by Jeff Carson
Jack came back outside and stumbled as he looked at his phone screen.
Probably getting a text message from Cassidy, explaining that their little jig was up. Probably doing one of the other million things he did on that phone every day.
“Dad.” Jack pointed his phone screen at him and then put it to his ear.
Wolf slowed to a stop.
“What’s up?”
Jack answered his phone. “Cassidy?” He said.
Jack walked toward Wolf and held up a finger.
Wolf waited with a furrowed brow.
“Why? …okay, okay.” Jack stepped up and thrust the phone at Wolf. “It’s Cassidy. She wants to talk to you.”
Wolf raised both his hands like Jack had a pistol pointed at his face. “Jack. Tell her we’ll talk later. After you and I have a talk.”
“Dad,” Jack put the phone against his body and covered it with his other hand. “I’ve never heard her so freaked out. Something happened. She said she couldn’t call 9-1-1 on her phone.” He thrust the phone out again.
Wolf took it. “Hello?”
“Mr. Wolf! My—”
There was scratching and then silence.
“Cassidy?”
Nothing.
Nate and Jack stared in mute curiosity.
“Cassidy? Can you hear me?”
“—Wolf? Can you hear me?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“My dad’s been shot. He’s been shot. Can you hear me? I can’t call 9-1-1 on my—”
Silence again.
“Is he hurt?”
No answer. Damn it. Damn the cell service.
“Cassidy? Is he okay?”
“No.”
The simple answer, the clarity and desperation in her voice, made Wolf’s insides sink.
“Go to the sheriff’s station, Cassidy. Go there now.”
Chapter 2
Wolf stood alone in front of the Frost residence next to Ryan Frost’s corpse. The driveway was the size of a baseball infield and about the same dirt consistency. Surrounded by trees and sheltered from the wind, it radiated heat like a skillet, and with the sun blowtorching the back of his neck he felt like a piece of sizzling bacon.
“DOA,” Wolf said into his cell phone.
“Shit.” Sheriff MacLean’s voice was crisp in Wolf’s ear.
A swarm of flies had set in on the body and they bumped against Wolf’s jeans. He ignored them and kept rooted to his spot. “I see two sets of footprints behind the body. No brass on the ground. Shot in the back of the head. Looks like an execution style murder.”
“Ah Christ, that’s all we need right now. That pile-up in Cave Creek, and now a murder? It’s like death came into town …”
Wolf pulled the phone away from his ear and looked down. Cassidy had left for the station after her call to Wolf, and since he’d gone straight here he hadn’t gotten the full story from her, but the dirt beneath his feet told the story plain enough. Small footprints, deck shoes, trailed up to Ryan Frost’s body and skidded to a stop. Wolf imagined Cassidy driving up, wondering what her father was doing as she slowed, the panic as she put it in park and got out of the car, the disbelief when her father wouldn’t answer her, the realization when she got close enough to see the blood…Wolf shivered and blinked the thought out of his mind.
He ignored MacLean’s continuing monologue coming from his phone speaker and felt the weight of the department issue Glock in his sweating palm. Twisting, though not moving his feet, he scanned the woods again.
Cassidy had come and gone unharmed, so it was likely the culprit was long gone, but he wasn’t so sure. Not when it came to the actions of cold-blooded killers. And there was no doubt Ryan Frost had been killed in cold blood. Half the man’s face had been deformed by the bullet exiting his cheek. Then there was another blossom of red in the center of his back.
Some psycho could have driven away, parked somewhere a couple miles out and hiked his way back through the forest to see the ensuing police action. It happened all the time in cities—murderers returning to the scene of the crime.
“Wolf! You there? Damn cell phones.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Wolf’s pulse jumped as he noticed the front door open.
“Are you listening?”
“I’ve gotta go.”
Wolf pocketed the phone without ending the call and ran to the edge of the house. The front door bumped shut, and then started a rebound action, opening slowly again. The movement seemed to be driven by the wind.
“Sheriff’s department!” Wolf said. “Come out with your hands where I can see them!”
No answer. The door swung open again and then bumped shut again. The house was breathing through the front door. A solid wood design adorned with frosted glass, Wolf could see no movement behind it.
Sweat slid down his temple and he wiped it away and then caught movement in the corner of his eye and aimed his gun.
A chipmunk stared back at him, twitched his tail, and scurried out of sight beneath a downed log.
He stepped up onto the concrete porch, and ducking low on one knee he pushed open the door and aimed his pistol.
The door opened noiselessly all the way in a one hundred eighty degree swing and bumped against the wall.
“Sheriff’s department!”
There was no movement or answer. A soft pulsing high-hat with a steady bass pattern emanated from somewhere inside.
With a final scan of the woods he slid into the house, gun barrel first. He ignored the floor to ceiling windows displaying the majestic views of the green-sloped ski resort and town below as he swept through the main floor.
The kitchen was all stainless steel and shiny rock, with no one inside it. When he entered a home office, he faintly registered the giant boulder in the middle of the carpeted space and the walls of dark wood shelves stocked with countless hardback books. He could stand and gawk at the impressive interior of the house later. At the moment they were distractions that could get him killed. He moved on and through the four bedrooms upstairs. Each had crisply made beds, including Cassidy’s room.
Making his way back downstairs and down a long hall, he reached a lone closed door and opened it, revealing a darkened garage. He snapped on the light and pointed his gun. No one was inside, but Wolf straightened and leaned back at the sight of what was. Two shiny black Land Rovers, a mister and misses pair, were parked on the left, and to the right was a collection of what looked like ancient bones.
Hundreds of them. There was blue masking tape on the smooth concrete floor separating specimens from other specimens, and within each of the cordoned off areas were neat arrays of bones, claws, skulls, and tusks. Some were recognizable: a triceratops skull, a mammoth tusk. Others were just lumps of dirty rock to Wolf’s untrained eye.
Wolf closed his mouth and backed into the house again. Shutting the door, he moved down the hallway, back the way he’d came.
Toward the music.
It was coming from downstairs, he realized. He walked his way along the rustic wood floors in the main great room to the edge of a wide staircase that led down.
“Sheriff’s department!”
He aimed his gun down the stairs and crept closer. A flash-bang grenade as a precursor to him going down the stairs would have done him nicely. In fact, Wolf was not about to go down without one. His six tours of experience in the Army, and a dash of common sense told him descending the steps was out of the question.
The faint sound of an approaching siren floated in through the open front door.
There. Wolf crouched and stepped back when he saw movement downstairs. It was a piece of blue fabric that had come into view and then disappeared.
He backed up another step and crouched to get a better look, but it was no use. The angle between the ceiling downstairs and the stairway was too small.
The sirens were getting closer.
The downstairs level was bright, lit by natural light streaming in through
windows that probably matched the enormity of the ones upstairs. He made a quick decision and bolted out the front door and took a right.
Rapidly he moved along the bright front of the house to the south side and paused. Pistol at the ready, he turned the corner. No one was there, so he stalked his way down the slope, slippery with dried pine needles, to the rear of the house.
Wind chimes were swaying and clanging from the underside of the rear deck, the trees moaning and creaking.
He stopped and peeked around the corner and saw no one. Edging his way to the first window, he peered inside and saw the blue fabric again. It was a hanging drape fluttering on the wind which streamed in through an open sliding glass door.
The music was louder now, a steady urban beat playing through tiny top-of-the-line speakers mounted in the corners on the underside of the deck.
He could see everything inside. It was a recreation room, one he had heard plenty about from Jack on many occasions. There was a pool table, and a pinball machine, and two couches with a large flat screen television, and framed European landscapes hanging on the walls.
Wolf stood a full minute staring inside the window, and all the while the sirens were growing in volume over the howling wind, until they were right outside the front of the house.
There was still no movement inside. Nobody fleeing. Nobody spooked by the ruckus outside the house.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
Wolf answered. “Yeah.”
“Where are you?” Deputy Tom Rachette said. “Why aren’t you on your radio?”
“I shut it off. I’m at the rear of the house. I want you to stay out front. I’ll be right there.”
“Are you inside?”
“I’m going to come out the front door. If there’s someone else in here I’ll probably flush them out.”
Wolf pocketed his phone and walked to the screen door. Covering his hand with his shirt he slid it open and walked inside.
The music was louder still in here, and he walked to the stereo and poked the power button with his knuckle, plunging the room into silence.
Once again he stood motionless, listening to the wind outside and the clanging of window coverings throughout the basement. They were the sounds of a hastily abandoned house—a house whose owner had stepped out with every intention of returning, but got sidetracked with a gunshot to the head and back and never returned.
After a quick sweep of the downstairs, he returned upstairs and repeated his sweep of the rest of the house and came out the front door.
Deputies Heather Patterson and Tom Rachette were behind the hood of their SUV with pistols trained on Wolf when he walked outside.
They relaxed and pointed their guns skyward.
“All clear.” Wolf’s voice echoed through the trees, along with another approaching siren. He took his radio off his duty belt, turned it on, and pushed the button. “I’m looking at a pistol discarded right here in the bush next to the front porch.”
Wolf stepped off the cement porch and down the walkway to the beginning of the dirt. “I see four sets of footprints here. They go all the way to the body. And you can see Cassidy’s prints there. And mine.”
Patterson was scribbling in a notebook and nodding.
“Off to your left,” Wolf pointed, “I saw fresh vehicle tracks.”
Wolf stepped back to the porch and walked along the front of the house, then skirted the tree to his deputies. “Looks like two gunshot wounds. One to the head, one to the back. No brass,” Wolf said.
Rachette leaned on his elbows on the hood. “Anything else?”
Wolf clipped the radio back on his duty belt when he got nearer. “Probably a lot else. A bunch of bones in the garage.”
“Bones in the garage?” Rachette’s eyes were wide with alarm.
“Like fossils. Animal bones.”
“Oh.”
The revving engine and roaring tires of the second department SUV drew their gazes down the dirt road. The driver kept his foot on the gas until the last second, at which point he mashed the brake and began a long slide that ended with a rocking vehicle buried in an explosion of dust.
“Easy turbo,” Rachette said. “My God this guy.”
Deputy Patterson had ignored the chaos behind her and stood rock still looking at Ryan Frost’s corpse. Her Colorado sky blue eyes were hard, unblinking, all business and forensic science. She pulled a stray strand of her shoulder length auburn hair behind her ear and looked at Wolf for the first time. “Ryan Frost you said? This was Cassidy’s father? Jack’s girlfriend?”
Wolf nodded.
She shook her head.
Rachette walked to them and pulled off his SBCSD ball cap, revealing a brand new buzz cut of his blond hair underneath. Wiping his forehead he said, “Damn. It’s hotter than Satan’s nacho farts out here.” He pushed his tongue against a wad of chewing tobacco in his lip and spit on the ground.
Patterson twisted her face. “Why don’t you show a little respect?” She gestured to Frost’s body and then to Wolf.
Rachette shrugged and looked at Wolf. “What?”
“That’s Jack’s girlfriend’s father.”
Rachette mouthed the words silently, and then looked at Wolf. “Shit. Sorry.”
Deputies Barker and Hernandez thumped closed their car doors and emerged from the cloud of dust.
Deputy Greg Barker was in front as was his alpha nature, trotting at three-quarters of a sprint. At six foot one, he was muscular with freckled white skin and red hair and moved like a track star. “Sorry sir, we were up at mile marker 137 for the 10-32. Five cars.”
“So I heard,” Wolf said. “You guys got here fast.”
Deputy Jon Hernandez approached with thumbs hooked on his belt, his eyes fixed behind them at Ryan Frost’s body as well. He let out a whistle through his teeth, mumbled a quick sentence in Spanish and crossed himself.
Soft from eating his wife’s meals, but certainly fit enough to make Wolf’s squad, Hernandez was short, an inch taller than Rachette, but had a large personality that everyone had warmed to. Everyone save Barker. Warm feelings and Barker seemed to never go in the same sentence.
Barker stood shaking his head, hands on his hips as he craned his neck to see behind Wolf. His blue eyes were wide and his chest heaved. “Damn.”
Wolf stared back at the swirl of shoe prints in the dirt. A thought knocked the wind out him. He remembered one of the shoe prints behind the body had been about Wolf’s size. They had a diamond tread pattern, and Wolf knew the tread pattern were Converse All-Stars. That was a young person’s shoe, and a tall, young person at that. Wolf knew a tall, young person intimately.
“Sir?” Patterson asked.
“Boss?” Rachette asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Let’s get to work. Patterson, get the camera and start processing the body. Hernandez and Barker, I want you two inside. Is Lorber on his way?”
She nodded. “Yep. He’ll be a few minutes with his team.”
“Rachette, secure the scene. Set up the tape a good hundred yards up the road. I don’t want …” Wolf let his sentence die at the sound of popping tires. A truck was easing down the road toward them.
“Who’s that?” Hernandez asked.
Wolf shielded his eyes and stepped toward it. “I don’t know.”
The truck rumbled at an idle, the tires crackling as it approached at no more than a few miles an hour.
When Wolf put his hand on his pistol the truck skidded to a stop. When the truck skidded to a stop Wolf pulled his pistol and held it pointing at the ground in front of him.
It was impossible for Wolf to see inside the windshield with the glare, but whoever was inside was no dummy. Two arms thrust out the open driver’s window, palms out.
“Don’t shoot!” A voice said, barely audible behind the diesel engine. One hand disappeared and the engine shut off and the truck rocked in place, and then the open hand appeared again. “Don’t shoot!”
Wolf steppe
d sideways to the edge of the woods to get a view inside the driver’s window, keeping his pistol at the ready.
The man fumbled with the door, trying to open it from the outside. It was locked so he had to reach back inside to unlock it, then he opened it and spilled out.
Wolf saw a shiny leather loafer first, and then a man stumbled out from the behind the truck door. In that moment he also saw that the passenger seat and the rest of the extended cab appeared to be empty.
“Hi,” the man said with a disarming smile. “Scott Levenworth. Please don’t shoot me.”
The man was in his early fifties. His hair was wavy gray, full and swept back like he was sitting in a wind tunnel set on low speed. He wore a snap button cowboy shirt rolled to the elbows, revealing tanned arms adorned with multiple rings on his fingers, a gold watch on one wrist, and a gold bracelet on the other.
His teeth gleamed in the sun like they were under a black light. “Can I put my hands down now deputy?”
Wolf twirled his finger. “What are you doing here Mr. Levenworth?”
The man closed his door and put both hands on the hood of his pickup.
Wolf frisked him quickly and thoroughly, checking the waistline which was wrapped with a handmade leather belt and large buckle. The man’s cologne was thick.
“You can turn around.” Wolf holstered his gun and backed up.
Scott Levenworth had lost his smile. Replacing it was a puzzled look. He kept glancing toward Wolf’s squad of detectives, who stood staring back at the new visitor.
“My God,” Levenworth said. “They killed him?”
Chapter 3
Wolf stared at the man, waiting for more words out of his mouth that never came.
“Who’s they?” Wolf asked.
The man said nothing, still staring at the corpse.
“Who?” Wolf asked.
Levenworth blinked and snapped to attention. “What?”
“You said ‘they’ killed him. Who are ‘they’?”
The man’s eyes were drawn to the corpse, which seemed to override his ability to speak.