David Wolf series Box Set 2

by Jeff Carson

  “Green,” Wolf said.

  Patterson nodded. “And like we said, he hasn’t returned the moving truck.”

  Silence descended on the room.

  Lorber folded his arms. “So he’s probably toast, too. These two guys knock on the door with gun raised, force Frost and Green out of the front door by gunpoint. Frost was no dummy, was packing heat, but he didn’t have it drawn and the two culprits made him take it out of his waistband. Had him chuck it in the bushes. Shows that Frost didn’t suspect danger until they pointed their gun. Might be a clue right there. They might’ve known who was at the door. Didn’t consider them dangerous.”

  Patterson nodded. “Two shots for Frost, one for Green. They take the cash. They take the bones. They … go somewhere.”

  “And where’s Green’s body?” MacLean asked.

  Patterson shrugged. “Back of the pickup? Back of the moving truck?”

  “Makes sense,” Rachette said. “Green missed his flight. The rental truck hasn’t been returned.”

  Lorber folded his long arms and widened his stance. “We’ve gotta find Green’s dig team. Senator Levenworth was right—he had to have had a dig team. And this whole trip to Argentina is fishy. Points to motive.”

  “How?” MacLean asked.

  “Think about it,” Lorber said. “The dig team had to be in on the bones sale, right?”

  “And Green buys a ticket to Argentina,” Patterson said. “Due to take off this morning. He’d already decided to take the money and run.”

  Rachette shook his head. “That makes no sense. How big and heavy is a million bucks in hundred-dollar bills? Like half a dump-truck full?”

  Patterson pulled up Google and typed in the question.

  “20.4 pounds in bundles of hundreds.”

  “Still risky taking it on a plane,” Rachette said. “You’d have to check it in luggage, and hope some airport worker doesn’t steal it. Then hope you don’t get searched in customs when you land.”

  Lorber nodded. “Let’s say he’s willing to take that risk.”

  “A big risk,” Rachette said.

  Lorber ignored him. “But the dig team figures out what he’s going to do. Maybe they come across his plane ticket to Argentina or whatever. They follow him down here and get the money, and off him.”

  “And Ryan Frost,” Wolf said.

  They descended into silence again.

  “And leave a whole hell of a lot of prints and tracks,” Hernandez said.

  Lorber raised a stick finger. “But no trace evidence. No fingerprints. No hair.”

  Patterson clicked her mouse and a photo of the UrMover box truck came up. “Basic white paint. This is a ten-foot model.”

  It was scratched and dinged to hell on the sides. There was a black-and-white logo with a guy winking and giving a thumbs-up. Underneath it said UrMover Moving, Windfield, CO, with a listed phone number.

  “I’ve called up north to Brushing PD and Summit County,” Barker said in a voice louder than needed. “The truck hasn’t come up on their radar.”

  “And south?” MacLean pressed him.

  “Same thing. Nothing found south of Williams Pass. Ashland PD said no. We’ve got a BOLO out everywhere.”

  Wolf nodded at Patterson. “You have the credit-card transactions for Green. I take it he didn’t purchase gas in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Patterson shook her head.

  Wolf split two fingers and pointed at Patterson and Rachette. “You two head out right now and get to the gas stations down south. Retrieve footage.”

  Patterson paused for a second, glanced at her watch, then nodded and stood up.

  Rachette frowned and looked up at her, like she had agreed to kill someone without an argument.

  “Wait,” Wolf said, “I forgot. It’s Sunday night. You have something going on, don’t you?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Rachette said, “if you count a bridal shower as something important.”

  “It’s no problem,” she said. “This is more important. They’ll understand.”

  The room fell still and silent.

  Wolf pointed at Hernandez and Barker. “You two go instead.”

  “How far south?” Hernandez asked.

  “Those UrMover trucks come full to the rim with gas,” Wolf said. “We know Green didn’t fill up from Windfield down to here, he wouldn’t have needed to. Figure out the distance it could have driven to on the remaining gas and check all those stations within that circle radius.

  “We’ll do what we can tonight. Rachette, you take the local stations. Hernandez and Barker head south. Then we’ll start north bright and early tomorrow morning. It’s been a long day, and it’s looking like it’s going to be a long one tomorrow.”

  “Who’s going to check out this dig team?” Rachette asked.

  “I am.” Wolf walked up the aisle of the room. “Jet, come.”

  “Alone?” Rachette asked.

  “I’ll have local support.” He nodded at MacLean to follow him.

  MacLean stood up and walked after him. “Where are you going now?”

  “To the airport to pick up Ryan Frost’s wife.”

  “DIA?”

  “Yep.”

  MacLean followed silently through the doors into the squad room.

  “Can you do me a favor?” Wolf asked.

  “Shoot.”

  “Watch Jet while I’m gone.”

  “No.”

  Wolf stopped and turned, and Jet did the same.

  “Have you smelled him? I’m not putting that bag of methane with legs in my office.” MacLean looked around the squad room. “Have one of these grunts do it.”

  “I’ll put him in my office. Nate Watson is dropping off some medication down at the lobby to help his gas. I need you to give it to Jet. It’s important. If his bloating gets out of control he could die.”

  MacLean rubbed his silver goatee and stared at Jet. “Fine.”

  Jet raised an eyebrow.

  “How do I give it to him?”

  “Shove it in some food.” Wolf pulled out his wallet. “Piece of cake.”

  “Where’s the food?”

  Wolf handed him a ten-dollar bill. “At the store.”

  Chapter 8

  Wolf stepped into his office with Jet on his heels. The metal and wood furniture shone in the afternoon light like a nuclear detonation, so he went to the windows and cranked the blinds.

  A brochure sat conspicuously on the desk. He picked it up and leafed through it.

  “Who in the hell?” Wolf said under his breath. He dropped it in the trash, sat in the leather chair, and closed his eyes. The seat material beneath him was slippery and smelled like industrial cleaning agents, just like the rest of the building.

  His phone chimed and vibrated in his pocket.

  Margaret Hitchens.

  He stared at the screen for the duration of the call and set his phone down—now the brochure made perfect sense. If ever there were a time to avoid a Margaret Hitchens call, it was now. The owner of the largest real-estate brokerage in the county, Margaret Hitchens was a hard-nosed motherly figure in Wolf’s life, even more so now that Wolf had lost Sarah.

  Clearly, she felt duty bound to make sure Wolf was on a proper path of healing, and it was getting on his nerves.

  Margaret had foregone leaving a message, and the phone began its vibrating and chiming all over again. She was going to call until he picked up. Every once in a while, she did that. A week ago, out of curiosity, he’d let her call six times in a row before he’d finally answered.

  He poked the screen and brought the phone to his ear. “Hey, Margaret.”

  “Hi, David,” she said in that smug, knowing tone of hers that she had no clue she used.

  “I’m in a meeting. I can’t talk right now.”

  “Bullshit. I just talked to my niece and she said you just walked into your office with Jet.”

  He needed to go over some phone call rules of engagement with Patterson. “Yo
u’re so resourceful.”

  “That’s the understatement of the year. Did you get the brochure I left on your desk yesterday?”

  Wolf leaned over and looked in the trash. The brochure was gone.

  He frowned, wondering for a second whether he’d gone crazy, and then he saw Jet. The dog sat staring at Wolf, the brochure in his mouth. He stepped to Wolf and dropped it at his feet.

  Wolf stared at the brochure, now crumpled and covered with slobber, and shook his head at Jet.

  “You’re working with her?” Wolf asked.

  Jet tilted his head.

  “What?” Margaret asked.

  “Nothing.” Wolf threw the brochure back in the trash.

  “And what do you think?”

  Wolf said nothing.

  “David, you remember what brought Sarah back from the brink of depression?”

  He stood and peeked through the blinds.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yeah. Please, go ahead,” Wolf said.

  She huffed into the phone. “Those community meetings in that brochure—they’re what brought her back into your life before she died. Do you remember?”

  Wolf said nothing.

  “Shit, Sarah’s parents are up in Vail all the time now. They’re checked out. It’s tough raising a kid all by yourself. Even though you guys weren’t technically together, you used to be able to talk to Sarah about all the stuff that happened with Jack—the scraped knees, girls … whatever.”

  The overnight camping trips.

  Wolf sat down. “You haven’t heard about Cassidy?”

  “No. What?”

  “Her father was killed.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath. “My God. How?”

  “Shot.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Yeah.”

  She went silent.

  “So I have quite a bit on my plate at the moment. Besides, I don’t think that type of thing is for me.”

  “That type of thing is not for you?” She stuttered a line of incomplete cuss words. “Happiness is not for you? Being able to communicate your feelings and get help from real people who’ve gone through similar situations is not for you?”

  He stood up and pulled his keys out of his pocket, making a point of jiggling them near the phone. “I’ve got to pick up Trudy Frost from DIA, so I’d better get going. It’s Sunday afternoon. The traffic’s going to be crazy.”

  He looked at his watch and calculated he had four hours until the plane landed. He stepped to the door, deciding, although he was making the excuse to get off the phone, his argument was valid. Even in the middle of summer, supposedly off-season for the mountains, the traffic was bad, made worse by the road construction, which was everywhere while the weather was good in the Colorado high country.

  “I’m out the door.”

  She hesitated. “This isn’t over.”

  He hung up.

  Jet wagged his tail.

  “Stay here.”

  Jet turned around and seemed just as content to curl up on some slices of sunlight on the floor.

  Chapter 9

  For the man, staring at the flaming reds and oranges of a sunset, its infinite patterns shifting anew each day, was like staring into the eye of God.

  Which was why he’d despised sunsets for years.

  No one should be so unfortunate to live through what that all-knowing presence on the horizon had put him through.

  For thirty-seven years, the man had been a devout Mormon, learning and living by the word of God in the footsteps of his father, and his father before him—both of who had died from the strange blood affliction, as had two of his brothers, as had six of his cousins, as had his uncle.

  God was chastising him now. He could feel it plain as the heat on his eyelids, and he just didn’t care. If He had a problem with what the man was doing, then He should have poisoned his blood, too, and taken him.

  The man pursed his lips and glared at the setting sun. The orb seared his eyes, but he stared a second longer in defiance before stepping away from the outbuilding doorway and dialing a phone number.

  “Hello?” His daughter-in-law had a soft, lilting voice he loved so much. If he’d been in his son’s shoes he would have married the same woman.

  “How’s he doing?” He blinked and the afterimage of God swam in his vision.

  The way her breath came out of the earpiece of his cell phone was a clear enough answer. Her pained sigh was code for not doing well. He was suffering. He was watching cartoons to try to forget the throbbing pain in his bones, the hot sweats, the nausea from the crappy drugs provided by the cheap, inadequate doctor from the cheap, inadequate circle approved by the cheap, inadequate healthcare coverage—the kind of stuff a seven-year-old should never have to deal with on a minute-by-minute basis.

  “I’ll be coming up later this week with the money. I just have to … go through some more stuff with the lawyers. You know lawyers—they want every ‘t’ crossed, every ‘i’ dotted.”

  She sniffed into the phone.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see her nodding and wiping her pretty button nose.

  “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be a good year for once,” he said.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Shoot. I was talking to one of the lawyers about Edinburgh. You know what they wear over there?”

  “Kilts?”

  “Yeah. Man-skirts.”

  She laughed.

  He smiled and laughed, too, and a tear slid down his cheek. “When we go over there, I’m going to put on a man-skirt before I march my grandson into that doctor’s office. I’m going to pull it up, and underneath it’s going to be a wad of cash so big, and I’m going to say, ‘Give my grandson a new life!’”

  “No, no. You’re terrible.”

  He smiled even wider. “You wait and see. That’s a promise.”

  The conversation died to silence and he nodded. “I’ll be up there to see you in a couple days, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Okay,” she said in a louder voice.

  “Bye, baby doll.”

  “Bye.”

  He kept the phone to his ear, listening for the call to end, then dropped it in his pocket and pulled out a throwaway phone he’d purchased from Walmart.

  “Yeah.” The man’s voice on the other end was squeaky, his tone impatient.

  “Well? How was the rest of your day today?”

  “How was the rest of my day? Let’s see … very bad. Truly the worst day of my life. Thanks for asking.”

  The man turned away from the sun and switched the cell phone to his other ear.

  Three mourning doves whistled by on the warm wind. It was almost bearable outside at this hour.

  “And what did you find out?”

  “To use a big lump of money like this is very difficult.”

  “But doable. People do it all the time.”

  The voice scoffed. “The people who do it all the time are called criminals. Most of them are caught by federal agents with sophisticated surveillance techniques. They monitor financial transactions. Certain behavior sends up red flags.”

  The man clenched his fists. He hated this defeatist talk. He hated the lies.

  “And what was your plan in the first place? You were going to split the money with the professor, fifty–fifty. That’s four hundred and fifty K.”

  “I was going to leak it to myself over several years. You’re asking the impossible if you want a deposit like this showing up in your account overnight.”

  “By Thursday.”

  The man tittered through the earpiece. He was cracking. “I can’t believe you shot …”

  The man narrowed his eyelids. “So what’s the plan?”

  “I don’t have a plan!”

  The man stared at the oak trees near the river. The boughs swayed in the wind, the leaves sounding like a roaring river.

  “I don’t know if I c
an do this.” The tinny voice in his ear was barely a breath. “I’m not a killer.”

  The man stared at the phone and considered a response, but found none worthy for such a coward, so he pressed the call-end button.

  He looked at his watch and did some calculations. They were going to have visitors from the south, that much was certain.

  It had already been the longest of the longest of weekends, and it had just gotten longer with that phone call. But at least his cut had just doubled.

  Chapter 10

  The last time Wolf had descended to the plains had been to see the other woman in his life that called him every week—his mother. Mom had given up the mountain life, moving to Denver when his father had died all those years ago, and never looked back. She may have been a flatlander at heart, but Wolf was not. And as he coasted down I-70 with his foot on the brake for the third straight hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic with the rest of the weekend warriors returning to their city life, he vowed it would be another year before he did this again.

  The steep, winding final stretch of chaotic highway, past Morrison and the jutting megaliths of Red Rocks Amphitheater, finally flattened and straightened and the traffic opened. He drove onward on I-70 through Denver, past the fragrant dog-food plant, and out into what seemed like halfway to Kansas before he pulled into the arrivals drive-up at Denver International Airport.

  Trudy Frost was waiting patiently on the curb, staring into nothing and sitting on her luggage in the dark. Her long blonde hair was pulled in a ponytail lying against her straight back.

  He squeaked to a stop and got out; by the time he’d rounded the back of his SUV, she’d already opened the rear door and dumped her luggage in back. He got there in time to help shut the passenger door.

  Climbing back behind the wheel, Wolf said, “Sorry. I misjudged the traffic.”

  She waved a dismissive hand.

  He checked his mirror and then turned to her. In a soft tone, he said, “I’m sorry.” This time he was apologizing for Ryan.