Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Brandenburg took a circuitous route to Lawrence Hunt’s place, stopping by a Burger King south of town before heading back in and then out to the east. Wolf had no protest, ordering himself a couple of burgers and fries in the drive-through, watching with interest as Brandenburg waited for him to get his food and then follow him back north on the highway.

He enjoyed the meal, washing it down with a Coke, grateful to be in his own vehicle without the electricity between him and Brandenburg.

The sheriff was clearly territorial before anything else—the kind of alpha male that ran and fell on his backside when it came down to it. Maybe Wolf was judging too harshly, but for now, that was the view he was sticking with.

The drive east of town was over a different terrain than near the SOV compound. The hills were covered in lush grass and sagebrush, and the forest, far more sporadic here than in the southwest, was made of pinons and juniper .

Wolf followed the dust trail of Brandenburg’s truck along a county dirt road, winding through rolling hills.

Seeing the reception on his phone was strong, he decided to call Patterson.

“Lawrence Hunt,” Wolf said.

“That’s our man?” Patterson’s voice came out of the speakers.

“That’s our man,” Wolf told her the address. “Are you near a computer? Let’s get his license plate number.”

“Yes. I’m searching now.” A few seconds later, she read. “Lawrence David Hunt…fifty-five years old. He has a registered Chevy Silverado pickup truck. Color gray. Not our blue Ford F-150 in question.”

“Shit,” Wolf said. “What else do you have on him?”

“Checking criminal history. Let’s see…no prior arrests. His record is clean. Squeaky clean.”

“Married?”

The tapping of keys came out of the speakers. “He’s a widower. His wife died fifteen years ago in a car accident. Never remarried. Huh, looks like he was a Green Beret.”

“Okay,” Wolf said, viewing the carnage the man had done at the compound in a new light. It made sense now how the man had been highly trained enough to get in and get the jump on that many dangerous SOV men.

“His son,” Wolf said. “His name is Irving Hunt. He’s gone missing. Twenty-eight years old, according to the sheriff. Possible member of the Sons of the Void. What do you have on him?”

“Irving…Hunt.” More keys tapping. “Irving Hunt. Twenty-eight years old. Has a prior arrest in Steamboat Springs for drug possession. Marijuana. That was ten years ago. ”

“Anything else on his record? Anything more recent?”

“Nothing,” Patterson said. “He went missing? What’s the story with that?”

Wolf explained Lawrence Hunt’s visit to the department headquarters in Doyle and his report to the sheriff that the SOV had something to do with his son’s disappearance.

“Hmm, so we’re looking at revenge killings?”

“That’s what it looks like. We’re headed over to Hunt’s house now.”

Brandenburg’s brake lights bloomed out of the dust ahead.

“I gotta go,” Wolf said. “Tell Waze everything for me, okay?”

“Will do,” she said. “And I’ll look into Lawrence Hunt’s cell phone data, see if we can’t locate him that way.”

“Good. Keep me posted, and I’ll do the same.”

“Be careful.”

“Will do,” he said and hung up. He shoved the phone in his pocket and slowed behind Brandenburg’s truck.

Lawrence Hunt’s house was a single-story building, painted gray, surrounded by a lawn of two or so acres and then the wild elements. A shed crouched in the backyard with an irrigation ditch running behind it.

Brandenburg slowed, stopping at a long driveway leading in. At the top of the drive, a gray Chevy Silverado truck was parked.

The sheriff’s brake lights turned off, and the two Doyle men got out.

Wolf parked behind him, keeping an eye on the property as he got out. There was no movement in the windows or surrounding the house .

The air was warm and still, smelling of sage and wild grass. Insects buzzed by on swirling paths.

“That’s Hunt’s truck,” Nichols said. “I looked up his DMV file when you guys were talking.”

Wolf nodded, pulling his Glock as he looked at Brandenburg. The sheriff pulled his own gun, then gestured: after you.

Wolf led the way down the driveway, Brandenburg and Nichols following silently.

They made it to the Chevy, still without any visible movement from the house.

Brandenburg went to the driver’s side door of Hunt’s truck. “It’s open,” he said. He looked in and then gestured inside. “And you can see why.”

Wolf pulled his eyes from the house and looked into the truck. Broken glass was strewn over the seat under the passenger side window. The center console was open, along with the glove compartment, and the papers and effects were strewn everywhere.

“SOV,” Brandenburg said. “They knew it was him. They would have come here by now.”

Wolf nodded and put his attention back on the house.

Nichols took the lead now, walking toward the front door with his gun at the ready. Wolf followed, and Brandenburg came up last.

The house looked more weathered up close than from afar, with warped siding, a front porch built from bleached wood, and windows looking like they hadn’t been washed since installation.

The wooden steps to the front porch creaked with an alarming bend as Nichols stepped up to the door. He looked back at Wolf and Brandenburg, then knocked .

“Sheriff’s department!” Brandenburg yelled.

A window next to the door was uncovered, but it was impossible to see through the filth into the darkness inside.

Brandenburg stepped in front of them and twisted the knob. The door swung inward, creaking on its hinges, revealing a slice of dark interior.

Wolf and Nichols followed the sheriff inside.

Brandenburg flicked a light switch, and an overhead bulb brightened the foyer.

“Whoa,” Nichols said. “The SOV’s been here all right.”

A room to the left had a dining table covered in papers and clothing, other debris flung to the floor. Chairs were tipped over.

A family room opened to the right, where a green couch and chair had been rifled, the cushions uprooted and swept aside. An old TV lay broken on the carpet, the stand leaning on its edge. A tall hutch along the far wall had been pulled down and smashed face-first into the floor. Shards of ceramic plates and trinkets lay everywhere.

Wolf wanted to tell them they should clear the place but waited for Brandenburg to take the lead.

A few seconds later, the sheriff used hand signals to point Wolf into the living room, Nichols into the dining area, and to show he was going to take the hallway.

Wolf waded through debris into the living room, rounding into another small area and coming into the kitchen from a back entrance.

More ceramic on the ground crunched under Wolf’s work boots. Dishes were smashed everywhere, every cabinet emptied and dashed to the floor, and every drawer pulled out and treated the same .

“Clear!” Nichols called from the back hallway.

“Clear!” Brandenburg said, emerging from a room off the kitchen.

“Clear,” Wolf said.

They gathered near the kitchen table.

“They were looking for their money,” Nichols said.

Wolf walked past them and down the hallway, stopping at the doorway to a master bedroom. Inside, a queen-sized bed sat in disarray, the sheets flung aside, the mattress flipped over. Brandenburg and Nichols stepped up next to him and looked inside.

They continued down the hallway into another room.

Psychedelic posters that had adorned the walls were torn off and tossed on the carpet. An acoustic guitar was smashed into a tangle of strings and splinters. The bed was also dismantled. The closet door was open, and inside lay a few open boxes, the contents strewn about.

“Irving’s room, I take it? Back when he lived here?” Wolf said.

“It looks like he had a lot of guns,” Brandenburg said from across the hall.

Wolf remained where he was, looking down at a picture frame smashed on the floor. He gently lifted the photo from the wreckage. Two young men in their late teens or early twenties were in the picture. One of them wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with a Grateful Dead logo on it and jeans; the other wore shorts with a tattered purple shirt.

They both had long hair. One, curly brown that settled just above his shoulders, and the other, straight and blond, parted in the middle, hanging down past his chin and covering one side of a carefree smile .

They stood with their arms around each other, flanked by hundreds of people on either side, a concert stage visible far down a hill behind them. Blond-Hair had a tattoo on one bicep dipping into view from under his shirtsleeve.

“Looks like he took them all,” Brandenburg said, still in the other room. “Probably used them to shoot up the place. What are you guys doing?”

Wolf turned around. Nichols stood next to him, staring at the photo in Wolf’s hands.

“You know these two?” Wolf asked.

Nichols blinked out of a daze and nodded. He pointed at the kid on the left in the tie-dyed shirt. “That’s Irving Hunt there.”

Wolf nodded. “And the other one?”

He shook his head.

“What’s going on over there?” Brandenburg came to the doorway. “What’s that?”

Wolf showed him the photo. “Nichols says this is Irving Hunt here. You know this other kid?”

Brandenburg shook his head. “No.” He thumbed over his shoulder. “Lawrence Hunt’s den.”

Wolf took out his cell phone, snapped a photo of the picture of Irv Hunt, set it down, and followed them across the hall to the other room.

Inside, a big wooden desk was overturned, broken glass covering the floor, and pictures of Hunt in uniform spilling from frames on the carpet. A shadow box filled with military memorabilia had been destroyed.

Wolf picked up a beret, the wool soft yet firm under his fingers. The flash on the front—a shield of black with diagonal yellow and red stripes—gleamed faintly in the dim light. Centered on it was the silver crest of Special Forces: a dagger flanked by two crossed arrows. Shaking away the glass, Wolf set it on a shelf. “He’s a former Green Beret,” he said.

“That fits,” Brandenburg said. “With what he did to those boys up at the compound.”

Along one wall stood a gun case that could have held dozens of rifles, shotguns, and handguns. Now it stood empty, its case a gaping maw with razor-sharp glass teeth.

“Here was his arsenal,” the sheriff said.

Nichols picked through some debris quietly.

Wolf went back out into the hall, back to the master bedroom, and to the ensuite bathroom inside.

The space was smallish and also smashed, with bits of mirror on the ground. There were two sinks sunk into a low counter and a glass-enclosed shower that had been spared.

He stared at a stick of deodorant housed in pink plastic lying on the floor. “There’s women’s deodorant in here.”

“Oh?” Brandenburg asked, appearing in the doorway.

“But his wife died fifteen years ago,” Wolf said.

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to my detective on the way here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Any other interesting information?”

Wolf shrugged. “No. She said his criminal record is squeaky clean. How about you, Nichols? Is that what you found?”

Nichols came up behind the sheriff, nodding. “Yes. No record.”

Wolf picked up the roll-on antiperspirant and checked the bottom of the cylinder, finding an expiration date a year in the future. “It’s new.” He handed it to Brandenburg, who read the date and handed it over to Nichols.

“I didn’t know these things had expiration dates,” Nichols said.

Inside the shower, there was a clear mix of male-female products—organic and floral women’s shampoo and artificially colored and scented men’s.

“Do you guys know if Lawrence Hunt has a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know,” Brandenburg said. “I don’t exactly keep up with romance gossip in town.”

Wolf looked at Nichols. The deputy shook his head, but his eyes had a faraway look again.

“Everything okay?” Wolf asked.

“What? No.”

“No?” Wolf asked.

“I mean, yeah.”

Wolf eyed them. He didn’t know these two from a hole in the ground, but they still appeared to be acting strange. They knew something he didn’t. Were they both lying about the other kid in the picture, and if they knew him? If so, why? Or was it something else? It could have been a hundred different things.

Wolf decided to leave them be and go back into the kitchen.

Nichols and Brandenburg joined him, Nichols kicking aside a plastic bowl.

A rear door led from the kitchen to the field out back. “I’d like to check around outside.”

Brandenburg gave him the after-you gesture again.

Wolf twisted the lock, pulled it open, and stepped out onto a concrete patio. Old, cracked vinyl chairs were gathered around a plastic table that held an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, half of them with red lipstick smeared on the filter.

Nichols stood next to him. “More signs of a woman.”

Brandenburg grunted.

Wolf went to a soccer ball lying on the grass and picked it up.

“It’s youth size.” Wolf turned to them. “Did Irv Hunt have any kids?”

Nichols shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Maybe the girlfriend has a kid,” Wolf said, wondering if a woman of the same age as Lawrence Hunt, at fifty-five, would have had a kid needing a youth ball. It looked newish and not a relic from Irv Hunt’s past.

“What’s up?” Nichols asked.

“Just thinking maybe it’s a grandkid.”

“Oh.”

Brandenburg stepped off the porch and into the grass, looking around the yard.

Wolf’s eyes went to the shed that stood on the other side of the lawn, and he walked over to the building. Nichols and Brandenburg’s steps brushed behind, joining the burble coming from the irrigation ditch that ran along the back of the property.

The shed stood at a crooked angle and was made of particle board that had warped over time in the harsh high-alpine desert environment. It was painted the same color as the house, with a single rolling door with a handle at the front.

Wolf grabbed the cold bar and pulled. The door slid up on well-oiled track wheels, revealing a dirt-floored space filled with garden tools and a workbench inside.

A riding lawnmower sat along the left wall, but the space in front of Wolf was conspicuously vacant. Harried boot prints, presumably from the bikers checking the place for any sign of their bag of money, were stamped into the dirt.

Wolf knelt down to inspect and found evidence of knobby tires. “There are tire marks here.”

“Yeah?” Brandenburg put his hands on his hips.

“Looks like they’re for a four-wheeler.”

Nichols knelt down, then looked up at his boss. “He’s right.”

“So, where’s that?” Wolf ducked out of the shed. There was no sign of any vehicle on the property other than Hunt’s truck.

He went back inside and noticed a folded sheet of stretchable fabric sitting on a wooden shelf. He picked it up and let it unfurl. The Polaris brand name was stitched onto it, along with the model name of Ranger . Wolf was familiar with the model, having recently been looking online to buy one himself.

“Looks like a cover for something bigger than a four-wheeler,” Brandenburg said. “Like a side-by-side.”

Wolf nodded, wadding it up and putting the cover back on the shelf.

Tracked grooves were worn into the dirt leading out of the shed and then disappeared into the lush lawn. But kneeling down, Wolf found a slight groove worn into the sod that headed toward the edge of the property and a piece of plywood that served as a bridge over the two-foot-wide irrigation ditch.

He walked the trail to the wood, which was streaked black with tire marks. On the other side, the tracks led through some weeds and then to a two-track trail veering around some junipers and into the wilderness behind the property.

“Where does this lead?”

“I don’t know,” Brandenburg said. “We’ve got hundreds of miles of trails surrounding Doyle. Could be a connector from his house to one of them.”

“Let’s check it out.”