In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)

by Jeff Carson

  “Well, I did. He’s demanding we release the crime scene and let the miners get back to work, and he’s using some credible threats. Seems the guy is pretty connected with Senator Ponsfeld.”

  “Seems McBeth has some money, then,” Rachette said.

  Wolf looked at Lorber.

  Lorber shrugged. “We’ve had K9 units and my forensic team searching that place for clues for two days now. We’ve probably sifted through more dirt than those miners have. Looks like we’ve found all we can for now.”

  Wolf nodded. “I’ll release it.”

  “Okay,” White said, splaying his hands, “of course if you need to get in there for anything else, we can get a warrant. Now, onto today’s exploits. I think I’m up to speed on everything that occurred, just check me if I’m wrong, please. We started with your search and arrest warrant for Rick Hammes. He finally showed up at his house, pulled a gun on our deputies and got shot, and then you found a forty-five caliber with—”

  “—Not just any forty-five caliber,” Rachette said. “The forty-five caliber with a do-it-yourself silencer made from a solvent trap that our miners up at Jackson mine told us Chris Oakley kept in his trailer.”

  White twisted and looked at Rachette. “Right. Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “Good,” White said, turning back to Wolf. “All of this is looking like a slam-dunk against Rick Hammes so far. What else?” He looked at Lorber.

  Lorber shook his head. “We had been looking into Mary Dimitri’s cell phone. Now we have Rick Hammes’s. Looking at the two together is interesting.”

  “How so?” Wolf asked.

  Lorber dropped a manila folder on Wolf’s desk and flipped it open. “There are a number of texts between Hammes and Mary Dimitri on his phone that we didn’t find on Mary’s. She must have deleted them.”

  “So she wouldn’t get caught by her boyfriend,” Yates said.

  “Maybe,” Lorber said. “There’s also more sexting. Pictures of body parts, but more tattoos this time. Interestingly, she calls Rick Hammes at 11:05 p.m. on Friday night, the 10th.”

  “The night of Oakley’s murder,” Rachette said.

  “Correct. Phone call lasted twenty-one minutes and fifteen seconds. A significant conversation, by the looks of it.” Lorber paused for effect. “The other interesting thing we found was one of her text exchanges with Hammes. This was Monday night—that was the night after we were called to the mine and Chris Oakley’s dead body, mind you.”

  Lorber looked at White and Wethering, making sure they were on the same page with the timeline of events.

  “She specifically asks Hammes, ‘Did you do it?’ And he responds, ‘Do what?’ She responds, ‘Did you kill Chris?’” Lorber flipped the page. “He responds, ‘Fuck no.’ And then they don’t talk anymore.”

  The room went silent.

  “Just to state the obvious here,” Rachette said, “that does not sound like they’re in collaboration on Chris Oakley’s murder.”

  “He could be lying about doing it,” Yates said. “It’s not exactly something you’d want to put in writing.”

  “True.”

  “Has Hammes really been working in Vail?” White asked. “Is there any truth to that?”

  “I looked into his financials today.” Patterson opened the folder on her lap and picked out her own paperwork. “I couldn’t find any transactions for the last…well, he never uses a credit or debit card, let’s just say that. He only uses an ATM every once in a while, but he did once last Tuesday, when he withdrew one hundred dollars from an ATM at a Circle-Q convenience store in Eagle, Colorado.”

  “Vail area,” Rachette said. “Wolf found a receipt in his dirty pants, too. From a liquor store in Eagle, dated last Thursday the 24th, the night before the murder.”

  “That’s something,” Patterson said. “Otherwise, the ATM transaction is all I can find tying him to the Vail area. He holds a bank account at Peak National in downtown Dredge, but there are no recent debit transactions from that account or any other in his name, not since he got out of jail on February 18th. Again, the only thing I’m seeing are ATM withdrawals over the last few months.”

  Patterson flipped the page. “I also spoke to his former employer up at the casino today, since you guys got sidetracked. Hammes used to wash dishes at the Motherlode Casino Restaurant and up and quit two weeks ago. He never told his parole officer so I found nothing there on where he went.”

  “Who’s his parole officer?” Wolf asked.

  “Shante Laroque,” White said.

  “And why isn’t she here right now?”

  “Besides the lack of room in your office?” White asked. “She had a hearing. Couldn’t make it.”

  “What’s she saying about Hammes?” Wolf asked.

  White looked to his assistant. Wethering cleared his throat. “She’s saying he never missed a meeting. Passed all his drug tests so far.” He shrugged. “He never told her about a Vail job.”

  “Okay,” Wolf said. “What else?”

  Patterson continued. “According to his former boss at the casino restaurant, word was travelling through the servers and staff that he was going to work construction up in Vail or the Vail area. That’s as specific as he could get.”

  “Let’s talk motive for Hammes. What is it? He was screwing Mary and wanted her for himself?”

  “More exact,” Wolf said, “Mary Dimitri was dating Chris Oakley and seeing Hammes on the side. According to Mary’s coworker at the cocktail lounge, she’d begun seeing him a month ago. Secretly, behind Oakley’s back.”

  “And we have the text message from a guy named Spritz last Friday sent to Oakley,” Yates said, “telling Oakley the about his girlfriend’s infidelity.”

  “That’s good motive for Oakley to kill Hammes,” Rachette said, “not really the other way around. Not good motive for Hammes to kill Oakley.”

  “Let’s stop right there a second,” Patterson said. “How about this Spritz guy? Have you guys gone to the bar and grill where this guy works yet? Because the temp worker who dumped Oakley’s body onto the wash plant works there, too. Casey Lizotte. Spritz and Lizotte. Who are they?”

  All eyes landed on Wolf, who shook his head.

  “Not yet,” Rachette said. “We’ve been a bit busy.”

  She made a note in her notebook. “Just asking. It’s called The Picker Bar and Grill. I’ll tack that onto our to-do list.”

  “The Picker?” Rachette scoffed. “What’s that about? Oh wait, I get it now, like a big piece of gold you pick out of the ground. Not like a booger or anything.”

  The room went silent.

  “Sorry,” Rachette waved toward Yates. “Continue. You were talking about what happened? Hammes’s motive playing out or something?”

  Yates cleared his throat. “I was saying Oakley got the text message about Hammes hooking up with his lady. Later that night Oakley was killed. The news of Hammes and Mary getting together behind Oakley’s back and Oakley’s death seems obviously connected. That seems to point to Hammes as our guy.”

  “How’s Hammes doing, anyway?” White asked, looking at Wolf. “We gonna be able to talk to him? Or…” he finished his sentence with a slashing motion across his neck.

  “He’s in surgery right now,” Wolf said. “We’ll know more later.”

  “Let’s hope he lives,” White said.

  “And talks,” Rachette said.

  “And what about the dog?” Daphne asked. “Is he going to be okay?”

  Wolf nodded. “He’s fine. Bullet grazed his hind leg. He’ll have a hefty limp, but he’ll be okay.”

  Daphne deflated. “Good.”

  “So what are we saying happened?” Rachette asked. “Mary Dimitri comes up to the mine that night. She gets into an argument with Oakley and then drives away. Lorber said she called Hammes that night at eleven-ish. Maybe after the argument at the mine she goes home and calls Hammes, sweet talks him for twenty minutes, tells him to go kill Chris.
>
  “Hammes says, okay, anything for you, baby. He comes sneaking into the mine, breaks into Oakley’s trailer, takes the Glock with the silencer…” Rachette stopped. “Here’s a question—how does Hammes know where to find the silenced weapon?”

  “Mary Dimitri knew,” Yates said. “She tells him where to get it. She knows the exact drawer from spending so much time with Oakley.”

  They sat listening to the rumble of another thunder outside.

  “Okay, fair enough,” Rachette said. “And then he…what? Goes home that night? His neighbor reported him showing up Tuesday night. Not Friday night. He never said anything about the weekend.”

  “So he goes back up to Vail,” White said.

  “So he comes down from Vail to do the deed,” Rachette said. “In the middle of the night, he drives two hours, gets there in the middle of the morning, shoots him, drives back up to Vail.”

  “Another two hours,” Wolf said.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of driving,” Rachette said.

  “And then,” Yates said raising a finger, “Monday he gets the text message from Mary that says, ‘Did you kill Chris?’ And that pisses him off. He sees that Mary’s trying to play it off like she had nothing to do with the killing after she spent twenty minutes convincing him to do it Friday night on the phone. So he comes back down into town Monday night, goes and has a couple beers at Mary’s, shoots her dead. Then he goes home. The neighbor, Ned Larson, hears the dog. Hammes takes Oakley’s gun, shoves it in his woodpile, and then heads back to Vail.”

  “Why does he shove the gun into his woodpile?” White asked.

  “Because he’s a moron,” Rachette said.

  They sat listening to the rain on the window.

  Wolf laid his palms on top of his desk. “Deputy Cain told me that when Rick Hammes confronted them on the road, he asked the question, ‘What is Mary saying I did?’”

  “So?” White shrugged.

  “He used the present tense about Mary. He seemed to think Mary was still alive and talking to the cops about him. Deputy Cain said he sounded genuinely confused, or off-base, as to why they were there.”

  White scoffed. “This was all right before a raging pit bull and her satanic tattooed master came at her? She remembers the exact words that were said? Come on, Wolf. We know how memory works under pressure. What else do we have?”

  Wolf turned to Lorber. “Did you find prints on our wood-pile-gun?”

  Lorber shook his head. “There are no prints on that gun.”

  “And what about the rounds?”

  “Partials belonging to Chris Oakley.”

  White upturned his hands. “If it isn’t Hammes, who did it?”

  “Maybe somebody much closer,” Wolf said. “Somebody in a trailer next to Oakley’s up at that mine. Somebody who knew exactly where that gun was. Someone who doesn’t have to drive halfway across Colorado, down into a mine, in the middle of the morning hours, to do it.”

  “And their motivation?” White asked.

  Wolf shrugged. “A blow-out argument. Maybe Oakley had crossed a line.”

  “With McBeth, you’re saying,” White said.

  “Or one of the others.”

  “Or all of them,” Patterson said.

  Silence dropped on the room again.

  “So, they sneak from their own trailer into Oakley’s,” Rachette said, “take the gun from his drawer, go out into the night, find him in a tractor or something. Wave him over. Shoot him. Bury him. And then they go and shoot Mary Dimitri a couple days later. But, if it was about the argument, about gold or whatever, why kill her, too?”

  “To make it look like Rick Hammes did it,” Wolf said.

  Rachette nodded. “And they plant the gun at Rick house so we’ll find it.” He shrugged. “Like I said, there’s no reason to keep that gun around after you shoot two people with it. And out in the wood pile? Come on.”

  “They knew Hammes was screwing around with Oakley,” Wolf said. “They had a good person to frame.”

  “It’s a sloppy frame job when you really look at it,” Rachette said. “All we have to do is prove Rick Hammes was up in Vail during that murder and he’s off the hook.”

  “We’ll get Hammes’s cell phone GPS records in twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Lorber said. “That might help us.”

  “That will prove where his phone was,” White said. “Not where he’s been. We’ve come up against that before. You have to prove Hammes was in Vail, and that the miners did it.” His eyes slid to Lorber again. “But you found nothing up at the mine, correct?”

  Lorber shook his head. “We checked drains in all those trailers for blood, checked each miner’s clothing for gunshot residue and blood spatter. Carpets in the trailers. Boots. We’ve come up with nothing.”

  Lorber gestured to Daphne Pinnefield.

  “K9 units got a hit on some dirt with blood on it,” she said. “In one of the mounds next to the wash plant, and on the scoop of the front-end loader that put his body up on the hopper. We’ve swept with metal detectors and come up with a wheelbarrow’s worth of casings. They shoot a lot. The ammo found in each trailer was the same. All partially filled boxes. In other words, we’re getting nothing from the ammo or shell casings.”

  “As far as the clothing goes,” Wolf said, “they could have ditched what they were wearing after they shot him. Anywhere in a hole somewhere.”

  “Or a river or lake,” Rachette said.

  “We need to figure out where Hammes was working in Vail,” Patterson said, repeating what was becoming a mantra. “We find that, we can ask them if he was there last Friday night. We can see if he was there Monday night.”

  White raised his gold pen in the air in affirmation.

  “On that note…”

  All eyes went to Patterson. She pulled out another piece of paper. “I did some digging into what construction projects are happening in the Vail, Avon, Eagle, and Edwards area right now,” she said. She flipped to another page, looking skeptical. “There are lots of them. A few large commercial projects, and over two dozen private homes.”

  “It’s one of the larger commercial projects,” Wolf said. “There was the reflective vest in his duffel bag. His jeans had dried concrete on the cuffs, as did his boots. And the ATM transaction was in Eagle, according to the receipt I found in his pocket.”

  Patterson shook her head, looking at the paper. “There are no commercial projects going on in Eagle right now. The big commercial projects are happening in Vail Village and Edwards.”

  Wethering cleared his throat. “I have a brother in the oil industry up there. They put up a lot of workers in those cheap motels in Eagle and Wolcott.” He shrugged. “Maybe a large company doing the projects in Vail Village and Edwards are housing their workers there. It would explain the Eagle transactions.”

  White smiled and nodded. “See this guy? Told you he was good.”

  Wolf nodded. “We’ll go check it out.”

  “Now?” Rachette asked, leaning toward Patterson and rubbing his backside.

  “No. We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning.”

  The meeting broke up and people streamed out of the office. Patterson took her time getting up.

  “Patty,” Wolf said, “can I talk to you?”

  She stopped. “What’s up?”

  He closed the manila folder on his desk that Lorber had left and crossed his legs. “Do you remember coming across Deputy Cain’s resume this year? She…apparently applied, and I somehow didn’t see it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I saw it today,” she said. “I was speaking to Charlotte earlier, and she was telling me about how you and Wilson have been dragging your feet on a few things. I hope you don’t mind, but after that I finished your stack of paperwork,” she gestured to the empty wire basket on his desk.

  “Oh, yeah. Wow. Thanks.”

  “I went into your file cabinet to make sure there were no more forms that hadn
’t been filed since there seemed to be a few missing from May and June.”

  “There did?”

  “Yes. But I figured it out. Don’t worry.” She walked to the filling cabinet, opened the top drawer, pulled a file, and slapped it on his desk. “Deputy Cain.”

  Wolf opened it and was greeted by a photo of Deputy Piper Cain’s smiling face paperclipped to an application. Although it was a generic work photo from Gallatin County Sheriff’s Department, she looked good in the picture.

  A handwritten letter, signed by the sheriff of Gallatin County in Bozeman, Montana, was paperclipped to the back. Wolf skimmed it, coming across words like exemplary and remarkable. According to the letter she was a hard worker, a team player, a self-starter, and tough.

  “It’s a good letter of recommendation,” Patterson said.

  Wolf looked up and nodded. He closed the file. “ Thanks. I hired Deputy Chavez as a favor to Wilson. We…I, never hired another one.”

  Wolf turned in his chair, facing the window. He’d had more time to mull over the time period around the winter storm. That storm had also been when MacLean had called him, touting his recovery from advanced pancreatic cancer and his intention to return to Rocky Points and the sheriff’s position. Wolf had rarely felt such elation in his life as he had during that conversation, and though he was ashamed to admit it now, it wasn’t because of MacLean’s improved health. That had been the moment Wolf had decided to leave these millions of things that didn’t involve the detective squad and Wolf’s previous world to MacLean on his return.

  He looked underneath Deputy Cain’s resume and saw two other candidates, both with less than half the experience and qualifications she had.

  A wave of guilt washed over him as he thought about Cain’s predicament in Dredge, living with her father up there in the middle of the woods.

  “I’m a pretty out of touch sheriff this time around, huh?”

  Wolf swiveled back to see an empty office.

  “Yes,” he answered himself. “You are.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled to recent numbers, pausing at Piper Cain’s in his outgoing calls from earlier today. Maybe a good sheriff would call his deputy to check in on her after a day of action like that. Then again, maybe a creepy sheriff would have done that.