In The Ground
Jeff Carson
Cross Atlantic Publishing
Copyright © 2020 by Jeff Carson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Also by Jeff Carson
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Also by Jeff Carson
Also by Jeff Carson
Gut Decision (A David Wolf Short Story)– Sign up for the new release newsletter at http://www.jeffcarson.co/p/newsletter.html and receive a complimentary copy.
Foreign Deceit (David Wolf Book 1)
The Silversmith (David Wolf Book 2)
Alive and Killing (David Wolf Book 3)
Deadly Conditions (David Wolf Book 4)
Cold Lake (David Wolf Book 5)
Smoked Out (David Wolf Book 6)
To the Bone (David Wolf Book 7)
Dire (David Wolf Book 8)
Signature (David Wolf Book 9)
Dark Mountain (David Wolf Book 10)
Rain (David Wolf Book 11)
Drifted (David Wolf Book 12)
Divided Sky (David Wolf Book 13)
In the Ground (David Wolf Book 14)
Chapter 1
The unmarked Sluice-Byron County Sheriff’s Department SUV brushed the underside of a cloud as it drove through the saddle between two thirteen-thousand-foot peaks on County Road 621.
Air blew through the window and although it was late June, a few days into summer, to Sheriff David Wolf it felt as if he had his elbow propped inside an open freezer. He could have unzipped his jacket, rolled up the window, and set the inside temperature to seventy degrees, but then what was the point of getting out of the office?
Once beyond the road’s apex, he let his foot off the gas and coasted. He felt the cab rumbling deep in his chest as the tires skated over more washboard and potholes—a soundtrack that never got old.
The mountain on the right side of the road abruptly dropped away, revealing the majesty of the Colorado high country landscape behind it. The Dredge River sparkled in the seam of the valley below, cutting through a carpet of trees on its way east, out into the green, shadow-speckled high plain Dredge Valley. Beyond that was another wall of snow-laced peaks in a seemingly endless sea of mountains.
A rock pinging off the bottom of the SUV brought Wolf back to the task of keeping from tumbling off the roadway’s edge.
He checked his speed and leaned over toward the passenger window, catching a glimpse of the mining operation far below. Pinprick reflections glanced off of a group of county law enforcement vehicles amid a handful of civilian trucks. A cluster of tiny white-clad ants—CSI investigators—swarmed a piece of red machinery that looked to be the wash plant. Deputies in dark jackets stood in clusters or wandered the area.
After the first hairpin turn, the spectacle came into view without him having to risk death. The mine was a small operation compared to some surface mines Wolf had seen. Earth movers had cleared a few football fields’ worth of forest and gouged their way into the mountain on either side of the river. There was a retaining pond, unnaturally turquoise, a lower cut where a single excavator sat idle, and a flat upper area where four trailers were lined up.
A row of pickup trucks in front of the trailers stood out among the other official vehicles, which were all labeled with the SBSCD logo and paintjob and parked more haphazardly.
In addition to the trucks sat three four-wheel ATV vehicles, the kind with bucket seats, roll cages, and flatbeds, used for navigation within the mine space.
Wolf had visited a few gold mines growing up, as the former landlord of his family’s ranch had been a mining magnate himself, so he could now confirm the large red machine sitting at the edge of the flat area below as a wash plant. The bulky section of the gold-extracting-machine was about the size of a semi-trailer. Out of the top yawned a rectangular covered opening called a hopper, where dirt was dumped in by excavators. Then the earth tumbled through a series of chutes with the aid of running water, depositing the heavy gold contained within into riffles beneath sifting screens. The remaining dirt, now free of the sifted gold, was gathered into another chute and deposited into the turquoise pond.
As Wolf reached the bottom of the hill his eyes flicked for the dozenth time back to the hopper with its iron bars covering the opening to stop larger boulders from entering the machine and tearing it from the inside out, because that’s where the dead body lay sprawled to the sky.
He parked and got out. Stretching his arms overhead, he felt a crick in his back from sitting too long behind the wheel, or too long behind the desk before that.
Closing the door, he sucked in the thin mountain air laden with the scent of pine and running water.
He could hear the whoosh of white water flowing off the snow-veined peaks down in the crack of the valley, over that the faint sound of radios scratching and people chatting. He unzipped his rain jacket to let his neck breathe, alert to the sound of quick footsteps heading towards him.
Wolf crunched through the wet gravel, down a small embankment and met the footsteps halfway.
“How are you, sir?” Chief Detective Heather Patterson asked.
"Patterson.” Wolf’s eyes scanned the cut in the land below, the muddy road the earth movers used, the big red metal wash plant, the scrum of bodies bustling nearby.
Wolf had parked slightly upslope and above the flattened upper area of the mine, and as they walked down toward the action Patterson gave him time to take it in.
The dead body lay atop a flat grate on the red machine. Face up, on his back with arms sprawled to the sides, the corpse looked placed for
