To the Bone (David Wolf Book 7)

by Jeff Carson

  “No what? Tell me. We’re confused here. You don’t have to go along with Felicia and Steven’s lies anymore, Molly. They’re not here. Tell us.”

  Eyes screwed shut now, she shook her head.

  Wolf softened his voice. “Do you think Steven did this, Molly?”

  She opened her eyes. “No. It doesn’t make any sense. He never even fired that gun before. He’s a wimp with it. Felicia and I have fired it, he never has. And he’s telling the truth about those shoes. I haven’t seen him wear those things for over a month.”

  Wolf nodded. “Okay. So where do you think he was that night?”

  She looked at Shumway, then back at Wolf. “I don’t know.”

  Wolf stared hard into her eyes until she looked down.

  “We’re going to figure all this out,” Wolf said, “and it’s not going to go well for you if you’re hiding knowledge of who did this.”

  “I told you what I know. I’m done talking. I have to talk with my lawyer first.”

  Wolf checked his watch: 6:14 pm. They’d gotten nowhere, and these lawyers were going to be here any minute to consult with their clients. Apparently these lawyers had made it clear to all three of them to not speak, because Molly was the only one who had said a word all afternoon. Felicia and Steven had said nothing.

  They had another 69 hours allowable by law to hold these three, but they had nothing beyond circumstantial at the moment.

  Wolf tapped a finger.

  Molly Waters bounced her knee and her shoe squeaked.

  He thought of Cassidy’s tiny shoe prints next to her dead father and the heat rose in his face. He wanted to reach across the table and grab Molly by the neck, but instead he stood and walked out of the room.

  Shumway followed on his heels.

  When they got out into the hallway they almost ran into Deputy Etzel, who held a wireless phone in his hand. “Sir, you have a call.”

  Etzel held the phone to Shumway.

  “Shumway … yes, hi Bradley.” Shumway looked at Wolf. “We’ll meet you at the gate in a few minutes.” He hung up and handed the phone back to Etzel. “That was Boydell. Levi Joseph still hasn’t come back to his camp.”

  Chapter 25

  Patterson reached her desk and pulled open the laptop. It whirred and clicked and labored through a full minute of startup and when she was typing in her access password she felt a presence at her back.

  She recognized Munford’s perfume.

  “You told Rachette about the pregnancy test, huh?” Patterson said.

  Munford said nothing, so Patterson swiveled in her chair and looked up at her.

  “He … told you about that?” Munford’s mouth dropped open.

  “That’s your boyfriend for ya.” Patterson poked the power button to her desktop. “In case you haven’t learned by now. Tom Rachette has the secret-holding ability of a five year old.”

  “I’m sorry.” Munford stepped up into Patterson’s peripheral. “I wasn’t being vindictive or anything. I was concerned for you. You looked very upset, and that’s what I was talking to Tom about.”

  “Whatever.” Patterson concentrated on pulling up the footage of the man in the huge cowboy hat.

  “What’s going on?” Munford asked.

  “Just doing some work.” She paused for effect. “What are you doing?”

  Munford narrowed her eyes for a second. “What’s your problem with me, Heather? What have I done to you?”

  Patterson’s face flushed and she tapped on her keyboard. A few seconds later she opened the footage. As she drew the video player slider to the right, the interior footage flickered in ultra-fast motion, until she found the spot and pressed play.

  The man with the big cowboy hat on walked in and did his thing again—grabbed a candy bar, a gas can, paid cash, grabbed some matches and went out. It was impossible to gauge a height, because the man crouched on his way out.

  Smart bastard.

  Munford stepped behind her and mouth-breathed over Patterson’s shoulder. “Where’s Tom?” she asked.

  Patterson rolled her eyes and opened up the exterior footage on her desktop. “With Barker and Hernandez up at the gas station. Trying to get some prints. It’s gonna be futile.”

  “Ah.”

  Patterson pulled the video player slider to the proper spot on the exterior video and pressed play.

  The man in the ten-gallon hat walked out and went to a far gas terminal and ducked down behind it.

  “What’s he doing?” Munford asked.

  “Filling up ten bucks worth of prepaid gas.”

  Patterson rewound to a point where the man was shown walking and leaned into the screen. The man’s shoes were barely visible underneath the wide leg of his jeans, but they were unmistakable. She took a screen shot of the man in mid-stride and saved it to her desktop.

  “He’s wearing the shoes.”

  Patterson flinched. Munford’s breath was on her neck.

  “Jesus, can you back up a bit?”

  “Sorry. I just heard about the case from Barker.”

  Patterson took a deep breath and continued the tape. The man in the hat was careful the whole time to keep his face shielded. Not only that, Patterson realized, when he stood up and left with his gas can, he walked in a perpetual crouch, loping with rounded shoulders like he was a Sasquatch or something.

  Smart again, still masking his true height.

  The man disappeared from view and out of the video footage forever.

  “Did you see that?” Munford asked.

  “What?”

  Munford came up next to her and sat on the edge of the desk. “If I tell you, you have to tell me what your problem is with me.”

  Patterson stared at Munford for a second and shook her head. “I don’t have any problem with you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What did you see on that footage?”

  Munford reached onto the side of Patterson’s monitor and fiddled with the dials. The screen went almost completely dark.

  “I saw shit footage. The contrast is way too high. Rewind it and look again.”

  Patterson was intrigued, because the video footage was much darker and held much more detail. Whited out areas popped with shadow now, and grayed areas darkened to black. They were looking at sharper black and white images now.

  Patterson rewound, and she was astonished to see a rectangle appear in the upper right hand corner. She picked up a picture of the truck they’d gotten from Windfield Moving Company and held it to the monitor. “The truck.”

  Munford showed serious gum as she smiled wide.

  “Okay.” Patterson felt like an idiot for not trying that, and she probably would have gotten to messing with the contrast in a few minutes, but there was no ignoring the sheer joy radiating from Munford’s face. “Nice work,” she said.

  Munford leaned into the screen. “I saw the truck already. I want to look at the guy’s shoes. Rewind a little bit more.”

  Patterson pulled the slider back until it showed the man in mid-stride.

  “Check those shoes out,” Munford said.

  Patterson frowned. “I already said I saw the shoes. They’re converse.”

  Munford looked at Patterson, as if waiting for her.

  Patterson shook her head and looked closer. The front of the shoes had been white, almost completely invisible the first time she’d looked at them in the overexposed footage. Now they were a light gray against an almost black background and the effect was that the shoes had grown from one viewing to the next.

  “The size.”

  Munford nodded, her eyes alight.

  “This guy’s feet are huge,” Patterson said.

  “Too huge.”

  Patterson pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed Wolf’s number. It went straight to voicemail. “Sir, call me as soon as possible.”

  She relayed her and Munford’s thought process, mentioning Munford’s help, much to Munford’s delight, in the message. When she h
ung up she stood and paced. “Damn it. There’s shit cell service up there.”

  Munford sat quietly, and then she looked away and stood. “Okay. Well, have a good one.”

  “Wait.”

  Munford stopped and turned. “Yeah?”

  “I really don’t have a problem with you. I just … have a problem with what you … I really have a problem with myself.”

  “Okay. And being rude to me makes you feel better?”

  Patterson rolled her eyes. “I’m about to get married.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I’m going to get some pressure to start a family now.”

  “So? Do you not want kids?”

  “I do.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “There. That’s the problem.”

  Munford frowned. “I’m not following.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen how you talk about family. About having a family, and I can’t even imagine trying to have a family and keeping this job. It’s impossible, isn’t it?”

  Munford shrugged. “Says who?”

  Patterson felt a surge of annoyance. “This is what I’m talking about here. You don’t see the roadblocks standing in front of you? I watched my mother resent us for years, because she had to quit her job as a public prosecutor to raise four kids. You think you can keep a career with the department and have a family?”

  Munford shrugged again. “I think I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

  Patterson smiled momentarily and then shook her head.

  “I think y—”

  “Period.” Munford glared at her. “My mom kept her job and raised three kids. She had no choice, because my dad got coked up and ditched us, and if she stopped working we would have starved. If she can do it, I can.”

  Patterson blinked.

  “I think if you have concerns, you should talk to Wolf. Not me. But if you want my opinion, life is what you make it.”

  Patterson suddenly felt dumb. She knew what it meant to make a goal and commit until it was accomplished. Her martial arts, her career so far? That had been how she had lived her entire life.

  “Thanks.”

  Charlotte smiled. “You got it.”

  Chapter 26

  Jet the dog had been trained by the Vail PD as a “Detection Dog”. He would ride around with an officer in the pre-legalized-marijuana era and assist on routine traffic stops, often sniffing out weed, magic mushrooms, and other illicit substances that Coloradans tended to carry around in their cars more often than jumper cables.

  It was lights, pull to the shoulder, “Do you know how fast you were going?”, and then Jet had his paws on the trunk sniffing out a doobie inside.

  Other specialty dogs included Cadaver and Search and Rescue, both dogs that spent their days sniffing out human scents. Cadaver dogs were often bloodhounds. SAR K-9 units were German Shepherds in Vail. Vail had enough money to fill its back bowls with twenty-dollar bills. If they needed another SAR dog, they’d get and train it. Same with a cadaver dog. Multi-tasking a dog would be out of the question. Or so Wolf had thought.

  Because now, for the second time of the day Wolf followed Shumway and Boydell up the dry wash and onto the plateau, and for the second time of the day Jet went berserk when they reached Levi’s camp. And now Wolf had the sinking feeling this dog had had some other specialty experience under its collar.

  Wolf endured the air shaking barks as he pulled up behind Shumway’s truck and parked. He shut off the engine and let Jet out, and once again Jet went to the back of his SUV and stood expectantly.

  “What’s going on?” Shumway asked.

  “I don’t know. Go on, Jet.”

  Jet sprang off the edge of the road and scurried down the side of the hill, weaving his way past bushes and trees, heading in the same general direction that he had before.

  Wolf followed.

  “Where you going?” Shumway asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I get there.”

  Wolf slid on his heels down the steep dirt at the beginning, and then he was among the trees and shrubs.

  He paused and listened, and heard Jet panting below and to the right, his paws pattering on the dry earth.

  With plenty of assistance from gravity Wolf was going at a fast jog pace, slaloming left and right to avoid sage and cactus, ducking to miss juniper and pinyon boughs, jumping up and over red and white rocks and downed logs.

  As he rounded a large sage, Jet came into view. The dog’s rear was low, his ears standing straight up, head bouncing and jaw snapping as he barked.

  Wolf walked up and put a hand on Jet’s back and he stopped barking and whined.

  “Good boy,” Wolf said.

  Jet sat.

  Wolf stared at a low mound of sandy dirt that was all too unmistakably shaped. He tilted his head. A sand encrusted patch of grass at his feet had been uncovered by Jet, and Wolf stepped back when he realized it was a tuft of hair.

  “What d’ya got?” Shumway yelled down.

  Shovel marks were gouged into the earth all around—next to the mound, behind Wolf’s feet—and amid those was a flurry of shoe prints with the diamond pattern.

  “Wolf!”

  “You need to come down here. Mr. Boydell needs to stay up there.”

  Wolf stood back as Shumway snapped on a pair of gloves and pushed the dirt away. Smooth skin emerged immediately, so shallow it was a wonder how the animals had overlooked it. The skin was ghost white and crusted with maroon dirt. There was more hair, this part caked with red mud, and brown eyebrows and then dirt-packed slit eyes. As Shumway removed more of the fine earth with his rubber-gloved hands a crooked looking face emerged.

  “Levi Joseph?” Wolf asked.

  Shumway looked at him and nodded. “Yeah. That’s him.”

  “What’s happening down there?” Boydell was pacing at the road on top and stopped. He was a silhouette against the reddening sky. “What did you find?”

  “Don’t say anything,” Shumway said in a low voice. “Boydell was close to this kid.”

  Wolf was standing and out in the open from Boydell’s vantage. He held up a finger and said, “We’ll let you know when we know, Bradley.”

  Boydell scoffed and resumed pacing.

  “Holy mother of …” Shumway said as he brushed away some more dirt from the neck area, revealing a slash of dark red that was all the way across the throat. “Just about cut off his head.”

  Wolf watched as Shumway pushed and pulled more dirt off, revealing more and more carnage as he did so.

  “Chest is slashed to hell,” Shumway said unnecessarily, because the shredded, red-stained clothing and dirt packed crevices explained it all.

  Wolf grabbed a rock and bent down next to the body. He scraped off some of the caked on dirt and revealed a wound underneath. It was seven or eight inches from end to end, canoed up on both sides.

  “A shovel,” Wolf said.

  “My God,” Shumway said.

  They stood in silence for a moment, neither one of them needing to point out how many stabs with a shovel would make a body look like that. Clearly it was more than one could count on two hands.

  “Shit,” Shumway said, standing up.

  “What is it?” Boydell called down from up above.

  “Uh, just … hold your horses Bradley! We’re trying to make sense of this now.”

  “Make sense of this?” Boydell shook his head and started pacing again.

  Shumway turned downhill and lowered his voice. “There’s more to this, Wolf.”

  Wolf stared at him.

  “What the hell is this?” Boydell was yelling at the top of the hill now, pointing down on the ground. “What is this?”

  “What is what?” Shumway yelled back.

  Boydell was further down the road than he’d been before, a good twenty yards behind Wolf’s rear bumper. Boydell bent down and then stood up abruptly and staggered back. “Is this blood? Oh my God, is this blood? What did you find down there, Sheriff?”


  “Shit,” Shumway said and assessed the climb back up to the road.

  “I’ll go up,” Wolf said.

  “Hell, I’ll come up too. Gonna have to radio everyone. It’s gonna be a long one tonight.”

  Chapter 27

  Wolf climbed back up to the road as fast as he could with legs that ached from so much driving and activity in one day.

  Bradley Boydell was leaning on his elbows against the front of his truck. Head down, tears were streaming onto the hood making a tiny puddle that reflected the orange clouds. “It’s Levi, isn’t it?”

  Wolf stood breathing hard next to his SUV.

  Shumway was grunting his way up the slope behind him and Jet was over sniffing where Boydell had been earlier.

  “Jet. Come.”

  Jet came over and sat down, a low growl coming from his throat.

  Wolf went and studied a bloody scrape that went across the road. He’d driven over it twice without seeing it, and so had Shumway and Boydell, leaving numerous tire tracks running through it, but it was visible now, plain as day.

  It was no wonder they’d missed it. The road was rusty orange, made from the pulverized rock from the area. The blood was a darker shade of the same color. Without the prior discovery of a mutilated corpse, the marks looked like nothing.

  Spotting the first Converse shoe print, he followed them across the road from right to left—from the camp to the edge of the road. There was a gouge in the soft shoulder where the killer had dragged the body off the edge. Wolf walked to the edge and there was a dirt groove that went twenty feet down the slope until it disappeared behind the bushes.

  Standing still, Wolf scanned the slope back and forth, studying it inch by inch.

  Shumway crunched up next to him, his lungs wheezing in his chest. “My deputies are on their way up. They’ll call in the crime scene techs. They’re on-callers, spread out all over the county, so it’ll take a while.”

  Wolf pointed and lowered his voice. “The Converse tracks go down with the body there, and come back up a few feet over.”

  Shumway nodded, still breathing hard.

  “We need to get Boydell out of here,” Wolf said.