Wolf ignored the majesty of the surrounding land and kept his eyes on the three men. Kevin Koling, James Sexton, and Eagle McBeth sat in camp chairs under a sagging tarp, all holding beers. Judging by the crumpled pile of cans, in the words of Wayne the concrete worker from Edwards, they were getting it done.
“Sheriff,” Eagle McBeth said, standing up.
Wolf nodded. “No need to stand for me.”
McBeth remained on his feet for a few seconds, then sat down. “I have a lawyer now. He wouldn’t like me talking to you.”
“I don’t need you three to say anything,” Wolf said. “I’m just here to talk to you. If you guys want to respond, that’s up to you. But I don’t need your involvement.”
Wolf looked at Koling, Sexton, and then McBeth again in turn.
“You figure out anything new?” Koling asked.
McBeth looked at him.
“What?” Koling asked.
“We’re not supposed to be talking to this guy.” McBeth turned in his seat. “Anything we say can, and will, be used against us.”
Sexton sat between Koling and McBeth, staring at Wolf with unblinking, bloodshot eyes. When Wolf nodded at him he took a sip and looked away.
Raindrops popped on the tarp overhead, slapping the ground around, pinging off the metal beast of a wash plant that loomed in the growing darkness. Piles of dirt lay near the plant, but they were in a different configuration than before.
“What I keep thinking about,” Wolf said, “is the dirt you guys were feeding into that wash plant when you dumped Chris’s body onto that hopper.”
McBeth said nothing. Sexton sipped his beer with a slurp.
Koling lit a cigarette. “What about it?” he said.
McBeth’s chair creaked as he turned to Koling again. “We have to stop talking to him.”
“Why? What the hell—”
“—Don’t you see that he thinks we killed Chris?”
“I sure as fuck didn’t kill Chris!” Koling stood up, toppling his camp chair. He loomed over his two companions. “I didn’t do anything!”
Sexton’s eyes clenched shut and he sagged into his chair. McBeth held up a hand. “Would you please relax?”
Koling pointed at Wolf. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill my best friend.”
Wolf nodded, otherwise remaining frozen at the edge of the open-sided tent.
Koling picked up his chair and put it down. “Sorry. I’m just…I get emotional.”
McBeth nodded understanding, holding out his hand, seemingly determined to calm his friend with a mime routine.
Sexton cracked his eyes open and raised his shoulders, looking like a turtle coming out of its shell.
Wolf gave it another moment, and the three men settled into a silent stare out into the rain past Wolf.
“Like I was saying,” he said, finally. “I’ve been thinking about that dirt that comes out the back of that wash plant. Spent. Used. Devoid of the gold that you extracted from it. So where do you put it?”
Nobody answered.
“You put it into a tailings pile, set aside from the other piles of dirt you have. You probably have an area for overburden—the soil scraped off the top before you get down to the paydirt. You put that somewhere.
“And then you get down to the paydirt, and you start digging that out, and you pile that up in a separate area. Right? That has the gold in it. You put that in a special spot.”
Sexton sipped his beer. Koling sucked on his cigarette. McBeth stared out into the rain.
“But you have no use for those tailings, so you make sure that you separate them. Those piles are the kind that will stay there for hundreds of years, waiting for the next generations of men to sift through, maybe with better methods by then, seeing if you missed any gold. That would be the perfect place to bury a body, wouldn’t it?”
Wolf paused for effect, taking the opportunity to watch their reactions.
Koling shook his head back and forth, sipping his beer again. Sexton stared out at the rain.
McBeth’s eyes strayed away from Wolf’s. He seemed lost in thought as his hand went to his jacket where he fingered a black circular hole on the breast.
“What happened there?” Wolf asked. “Is that where Chris burned you with his cigarette that night?”
McBeth ignored the question and lowered his hand back to his lap.
Wolf continued. “It was Mr. McBeth here’s idea to pull all those piles up and run them through the wash plant, right?” Wolf asked. “That’s what you told us. Eagle here was upset about the argument he’d had with Chris.” Wolf looked at McBeth. “He had flown off the handle. He had burned you with a cigarette.”
McBeth kept his eyes on the rain.
“But, in the end Chris was right, wasn’t he. You guys weren’t catching any gold. You needed to revamp the wash plant, and re-process that already spent ground to make sure you got everything out of it you could.”
They were statues.
“Which leads to the question: if Mr. McBeth here killed Chris, put that gun up against his chin and pulled the trigger, and then buried his body in the tailings … well, that would be just plain dumb to order everyone to rework that dirt, wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t he keep the body buried where it was?”
Wolf forked two fingers, pointing them at Koling and Sexton. “So which one of you two did it?”
They looked at him.
Koling’s eyes glazed over and he slowly turned to Sexton.
This time Sexton grew taller out of the chair. “No. It wasn’t us.”
“Damn right it wasn’t us,” Koling said. “Sure as hell wasn’t me.”
“It wasn’t me!” Sexton’s teeth bared. “It was that asshole Hammes. He did it.”
“We figured out Mr. Hammes couldn’t have done it,” Wolf said. “He was up in Edwards at a construction site Friday night. We have multiple witnesses saying he was there the whole time.” Wolf rubbed his hands together. “So? Which one? Who killed Chris? And then who killed Mary Dimitri and planted Chris’s gun
