“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
