DONALD HARSTAD
A Long December

I WOULD LIKE TO DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THE MEMORY OF

KEITH LEMKA.

HE WAS A FINE OFFICER AND A TRUE FRIEND.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

15 :26

CHAPTER 01 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 15:34

15 :37

CHAPTER 02 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 16:07

15 :48

CHAPTER 03 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 18:11

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001

16 :12

CHAPTER 05 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 09:45

CHAPTER 06 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 10:51

CHAPTER 07 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 13:27

16:51

CHAPTER 08 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 15:12

CHAPTER 09 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 18:04

CHAPTER 10 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 21:09

CHAPTER 11 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2001 08:09

CHAPTER 12 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2001 09:31

16 :28

CHAPTER 13 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2001 10:40

CHAPTER 14 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2001 15:30

16:56

CHAPTER 15 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2001 19:30

CHAPTER 16 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 08:11

CHAPTER 17 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 12:21

17:03

CHAPTER 18 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 16:33

CHAPTER 19 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 19:27

CHAPTER 20 FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 23:03

CHAPTER 21 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 08:44

CHAPTER 22 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 15:23

CHAPTER 23 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 17:39

CHAPTER 24 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 22:08

CHAPTER 25 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 22:41

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

15 :26

SLUGS RIPPED THROUGH THE BARN’S OLD BOARDS, showering us with dust and debris. I got even lower than I had been before, pressing my cheek against the sooty limestone foundation. I could see George hunker down along the thick support beam he’d found, and I heard Hester, who was off to my right in the gloom, say “Shit.” At first I thought she was just sort of venting, but then she kept going.

“Shit, oh shit, shit, shit.”

Hester’s no shrinking violet, but she’s not one to curse for the hell of it, either. I rose and turned to her, and noticed that she’d rolled away from her vantage point near the rotted ground-level boards, and was half sitting with her back against the foundation wall.

“What? You okay?”

“My face,” she said. She held the right side of her face with one hand while she struggled to reholster her sidearm with the other. I saw blood ooze between her fingers. “Shit, shit.” she repeated.

George and I both got over to her as fast as we could crawl. “Let me see.”

She reluctantly moved her hand from her face, and I saw blood and torn flesh. Not too much. It was hard to see in the shadows. I unsnapped my coat and daubed her face as gently as I could with the fleecy lining. It was all I had.

“Ahhh!” She pushed my hand away.

“Sorry, sorry, just a sec, just let me look.”

“Don’t press.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said as I pulled off my gloves, fumbled under my sweater, and dipped into my shirt pocket for my reading glasses. I put ‘em on and looked again. Sticking out of her right cheek was about a half-inch stub of an old, rusty square nail, flattened, but about half as big around as a pencil. It had embedded back toward the corner of her jaw. “I see it… it’s an old square nail. Part of one. There’s a chunk of nail stuck in your cheek.”

“Don’t touch it!”

“No, no.”

“I can feel it,” she said after a second, “with my tongue.” As she spoke, a rivulet of blood dripped over her lower lip and onto her parka sleeve. “It’s gonna hurt,” she said, and then shivered violently. “It’s inside my mouth. Oh shit.”

“It doesn’t seem to be bleeding very much,” I said. “But spit, don’t swallow it.”

“I just had a first aid class,” came Sally’s voice from behind the rickety and rusty milking stanchions. “Somebody get over here, and let me come take a look.”

George reached out and patted Hester on the arm. “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Okay,” he said to Sally, “be right there. I’ll get you my stuff.”

Hester nodded, but said nothing as he crawled away.

“It’s not a bullet,” I said. She was shivering pretty hard, and breathing in deep, shuddering gasps, and I could see the clouds of frozen breath forming in the cold air. I didn’t want her hyperventilating on us, and tried to reassure her. “It’s just a piece of old nail, must have been hit by a slug. It’s not life threatening, okay? It’s not a bullet. Lots slower. There’s no damage other than a little hole.” It occurred to me that she might be worried about disfigurement. And it really wasn’t a very big hole. “Real small,” I said. “Try to slow your breathing, if you can.”

She nodded. “It’ll hurt,” she said, with a quaver in her voice. “Hit my teeth. Numb now…but it’ll hurt…oh boy.” She didn’t look at any of us, just stared at the concrete floor, concentrating, and beginning to try to breathe slowly and deeply.

If she was right about her teeth, it really was going to hurt like hell.

Sally scuttled over on all fours. “Hi, Hester. Let me see what I can do here, okay? You’re gonna be all right…”

“Sure,” said Hester. Her words were less distinct. Swelling inside her mouth?

Sally briefly examined the wound. “We need some sort of compress,” she said. “Just to protect it, if we can. Some water to irrigate it, maybe? Later, we better let the doc remove it, okay?”

As soon as I heard “irrigate,” I reached into my parka pocket and pulled out one of my bottles of water and handed it to Sally. As far as I knew, all our real first aid equipment was still in our cars, and they were effectively out of reach. I thought for a second. “My T-shirt? It’s clean today…”

“It’ll have to do,” said Sally. She too reached out and patted Hester on the shoulder. “You’re gonna have the world’s biggest compress.”

Hester made a muffled sound, and I think she wanted to sound like she was laughing. I took off my coat and started pulling my sweater over my head.

“It starting to hurt yet? “asked Sally.

Hester shook her head gingerly. “Mumm.” She tried again, making a real effort to be distinct. “Numb.” It was swelling all right.

“Here, put your sweater back on,” George called out to me, and I heard the distinctive sound of Velcro ripping open. “This stuff is part of my kit,” he said, and tossed over a blue nylon bag with a red cross in a white square stitched on the front. “Take my muffler, too, it’s warm and can hold the compress in place.”

“All right!” Sally opened it up. There were several packets inside, each labeled for a different medical problem. “Fracture. Burns. Drowning”—Sally riffled through—”ah, Wounds and Bleeding”—then tore the pack open. There was a large compress, gauze, disinfectant ointment, and a scissors. “Shit, this is great…”

“I’ll get an ambulance coming,” I said. For all the good it would do. There was no way we cold get Hester to the paramedics until we got lots of backup. I keyed the mike on my walkie-talkie. “Comm, Three… ten-thirty-three.”

Of course it was 10-33. This had been an emergency since the first shot was fired. But I had to say something to convey the extra urgency, and there’s no code for “more urgent than before.”

“Three, go ahead.”

“Okay, we have an officer down now. Get me a ten-fifty-two down here at the old Dodd place. Fast…but tell ‘em to hold until we clear ‘em in.”

“Ten-four, Three. Copy officer down?” She repeated it that way so everybody who was listening knew what we had, without her having to inform them separately.

“Ten-four, need as much ten-seventy-eight as you can get, and the ambulance. We are still pinned down. Repeating, still pinned down. How close is backup?”

“Ten-four the ten-fifty-two,” she said, and I could imagine her hitting the page button for the Maitland ambulance service. “And…uh…backup is en route.”

I was glad she acknowledged the ambulance request, but just telling me that the backup units were on the way, without giving me their current location, meant that it was going to take a while. I wasn’t certain just why, but there was obviously a problem with backup. It was so damned typical of the complex kind of plan that we were working under. I was angry, but there was nothing Dispatch could do about it. I was just sorry she hadn’t been able to give me an estimate. That was bad.

“Ten-four. Look, tell the responding units that we are still taking automatic weapons fire, from two or three locations. Repeat that, will you. Auto weapons fire from multiple locations.”.

“Ten-four, Three.” She repeated the message, and as she did so she sounded about ready to cry. Being completely powerless in a tense situation will make you sound that way. “Can you be more specific regarding the location of the automatic weapons fire?”

“I’m giving you the best I’ve got,” I said, as calmly as possible. “They were already here when we got here.” The calm was mostly for Hester’s benefit. The last thing she needed to hear was me getting all worried. “Just make sure you don’t send the EMS people in until we clear them.”

“Ten-four, Three. One says to keep them there until backup gets to you.”

Well, that wasn’t going to be too hard. It was them keeping us pinned down, not vice versa.

“I think we can do that, Comm,” I said.

“The dumb one’s coming back out,” said George.

The “dumb one” was one of the group who was shooting at us off and on. This particular idiot wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a gray sweatshirt. He’d step out of the old machine shed, half crouched, point his AK-47 either at our barn or the old chicken coop, and just blow out about thirty rounds in a couple of seconds. The first time he’d done it, George had said, “Look at that dumb son of a bitch!” It stuck.

So far, shooting from the hip the way he was, he’d not come very close to hitting the barn itself, let alone any of us inside. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to draw fire, and that was the other reason for “dumb one.” There was something about the jumpy way he did it that told me it wasn’t really his idea. The comfort was that it let us know they weren’t sure exactly where we were.

“Back in a minute, Hester,” I said. I crawled back toward my vantage point and pointed my AR-15 through a hole between the old foundation and the rotting boards of the barn wall. The elevated front sight just cleared the hole, but I had him dead to rights almost instantly. He was only about fifty yards away, and the upper two-thirds of him was in plain view. He’d be hard to miss. I squinted as I aimed at the white “NY” on his blue cap.

“Whadda ya think? Take him out?” I asked George. So far, we hadn’t returned fire since the first exchange about ten minutes back. We hadn’t because they had pretty much been shooting at the upper floor of the barn and into the loft, and we were down at the stone foundation. They were far enough off target; we’d been reluctant to reveal our actual position by shooting back. They had a lot more firepower than we did. But now Hester had been hurt. They were getting closer.

“Not yet, I think,” said George. “Wait and see what he does.”

The dumb one started waiving his assault rifle in the air and screaming something at us.

“Gotta be stoned,” I said. “Gotta be.”

“Any idea what he’s saying?” asked George.

“No,” I said. “Don’t even know what language. But I don’t think he’s trying to surrender.”

Suddenly, the dumb one lowered the assault rifle to hip level and pointed it right at us.

“Down!” yelled George.

CHAPTER 01 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 15:34

MY NAME IS CARL HOUSEMAN, and I’m a deputy sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I’m also the department’s senior investigator, which is a title that probably has as much to do with my being fifty-five as it does with my investigative abilities. It’s also a title that can get me involved in some really neat stuff, even in a rural county with only twenty thousand residents. That’s why I like it.

On that pleasant, twenty-degree December day, we were just beginning one of the mildest winters on record, the one that we’d later call “the winter that wasn’t.” I had some of my Christmas shopping done, was nearly caught up on my case files, and intended to take a few days off over Christmas for the first time in twenty-some years. On the down side, it was beginning to look as if it wouldn’t be a White Christmas. Snow or not, I was already about halfway through my usual noon to eight shift, and it looked like I’d be able to coast through the rest of it. Hester Gorse, my favorite Iowa DCI agent, and I had just finished interviewing Clyde and Dirk Osterhaus—brothers, antiques burglars, and new jail inmates—regarding seventeen residential burglaries that had been committed in Nation County over the previous two months. The interviews had been conducted in the presence of their respective attorneys, who were both in their late twenties. The young brothers had thrown us a curve when they’d readily confessed to only fourteen of the break-ins. Why just those fourteen, when we all knew they’d done the whole seventeen? Some sort of strategy? A bargaining chip? It beat both Hester and me. Maybe it was just the principle of the thing.

Anyway, the attorneys had left and the brothers were back in the jail cells, arguing with the other prisoners over whether or not they were all going to watch Antiques Roadshow at 7:00 P.M. We only had one TV in the cell block. I was pretty sure the Osterhaus boys were going to win. Research comes first.

Hester and I were in Dispatch, having a leisurely cup of coffee. We were talking to the duty dispatcher, Sally Wells, about whether she should take her niece to see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings when she got off duty. The phone rang, and our conversation stopped.

Sally answered with a simple “Nation County Sheriff’s Department,” which told me it wasn’t a 911 call. They answer those with “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency? “I relaxed a bit, and had just brought my coffee cup to my lips when she reached over and snapped on the speakerphone.

“…Best get the Sheriff down here… there’s this dead man in the road just down from our mailbox… “came crackling from the speaker.

“And your name and location, please?”

“I’m Jacob, Jacob Heinman,” replied the brittle voice. “Me and my brother live down here in Frog Hollow… you know, just over from the Dodd place about a mile.”

“I’ll be paging the ambulance now,” said Sally, very calmly, “but keep talking because I can hear you at the same time.”

“We don’t think he needs a ambulance, ma’am,” said Jacob, also very calmly. “I saw ‘em shoot him just about right smack in front of me. We went back up there. He’s still laying there just like they left him. He’s awful dead, we’re pretty sure.”

I suspect that even in departments where they have two or three hundred homicides a year, the adrenaline still flows with a call like that. In our case, with maybe one or two a year, the rush is remarkable. Hester and I headed out the door.

As we left, I said, “On the way. Backup, please.”

Sally waved absently. She knew her job, and would have everything she could drum up out to help as soon as possible. But you like to remind even the best dispatchers, just in case something slips their mind.

The Heinman brothers were known throughout the area as the “Heinman boys.” Confirmed bachelors, neither of the so-called “boys” were a day under eighty, and you couldn’t excite either of them if you set his foot on fire. Or, apparently, if you shot somebody right in front of them. As I got into my unmarked patrol car, started the engine, and strapped on the seatbelt, I could hear Sally over the radio, telling a state trooper that she was looking the directions up in her plat book. Frog Hollow was an old name for a very remote stretch of road, about two miles long, that wound down through a deep, milelong valley where there were just two farms. I don’t think anybody except the rural mail carrier and the milk truck went there in the daytime, and only kids parking and drinking beer ended up there at night. Sally probably had a general idea where it was, but considering there were more than two thousand farms in Nation County, this would be no time to guess and end up giving the trooper bad directions. Hester, behind me in her own unmarked car, couldn’t possibly know where we were going and was going to have to follow me to the scene. Her call sign was I 388, so I waited until the radio traffic between Sally and the trooper paused, and picked up my mike.

“Three and I 388 are ten-seventy-six,” I said. That meant we were heading to the scene, and was meant as much for the case record as anything else. You always need times. “Which trooper you sending?”

“Two sixteen is south of you. I’m working on the directions…” There was no stress in Sally’s voice, but I could tell she was really concentrating. “Be aware I’ve confirmed there are at least two suspects. Repeating, at least two suspects.”

Two for sure. That always meant, to my mildly paranoid mind, that we were talking a minimum of two. Okay. Well, there was Hester, 216, and me. Fair odds, as 216 was new state trooper sergeant named Gary Beckman, who’d transferred into our area about six months ago. He was about forty and really knew his stuff.

“I’ll direct him,” I said, so she could forget the directions for him and concentrate on getting an ambulance and notifying our sheriff. “Two sixteen from Nation County Three, what’s your ten-twenty?” I needed to know his location before I could give him directions. I also needed to find out where he was because we were both going to be in a hurry, and it would be extremely embarrassing if we were to find ourselves trying to occupy the same piece of roadway at the same time.

“I’m four south of Maitland on Highway Fourteen, Three.” I could hear the roar of his engine over his siren noise. He was moving right along. Hester and I pulled out onto the main highway and headed south. The trooper was four miles closer than we were.

“Ten-four, two sixteen. We’re just leaving Maitland now. Okay, uh, if you turn right at the big dairy farm with the three blue silos, take the next right, and, uh, continue on down a long, winding road into the valley. That’s the right road, and the farm you’re going to is the second one.”

“Ten-four, Three.” His siren was making a racket in the background. My siren was making a racket under my hood. Hester’s siren was making a racket behind me. I reached down and turned the volume way up on my radio.

“Okay, and the, uh, subject is right in the roadway, so…” The last thing I wanted was for a car to run over the victim. “And Comm confirms two suspects.”

“Understood.”

I hoped so. After 216 and I shut up, I heard Sally talking to our sheriff, Lamar Ridgeway, whose call sign was Nation County One. From listening to their radio traffic, I could tell he was a good ten miles north of me. Since he drove the department’s four-wheel-drive pickup, he wasn’t going to be able to make more than eighty or so. Which begged a question.

I called Sally. “Comm, Three?”

“Three, go.”

“Subject say whether or not the bad guys are still there?”

“Negative, not there. Repeating, the caller says the suspects have fled the immediate scene. He thinks they went southbound from near his residence, but he didn’t get a vehicle description, just heard it leave, as it apparently was around the curve from his place, and out of his line of sight.”

Great. “Give what you got to Battenberg PD.” The small town of Battenberg was about five miles south of the Heinman boys’ farm, and their officer could at least say who came into town from the north. Assuming that the suspects continued that way.

“He’s already on the phone.” She sounded a bit irritated. I wisely decided to stop interfering and let her do her job.

It had taken us about three minutes to cover the four miles to the cluster of three blue silos, and I braked hard to slow enough to make the right turn onto the gravel. I had anticipated the turn because I knew the road. Hester, who didn’t, just about ended up in my trunk.

“Could we use our turn signals? “came crackling over the radio.

“Ten-four, I 388,” I said to her. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

We were having a pretty mild winter so far, and there was no snow at all on the roadway. Just loose gravel. Almost as bad as ice and snow, if you oversped it. Without snow cover, though, there was much better traction. There was also a lot of dust from 216. Another reason I was unhappy he was ahead of me. Hester, behind both of us, had to back off quite a distance just to be able to see.

At that point, I heard “Two sixteen is ten-twenty-three” come calmly over the radio as the sergeant told Comm that he had arrived at the scene. After a beat, he said, “The scene is secure.”

That meant that there was no suspect at the scene who was not in custody. Good to know, and it tended to affect how you got out of your car. Hester and I both shut down the sirens as soon as he said that.

I almost missed the next right due to the dust. It was just over the crest of a hill, and judging from the deep parallel furrows in the gravel, 216 had almost missed it, too. I was in an increasingly thick dust cloud for almost a minute, and when it tapered off I knew I was at the point where 216 had slowed. In a few seconds, I rounded a downhill curve and saw his car about fifty yards ahead, parked in the center of the roadway, top lights flashing. Excellent choice, as he was completely protecting the scene. Nobody could get by him on an eighteen-foot road with a bluff on one side and a deep ditch on the other. I stopped near the ditch and waited until I saw Hester in my rearview mirror.

“You go on up,” I said on the radio. “I’ll make sure nobody hits us.” I carefully backed up around the curve until I was sure somebody cresting the hill could see the flashing lights in my rear window before they got into the curve. This was no time to get run over by an ambulance. Or the sheriff.

“Comm, Three, and I 388 are ten-twenty-three.” I hung up the mike, grabbed my walkie-talkie, and opened my car door.

Sally’s acknowledging “Ten-four, Three” just about blew me out of the car. I’d forgotten about cranking up the volume in order to hear over the sirens. I took a second to turn it way down, and then got out of the car, locked it up, and headed toward the scene. You always leave the engine running in the winter, so radio traffic doesn’t run down your battery. It’s also a good idea to have at least three sets of keys.

The Heinman farm sat well below road level, about fifty yards to my left. On my right, a steeply sloped, heavily wooded hill rose maybe a hundred feet above the roadbed. The farm lane came uphill toward the mailbox at a slant, with bare-limbed maple trees between it and the road. As an added measure, between the road and those trees was an old woven-wire fence covered with a thick tangle of brush and weeds. Put up, I was sure, to keep the larger debris from the roadway out of the Heinman property. There was an old, rusty Ford tractor from the fifties, quietly decomposing within ten feet of the galvanized mailbox that was perched on top of a wooden fencepost. That old tractor had been there the very first time I’d seen the farm, nearly twenty-five years ago. By now it and its rotting tires had become part of the landscape.

I saw 216 talking to the two elderly Heinman brothers. They were near the mailbox, looking toward the area ahead of the patrol car. As I approached, a body came slowly into my view in front of 216’s car. It was lying kind of on its left side, parallel with the direction of the road, with its feet pointing away and downhill from me. I started making mental notes as I walked. Faded blue plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, one black tennis shoe…and hands bound behind its back with yellow plastic binders. Damn. We call them Flex Cuffs, and use them when we run out of handcuffs. They’re like the bindings for electrical wiring: once they’re on, they have to be cut off. What we had here was an execution.

Two more steps, and I saw the head. More accurately, I saw the remains of the head. You often hear the phrase “blow their head off,” but it’s rare to actually see it.

Hester and 216 stepped over and joined me at the body.

“Hi Carl,” said Trooper 216.

“Gary. Glad you could come.”

“Notice the hands?”

“Right away. And the one shoe. And the head… or what used to be the head.” From what I could see, from about the ears on up was gone. Although nearly all the cranium seemed gone, lots of skin was left and had sort of flapped around back into the cavity. One ear, perfectly recognizable and still attached to the neck by a flap of flesh, seemed to be pretty well intact. Seeing things like that always has a sense of unreality to it. Guess that’s what keeps you sane.

“Uh, yeah,” said Gary. ‘“Used to be’ is right. I think I’m parked over top of some, uh, debris, from the head and stuff. I didn’t even see it until I was just about stopped.”

“Okay.” His car was about fifteen feet from the top of the body’s head, and still running. That was fine. We could have him move his car back when the crime lab got there.

Hester spoke to him. “Doesn’t leak oil, does it?”

He looked offended. “No.”

“Just checking.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t want oil all over the… debris. Just make sure your defroster or air conditioner’s off. It’s a lot easier if we don’t get condensed moisture on the stuff.”

“Right. Uh, you two better talk to the two old boys over there. Very interesting stuff.”

“Just a few seconds more,” I said. “Tell ‘em we’ll be right there.”

Hester and I just stood and looked at the scene for a short time. You only get one chance to see a scene in a relatively undisturbed state, and I’ve learned to take in as much as I can when I have the chance. An ambience sort of thing, you might say. You just try to see, smell, and hear as much as you can. It helps when you try to return to it in your imagination, later in the case.

A sound was the first thing that distinguished this scene from the hundreds of others I’d been at before. The Heinman brothers had some galvanized steel hog feeders near the roadway. Looking like huge metal mushrooms, they had spring-loaded covers on them, and every time a hog wanted to eat, all it had to do was press its snout into the mechanism and open it. When it was done, out came the snout, and that spring-loaded lid slammed down with a loud clank. Usually two or three clanks, in fact. One, a beat, and then two very close together. All the time we were at the crime scene, those hog feeders made a constant racket in the background.

Now, bodies look smaller dead than they do when they’re alive. I’m not sure why; they just do. This one was no exception, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was a half a head shorter, so to speak. Even with the legs straightened out, he’d probably only be about five-three or five-four. It was sobering to see this wreck of a corpse, and think that he’d been alive and well only half an hour before. I just stood there looking for almost a minute, sort of taking it all in. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. But if you don’t do it, you always seem to regret it later in the case. I looked around for his other shoe, but didn’t see it.

“Sure looks dead,” I said.

“You must be a detective,” said Hester.

“Kneeling, you think? When he was shot?”

She paused a moment. “If the debris is under Gary’s car… I’d think it would have gone further if he’d been standing, maybe. But there’s always the angles… but sure. I’ll go with kneeling until we find out differently.”

“Restrained and shot. Whether he was kneeling or not doesn’t matter. Talk about malice aforethought.” Binding the wrists surely eliminated sudden impulse. I took a deep breath. “Well, let’s see what our witnesses have to say.”

Hester and I crossed to the two old men standing by their mailbox. “I’m Deputy Houseman,” I said, not sure if they’d remember me, “and you’ve already met Agent Gorse?”

“Sure have. You was at the bus business, right?” asked the one I thought was Jacob.

He was referring to a car crash about fifteen years ago, when the two brothers in their old Dodge had been rear-ended by a school bus. They’d stopped in the middle of this very road to have a discussion, regrettably just into the hill and curve where I was now parked. The bus didn’t see them until it was too late to completely stop. The brothers were just shaken up, but the bus driver was furious. I’d given them a ticket.

“Yeah, that was me.”

“You put on a little weight,” said Jacob.

“Yeah.” I glanced at Hester, who was doing an admirable deadpan. “So, what happened here, Jacob?” I asked. “What did you see?”

“Well,” he said, “I was comin’ up to put a letter in the box, and Norris was in the barn feedin’ the cows, and there was this commotion down the road there.” He pointed downhill to where the road curved around to the right. “I said to myself, ‘well, what’s all that commotion?’ and just then this young man here come a hell a kitin’ round that curve, about as fast as he could go, and I thought there was something funny about him, and then I saw he had his hands behind his back, like he was ice skatin’.” He shook his head. “Had to be hard to run that way.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. I already had questions, but I let him go on with his story. Witnesses have a way of clamming up on you if you keep interrupting their train of thought.

“And he kinda came up short on one leg. I think that’s ‘cause he only had one shoe on. Anyways,” he said, “these other two come runnin’ behind him, and they was gaining pretty fast, and one of ‘em had a shotgun.” He paused. “I ducked down right quick. I was at Anzio, you know. Ever since, I see somebody runnin’ my way with a gun, I duck.” He smiled, almost shyly. “Instinct, they call it.”

“Okay… me too, and I’ve never been to war.” It still surprises me to see how much the WWII vets are aging.

“So I’m kinda behind the tractor, but I’m still lookin’. Then this one fella hollers something I didn’t catch, and the one laying over there sorta turned his head to look, and he musta tripped, ‘cause he just fell flat. Kerwhump.” He shook his head. “Couldn’t get up fast, ‘cause of his hands, so they was on him just like that.”

“Sure.”

“They was saying something, but I didn’t get it. Mostly another language, you know?”

“Like what?” I thought I could ask that without inhibiting him.

“Oh, golly. There was some different language… maybe Spanish? Sounds a lot like Italian to me, but I couldn’t make out words I knew. Then English, too. That I could make out. That one word was ‘motherfucker.’“He looked startled. “Oh, I’m so sorry, ma’am!”

“Think nothing of it,” said Hester. “Did they say any proper names or anything?”

He shook his head. “Nope. They just seemed real upset, you know? Anyway, the one on the road over there, he was crying, I think, and they got him up on his knees, and the one with the shotgun, he just come up behind him, and put the gun to his head, and shot him. Bang. One time. A terrible thing. And that one there, he just flopped into the road so hard and fast the dust flew.” He reflected a moment. “Musta been like getting hit with a truck, almost. That close and all.”

“Musta been,” I said.

“Then the others, they just looked around real fast, and I think they really saw the barn and the house for the first time, down there, you know? Like they saw it before, but it didn’t register…” Jacob’s hands had been in the pockets of his overalls throughout, and now he brought one of them into the conversation by pointing toward a cat in the barnyard. “It’s like, you ever notice how a cat fixes on its prey? He’s aware of everything, but just doesn’t care about it bein’ there. All he sees is the mouse, until the job’s done. It was like that.” Mission completed, his hand returned to his pocket. “Anyway, these two just turned around and ran back down the road and disappeared.”

“Do you think they saw you?” asked Hester.

“Pretty sure they didn’t. Their eyes just passed right over me.”

I felt it would be best to lead him to the end before I backed up through the events. “Then what’d you do, Jacob?”

“Well, I didn’t stand up right away, that’s for sure.” That shy smile again. “But when I did, I did it real careful, just in case they was comin’ back for somethin’, you know?” He paused. “But then I heard a car leaving down the way, and I supposed it was them. I don’t take no chances, so I just took off for the barn lickety split, and got Norris, and we called from the telephone in the barn.”

“That’s what we did,” interjected Norris. “Just that way.”

“We thought it’d be best if we brought the shotgun, too,” said Jacob, pointing toward a fencepost just behind the mailbox with a twelve-gauge leaning up against it. I’d missed it in the weeds and scrub.

“Figured we’d better,” said Norris. “You never know.” Given the afternoon’s events, it was really hard to argue with that.

Jacob smiled again. “Norris, here, he was on Guadalcanal. Jarhead.”

“Ah. Always good to have a Marine around. You two didn’t happen to recognize any of the three, did you?” It hadn’t sounded like it, but you can always hope.

“No, I didn’t…. I think the dead one was a Mexican boy, but I’m not sure,” said Jacob. “One of the other two might have been, too, but he looked… different than that, but like that? I don’t know how to put it…”

I tried to help without planting anything in his head. “He was the one with the gun? The one who shot him?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of complexion?”

“Well,” said Jacob, “kind of dark, sort of dark… like a good tan would be.”

“Okay. You happen to notice his hair color?”

“If I recollect, I’d have to say very dark, too. Black, maybe? Really dark for certain.”

“What’d he have on? “I was taking notes now.

“Black pants, I think. Maybe navy blue. A dark sweater or something like it. Maybe a sweatshirt, with no sayings on it. Probably a sweater. I think maybe a real dark jacket, too. Maybe.”

“Got it.”

“And, oh… black tennis shoes.” He considered that for a second. “Maybe just black shoes. Might not have been tennis shoes, now that I think about it.”

“About how old? Best guess.”

“I can’t tell with them, the Mexicans. Not until they get really old, like me. Then it’s the wrinkles, you know? But… old enough to know better. No kid.”

“Okay.” I wrote down ADULT. “SO then, how about the other one, the white guy?”

“Well,” said Jacob, “to tell the truth, I wasn’t lookin’ at him too hard, because I was givin’ the one with the gun most of my attention.”

“Understandable,” said Hester.

“But if I had to guess, I’d say… about twenty-five or so.”

“Why do you say that, Jacob?” I asked.

“Well, because he looked like that,” said Jacob. “He wasn’t a kid. I know that. But I’ll tell you one thing. He looked as scared as I was.”

A perfectly reasonable answer, especially if you were Jacob. I didn’t think it was time to press him on just how you know when somebody’s scared. If I needed anything, I needed a physical description. The fear indicators could wait for later. I’d get ‘em, but eventually. Patience is very important in my line of work. “Can you describe him for me? What he looked like, just generally?”

“Oh, you know, pretty tall, a lot taller than the one with the gun. They were kinda like Mutt and Jeff. He had a pale complexion. Maybe blond hair, but it was tough to tell under the ball cap. Green jacket. That’s about all.”

“What did the ball cap look like? “asked Hester.

“A Forrest’s Seed Corn hat. Ed Forrest down in Battenberg hands ‘em out to anybody he thinks might buy seed. You know, yellow with the green lettering.”

Hester didn’t, but I did.

All could be local, then. “Can we go back to their ages? “asked Hester.

“Oh my,” said Jacob, with a sigh. “Everybody seems to be so much younger these days. But I’d guess none of ‘em was more ‘n thirty. If that.” He smiled at her. “I’m sorry, miss. I guess that’s the best I can do.”

“That’s okay.”

“This was a terrible thing,” said Jacob. “To do that. Him bound up that way and all. Didn’t have a chance. No chance at all.”

There was a siren in the distance. Lamar, I was just about sure. I removed my walkie-talkie from my jeans pocket.

“You’ll have to give me a minute here, Jacob,” I said, moving two steps away from him. I keyed the mike. “One, Three… that you?”

“Ten-four, Three. Where you at?”

“Slow way down before the curve; we’re blocking the road. Come in slow.” Lamar was known for his fast driving on gravels.

“Ten-four.”

I’d worked with Lamar for twenty-five years or so. He was going to hate this. Nothing appealed to him more than peace, quiet, and a placid surface to “his” county. “He’s not going to be a happy man,” I said as Hester stepped over.

“True.” Hester knew Lamar pretty well, too.

She regarded the body for a moment. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

I looked at her. “You mean dope?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Could be. It sure looks like what the media calls ‘execution-style.’”

I was rather startled when Gary, the trooper sergeant, said, “I’d say dope, too.” He’d apparently come up behind me while I was on the walkie-talkie, and I’d missed it. “Sure looks like it to me.” He said that with the complete assurance of an officer who wasn’t working dope cases.

“It’s sure as hell possible,” I said. As the investigator who had the case, I didn’t want to establish a mindset by labeling this “dope-related” unless and until I had hard evidence to back it up. I’d been racking my brain to try to come up with an instant suspect, and couldn’t. We had meth labs in the county, and we had good-quality marijuana crops, but I wasn’t currently aware of any really bad blood between local dealers. That didn’t mean much, as a violent relationship in the dope business can spring up overnight. Nonetheless, at this point there was no evidence either way.

I shrugged and said, “All I know now is that he really musta pissed somebody off. Anyhow, you want to walk around the curve there and see if there are any tracks from the suspect vehicle?”

“Sure.”

“Get photos and measurements, if there are any, and let me know, okay?”

Gary grinned. He had been a TI, one of the specially trained accident investigators for the state patrol, before he’d been promoted to sergeant. If anybody on earth knew how to interpret and photograph tire track evidence, it was Gary. “Want me to do plaster casts? I love doin’ plaster casts.”

“Better leave that to the lab team, but if you find something for them to cast, let me take a couple of photos right away, okay? Continuity in the courtroom,” said Hester.

“Okay.” I think Gary had been feeling kind of nonessential, and was anxious to get into his own area of expertise.

“And,” said Hester, “I’d really like it if you could find a shotgun just laying around, you know? Or at least an empty shell.”

Gary chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do, Hester. You don’t want much.”

As soon as Lamar arrived at the scene, I briefed him on what I knew and then trudged back up the hill to my car while Lamar talked to Hester and the Heinman boys. I grabbed the big, padded nylon camera bag out of the backseat, and opened it to make sure everything was there. Other officers sometimes borrow equipment when you’re on days off or vacation, and forget to put it back. They especially like to borrow 35mm film. A quick inventory revealed my 35mm SLR, my zoom lens, my digital camera, some ten rolls of 35mm film, and my short tripod. Mine in every sense, since the department didn’t provide a camera or the supplies. The bag also contained a bag of Girl Scout cookies, a chocolate bar, and a box of latex gloves. Since we were beginning to draw a crowd, I grabbed the half roll of plastic crime scene tape I had left, and put it in my camera bag. I closed the trunk, reached into the backseat, and hauled out my jacket. It was going to get cold in a hurry when the sun went behind the hills. I was set. As I closed the car door, it occurred to me to try to call the department on my cell phone. We’d fought for years to get them, and had finally obtained grudging permission to carry them in the cars. We had to buy them ourselves, of course, even though we had to assure the county supervisors that we wouldn’t be making personal calls. They didn’t want us distracted. But it was a small victory, in spite of that. It had gotten smaller as we realized that they were pretty useless at our worst events. The really bad wrecks tended to be at the bottom of long hills on curvy roads, for instance, and we seemed to frequently find ourselves at crime scenes inside buildings with steel frames—both kinds of locations made it very difficult to reach a tower. I looked at the LCD display panel as I dialed. The little icon that indicated the strength of the nearest tower’s signal was at the minimum. I tried anyway. Nope. I tried once more on the way back down the road. Nothing. Lamar glanced at me, and I knew he’d noticed I couldn’t get a call through. I’d hear about that sooner or later. I made a mental note to tell him that there would be more towers in our area soon.

As I approached the body, Lamar excused himself and came over to me. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

“Sure is.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Not yet. Not even close.” I produced the black and yellow roll of crime scene tape. “We better get some of this around.” Our tape says SHERIFF’S LINE—Do NOT CROSS, and I knew that Lamar would want that up instead of POLICE. It’s a sheriff thing.

“We better,” he said.

We made a simple square of the stuff by tying one end to the Heinman boys’ mailbox, stringing the tape across the road to a tree, then to a tree south of the body, to the Heinman boys’ fence, and back to the mailbox.

That was a lot of tape, and I tried to placate the cost-conscious Lamar by saying, “That should look good in the photos.” Then I held out my tape measure. “You want to do this, while I take the shots? “We always need a scale in each photo.

“Yep.”

As I attached the flash to my 35mm SLR camera, Lamar knelt down about a yard from the body and extended the yellow steel tape from its chrome case.

“That’s a new tape,” I said, checking my batteries. “Don’t let it snap back and cut you.”

“You gonna use flash?” asked Lamar, ignoring my cautionary words about the tape. He never admitted to mistakes even after he made them, let alone beforehand.

“Yeah, the sun’s going behind the hill here. Think I better.” I looked through the lens and focused on an establishing shot.

“Don’t get me in the damn pictures,” said Lamar. He didn’t want to have to go to court and testify about the photographs.

“Hell, Lamar, you know I won’t even get your shadow.”

I took eleven overall photos of the scene from different angles, with each camera, and then got to the close-ups of the body. Lamar, who was anticipating every shot, sort of duck-walked around the scene, standing and taking a giant step when he got to the area where the shooter had probably stood. It’s hardly likely that you’re going to get a good footprint on a gravel road, but you never know.

I used the digital camera in order to have photos on my computer as soon as I got back to the office. The 35mm was for the court, which didn’t want to allow the digital stuff into evidence because it could be enhanced or manipulated too easily.

Finished with her notes from the Heinman boys, Hester came back over to the body. As we three got a closer look, we began to get an even better understanding of the extent of the damage. It was, as coroners say, massive.

It certainly appeared to have been a contact shotgun wound to the back of the head, just as Jacob Heinman had said. There really wasn’t any entrance or exit wound. What there was was a U-shaped gap that had excised everything between the victim’s ears. The entire top of the head was gone, and from what we could see without moving him, the missing area included most of his face.

“Christ,” said Lamar.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the last shot on the roll and stopping to reload. “Not much left.”

“Where’d it all go?”

“Lots of it’s under Gary’s car,” I said. “He couldn’t get stopped before he realized he was just about on top of the stuff. We thought we’d leave it there until the lab gets here. I hope there’s teeth and stuff under there, so we have some sort of chance of positive identification.” I finished loading the camera and, lying down on the roadway, took three shots of the area under the patrol car. I could see chunks of tissue, and blood. I’d half been hoping to see the other shoe. No such luck.

“Well, we still got his fingerprints,” said Lamar.

“Yeah. That’s about all, unless we have tattoos or birthmarks.” I got back to my feet and dusted myself off as well as possible. Frozen dust is still dust. “We sure can’t tell eye color… unless we get lucky and find part of an eye.”

“It had to be quick,” said Lamar. “I mean, it wouldn’t hurt at all, I think.”

“Yeah. It looks like a lot of his head was just about vaporized.” I thought I heard a siren in the distance. “Ambulance?”

“Should be,” he said. “You two call for the DCI mobile lab yet?”

“I notified them,” said Hester. “Haven’t heard anything back yet.”

“I’ll check and see,” he announced and headed back toward his car. “Radios still work better than those phones.”

Ah, yes. But they weren’t as private.

“You thinking dope on this one? “he asked.

“I’m leaning that way.” I shrugged. “Way too early to say for sure, though.”

Gary appeared around the curve and yelled out. “Hey, one of you?”

I looked up from my camera. “What’s up, Gary?”

“You wanna come on down this way? I think I got some tracks here, where somebody spun as they left.”

Hester and I headed down toward him. On our way, I checked in the right-hand ditch for a black tennis shoe. Nothing.

When I got around the curve to where the tire tracks were, they were pretty good indicators of a very fast turnaround and departure. There was a set of parallel furrows in the gravel and a partial track from one tire in the dust on the edge of the road.

I looked at them and snapped some quick shots. “So, what do you think?”

“Well, it’s front-wheel-drive, from the relative positions of the furrows and the nonspinning tire tracks. Came from the south, and turned around and went back the same way.” He sounded pleased with himself. I looked at the tracks and could see what he meant. I doubted if I’d have been able to decipher them, but once he explained it, it was obvious. “He couldn’t get it turned on the roadway in one motion, so he went forward and to his left, backed around, then forward and cranked the wheel, and that’s when he stepped on the gas and made the furrows.”

I remembered that Lamar had my tape with him, so I laid my pen down alongside the partial track and took a photo of what seemed to be about half the tread-width, well impressed into the soft dust at the very edge of the roadway.

“You think they can get a plaster cast of this? “asked Hester.

“Maybe… if they just spray a mist of water to settle the dust first, it should go all right.” Gary looked thoughtful. “I’ve got a box lid in my trunk, and that ought to preserve it until they get here.”

The approaching siren was getting louder.

“We better stop the ambulance on the south side of these tire tracks,” I said.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.