Committed

by E. H. Reinhard

  I stood on the porch of the home with Bill and Scott.

  “Again, birds are in the air,” Scott said. “The vehicle make, model, and description has been circulated. No sightings so far.”

  “This is becoming a habit,” Bill said.

  “Yeah, one I’d like to break,” I said. “Neither of you two saw anything out of the ordinary inside of the house?”

  “Nothing that was really ringing a bell,” Bill said. “The same forensics guys from Omaha should be here any minute. There’s a resident agency in Sioux Falls, but seeing as how the Omaha guys have been working the rest of the investigation, I figured it better to leave this to them. They’re going to give the place a good once-over before the bodies and scene are handed off to the locals. I’m assuming they’ll be headed off to the superstore after that to deal with the RV.”

  I called for Gents and Makara, who were speaking with some of the officers that had arrived. The pair walked up.

  “See anything that resembled a clue as to where these two were headed in that RV when you guys were over there?” I asked.

  Makara shook his head. “Nothing there, aside from two bodies being stuffed into the storage compartments and the firearms. Everything else looked like it belonged to the owners. If I had to guess, the firearms probably belonged to a prior victim. We’ll run the numbers on all of them either way.”

  “Okay. Let’s have a quick little look around inside until those forensics guys get here,” I said.

  “It should just be a few minutes or so,” Gents said. “I just spoke with Mike Halsey. He’s the lead on the forensics team that has been on the last few scenes. He said they were close.”

  “All right.” I turned toward the front door.

  Bill, Scott, and I walked into the house, and I heard Agents Gents and Makara climbing the front porch and entering behind us.

  “Spread out. Let’s find something,” I said.

  Scott disappeared up the steps to the second floor, and Agents Makara and Gents followed him. Bill went left into the living room. I walked forward to the kitchen area. The knife I’d seen upstairs had to have come from the house.

  I stopped at the hallway’s end and looked into the kitchen area. Directly before me was a cream-colored wall with a single window looking back into the trees behind the home—a small kitchen table and four chairs stood below the window. To the right of the kitchen set was a patio door leading out to a small wooden deck. Farther right was a pair of open doors leading to what I assumed to be the bathroom and laundry room Beth had cleared earlier. I looked left into the kitchen itself taking up the far corner of the room. A small island sat in the center of the room. To the left of the island were the refrigerator and an opening leading out into the dining room. The cabinets of the kitchen were all white—they were broken up above the kitchen sink with another window looking out to the back of the property. I quickly looked over the items sitting on the countertops—a coffee maker and some miscellaneous coffees in bags sitting beside it. My line of sight continued to the right, past the kitchen sink and a cookie jar. I spotted a knife block near the edge of the counter nearest the kitchen table set. I walked to it and confirmed a single knife missing. Between where the cabinets ended and the window above the kitchen table began was a green, corded telephone hanging on the wall. I looked farther down the cream-colored wall and spotted what looked like a single drop of blood.

  I took a few steps back and tried to figure out how the blood could have gotten there. We’d seen the knife still upstairs—no one replaced it. That left someone who had blood on them prior to getting the knife or came back to the area after killing the couple. I stared at the phone.

  The sound of movement at my back caught my attention and broke my train of thought. I turned to look. Agents Gents and Makara had come back downstairs and were standing with a pair of guys at the farmhouse’s front door. I recognized both men as members of the Omaha forensics team. Makara walked the two guys to me.

  “Forensics is here. Where do we want them first?” Makara asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess first things first. I’ve seen you guys, what, three times now, and I don’t think I’ve caught your names.”

  “Mike Halsey, lead for the Omaha forensics division,” the one on the left said. The man appeared in his late forties from the gray in his hair. He held a plastic box in his right hand and had a pair of white throwaway coveralls draped over his left arm. He set the box down on the wood floor of the house and held out his stubby right arm for a handshake.

  I took it. “Agent Hank Rawlings,” I said.

  His associate introduced himself as Randy Simmons when I shook his hand. He was a bit thinner and at least ten years younger than Mike.

  I waved the pair to follow me to the telephone area, and they did.

  I put my back to the kitchen countertop and pointed to the blood. “Looks like we have a drip of blood on the wall there, which seems a bit out of place. We have a knife from the block here upstairs, which is the scene of our bodies.”

  “Made a call after the killing, you’re thinking,” Mike said.

  “It’s a thought,” I said. “Let’s get the phone here printed. I haven’t touched it.”

  “It would be nice if it was digital and could show us the last call made,” Randy said.

  “Well, we can get that either way,” I said.

  “Okay,” Mike said. He looked at Randy. “Why don’t you get started upstairs, and I’ll dig in here.”

  “Sure,” Randy said.

  “I’ll lead you there,” Agent Makara said. He walked back toward the front of the house with Randy following.

  I watched as Mike set his coveralls and box down on the kitchen table. He cracked open the box’s top, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, and put them on. “We’re going to have to confirm that we’re looking at blood here first. If I dust above it, we’ll get some contamination.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Bill and Scott walked into the kitchen. “Something going on with the phone?” Scott asked.

  “The couple might have made a call,” I said. “We have a blood drip over here. Thinking it came after the murders.”

  “No screen on the phone?” Bill asked.

  “We haven’t pulled it off the receiver yet, but I’m betting not,” I said. “The phone looks like it’s from the nineteen eighties, maybe older.”

  “Let me call back to the office and see if we can get someone on outbound phone records from here,” Scott said. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

  Bill came and stood beside me at the counter. We watched Mike go about photographing the blood drip before he set his camera down and pulled a couple items from his box.

  Beside me, Bill was looking at his watch every minute or so. He glanced over at me. “We’re burning time.”

  I didn’t have a response for him.

  “I’m going to go see if we got anything from upstairs.” Bill left my side and walked toward the front door and staircase.

  I continued to watch Mike as he confirmed that the substance was indeed blood and collected a sample. He first placed some of the wet blood in a separate container and then cut out the section of wall containing the drip and placed it in another evidence container. The process took him the better part of ten minutes.

  “On to the phone,” Mike said. He pulled a brush and some dusting powder from the box and stepped to the phone. He unscrewed the lid on the dusting-powder container and dipped the brush inside. “You said you didn’t touch it?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  Mike started sprinkling the dust onto the receiver from the brush.

  I pulled up the sleeve on my suit jacket and looked at my watch. We had another two hours of daylight before we’d have to suspend the search from our air support. Bill was right—we were burning time.

  “It’s clean,” Mike said.

  I pulled my sleeve back down over my watch and looked at him. “Clean?”

  “Wi
ped down. Not a single print on the receiver or base. Hold on, people always forget to wipe down the buttons.” He pulled the phone from the receiver and stared at it. He held it up toward me. “This thing is a dinosaur,” he said.

  I stared at the yellowed plastic rotary dial attached to the receiver.

  “I can probably get prints from between the holes on the dial. Um, as far as getting last number called, I think you can still redial from a rotary with a four digit code.”

  “Does it give you the number that was dialed or put you directly through?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Probably directly through like a normal redial would do.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think we want to make a direct call to whoever they did, but let me double check,” I said.

  I walked from the kitchen and out the front door to Scott standing on the porch. He clicked off from his phone call and slipped his cell phone back into his pocket. “The twins are on it. We should have the records soon,” he said.

  “Okay. I just wanted to let you know that if needed, we could redial from the phone, but that’s going to alert whoever they called.”

  “We don’t want to do that. This might be an opportunity. Let’s just see who the number belongs to,” Scott said. “The twins are putting a rush on it.”

  “Okay.”

  I noticed a blue sedan parked in the gravel driveway behind Agents Gents and Makara’s cruiser that Beth and the boy, Mark, had been in. A woman dressed in business casual was standing and talking with Beth at the trunk of the agents’ car. She looked like someone from social services. I walked down the front steps of the porch and headed over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mike and Randy from the forensics team walked from the front of the house. Both men had blood on their coveralls from helping the coroner to remove the bodies from the home.

  “Are we ready to head over to the RV at the store?” Mike asked. “The coroner said he’d meet us there.”

  “Yeah, I think we’re just about set,” I said.

  “All right, we’ll see you guys over there.” Mike headed for his car.

  I walked across the front yard to Beth, standing at the side of Agents Gents and Makara’s car.

  “Done in the house?” Agent Gents asked.

  “Looks like it, yeah. Bill and Scott?” I asked.

  “They walked the path into the other neighborhood to get their car,” Beth said. “They’re going to meet us back at the RV.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Did anyone talk to the locals here and tell them we’re leaving the scene to them?” I asked.

  “I did,” Makara said. “I don’t know what else they plan on doing with it other than closing it up, but Lieutenant Hampton said he’d handle it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Over at his car, Mike pulled off his coveralls and jammed them into a plastic bag. Then he loaded it into his trunk and sat behind the wheel.

  “Do you guys mind giving Agent Harper and me a lift back over to the store?” I asked.

  “Not at all. Hop in,” Makara said.

  Beth and I got in the back of the car. Makara turned around in the driveway and took us past the golf course and back out to the main street that would take us over to the superstore. I glanced over at Beth, sitting beside me, her face worn with sadness.

  She rubbed the knuckle of one index finger across the corner of her eye and then looked at me. “Sorry,” she said. “That had to be about the saddest damn thing I ever saw, though.”

  “Social Services taking the boy,” I said.

  She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Get it together, Beth,” she said.

  “But what could we really do?” I asked.

  “We could have stopped his parents from getting killed,” she said. “That would have been a start. We should have known something was off with them when we first talked to them.”

  “How? Did they not seem normal to you?” I thought back to the interactions we’d had with the man and the short exchange with the woman. I couldn’t put my finger on anything that would have raised a red flag. “And we were the second set of law enforcement there. The guy gave us no clue, no signal, no nothing that anything was wrong. He stood there and talked to us with a straight face. His wife came out and did the same thing. Were we supposed to automatically know that the neighborhood behind the house was pet free and put it together that it was some kind of sign? Hey, there’s two murderers in my house is a little more straightforward as a call for help.”

  “I know. I just… Forget it. I can’t talk about it right now.” Beth turned her head away from me and looked out the window.

  I couldn’t come up with any other words that were going to make her feel any better about the boy’s situation. I glanced toward the front of the car and caught Makara looking back at me in the rearview mirror. We pulled into the store’s parking lot near the RV a minute or two later. The local police had created a makeshift barricade around the area. We parked outside their blockade and walked over. Bill and Scott stood outside of the RV, staring at it. When we got to their sides, I could see what they were watching: the forensics guys photographing the two bodies in the storage area at the bottom of the vehicle.

  I stood directly to Scott’s left shoulder. “Any word back on anything?”

  “No, no one has seen anything,” he said. “We did the exact same thing as before, birds flying, patrol cars on overpasses, you name it. Not a peep.” He shook his head. “I’m betting they’ve already swapped vehicles.”

  “Nothing on the phone records yet?” Beth asked.

  “No.” Scott said. “Not yet.”

  “Do we have any kind of time frame on that?” I asked.

  Scott looked at his watch. “Should be soon.”

  We continued to watch the forensics guys photograph the bodies lying inside the storage compartment of the RV before they assisted the coroner in removing and bagging them. Randy and Mike from the forensics team boarded the vehicle. I walked over, took the couple steps up into the RV and looked left. The RV had white tile floors. A couch, table, and chair sat along the wall to my right, and the kitchen area took up the left side of the interior, with only a small walkway separating the two sides. An extension beyond the sink area of the kitchen created an area that needed to be walked around to get back to the rear bedroom and, I assumed, bathroom. Mike and Randy stood in the center of the RV.

  Mike turned back toward me. “Any idea on how to extend the slides?”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Actually, one of the other agents is an RV owner. He might know how. Let me go and check.” I turned and stuck my head out the doorway. “Bill, any idea how to operate the slide-out extensions on this thing?”

  “I probably can figure it out,” Bill said. He walked to me. I stepped up into the vehicle and gave him room to board. “I imagine the controls are similar enough to mine.”

  Bill had the four slides out within a matter of minutes. We stood near the driver and passenger seats at the front, watching the forensics guys.

  Mike stood in the kitchen area, staring down at the white tile floor. “The murders happened in here. Well, at least one of them did. Looks like a half-assed cleanup job here.” He pointed at the floor in the kitchen near the sink. “We have some blood in the joints between the tiles still. I’m going to get at processing this. You guys have already been through here?” he asked.

  “Makara and Gents went through it,” I said.

  “Okay, do you guys need to look around? This will take us a bit, and we’re going to need some room to work. Why don’t you have a look around quick, avoiding this area here, before we get started?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “There’s some gloves in my box if you need them.” Mike jerked his head at the gray kit sitting on the small table on the other side of the RV. Bill and I walked to it, gloved up, and took a quick look around. I headed for the back bedroom. The bed was unmade, the closet doors and a few drawers open.
I went through each cabinet and drawer and pulled the sheets back on the bed. I didn’t see anything that made me think it belonged to our couple. I took a quick glance around the bathroom and a small room with a pair of bunks on my way back toward the front. Nothing stood out to me. I walked around Randy and Mike and the area they wanted undisturbed in the kitchen. Bill met me just beyond them.

  “Nothing in the front. No paper with an address written down, no destination programmed into the navigation system,” Bill said. “Guess that would have been a little much to ask for. Anything back there?”

  I shook my head.

  “Bill, Hank!” Someone shouted from outside. We stepped out to see Scott walking toward us.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “The last number dialed from that farmhouse went to a man just outside of Great Falls, Montana. The guy’s name is Armond Gormon.”

  “Anything that ties him to our couple?” Bill asked.

  “Nothing that we know of yet.”

  “What else did you get on the guy?” I asked.

  “Not much. Lewis just called me with the name and the guy’s address. He said he was going to get everything he could on Mr. Gormon and call me back. I’m going to make a call to get a couple of cars out to this guy and pick him up,” Scott said. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “Wait on that,” I said.

  Scott paused. “Different idea?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but first let’s run this guy through the system and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “Beth is doing that now. She’s with Makara and Gents at their car, running the name,” Scott said.

  I glanced around, spotted them at the car, and started walking over—Scott and Bill followed. I rounded the car’s hood to Beth and Agent Gents, standing outside the open driver’s-side door. Makara was in the cruiser at the computer.