio almost vibrated off its clip. “I need all on-duty officers on their way to the Pine Cliffs trailhead, right now,” Sergeant Derek Connell said.
Rachette shook his head and pleaded silently to the ceiling of the cab.
“Tammy,” Connell continued
, sounding like he now had half the radio in his mouth, “You need to contact RPFD, that’s your job. Also, call Summit and get them pre-flighting the chopper. We may need an air extraction.”
The radio fell silent. There was no response from Tammy. Rachette smiled wide, and Wolf couldn’t help curl his lips. Tammy hated Derek Connell more than anyone on the force. Wolf and Rachette knew expletives would be flying out of Tammy’s mouth any second.
“Tammy. Do you copy?” Connell’s voice was thick with menace.
“Sure thing.” Tammy said curtly.
After a few seconds of desolate radio silence, it crackled back to life as four more officers gave their positions and estimated times of arrival.
Officer Wilson, one of two rookies on the force, clicked on. “Officer Wilson here. On my way. I’m near the trail now.”
“Don’t let that woman leave, and wait for me to ask the questions,” Connell said.
“… sir,” Wilson said, apparently pushing the radio button with poor timing or in a bad reception area.
The radio went silent for a few seconds, and Wolf let out his breath, hoping Connell’s tyranny on the radio was over. It wasn’t.
“Do you copy, Officer Wilson?” Connell asked in a drill-sergeant tone.
“Yes, sir. Understood.”
And with that, the radio fell silent.
“Jesus Christ,” Rachette said looking out the window. Although Officer Rachette often uttered that particular expletive in the course of a normal workday, he rarely did with such gusto.
Wolf knew what Rachette was thinking. He knew what every single person on the radio was thinking. In one week’s time, the Rocky Points City Council would appoint a new sheriff, and there was a chance it could be Sergeant Derek Connell.
Luckily for the rest of the force, another candidate stood in Connell’s way. Wolf, who was considered by many to be better suited for the position, hoped he would be the council’s choice. The current sheriff, Harold “Hal” Burton, had mentally checked out a year ago, and had effectively given over the reigns to Wolf. It was clear to everyone on the force, and to the residents of town, that Wolf was being groomed to be the next sheriff of Rocky Points.
