David Wolf series Box Set

by Jeff Carson

  “I know, sir. But something isn’t right over there. The John I knew wouldn’t consider suicide an option, much less the answer. If he truly did this, I need to be convinced, and that won’t happen if I stay here. I can’t take a half-way-around-the-world-stranger’s word on something this big.”

  Burton nodded and stood up. “Well, at least you don’t have to worry about the Wheatman case while you’re gone. You’ll have enough to worry about over there as it is.”

  Wolf narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, what do I mean?”

  “The Wheatman case? I don’t have to worry about it?”

  “You didn’t hear about Julie Mulroy and Chris Wakefield?”

  “No.”

  Burton’s chair squeaked as he sat back down. “I thought Deputy Rachette gave you a call yesterday to fill you in on the whole thing.”

  Wolf remembered the missed call from Rachette along with the three missed calls from his mother. “Well, yeah. I think he called, but I never did talk to him. He didn’t leave a message, and I forgot to call him back with all the—” Wolf interrupted himself and sat forward. “Just tell me what happened.”

  “Julie Mulroy and Chris Wakefield showed up yesterday. They were scared shitless, talking about how they were with Jerry Wheatman when he fell.”

  Wolf sat back. “Chris Wakefield? He was with Julie and Jerry?”

  Burton just nodded. They both knew Chris Wakefield well. He was the sixteen-year-old son of the mayor of Rocky Points. Whereas the mayor was a good man in every sense of the word, Chris was regarded as a bit of a rebel. He was the kind of kid that you would have avoided eye contact with if you passed him on the street. For a couple of years, he had dressed in all black, wearing headphones and shutting out communication with anyone. Save for a couple friends he had had in town, he spoke to no one. Not even Wolf.

  Recently, however, Chris Wakefield appeared to integrate himself back into society. Over the past year, he had changed his attire to “fit in,” and he seemed to lose some of his animosity toward the town and for life in general. Wolf had theorized that it was no coincidence the kid’s metamorphosis had coincided with his father’s run for mayor a year ago.

  “Okay,” Wolf said. “So according to Julie and Chris, Jerry fell. How? Why wait so long to report it? What angle are we taking on these two?”

  Burton stayed silent for a second and then blinked. “We’re not taking any angle.”

  “All right.”

  Burton sat motionless.

  “So what’s their explanation of what happened?” Wolf asked.

  Burton shrugged. “They say Jerry was dickin’ around up top and fell. End of story.”

  Wolf was unconvinced. “Details, Sheriff. Details.”

  Burton took a deep breath. “Apparently, Julie and Jerry go up top together. Alone. Jerry shows off to Julie on top of the cliff, messing around near the edge, and slips off. Julie watches him plummet to his death, freaks out, and freezes up on top. Now, she can either call the cops or her friend. She opts for the friend, thinking we’ll think she pushed Wheatman off. So she calls Wakefield. Wakefield drives out to the trailhead, walks to the top of the trail, and helps her down the mountain.

  “Wakefield says Julie was catatonic on top of the mountain. Puking everywhere. In bad shape. He tries to convince her to go to the cops, but she’s having none of it, freaking out, thinking we are going to lock her up and throw away the key. Wakefield takes her to his house, and finally succeeds in convincing her to come to us. So they showed up yesterday.” Burton held up his hands like he’d just finished tying a rope on a steer.

  “So they don’t check if Jerry is okay? They just leave him to die?” Wolf was incredulous.

  Burton held up a hand. “Chris says he ran down to the body. Checked Wheatman’s pulse, and he was dead.”

  Wolf stared for a few seconds, just shaking his head. “Julie drove to the trail.”

  Burton nodded. “Julie drove to the trail. And Wakefield drove to pick her up. Then they both drove back to Chris’s house.”

  “And Julie was okay to drive to Chris’s house, despite having just been catatonic. That’s quite a story.” Wolf got up and paced. “What about the mayor? Did you talk to him? What does he say about all this? He just lets his sixteen-year-old son bring home a girl to spend a couple of nights at the house?”

  Burton’s face went red—whether out of anger or embarrassment, Wolf couldn’t tell. “Of course I talked to the mayor,” he said in an even voice. “He says he didn’t suspect a thing out of the ordinary. He says Chris told him that Julie needed a place to stay on account of her drug-addict parents, and he believed his son. And, of course, I believe the mayor. As you should, too.”

  Wolf waved a hand. “Okay, okay. But this just doesn’t add up. These kids are hiding something, and you know it.”

  “Sit down,” Burton said. “Sit.”

  Wolf did.

  “We don’t have any evidence to contradict these kids’ stories. Nothin’ on Wheatman’s body, no defensive wounds, nothin’. What do you suppose we do? Accuse the girl of murder? That would make the mayor’s son an accomplice to murder, without any evidence to back it up. Personally, I’m real attached to the prospect of getting my pension. And I’m sure you’re real attached to the prospect of becoming sheriff next week.”

  “I understand,” Wolf said, standing. He didn’t need further explanation. Getting on the bad side of the mayor was professional suicide, but Wolf still didn’t like any of it. It would have to wait, though. There were more pressing issues that Wolf needed to take care of.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Burton said.

  Rachette poked his head in and did a double take at the sight of Wolf. “Sirs. I was actually just going to let you know, Sheriff, that I’ll to be taking Sergeant Wolf to the airport this morning down in Denver.”

  Burton stood up and squeezed Wolf’s shoulder. “Son. Again, I’m sorry, and let me know if I can help in any way.”

  He shook Burton’s hand and walked out of the office with Rachette on his heels.

  Chapter 11

  Wolf was jolted awake by the ping of the seatbelt sign and a loud voice in Italian over the Boeing 777’s intercom. He was in Milan. Milano. He looked out the window and saw green fields and countless red-roofed buildings. Anything tall enough to be hit by an aircraft was painted in a red-and-white candy-cane striping.

  While in the army, he’d been to Germany on many occasions, en route to the Middle East, and that was the extent of his experience in Europe. He was more familiar with countries further east of the Prime Meridian, or south—the Middle East, China, Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, Central and South America.

  And when he was in another culture, it was usually on missions, taking in the sights from a helicopter at night or through the scope of a gun. Ever since his final day as an army ranger ten years ago, he hadn’t set foot outside the United States, so it was safe to say he had no clue what to expect in Italy.

  He’d seen the pictures on his brother’s blog, read a few of his posts about life there, but he really didn’t have a sense of what he was getting into at all. For him, the word Italy conjured up thoughts of pizza, spaghetti, meatballs, and calzones. Ferraris and Ducatis and Mario and Luigi.

  The plane came to a halt at the Lufthansa gate at Malpensa International Airport.

  “Ciao,” a pretty dark-haired flight attendant said to Wolf as he stepped off the plane. The air was warm and startlingly humid inside the jet bridge, and his Colorado-dried skin drank the moisture like a sponge.

  As he reached the main terminal, the air was still thick, and whatever was in the air, probably smog, tickled his throat. Looking out the terminal window, past the docked planes, revealed a flat landscape with a dense hazy sky. Any direction he looked seemed to present the same thick copse of deciduous trees beyond the airport. He knew the Alps were close by. He’d gotten a good look at t
he Matterhorn before the rough dive into Milan, but the Alps hid behind a veil at the moment. His mental compass was spinning. At home it was easy. Rocky Points had the Rocky Points to the west, and Denver had the towering mountains to the west. Gauging direction without landmarks was proving difficult, and his inability to get his bearings exacerbated his uneasiness.

  A sea of people chattered all around him in a language he had little experience with other than one semester class in high school before he changed to Spanish. Everyone was using the same voice intonations along with the same hand gestures. Grandiose was the word that came to his mind when he watched the people speaking around him.

  Passing through the customs line, the officer asked him why he was in the country.

  “Vacation,” he said. No sense causing any confusion.

  The customs officer said something else to him, looked at him expectantly, rolled his eyes, and then shooed him onward. Wolf walked on, into a vast terminal, coming up blank when he tried to figure out what had just been said. The language resembled Spanish in many ways, but was spoken in such a rapid staccato that he had no chance of picking out a single word.

  Signs throughout the airport were in Italian with English underneath. He concentrated on listening to the people around him, listening for other English speakers, and heard none. He thought back on the phone calls and how difficult it was to communicate with the few people he’d spoken to.

  What was he expecting here? Sure, he was getting John’s body and bringing it home, but he had much larger aspirations for this trip. How the hell was this going to go down?

  He set out to find the train.

  Chapter 12

  The next two hours were an exercise of faith and following the poor directions from Maggiore Rossi of the carabinieri. Not once was he completely sure he was on the right train or going in the right direction. The train app he’d gotten for his iPhone was rendered useless the moment he’d stepped off the plane, as he didn’t have an Italian SIM card for his phone. The sky outside was a dull gray, no shadows. Coupled with the flat landscape and towering buildings everywhere, there was no way to get a bearing on direction.

  Two trains later, however, he was reasonably sure he was on the right route. Twice he caught a glimpse of the word Lecco on signs—the city where John lived, and where the carabinieri awaited Wolf’s arrival—and the Alps finally came into view amid the haze ahead, indicating he was at least heading north. The train stopped often, slowly weaving its way into the green hills. A large slow-moving river flitted into view on the left-hand side. There were boats pulled up along the shore on the dry riverbank, the waterline seemingly a few feet lower than it had been in the recent past. Still, the amount of water sliding by looked to be more than a few of the largest Colorado rivers combined.

  Brightly painted buildings of sorbet orange, sky blue, purple, lemon yellow, and other electric shades were everywhere—next to the river, halfway up the steep inclined hills, even directly on top of the mountain peaks. Nature was choked out by thousands of years of settlement, but the foliage was rampant at the same time. It was thick, dense, wiry, and thorny. Grass grew in feet, not inches.

  Vibrant shades of painted stucco gave way to a consistent powdery gray stone color as the train continued north. Each roof on the thousands of buildings of all shapes and sizes was topped with the same tangerine-hue clay tile.

  As the train slid steadily north, the gaping river widened into small lakes, then narrowed into a tighter bottleneck before ultimately opening up into a gigantic body of water.

  Towering steep mountains lined all sides of the blue expanse. They were densely green with deciduous trees, and there were chalk-white cliffs where the land had slid into the water at some point in time thousands of years ago, or last week, as far as he knew. Straight ahead, the lake continued until it faded out of sight in the muggy air.

  Thanks to his Google searches the night before, he recognized it as Lake Como. The lake was one of the deepest in Europe according to the internet, and, looking at the steep mountains that dove straight into the edges of the lake, it wasn’t hard to imagine the limestone slopes continuing for another thousand or so feet down under the water.

  The train arrived in the city of Lecco, where his brother had lived for the past five months. Wolf recalled that Lecco sat on the geographical lower right tip of the lake, which itself was in the shape of an enormous upside down Y. They were on the southeastern tip, and the northernmost end was somewhere far ahead.

  He was to get off at the train station and wait for his contact to find him. Wolf looked at the “No Service” indicator on his phone and hoped to God they held up their end of the bargain.

  After an uneventful debarkation of the train, he walked a short distance to the front of the train station and sat on a steel bench that was riddled with graffiti.

  For fifteen minutes he sat thinking about SIM cards for cell phones and with a cursory glance around the area came up with zero ideas as to where to get one. He would settle for an internet connection and Skype, but all he saw was a small hole-in-the-wall looking place that said “bar” above the door. A carabinieri officer would help, he assured himself.

  Thirty-five minutes later, he decided to begin walking, somewhere, when a uniformed officer approached him.

  “David Wolf?” The carabinieri had a phone pressed to his ear.

  “Yes.”

  The officer was no older than twenty-five, dressed in a dark-blue, sharp-looking uniform that had a red stripe down the leg, with a glossy white leather belt from which hung a Beretta pistol. He held a shiny-billed military-style hat in his left hand, and his cell phone in the right.

  “I am Tenente Langoria,” he said not offering a shake, since both hands were full. “You may call me Tito.” Tenente Tito put the phone back to his ear and waved Wolf to follow.

  Wolf thought back on the phone conversation he’d had with Tito when he was in Colorado and resisted the urge to drop kick him. Following dutifully, he studied the young man. Tito’s hair glistened in the sun as they stepped out of the station—hat still tucked under his arm. His sideburns were shaven to a precise point halfway down the sides of his face, and a pencil-thin goatee was etched on the skin around his mouth. It looked like it took him well over an hour to get ready in the morning.

  Wolf felt his own hair. It was a greasy mat that left his fingers slick. Then he pulled his hand over the sandpaper stubble on his face, and decided to take his mother’s advice and not pass judgment on others.

  Tito continued an animated conversation on the phone, bending to plead at the ground and standing straight to yell at the sky as he did so. It was a painfully slow march down the street, but they finally reached and stopped at his sleek Alfa Romeo carabinieri cruiser. It had a V-configuration of three cylindrical lights on top and was painted a shiny jet-black with a white stripe.

  They slowed at the vehicle and Tito fished in his pocket, pulled out some keys and then clicked open the locks, all the while talking incessantly. Wolf dropped his bag on the back seat and slid onto the warm leather passenger seat. The interior was nice, equipped with what looked to be a top-of-the-line dash computer mounted in the center between the bucket seats.

  Tito fired up the engine with a roar and pulled out of his parking spot with a jolt. A car screeched to a halt behind them, its driver leaning on the horn for a few seconds. Tito merely glanced in his rear-view mirror while he spoke and peeled down the street.

  The leather seat creaked under Wolf as he was pulled back from the acceleration. With reflex speed, he reached for the seatbelt and put it on.

  Ten minutes later, with three near collisions of which Tito seemed oblivious, and two pedestrians who were lucky to still be alive, they reached their destination. Tito, still talking to some lucky human on the other end of his phone call, clearly regarding unprofessional matters, pulled into a parking lot behind an old building and parked.

  The building stood on the eastern shore of the lake. It was s
quare and gray, four floors high, reminding Wolf of any number of communist-era buildings he’d seen throughout the world.

  He stepped out of the car and pulled his bag from the back seat. A damp breeze came off the lake, smelling vaguely of fish, and the air was clearer than it had been just a few miles away, on the train. There was a line of crisscrossing sails in the distance moving at high speed—kite surfers and sailboarders.

  They walked the short distance to the back of the building and entered through a thick metal door set in worn marble.

  Wolf almost gagged as the spicy odor of human sweat filled his nose. He appeared to have just entered hell, or at least the waiting room for it.

  People were jam-packed in a room to the right and had spilled out into the lobby he’d just entered. People inside faced front in dense lines, waiting for something that didn’t seem to be coming nearly fast enough. Apparently the gatekeeper of that something was a uniformed man behind bulletproof glass who was stamping a stack of paper.

  The people looked to be immigrants from places south or east of Italy, if Wolf had to guess. Many leaned up against the cracked and dirty yellow walls of the lobby, fanning themselves with stacks of paper. Next to them hung black-and-white pictures of various buildings in rubble, as if after an earthquake or an aerial shelling. An infant’s muffled shriek was their soundtrack.

  Welcome to Italy.

  Across the vast room was another entrance with a metal detector. An armed carabinieri officer interrogated an Asian couple with a baby, while people streamed in behind them, tripping the alarm. No one of authority seemed to care about the blinking light and incessant beeping, so Wolf guessed he shouldn’t either.

  Directly above them was a vaulted ceiling, and, to the left, a spiral stone stairway corkscrewed to the upper levels. To his relief, Tito was already halfway up the first flight, wrapping up his phone conversation and waving to Wolf to follow.