She walked to the fence and eyed the woodpile standing alongside the house. At least twenty feet separated it from the fence line. All territory that would have had to be crossed by somebody planting a gun inside the property.
“Thanks,” she said, holding up the steak bone and hopping back into her Jeep.
She sped away, leaving Ned Larson with his shiny bowl and a puzzled look on his face. She was so excited to get to Lonnie’s Market on Main Street that she failed to take notice of the pickup truck pass her at the top of the hill.
Chapter 27
Wolf sat staring out his office window at the Rocky Points resort. He’d spent the morning in the gym doing a vigorous weights workout that would undoubtedly leave him immobile come tomorrow. The workout had stirred up a ravenous appetite and now he sat in a post-lunch haze.
His cell phone vibrated and rang on his desk.
He picked it up, reading a non-Colorado number. “Sheriff Wolf here.”
"Hey, Sheriff Wolf. Sheriff Domino with Teton County Sheriff’s Department here.”
“Good to finally talk with you.”
“ So you have some action involving our boys down there, eh?” Domino said. “It’s a shame about Chris, but I have to say I expected some sort of violent end for that boy. Kid was always a bad seed. Once you get to know his parents, you start to understand why.”
“One of my detectives has been trying to get hold of them,” Wolf said. “They weren’t answering so he called to get you guys to help on that matter.”
“Yeah. They know about his death,” Domino said. “They just don’t care. The two of them are career alcoholics and never lifted a finger as far as raising him went, unless it was out of anger. His father was one of those guys who opened the bar every day and shut it down every night. His mother worked at that bar.”
“And now?” Wolf asked.
“Now…I don’t know what they do. Drink.”
“So how about Chris?” Wolf asked. “What’s his story?”
“As far as I could tell, his mom and dad would whip on him pretty good. We were once called there on a domestic. His father had called us. His old lady was beating them all up. That was … let’s see … must have been back when Chris was in middle school. He never pressed charges, and Chris had no visible marks on him. But I suspected he was getting hit by her. At the very least, he suffered major emotional abuse.
“A few years after that, when Oakley was in high school, we started having regular run-ins with him for fighting. Like mother, like son.”
“And how about the others?” Wolf asked. “I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on the living.”
“Right,” Domino said with a sigh. “Well, first thing is, you have Kevin Koling and Chris Oakley, and then you have Eagle McBeth and James Sexton. It’s not a group of four of them as much as two groups of two. Oakley and Koling were inseparable in high school, and they graduated three years before the other two. I know a lot less about McBeth and Sexton. They were good kids who generally stayed out of trouble.”
Sheriff Domino took a sip of something and shuffled some papers. “I’ve sent you these files by the way through InterDocs.”
Wolf went to his email and logged in to see the files. “Thanks, got em’ right here.”
“Let’s start with Koling,” Domino said. “You can see he had one aggravated assault when he was a senior in high school, which had everything to do with Oakley. Oakley was the bully in town, and Koling was his sidekick. Wherever there was a high school party out in the sticks, there was an Oakley assault and Koling at his side. Koling was always guilty by association.
“Oakley’s record does not reflect the trouble he used to get in. Like I said, the assaults and threats to others were the main problem. I’ve personally put him in jail twice, and he had a DUI five years ago. He squeaked out of serving his full sentence.”
"How about McBeth and Sexton?" Wolf asked. There were no links next to their names, which meant there were no official records.
"Like I said, those two were different. They're three years younger and kept their noses out of trouble, generally because they worked for a living growing up, and didn’t dink around town getting in fights.”
“So how do these four guys hook up?” Wolf asked. “I don’t get it.”
“McBeth’s mother and father own—owned—the Triple-O ranch up here in Jackson. The ranch is a huge mainstay of the Teton Valley. Has been for quite a while now. James Sexton, he’s an interesting fellow. He was part of the foster system up in Driggs, Idaho, and he moved over here and started working at the McBeth Ranch when he was in high school. The McBeth ranch takes in all sorts of people. Every year paying tourists come to the ranch to do the dude ranch thing. You know, like the City Slickers movie and all.”
“Right,” Wolf said.
“And then there are the employees of the ranch. They’re quite a varied bunch, from all walks of life and from all corners of the globe. And, back then, we used to give credit for community service to those completing work programs at the ranch. That’s where Chris Oakley and Kevin Koling come into the picture. Eagle McBeth was already working there, it was his family ranch. So was James Sexton, he’d come in there sometime before from the foster system. A different program I’m not familiar with. Koling and Oakley came in on a court-ordered work program for community service for beating up a kid up near String Lake.”
“I see,” Wolf said. “Although they still seem like opposite types of kids to me.”
“I think it was the traumatizing events surrounding McBeth’s father that made them close.”
“What traumatizing events?”
Domino paused for a beat. “Have you ever seen
