David Wolf series Box Set 2

by Jeff Carson

  “Back here,” she said.

  “Where did Professor Green go?” Shumway asked.

  Felicia shrugged. “Said he was going up to the university. Wouldn’t tell us why.”

  “Mo,” Wolf said.

  Mo jerked to attention.

  “Is that true? They dropped off Professor Green and then came back here?”

  Mo took her time and then nodded.

  “And where’s Professor Green’s truck?” Wolf asked. “His pickup?”

  “He left it in town,” Felicia said. “Near the moving place. Steven and I came back together in Steven’s truck because Professor Green needed his truck when he came back.”

  “But he didn’t tell you when he was coming back.” Wolf nodded.

  “Nope.”

  “And what did you do after you dropped him off?”

  “Just came back here.”

  “Four hours later.”

  Felicia’s eyes darted. “Four hours later?”

  “That’s what the Dig 1 team says. They saw you leave at noon, and saw you return at around four.”

  “Oh, yeah … we got a bite to eat. Did some shopping.”

  “Got some scotch,” Wolf said.

  Felicia blinked. “Yeah.”

  Steven slid his gaze back and forth between Wolf and Shumway.

  “Okay,” Wolf said. “Let’s take that walk to your camp, Steven.”

  Steven began walking, and Felicia and Mo followed silently.

  Wolf looked at Shumway and held back a few steps.

  “What the hell is going on?” Shumway whispered to Wolf. “I saw those photos of the dinosaur bones Green was selling. They were out of the ground. There was date proof from one of the pictures in our local newspaper. That gives time and location of those bones being dug up somewhere around here.”

  Wolf nodded but said nothing.

  “So, where did those bones come from?” Shumway’s voice was barely audible over the squish of their footsteps on the sand and pebbles.

  “I don’t know,” Wolf said.

  They walked in silence for another beat and Shumway leaned close again. “I’m thinking, we really have nothing. I mean, nothing. Not unless we find that revolver and that pair of shoes up here.”

  “We have something. They’re lying about the four hours they killed on Saturday afternoon. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see any vehicles parked near Windfield Moving Company. We have mountains of probable cause for arrest. Steven and Felicia look like they might lawyer up and not talk, but Molly’s conflicted. We just have to separate them.”

  Shumway nodded. “Yeah. Okay, then let’s bring them in. We can separate them by putting Molly in your car, and I’ll take the other two. We have two interrogation rooms and two holding cells back at the station.” The sheriff eyed the wash ahead. “This is strange. Why’s he camping all the way up here?”

  Wolf wondered the same thing.

  Molly, Felicia, and Steven marched in silence. Their heads were down, their shoulders slumped, like they were approaching execution.

  Steven looked over his shoulder. “Just up here. Next bend.”

  As they followed the swerve of the wash, a pickup truck gleamed on the hill to the right. A blue tent was erected near it—the same blue Wolf had seen from the top of the plateau at Levi Joseph’s camp.

  He did a double take to the top of the mountain. Megan Shumway was standing against the sky, staring down at them.

  Steven stopped. “Here it is.”

  Felicia and Molly stopped next to Steven and folded their arms.

  “You three stay here,” Wolf said.

  They failed to respond because they were all now looking up too.

  Megan and Boydell must have stopped at Levi’s camp, Wolf thought. Boydell’s truck was parked near Megan. When everyone looked up at her, she walked to the vehicle and climbed inside.

  Shumway’s daughter seemed like she was on a single-minded mission to shake up her father, and Wolf was an integral prop in her act. He felt his face warm.

  “You,” Shumway said. “It was you.”

  He turned, hearing thumping footfalls come up behind him.

  The sheriff launched past him and barreled head first into Steven’s chest.

  Steven was too slow to react and took the collision standing still. Shumway thumped into him, sending him through the air and onto his back.

  Shumway fell square on top of him, got to his knees, and started punching.

  Wolf got there in time to catch the third right-hander in its backswing. “Sheriff!”

  Shumway ignored him and wrenched his arm free, then started another flurry of punches, this time with alternating rights and lefts.

  Wolf pointed at the two women. “Stay back!”

  They were wide-eyed and already shuffling away.

  Wolf straddled Shumway’s back and pulled him off and into the air. He dropped him on his feet and then grabbed his arm, securing it in a wrap wrist lock.

  “Dah! What are you doing?” Shumway sucked in air through his teeth. “Stop, stop.”

  Wolf held firm as he walked them up the wash.

  “Calm down,” Wolf said.

  “You’re gonna break my wrist!”

  Wolf let go and Shumway spun on him.

  The sheriff’s chest was heaving, eyes wide. He pushed his torso into Wolf’s and then backed away, pointing at Steven. “You son of a bitch. It was you. Don’t think I don’t know. It was you.”

  Steven was slow getting to his feet, checking the blood seeping from his lip with the back of his hand.

  “It was you,” Shumway said. He bent over and put both hands on his knees to catch his breath.

  Wolf noted the conspicuous distance Felicia Kennedy stood from Steven lying on the ground, like she had no concern for her husband at all.

  They all turned toward a sound traveling up the draw. It was strange at first, impossible to discern, but coming closer and getting louder, nonetheless. Then the noise sharpened to rhythmic breathing and footsteps coming at fearsome speed. Jet came skidding around the corner and barked with snapping jaws.

  The murderous expression on Jet’s face surprised Wolf. “Jet! Heel!”

  Jet immediately slid to a stop.

  “Sit!”

  He sat.

  “Keep that thing away,” Steven said, scooting back on his butt.

  Wolf stood catching his breath, taking it all in. Felicia and Mo kept their distance from both Steven and Jet. Steven rubbed his chin, dejected and humiliated. Shumway clenched his fists and glared at him.

  “You three stay right here. You move and Jet runs you down.” Wolf had no intention of using the attack command. In fact, Jet’s Vail handler had made Wolf swear to never use it, but the threat had the desired effect.

  He jerked his head at Shumway and walked up the wash.

  Shumway stepped over with more than a little reluctance.

  “What the hell was that?” Wolf asked, leading them behind a juniper tree.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. But that guy deserves a hell of a lot more than what he got.”

  “We need to keep the situation at hand under control.”

  Shumway put his hands on his hips and nodded.

  Wolf backed up a few steps and peeked around the tree.

  Jet watched the three graduate students; they stared back, frozen in place.

  “I’m going to search that tent,” Wolf said. “And I want you to come with me.”

  Shumway rolled his eyes. “Yeah, all right.”

  Wolf gave him the after you hand.

  Steven’s tent was a three-man design, much like his other dig team members. Nearby he had a firepit dug out of the dirt and ringed with rocks—blackened and well used. A lone camping chair sat next to it, and a gas stove and fold-out table stood under an overhanging juniper tree.

  There was a black plastic trash can next to a bush. Wolf opened it and looked inside, finding dozens of empty cans and food packets.
/>   Shumway went to the tent and studied some hiking and running shoes lined up on the exterior wall.

  “Got your gloves?” Wolf asked.

  Shumway pulled them out of his pocket and put them on.

  Wolf kept an eye on the other three as the sheriff peeled back the zipper and knelt inside the tent, rummaged around, then came out with his hands splayed.

  “No gun. These are size fifteen and a half,” Shumway said, picking up one of the running shoes. “And these are sixteen. Phew, I can see why he keeps these things outside.”

  Wolf caught the scent of untreated athlete’s foot coming off the shoes as he ducked in for a look himself inside the tent.

  Keeping his ears open in case Shumway made any sudden movements outside, Wolf sifted through an explosion of dirty clothing. The tent held a superheated pocket of air saturated with body and foot odor, so he held his breath and made haste.

  He rifled through everything and found no other shoes, and just like Shumway had said, no gun.

  After thoroughly searching every nook and cranny, he backed out of the tent and sucked in a breath.

  Shumway was staring toward the wash, his fists clenching and releasing. “They’re talking.”

  Wolf nodded. “I’m sure they are.”

  “They’re going to lawyer up.”

  Wolf searched the rest of the camp. He opened a cooler and looked inside. Lifted a conspicuous-looking rock with his toe.

  Walking to the Ford pickup truck, he bent down and checked the tires: Goodyear P265/70R17.

  “A match?” Shumway asked.

  “Yep.”

  “You know, I have those tires too,” Shumway said.

  “So I saw.”

  “I’m pretty sure any government vehicle up here’s going to have them. You’ve got the same ones but sixteens.”

  Wolf nodded.

  Shumway said nothing.

  Wolf lifted the passenger handle and the door squeaked open. It smelled faintly of cologne and coconut oil. Faintly like Megan Shumway, Wolf thought. He thoroughly checked the interior, found no gun or shoes, and shut the door. The rear of the truck had tiny chunks of white crumbly material—like plaster used for encasing fossils.

  “Check out these tracks.” Shumway was in the trees, pointing down at tire marks.

  “Looks like they’ve been taking another way out of camp.”

  Wolf took off his rubber gloves and wiped the sweat from his hands on his jeans. He bent down and felt the dirt. It was hot and soft, and held no shape or tire-tread pattern, but the depressions clearly came from the opposite way they’d come in and ran all the way to Steven’s truck.

  “This looks like an old road,” Wolf said.

  Shumway nodded. “Sure does.”

  Wolf eyed him. “You’ve never been out here on this road?”

  “No. What? Why you lookin’ at me like that?”

  “Megan told me this was your land, growing up.”

  Shumway shrugged. “It was our family’s land. Just had some cattle. I never spent much time here. We’d go visit my granddad at his ranch house, which is south over that hill a long way. My mom and dad moved in there when he died. I’d already moved out by that point. My dad might have come out here but I never did. It was a big piece of property. I haven’t been on a lot of it.”

  “And you got rid of the land when your father passed away?” Wolf asked.

  “When my dad died, my brother and I sold everything—the cattle, equipment, the land. We weren’t going to ranch and it wasn’t making us any money the way it was.”

  Wolf nodded. “You didn’t know about the oil?”

  “Psh. That bastard knew something we didn’t when he bought it from us, that’s for sure. We should have charged him twenty times the price and he would have taken it.”

  Megan had told Wolf her father had lost the land to the new owner, implying her father was at fault for getting rid of it against his will. Wolf detected no animosity with Shumway about the deal, only seller’s remorse for not getting more money.

  “What?” Shumway asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Wolf looked down the road. “Let’s photograph these tracks leading to Steven’s truck and follow this route too.”

  Chapter 24

  Wolf kept his eyes on the sandy desert bottom and followed the tire depressions as they weaved around trees and boulders.

  He met Steven’s eyes in the rear-view mirror again, and Steven turned away and looked out the window.

  “That wasn’t me. It was your dog.”

  “You were displaying a lot of control over those two women back there,” Wolf said, rolling down the windows.

  Steven blew air between his lips.

  “What was Shumway’s outburst all about back there, anyway? Megan?”

  The question hit home. Steven closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “That Megan is something else,” Wolf said.

  Steven glared at him in the rear-view.

  “Apparently you know that. And, apparently, so does your wife and Sheriff Shumway.”

  Steven looked out his window.

  “I’ve heard of being in the dog house, but what you have going on is … well, that’s another level living in exile up the wash like that.”

  “I’m not going to talk to you,” Steven said for the fourth time. “None of us will.”

  “What I don’t get is if you got caught messing around with Megan Shumway, why are you sticking around? You just moved up the wash? Why not just leave altogether and save your wife the heartache?”

  “I’m not talking.”

  Wolf nodded. He wondered how much Shumway was learning in the truck behind him.

  “It doesn’t matter if you talk to me or not,” he said. “The evidence will speak for itself.”

  Steven smiled. “What evidence?”

  Wolf slowed as the tracks disappeared over an edge and out of sight.

  “This a navigable hill?” Wolf asked.

  Steven said nothing.

  Wolf got out and checked. The slope was a good thirty degrees and there were deep gouges where vehicles had gone up and down. At the bottom there were more bushes and boulders, and then the dry wash they’d driven up earlier behind Boydell.

  Wolf climbed back behind the wheel and drove over the edge. “Speaking of evidence, here’s the way you and the girls could’ve left your camp without the other dig team knowing. According to Dig 1, you three came back in your truck at around 4 p.m. on Saturday. With that ten-minute jaunt we just took, and the rest of the drive down to Windfield … I’d say it takes just about three and a half hours to drive down to Rocky Points from your camp. If you left at 4 p.m., that could have put you guys in Rocky Points right in time to commit the murder.”

  Steven shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, man.”

  “That was smart of you guys to do a drive-by past Dig 1. Make it look like you were returning for the night.”

  Steven shook his head.

  They drove in silence the rest of the way down the wash.

  The barbed-wire gate near the main road had been left open, so he drove through and pulled over. He waved Shumway past him to lead the way back to the station.

  Wolf rolled up the windows and turned on the air conditioning. His stomach was empty, churning air, making him well beyond irritable and only a lot of food was going to remedy that. Jet had to be starving too.

  Steven scrunched up his nose. “Oh, man, roll down the windows again.”

  Wolf followed the good advice and then pulled over and let Jet out.

  While Jet found the shade of a juniper and did his business, Wolf’s phone beeped and vibrated as multiple messages streamed in.

  There were two text messages from Rachette and two voicemails, one from Rachette and one from MacLean.

  Rachette’s message said:

  Patterson and I found the truck! It was burned out. Green’s body inside, and the bones.

  Where are y
ou? Call us when you get this. We’re getting worried.

  Wolf read the message again, then lowered the phone and eyed Steven in the rear of his truck.

  Steven sat with closed eyes.

  Wolf walked down the road out of earshot and pressed Rachette’s number.

  “Hey, where the hell are you?” Rachette said.

  “Hey.”

  “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

  “You found the truck?”

  “Yeah, we did.” Wind ruffled the microphone on Rachette’s side. “We’re all at the scene now. Patterson got a hunch from looking at the video footage from the Brushing gas station. They doused the truck with gas and left it to burn in a culvert under County Road 39. Turns out the truck started that fire outside Brushing. We’re here with Summit SD now, and Lorber’s up here. He confirmed it’s Green’s body. MacLean’s up here with Senator Levenworth. They’ve got a hard-on for me and Patterson right now for finding the bones.”

  “What bones?” Wolf asked, looking over his shoulder at his SUV. Steven still sat motionless in the back.

  “The fossils. The Allosaurus bones Levenworth was buying. Hello?”

  Wolf stared at the ground, trying to process the information.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah … I just saw the bones up here. Sitting in the ground. Are you sure they were the bones we’re looking for?”

  “Yeah. Levenworth just cracked one out of its shell and looked. Identified it as an Allosaurus shin bone or some shit.”

  “Out of its shell?”

  “Yeah. They’re all encased in casting material. Levenworth said they call it a field jacket. Protects the bones … or the fossils, sorry … Patterson’s correcting me here. You say they had a full skeleton sitting in the ground?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s definitely a full skeleton in the back of this truck, too. So … there must have been two sets of bones?”

  Wolf eyed Steven again, thinking of the white plaster in the back of his truck.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Just trying to understand what’s going on.”

  “Sounds to me like they have a second dig site,” Rachette said. “Anyway, I’ll let you give that news to MacLean. He’s been calling you too. Have you talked to him?”

  “Yeah, I saw. What about that security video from the gas station? Can we get a good look at the guy on it?”