Cold Lake (13 page)

Wolf stood at the front of the situation room with a pen in hand, waiting for his five on-duty deputies to take a seat around the large rectangular table.

As they sat, slits of morning sun came in through the blinds and lit up swirls of steam rising from their coffees. Along with caffeine, each deputy had a stapled packet of paper with them—the photocopied report Burton and Wolf’s father had compiled on the case twenty-two summers ago.

“All right,” Wolf said. “Let’s go over what we’ve got.”

“We’ve got a sick bastard killing people,” Baine said with a humorless chuckle.

“The father?” Wolf asked, writing Parker Grey’s name on the board.

“He’s dead,” Rachette said.

“I know. I still want to talk about him.”

“He fits the bill as the killer,” Wilson said. “We’ve got Katherine Grey’s testimony on video that he came back with blood on his clothing. And then,” Wilson pointed at Wolf with a pen, “your father and Burton tracked down that psychiatrist in Grand Junction, and confirmed his diagnosis. Schizophrenic, with psychotic tendencies. The doctor said he told Parker Grey that he could legally put him in the loony bin, because of the murdered squirrel story he admitted to. The doctor said Parker Grey was potentially a danger to himself or others. Prescribed him anti-psychotics.”

“Where’s that psychiatrist now?” Wolf asked.

“Dead.” Wilson pulled his lips into a line under his mustache.

“Yeah, there’s just that one big problem,” Rachette said, “We found the father’s body with the other victims. So that means it wasn’t him.”

“Just because we found the father’s body doesn’t mean he’s exonerated,” Patterson said.

“Agreed,” Lorber’s voice barked out of the laptop in the center of the table. “Thanks to the cold water of the lake, it’s impossible to know when Parker Grey died exactly. He could have disappeared on the fifth of July, gone into hiding and gone on killing, and then he was killed himself.”

“By someone else, years down the road.” Patterson finished his thought.

“With a bullet to the head, mind you, not the same M.O. as the other kills. Maybe his kills were the decapitations, and someone killed him with the gun.” Lorber smiled and bit a donut on the computer screen.

Wolf turned away from Rachette’s souring face and scribbled profusely on the pen board. “Timeline,” he said. “Let’s go over what we absolutely know, and when.”

Patterson raised her pen. “Nick Pollard goes missing twenty two years ago.”

Wolf wrote that.

Rachette cleared his throat. “And we’ve got the phone call coming from the
Pumapetrol
gas station down the road the night of the fourth. Call went out at 9:39 p.m. according to the phone company records from twenty-two years ago. Burton and your father found Nick Pollard’s blood on the receiver of that phone. So I think that we can definitely say Nick Pollard died that night, sometime before 9:39 p.m..”

“Not necessarily,” Patterson said. “He went missing that night. His blood was put on the phone at 9:39. But died? He could have been wounded, and some girl was helping him. She gets his blood on her hand, calls Parker Grey from that pay phone at the gas station ... and then Parker Grey comes and picks her up.”

The room went silent.

Baine scrunched his face. “Why?”

“I’m just saying. We don’t know what happened. All we know is there’s Nick Pollard’s blood on the phone, and when the phone call went out.”

Wolf took a sip of coffee and folded his arms. After a few seconds he turned back to the pen board. “All right. We’ve got Nick Pollard: missing twenty-two years ago. Parker Grey: missing two days later, on the 6
th
of July. Katherine Grey: she bolts a day after that, on the 7
th
of July, supposedly goes back home to Tennessee, which no one has been able to confirm.

“James Trujillo’s body is in with the others, he went missing six years ago, last seen in Alamosa, Colorado. What else do we have on him?”

Baine held up a finger. “I talked to the Alamosa PD. James Trujillo’s grandmother reported him missing six years ago. She’s since deceased, and there are no other next of kin. They stopped looking for him before they started, because the grandmother was apparently on all sorts of medication, and they thought he just left on his own accord.”

Lorber’s voice croaked through the speakers. “But we now know he was stabbed fifteen times, slit from the stomach to the neck, and decapitated, and then thrown into Cold Lake in a plastic bag.”

The room went silent.

“Thanks, Doc,” Rachette said. “Maybe you could sing it next time?”

They chuckled for a few moments and Wolf capped the pen. “The point is, we know that whoever is responsible for these grisly killings has been doing it at least up until six years ago.” He turned to Wilson and then Rachette. “How we doing on those missing persons database searches.”

Wilson held up a hand. “Real slow. I’ve got no other confirmed IDs.”

“None of the DNA samples are done,” Lorber said. “But I do want to say, the timeline of Nick Pollard’s death is looking to be a lot earlier than six years ago. The decomposition has been stalled, but his body is nowhere near as pristine as James Trujillo. And neither is Parker Grey’s. I’m going to start testing, using Trujillo’s body decomposition at six years, and I’ll be able to extrapolate when the others were killed give or take a few years. But nothing definitive.”

Wolf paced in front of the room. “Okay. Thanks Doc. The fingerprints on the phone? We’ve triple checked those, right?”

“Still no match in any database,” Patterson said.

“And,” Baine chimed in, “where the hell is Pollard’s truck? That thing just vanished off the face of the earth back then. It’s gotta be in the lake.”

Wilson shook his head. “They ran sonar around the entire perimeter of the lake back in the day. Never found anything.”

“Then they didn’t look deep enough,” Baine said.

“And how is someone going to dump a truck
deeper
into the lake?” Rachette scoffed. “You can only get it out so far, and they checked already.”

“I don’t know, jump it off one of those cliffs?”

“Pfft, those cliffs aren’t over the water. They’re over land.”

“So someone took the plates off, scrapped it, sold it, painted it, whatever.”

“Then I guess you have your answer,” Rachette said.

Baine sank back in his seat, glaring daggers at Rachette.

“Pollard’s yellow Toyota pickup truck.” Wolf wrote it. “Good question. And here’s a question. What if Parker Grey was killed on the 6
th
? Where’s
his
truck?”

Wolf scribbled that question on the board.

Patterson cleared her throat. “Like Rachette said, they scoured the edges of that lake. It doesn’t look like Parker Grey’s truck or Nick Pollards pickup are in there. But we could get the sonar guys to do another lap.”

Wolf nodded. “It’s probably a good idea.” He took another sip of coffee, glancing at his quiet deputies. “Let’s talk about the neighbor, Olin Heeter.”

Patterson raised a hand. “I checked property records this morning. Olin Heeter was the original owner of the land and structure the Greys bought. Olin Heeter quitclaimed it to Parker Grey twenty-five years ago. There’s a cash transfer on record of one hundred thousand dollars. I’m not an IRS agent, but that sounds fishy to me. There’s over sixty acres and a house on the land. Otherwise, Olin Heeter also has a primary residence down south, in Ashland.

“His number was listed so I called it. No one answered there, either. The guy is seventy-one years old. Vietnam veteran. Wife is deceased, died of a heart attack three years ago.” She held up her hands. “Nowhere to be found.”

Wolf nodded. “And no sightings up at his place in Cold Lake?”

Yates inhaled. “Well, I’m supposed to go back up right after the meeting. I’ll report back ASAP. But I didn’t see anything this morning. I had that DUI I was helping with down the valley around—”

“Don’t worry,” Wolf said. “Just check it and let us know. What about Kimber Grey?”

“I think she’s fishy,” Baine said.

“I think she’s crazy,” Rachette said.

Patterson fluttered her lips.

“What?” Rachette asked. “Looks to me like she’s the only one left standing. Dad’s dead. Mom’s gone. She’s sittin’ pretty.”

“We have no evidence.” Patterson shrugged. “And I know what I just argued before, but if Nick Pollard was killed the night of the fourth, before that payphone call was made, we have plenty of witnesses that put her at the marina all night. And it’s not her fingerprints in Nick Pollard’s blood on the phone. The rest of her story, being locked up in a room all night I could take with a grain of salt, but facts are facts, if Nick Pollard died that night, she didn’t do it.”

Rachette picked up his packet. “Says here that Olin Heeter told Burton and Wolf’s father that he was,” Rachette flipped through the pages, “Quote: ‘Painting the moon on the sixth of July and saw Parker Grey’s boat out in the lake dumping something in the water. I saw it clear as day, because it was right in the reflection.’, end quote. Parker Grey, according to Kimber and her mother, was supposedly gone on the sixth.”

They sat in silence.

Wolf nodded. “So that means if Kimber and her mom were telling the truth about Parker Grey leaving on the 6
th
from their lives forever, then they were the ones out there dumping something in the lake.”

“Yeah, and now we’re pulling up bodies from the lake,” Baine said.

The room went silent again.

“So what does all this mean?” Yates asked.

“It’s what I like to call, a whole lot of nothing,” Lorber said through the tinny laptop speaker.

Wolf put the pen down on the tray and stood still, looking at the dejected faces. “We’re not going to solve the case in here. We’ve gotta get out there and work it. It’s been sitting dormant for twenty-two years, and it’s cold.”

Baine raised his hands. “And what do we do? Just go through the same leads your dad and Burton did? They were pretty good cops, and they never found anything.”

“But we have something they didn’t. Like you said, we have bodies. In the end, my father and Burton were stumped. A crew of rescue divers couldn’t find the bodies. The sonar wasn’t as advanced back then, the bodies were down deep, and apparently my father was diving in the wrong spot. In the end they had to assume Nick’s blood was on that phone because,” Wolf shrugged, “because who knew why. But we have Nick Pollard’s body.

“But, like we said. We have no time of death for any of these bodies. We need more, people.”

Wolf stood motionless for a full five seconds. He rolled his neck and scanned the faces in the room. “I’m meeting Chad Frehauf, the clerk that was working at the Pumapetrol gas station that night the phone call took place. Yates, make your way back up there to Heeter’s on the lake. Wilson, you’re going up with him. If there is no answer, I want you to check the surrounding woods, check out his boat.”

Wolf forked his fingers. 

“Patterson and Rachette, you’ll go to Heeter’s other place in Ashland.”

Rachette looked up. “Doesn’t that mean we have to work with Byron SD?”

Wolf nodded.

“Oh. Great.”

“I’ll call MacLean and tell him you’re on your way. Let’s move people.”

“What about me?” Baine sat up straight.

“You keep an eye on Kimber Grey.”

Baine raised his eyebrows and nodded.

“An eye.” Rachette got up and the room burst into motion. “And that’s it.”

Wolf pulled into the parking lot of Pumapetrol Gas and got out.

Rachette honked twice as he and Patterson coasted by toward Ashland.

Wolf waved without looking and shut his door. Twisting on his heels, he felt the warmth of the morning sun on his back. Maybe June would finally make an appearance today. He stood tall and stretched his arms overhead, and then reached into his cab and picked up the Nick Pollard file folder off his passenger seat.

Slamming his door, he turned and stared at the skeleton of a payphone mounted on the cinderblock south wall of the gas station.

The phone book had been ripped off, the handset had been severed and taken by SCSD twenty-two years ago, and the body of the phone looked like it had been beaten to death with something blunt. Wolf marveled at the thought that the last person to use the phone had had Nick Pollard’s blood on their hands.

What did that mean?

The person, a woman, killed Nick Pollard and then came and used the phone to call Parker Grey? Or the woman—or teenager, or young woman, or boy—injured Nick Pollard, used the phone to call Parker Grey, and then Parker came to pick said person up and finished Nick off with a mutilation ritual killing? Then brought his body up to the lake and dumped it in?

A rumbling engine came up from the south and pulled Wolf from his thoughts. He turned and squinted, watching a beat up mid-eighties full sized Chevy pickup lumber in and rock to a stop next to his SUV.

The door squeaked open and slammed shut, sounding like a muffled gong. A man walked up with a dirty trucker hat twisted sideways covering a head of long, greasy hair, his thumbs tucked into grease-stained and ripped jeans, the rest of him covered in denim that had never touched a bit of soap.

“Mr. Frehauf?” Wolf asked.

Frehauf reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboros. In a practiced move he tipped one out into his mouth and lit it, took a deep drag, and kept it dangling from his lips.

Wolf held out a hand, and Frehauf shook. Bone thin and sweaty.

“You remember the Fourth of July, twenty-two years ago?” Wolf asked with a wry smile.

Frehauf exhaled and pinched an eye shut against the rising smoke. “Nope.” His chest rattled rhythmically, like rocks in a coffee can, and Wolf took this to be a laugh. “Just kiddin’. I remember that deputy comin’ and talkin’ to me about that night. I’m not sure how helpful I was.” Frehauf had a clear southern accent. “Or how helpful I can be now.”

“Says here you talked to a Deputy Burton from our department?” Wolf asked.

“Yeah, I guess.” The same rhythmic rattle in his chest, like a big set of maracas, and now a flash of his three front teeth. “What do you need to know that I ain’t already told that deputy?”

Wolf shifted, turning his back to the sun, eying the crossroads a couple hundred yards to the north. A car came into view down County 74 from the direction of Cold Lake and squeaked to a stop at the junction before turning away north on 734 towards Williams Pass and Rocky Points beyond.

“My report says you stated someone in a black Chevy Blazer drove down County 74, from Cold Lake, and into the gas station parking lot that night?”

Frehauf pursed his lips and exhaled a plume. “Yeah. Pulled in right here.”

Wolf consulted the report. “Says here it was about 10:30 p.m.. Probably kind of difficult to remember that with all the people coming in and out of the station that night? Fourth of July … wasn’t it busy?”

Frehauf shrugged. “Half and half. Half the night it was dead. Busy before the fireworks show though. A whole mess of people came in from both directions, buyin’ beer, snacks, stuff like that, before they made their way up to the lake. A lot of young folks. Then it was dead for a spell, up until about midnight when they started comin’ back down.

“That’s how I remembered the Blazer, because it came down early, before the rest of the crowd. It was the only truck I seen for an hour, right in the middle of the dead spell. It pulled in all slow, and parked on the side of the building. Right here where we’re standing I guess. Only nobody got out and came inside. He just drove into the lot, I remembered seein’ the headlights flashin’ around, course I couldn’t see him from where I was inside”—he sucked another drag and exhaled—“and then that same Blazer just went past the windows and headed up 734. That way.” Frehauf pointed north towards Williams Pass.

“You don’t remember seeing anyone inside? In the passenger seat?”

“Nope.”

“I notice you keep using the word
him
.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. I guess it was kind of a manly vehicle. And it was drivin’ around like a man? I don’t know. Guess it could have been a woman. Shit.”

“You’re sure it was a Blazer?”

“Yeah. A Blazer. You know, all boxy and big. Chevy.”

“And how about outside before the Blazer came in? Did you see anyone in the parking lot? A girl or a woman?”

Frehauf shook his head. “Like I told that deputy back then: I didn’t see anyone hangin’ around. I woulda’ been spooked and remembered that. I was working alone on my second night on the job. Middle of nowhere. Middle of the night, know what I’m sayin’? Spooky. Specially for a rookie.”

Wolf pulled out a picture of Nick Pollard’s beat up yellow Toyota pick-up. “How about this truck?”

“I’m tellin’ ya. It’s like I said back then, I don’t remember anything but that Blazer comin’ down. I remember it because it was during the dead time. Anything before that or after, when it was hoppin’ with kids buying beer and hotdogs, I was like a chicken with my head cut off. Tryin’ to learn the register, tryin’ to bag hotdogs and taquitos. Them kids were rippin’ me off, a whole mess of ‘em in here.” Frehauf shook his head and chuckled. “But I do remember that Blazer.”

Frehauf took a deep drag down to the filter and dropped the cigarette on the ground. “That all? I gotta do some grocery shoppin’.”

Wolf inhaled and nodded. “Yeah, go ahead. Thanks.”

Frehauf pointed at Wolf and walked away toward the front of the store and then went inside.

Wolf twisted his heel on the smoldering filter, burying it deep into the dirt. He turned to the payphone and walked over to it. Then he walked along the edge of the building toward the front. Countless cigarette butts, pop-tops, cellophane pull strips, and other crap was strewn on the ground—decades of convenience store litter blown into a drift against the wall by years of southerly wind.

He rounded the corner and peeked in the windows, which made up the entire front of the building.

The cash register was right on the other side of the glass. Frehauf would not have been able to see someone hanging out by the pay phone, his back would have been up against the interior of the concrete wall. The man behind the register looked over his shoulder at Wolf and widened his eyes. With a sheepish grin he saluted at Wolf, and Wolf returned the gesture.

Inside Chad Frehauf was bringing a case of beer to the register and he set it down, nodding at Wolf through the window.

Wolf backtracked and went to his SUV, opened the passenger door and set the report on the seat.

Chad Frehauf came around the corner lighting another cigarette, juggling a case of MGD as he did so.

Wolf looked past Frehauf to the stop sign terminating County 74, and then up highway 734 until it bent out of sight.

“Mr. Frehauf.” Wolf picked up the report sheet with Burton’s handwriting on it and walked over. “It says here that you told the deputy you saw the Chevy Blazer drive away up County 74.”

Frehauf blew out a puff and frowned. He shook his head, then pushed out his lips again. “What? No, I said he went up 734.” He twisted and pointed straight up the highway towards the north, not up the road to the west towards Cold Lake.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I mean … I remember he didn’t go back up the road the way he came down. Went up 734 towards Williams Pass.”

Wolf looked at the report again.

Burton’s handwriting said,
Mr. Frehauf pointed in the direction of the junction of County 74 and Highway 734 and told me “I saw the Blazer (vehicle in question) take off up County 74.”

“Mr. Frehauf. You said it was your second day on the job that night?”

“Yep. I was fresh into town from Mississippi. My sister lived in Ashland down the road. Got me this job. Her friend used to own this joint. Mississippi was gettin’ to me, know what I’m sayin’? Hot as shit down there.”

Wolf nodded patiently. “Do you think that you may have said the wrong road? I mean, County 74 and Highway 734 … kind of sound the same, don’t they? Maybe you accidently said 74 instead of 734?”

Frehauf narrowed one eye and then looked at the ground, searching his mangled brain cells for a memory.

Wolf stared at him and held his breath.

Frehauf pointed a finger at Wolf and then bounced it up and down. “You know, my sister … oh man,” Frehauf took a drag, “I remember my sister and I got into it once back then, because I gave her directions to a … shit, I’m just gonna tell you seein’ it’s legal and all now … a
weed
hook-up.”

Wolf pulled his lips into a thin line and nodded.

“I told her directions off of 74, and I meant 734. Got her all sorts of lost. She was pee-issed. So yeah, I guess I could have done that same thing.”