The Wolf Read online

  Alex Grecian

  * * *

  THE WOLF

  Contents

  Part One: THE BEAST OF BURDEN COUNTY

  August 1951

  Chapter One

  August 1951

  Chapter Two

  July 1956

  Chapter Three

  September 1961

  Chapter Four

  August 1970

  Chapter Five

  February 1977

  Part Two: THE LORD OF LIGHTNING

  Chapter Six

  June 1992

  Chapter Seven

  June 1992

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three: RANSOM

  October 2018

  Chapter Nine

  October 2018

  Chapter Ten

  November 2018

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Four: THANKSGIVING

  Chapter Twelve

  December 2018

  Acknowledgments

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE WOLF

  Alex Grecian worked for an ad agency before returning to writing fiction full-time and raising his son. Alex is the author of the long-running and critically acclaimed comic-book series Proof, and the bestselling Scotland Yard Murder Squad series. He lives in Topeka, Kansas, with his wife and son.

  ALSO BY ALEX GRECIAN

  SCOTLAND YARD’S

  MURDER SQUAD SERIES

  NOVELS

  The Yard

  The Black Country

  The Devil’s Workshop

  The Harvest Man

  Lost and Gone Forever

  NOVELLAS

  The Blue Girl

  For Melanie and Kevin

  “The more I get to know people, the more I like dogs.”

  —HEINRICH HEINE

  Part One

  * * *

  THE BEAST OF BURDEN COUNTY

  August 1951

  He came up from South America by bus. At the border between Mexico and Arizona, he bought a train ticket and rode through the night and well into the next day. A long arc through New Mexico, across the southeast tip of Colorado, and most of the way up through Kansas. He had nothing with him but his clothes and a small overnight bag.

  And a new name.

  He had been born Rudolph Bormann, but the name on his passport was Rudy Goodman. Rudy. A solid American name.

  He kept to himself on the train, but the railroad employed a nurse, and the conductor brought her to Rudy. He had a compartment to himself, with a narrow bed that folded out of the wall. The nurse arrived as the sun was setting and pushed her way in as soon as he answered the knock at his door, overwhelming his objections with her efficiency and her aggressively sympathetic manner. She was a big woman, healthy and strong, with strawberry hair and a fetching overbite. She didn’t tell him her name, and he didn’t ask. She helped him wash up and she stitched the cut above his temple, which had been bleeding into his ear all the way north through Mexico. Six stitches and a sticky bandage. When he thanked her in his pidgin English, she shook her head and smiled.

  “Sei still!” she said. Her German was slightly better than his American.

  He tried to pay her, took a roll of bills from his pocket, all the money he had with him, and peeled one off the outside. He held it out to her, but she shook her head again.

  When she had left, he slid the window open an inch and breathed the soot-filled air. He undressed and lay on his back, listening to the rhythmic chug of the wheels. He allowed himself to relax then, his eyelids growing heavy as the locomotive swayed beneath him, bearing him to freedom.

  Later that night the door creaked open and he woke. Yellow light from the passage spilled across him, then disappeared, and a moment later the nurse climbed on top of him in the dark. The bed’s hinges creaked in protest. The scent of rubbing alcohol and cheap perfume filled his nostrils.

  “Wie?”

  “Sei still,” she said again, her lips brushing against his good ear.

  When next he woke, a predawn glow filtered through the sheer curtains over the window, casting the compartment in flat shades of purple, and he was alone.

  He disembarked in Phillipsburg, just south of the Nebraska border, and stood nervous by the tracks, which cut across a dirt road and disappeared around a curve behind a stand of stunted elm trees. The train chuffed away, taking with it the fragrant nurse and his roll of bills, which he did not miss until much later that day.

  It was August, and there were no clouds in the sky, nothing between the sun and the scrubby brown grass but shimmering heat waves. Rudy’s head hurt where the nurse had stitched it, a dull throbbing pain that was almost a noise. After ten minutes, a plume of dust and blue smoke appeared in the distance, coming from the direction the train had gone, and a truck lumbered into sight over a slight rise in the earth. It was the color of mustard, battered and rusty with peeling wooden sides. It stopped in front of him with a bang and a whimper, and Rudy saw that the tailgate was wooden, too, what was left of it. A slat was missing from one side, and yellow paint peeled away from the truck’s hood.

  The driver’s-side door creaked open and a man jumped down, came around the front of the truck with his hand out.

  “Jacob Meyer,” the man said. He was smiling, short and wiry with thinning hair. Nearing forty but with the jittery energy of a teenager. Rudy liked him right away. They shook hands.

  “I am Rudy Goodman.” It was the first time he had said the name aloud, and he said it again, listening to the cadence of it. “Rudy Goodman.” It still sounded authentically American to him.

  “Sorry I’m late, Rudy,” Jacob Meyer said. “This ol’ girl picked a hell of a morning not to start. Had to change the plugs again already. I only just changed ’em in June.”

  Rudy nodded, but he didn’t understand. He only wanted to be agreeable.

  Jacob took Rudy’s overnight bag from him and started for the pickup truck, but stopped and turned and looked at him for a long moment, his head cocked to one side like a dog listening to its master. “You’re really him?”

  “Ja.”

  “I’ll be damned.” Jacob shook his head and whistled, then turned away again and dropped the bag in the bed of the truck. He hustled to the passenger-side door and held it open, slammed it shut when Rudy was safely in, then ran around to the other side and hopped up into the cab.

  “Didn’t turn it off this time, so don’t have to worry about it stalling,” Jacob said. “See, I can learn, can’t I? You just see if I can’t.” He put the truck in gear and it lurched forward with a loud farting noise and another cloud of blue smoke. Jacob grinned at him, and Rudy smiled back. The dull throb in his temple had receded.

  “Where are we … To where?” These weren’t quite the right words, Rudy knew, but he hoped his meaning was clear enough.

  “We got a place fixed up for you out in Paradise Flats,” Jacob said. “You understand me good enough? I can talk German, but it’s better if you use English now. You’ll pick it up.”

  Rudy nodded.

  “Good, good,” Jacob said. “It ain’t much, the house we got for you, but it’s free and clear. Belongs to Don Veitch, but he moved into an apartment closer to the city when his wife died. Easier on his knees without all them stairs and havin’ to go up and down all the time. Anyway, he don’t live in it now, so it’s yours long as you want it.”

  “How many?”

  “What? I don’t … Oh, how many of us are there? Die Gemeinschaft. Well …” Jacob fell silent and stared out the dirty windshield, drummed his hands on the wheel. “I wish it was more,” he said. “Sad to say it’s just seven of us in Paradise Flats, five others besides myself and Don. Used to be more, but folks kinda drifted away over the last couple years, you know?
It’s hard to keep ’em here.”

  Rudy understood all too well.

  The truck picked up speed, bumping over ruts and clumps of hard dried mud. A grasshopper thumped against the glass and disappeared, leaving behind a messy white smear.

  Watching out the window, Rudy saw a flash of gray fur among the vegetation.

  “I think I saw a wolf,” he said. “In English?”

  “They’re called wolves in English, too,” Jacob said. “But there ain’t a lot of those around here. You probably saw a coyote.”

  “I think it was a wolf.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Rudy waited again until Jacob glanced his way. “Jacob,” he said. “This is a good start.”

  Rudy Goodman, formerly Rudolph Bormann, assistant administrator of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, looked out the window of the pickup truck. He looked out across infinite rolling fields and pastures, all the way to the thin black line of the horizon. He was twenty-seven years old that summer, and America stretched out all around him, a land of boundless opportunity.

  Chapter One

  Trooper Skottie Foster refilled her coffee and gave the counterman a nod, headed back out to her vehicle. She snugged her cup down into the well next to her and pulled her Explorer around to the west side of the 24/7 Travel Store, where a bright green Toyota pickup sat low on its back tires in the lot. She filled out a tow report form on the computer mounted between the Explorer’s seats and pulled up OpenFox, the software used by the department to run tag checks. She stepped out and approached the vehicle on the driver’s side.

  Thanksgiving was three days away, and the sky was flat and gray. Dizzy snowflakes eddied about, but there was no breeze, and she was sweating under her heavy uniform jacket.

  Skottie had been with the Kansas Highway Patrol for nearly six months, transferred in from Illinois. She’d grown up in Kansas, had left at the first opportunity, started her career and a family in Chicago. Now she was back, living in her mother’s house and hoping for a fresh start, for a stable environment for her daughter, for some distance from everything that had recently gone wrong in her life.

  She had been required to go through twenty-two weeks of retraining after returning to Kansas, and she had used the time to adjust to her new circumstances. Back on active duty, she had been surprised to discover she was one of only a handful of female troopers in western Kansas, and one of three African Americans, but despite the usual stumbling blocks that came with any new position, she had encountered very little hostility or disrespect. She was tall, five feet nine inches, and slim, with skin the exact shade and color of her eyes. She kept her carefully braided hair pulled back low against her neck so that she could position her hat properly when regulations demanded that she appear in full uniform.

  She had been watching the Toyota for two days as she made her rounds and had seen no one approach it. The wheel wells were crusted with rust and the paint had peeled off along one side, leaving a dappled surface like a bruise. There was a toolbox tucked up under the back window in the bed of the truck, big and heavy, long enough to hide a body inside.

  She peered through the window to make sure the cab was empty. The driver’s-side door was unlocked, and she pulled it open, releasing a heavy odor of must and disuse. The radio had been pulled from the dash, the mats had been taken from the floor, the glove box was open and empty. She wrote down the VIN from the inside of the door and closed it, then walked around to the back and flipped open the toolbox. An ancient ball-peen hammer, a length of bicycle chain, a cheap pair of rusty pliers, blue rubber crumbling away from the handles. She closed the box and went back to her vehicle.

  She plugged the tag number into OpenFox and it spit out the VIN, which she checked against her notes, and the name of the truck’s registered owner: Wes Weber. She unhooked her radio and called the information in to Sarah, the dispatcher in Norton.

  A small stack of postcards was clipped to the back of the Explorer’s sun visor. She pulled one off the top and filled it out with Wes Weber’s address and a short note, letting him know his truck was being towed from the rest stop and where he could claim it. A moment later, Sarah called back.

  “Norton to One-Eleven?”

  “Here,” Skottie said.

  “Wrong case number on that.”

  Skottie frowned and checked her notes. “I see it.”

  “Go ahead with the last three.”

  She read off the corrected case number and hung the handset back up, set the postcard on the seat beside her, and put the Explorer in gear. Sarah would call the tow company and Skottie would drop the postcard in a mailbox at the end of her shift. She guessed Wes Weber would not show up to claim his property. The Toyota wouldn’t bring much at auction and was undoubtedly destined for a scrap yard somewhere.

  She headed toward the westbound ramp to the highway, but slowed when she saw a vehicle parked on the shoulder, its hazards blinking. She pulled in behind it and lit up the blue and red array atop her Explorer. A little boy waved at her from the back window as she put her hat on. She walked up to the driver’s side, where a Hispanic woman was already rolling down the window, a sheepish grin on her face. A baby crawled across the back seat, clutching a french fry in one chubby fist, a stringer of drool dangling from its chin. The little boy was yelling at the baby in Spanish.

  “Sorry, Officer,” the woman said.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Just need a second.” The woman turned her head and yelled at the boy. “Hurry up and get her in her seat.” She turned back to Skottie. “She got out. Wanted a fry.”

  Skottie nodded, watching the boy wrestle the baby girl up into the car seat behind the driver. The baby was oblivious, eyes only for the mangled french fry that circled her open mouth, waiting patiently for contact. Fast food as incitement for developing motor skills.

  She leaned forward and caught the boy’s eye. “What’s your name?”

  He looked up, his eyes wide, as if he’d been caught in a criminal act, and the french fry went up his nose. The baby started to laugh, and the boy looked at her and smiled. He looked back at Skottie, the fry still dangling. “My name is Miguel.”

  “You take care of your sister, Miguel.” The fry dropped into his lap and the baby laughed again.

  “She’s not my sister. She’s my niece.”

  Skottie looked at him.

  “But I’ll take good care of her, ma’am,” Miguel said.

  Skottie saluted him and turned back to his mother, or maybe she was his sister. “Don’t proceed until the children are secured, okay?”

  “I won’t, Officer. Don’t worry,” the woman said. “It’s why I’m pulled over in the first place.”

  Behind her, a black Jeep Wrangler zoomed down the ramp. She caught a brief glimpse of a man behind the wheel and someone in the passenger seat that she first thought was another big man wearing a fur coat. Staring at the license plate—it was a rental—she belatedly realized the passenger wasn’t human.

  Skottie focused her gaze on the woman in front of her and the two struggling children. Miguel had stuck the french fry back in his nose, but his niece was no longer amused.

  “All right, ma’am,” Skottie said. “Travel safe now.”

  She walked quickly back to her vehicle and turned off the array, pulled around the woman’s idling car, and accelerated out onto I-70. She saw the Jeep again five minutes later, parked at a rest stop west of Russell. A man in a gray peacoat was standing near the passenger side with the door open. Skottie pulled into the lot and coasted along the low wooden fence that bordered a tree-lined oasis with restrooms, a few vending machines, and a big grassy field for drivers to stroll and stretch their legs. There were no other vehicles in sight, but a dog was running back and forth at the far end of the field. It was hard to gauge the dog’s size from a distance, but it had a bushy black mane and looked for all the world like a lion.

  When he saw her, the man stepped back from the Jeep and smiled. He
put his hands out at waist level and stood very still. He might have been a statue, something carved out of marble. He was very tall and very thin. His face was angular and unlined, and she would have guessed he was roughly thirty-five years old, except for his carefully tousled gray hair. He wore a light gray cardigan under his coat, charcoal slacks that matched his hair, and black shoes polished to a sheen.

  Skottie flicked on the array and stopped behind the Jeep, blocking it from pulling out. She put on her wide-brimmed hat again and adjusted the strap under her chin, then opened her door and stepped down onto the pavement. “Move away from the vehicle please, sir.”

  The man took one more step backward. “There is a weapon in my vehicle, Officer, but I have a license for it.” His voice was deep and guttural, barely more than a whisper.

  She glanced through the open passenger door and saw a handgun lying on the seat, a semiautomatic pistol. She put her hand on the butt of her Taser.

  The dog was approaching fast, and the man lowered his left hand, extending his index finger. The dog saw the signal and came to an abrupt halt. Up close, Skottie could see it was huge, easily a hundred and forty pounds of muscle and fur and long yellow teeth.

  “Do you have a leash for that animal, sir?”

  “I do, Officer. Inside the Jeep.” The man kept his hands where Skottie could see them, but inclined his head in the direction of his rental car.

  “Is your ID in the Jeep, too?”

  “No,” the man said. “That is in my wallet.” He raised his eyebrows and held his hands farther out from his body, silently asking permission.

  “Go ahead,” Skottie said.

  The man slowly took his wallet from the breast pocket of his coat and found three laminated cards, held them out for Skottie to take. “License for the firearm is there, too.”