“Look. Right there.”
Cain stood up against the other side of the fence, leaning on her elbows, her eyes wide with anticipation as she watched the action.
“What are we talking about?” Wolf didn’t have to wonder for long. Following Yates’ pointing finger, he spotted the matte black finish of a handgun shoved into the gaps in the firewood logs, barrel-first.
Wolf reached in carefully and pulled the weapon out. Like some sort of magic trick the gun kept coming, because about five inches of sound suppressor was screwed onto the end of the barrel.
He dangled it between thumb and forefinger, reading the stamps in the slide. “Glock twenty-one. Forty-five caliber.”
Rachette opened an evidence bag. “I’d say that’s our gun.”
“That was easy,” Yates said.
Wolf lowered the gun into the bag and met Cain’s eyes. She turned away, looking into the trees and taking a breath, as if wrestling with the recent memories still rattling in her mind.
“I stand corrected,” Rachette said. “The guy is a dumbass after all.”
Chapter 18
“My ass hurts,” Rachette said, landing hard on Wolf’s office couch. “Too much driving. Too much standing. Too much everything.”
Wolf sat heavily onto his desk chair, feeling much the same.
It had been a long day. After finding the silenced Glock 21 in Hammes’s woodpile, they’d spent the rest of the morning going through his house with a fine-toothed comb, then returned to Mary Ellen Dimitri’s to walk the crime scene once more. After that it was back up to the Jackson Mine to walk those grounds.
A team of crime scene techs at the mine had nothing new after searching for two straight days with their K9 units and metal detectors. The claim covered over a hundred acres. Finding evidence, K9s or not, was proving to be a tough task.
Patterson creaked into the office on her crutches and shooed Rachette to slide over on the couch. “Your butt hurts? Boo-hoo,” she said, sitting and propping her leg up.
“How’s the ankle, Patty?” Yates asked, next to come inside.
“It’s fine.”
Wolf saw she was lying. She had that permanent crease in her forehead that showed up whenever she was agitated. That, and she had been avoiding eye contact with everyone since they’d walked into the building.
District Attorney Sawyer White strolled in with his deputy Dan Wethering in tow. White was in his late forties, in good physical shape, and wore a crisp blue suit with a cream-colored shirt and a pink tie. His numerous rings and Rolex sparkled under the overhead lights.
Deputy DA Dan Wethering, younger than White by a decade, dressed in stark contrast to his boss, wearing a pair of khakis and a simple button up shirt. He nodded a greeting at everyone in turn and stood at attention in the corner. Wethering had nine children at home, all of them adopted from an orphanage in Denver.
Wolf nodded back, wondering again just how the man did it. Suddenly Wolf’s sore backside and fatigue felt like less of an issue.
“You people have been busy the last few days,” White said, taking one of the seats in front of Wolf. Yates took up a standing position next to Wethering, against the windows.
“Is the party in here?” Lorber walked into the office next, rapping on the door. Daphne came up behind him and stopped dead in the entryway. “Wow, standing room only.”
“Come on in,” Wolf said, “grab a piece of carpet.”
Thunder rumbled outside, shaking the building. Another afternoon storm had rolled down from the north and was spitting rain against the window outside. Although it was only five o’clock, it was very dark.
“Did you talk to McBeth’s lawyer today?” White asked Wolf.
Wolf shook his head. “We’ve been out in no-cell-service territory all day.”
“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
