Code 61

by Donald Harstad

  Sally climbed up a pile of soft dirt that had washed out of one of the limestone block walls, stuck one foot into a large horizontal crack, and simply stepped out of the foundation and back onto firm ground. I could see her removing her walkie-talkie from her utility belt, and heard her calling “81.” That was the number assigned to Knockle.

  “Hokay, Toby. Look, we'll have Sally grab your hand, and I'll give you an assist from down here. See how she got to the top using that dirt pile?”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Sure.” His head was moving around like he was going to see something. Fat chance of that in the dark.

  “Just don't step in her tracks, or you'll sink down too far.” I shined my flashlight on Sally's path out of the foundation, just to let him know exactly what I meant. I looked up, and Sally indicated she was ready. She held out a hand, and helped Toby up as I pushed.

  I went up the same way that Sally had, but sank appreciably farther into the dirt. I had to put my flashlight down, and use both hands to get to the top of the wall, and as I pushed myself upright, one of the blocks I was kneeling on came loose and went thudding back into the foundation.

  “You okay?” asked Sally.

  “Yeah, just fine.”

  “You sure make a racket,” she said.

  I assumed the lead, with Toby close behind me, and Sally bringing up the rear. “Just where can I find this Dan the vampire?” I asked.

  “I don't know. Hell, anywhere. He could be down in the woods back there,” said Toby, his voice tense. “I don't know.”

  Almost as if by magic, Sally was in the lead.

  “What's he do?” I asked. “Drink blood?”

  “Sometimes.” He sounded out of breath.

  “You want to stop for a few seconds?” Even though Sally had said he was all right, I didn't want him fainting from the pain of a possible sprained knee or ankle. It was still too far to carry him.

  “No!” he whispered, but with considerable emphasis.

  As we got closer to the house, and the trees thinned, the headlights of the cars we'd positioned to help began to interfere with our vision.

  “Tell Eighty-one to turn off the car lights, just parking lights will do,” I said. Sally complied.

  They went out about five seconds later. Much better. I realized that Toby hadn't really complained about any pain since we got out of the foundation. “You okay, Toby?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Just fine. Dead man walkin', that's me.” I thought the sarcasm was appropriate this time.

  It was a strange situation, really. I was in possession of a name, purportedly that of a suspect. That was good. The fact that I didn't have the foggiest idea who this Daniel Peel was didn't bother me much, seeing as it was fairly easy to find people in the information age. I was about to set Toby down and have a nice, heart-to-heart chat. Whether or not this Peel was actually a suspect didn't really bother me. Just the additional name would enable us to open more avenues of inquiry, as it were. Sure didn't hurt to have Peel's name, though. Not a bit. The problem, in a nutshell, was Toby's announcement that Peel was a vampire. I mean, it's always better to have your only witness not be delusional. Sanity really does enhance credibility, no matter what they say.

  We kept Toby outside in the back of a squad, with Sally standing right by his door, while Hester and I talked.

  “Vampire? You're kidding. Carl? You are, aren't you?”

  “No. 'Fraid not. That's what he says, anyway.”

  “Named Daniel?”

  I found myself getting a little defensive. “Well, nobody's really called 'Count' much anymore.”

  “And,” Hester asked, struggling, “is there, maybe, a werewolf named Bob?” She lost the battle, and kind of giggled. “Jesus, Houseman. Where do you ffnd these people?”

  “Okay, okay.” I sighed. “But, we do have Toby saying that this Daniel Peel dude killed Edie. And he did run out of the house…. ”

  “He probably couldn't keep a straight face anymore,” she said. Then a deep breath. “Okay, right. Look, it's just late, and we've all had a long day, and it looks like it's just getting a good start, so, what do we need?”

  It was good to get back to business. “We need an interview with Toby, a good one, and real soon. First of all”—I thought for a second—“I don't think we want Toby back in the house with the rest of them, especially not with the vampire business. If we do have something to that, I don't want them to know that we know.”

  “Can we keep him isolated?” Hester asked the question even as she came up with the answer. “Of course we can. He's a runner.”

  “You got it. A material witness, who's demonstrated his desire to flee.”

  According to the Iowa Code, any officer may arrest any person as a material witness, provided that the person is a material witness to a felony, and if the person might be unavailable for subpoena. Toby claimed knowledge of a felony, all right. He'd already run once.

  And we were, via the bridge across the Mississippi at Freiberg, less than five miles from Wisconsin. We can't subpoena from another state, and we sure can't subpoena somebody we can't ffnd, even if they stay in Iowa.

  I went to the squad car.

  “Hey, Toby?”

  “What?”

  “You know that I'm a deputy sheriff, don't you?”

  “Now what?” He had a right to be suspicious, and he certainly appeared to be.

  “Well, Toby, since you've run once, and since you're a material witness in a felony case, I'm placing you under arrest as a material witness.”

  “You can't do that!” They always say that. Hell, even their attorneys say that.

  “It's done, Toby,” I said. “Don't be too bothered about it. I told you about that earlier today, didn't I? We'll take good care of you.” I gestured to Sally. “Go ahead and take him in. Stop and have him checked at the Maitland Hospital before you book him. Just in case of some lawsuit over his leg.” I moved a bit closer to him. “Okay, now, you've got the right to remain silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court or courts of law. You have the right to an attorney, and to have him present during questioning.” I smiled. “Got that?”

  “I don't believe this,” said Toby. “I just don't believe this.”

  “But, do you understand what I've just said? You gotta understand it, Toby.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I understand all that shit. But it just isn't gonna help, is all.”

  “Don't worry,” I said. “It should be a lot easier than running through the woods in the dark.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Hey, Toby, just consider it revenge for scaring the hell out of me.” I smiled.

  “What?”

  “When you ran right by us in the woods. Just before you fell in the foundation.”

  He shook his head. “I never ran by you. I was lying down until I got up when you turned your lights on. When I ran into the hole.” He gave kind of a satisfied smile. “Like I said, dude. Like I said.”

  Sally and I exchanged what I would call meaningful looks and then she glanced back toward the woods. “I think we'll be leaving now,” she said quickly. She turned to Toby, in the backseat behind the thick Plexiglas screen. “Now you behave, Toby, and just be quiet back there, and put on your seat belt.” She got into the squad, and left the door open while she buckled herself in.

  “Don't pick up any hitchhikers,” I said. That earned me a look from Sally. “Don't forget, cite under Code Chapter 804.11. Make certain you include that.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “And no questions to him until one of us gets down there.”

  I went back to Hester. “We can talk to him when we get back to Maitland. Ought to be good enough.”

  “You know what bothers me?”

  “Tonight? Hard to tell,” I said. “What?”

  “The man who joined us at the restaurant. That Chester dude.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, somebody shows up who hunts vampires, then we have a susp
ect say that our victim is killed by a vampire. What're the odds?”

  “Tonight? Pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I'm afraid we better talk to this Chester guy again. Not right away. Damn. Not tonight, anyway.” She brushed a wayward strand of hair from her forehead. “But this stinks. It almost feels like some sort of setup.”

  “Maybe … ”

  “Do you want your office, then, to get hold of this vampire hunter and set up an appointment?”

  “Oh, Harry will keep us in touch,” I said, half kidding. “Right now, the two of us are the only people who know all the connections. I'd like to keep it that way.”

  “There's a third one, Carl.” She was beginning to smile, broadly.

  “Who?”

  “Dangerous Dan the Vampire Man,” she said, and snickered. “Honest to God, I'm never coming to Nation County again.”

  “We're entertaining, you gotta admit,” I said.

  “Right. So, anyway, regardless, then we need a search warrant application for the house and related property, real quick.” She looked tired. “And then we need to do the damned search, and in a house this big, that could take a day or more.” She regarded the Mansion, looming in the dark. “Easily. Can your department stand the cost of putting the residents up for the night?”

  Well, we sure as hell couldn't leave them in the house.

  “Let me call Lamar,” I said, “but I think we should talk to the group inside, first.”

  “Sure.”

  We explained to Hanna, Huck, Kevin, and Melissa that we were going to make out an application for a search warrant, and submit it to a judge.

  “Then what?” asked Huck.

  “Then,” I explained, “the judge either issues the warrant or he doesn't. If he does, we begin the search.”

  “If he doesn't?”

  “Then,” I said, “we go home to bed.”

  “What about us?” asked Melissa.

  “Well, that's the tough part,” I said. “We can't let you just go about your business, because we have the right to secure the premises while we make application to search it.”

  “You mean we can't go to our rooms?” This from Hanna.

  “Not without an escort,” I said.

  “I don't think you can do that,” said Kevin. “I don't think that's legal.”

  I sighed. “Okay, let me explain it this way. If I tell you it's legal, and it isn't, then I can't use anything in court that I find here at the house. See?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Neither can I use anything that I'm led to by any evidence in the house that I've discovered under the search warrant.” He was still quiet. I sure had their attention, though. “Judges call that the fruits of a poisoned tree. Means it's all tainted and unusable. Okay so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. So, then, you understand that when I say we sure as hell can do that, that only an idiot would tell you that if it wasn't true, because then it would totally screw up his investigation. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you don't have to worry, even if I am an idiot.” I grinned. “And what are the odds?”

  He didn't return the grin, but Melissa and Huck did.

  “The bad news,” Hester said, “is that, if we do get the warrant, you all won't be able to remain here tonight, and can't be let back in until we're done.”

  That didn't go over well.

  Once we got that all straightened out, and the group had started to settle down, I dropped the bomb.

  “Oh, yeah. Before we do anything else, any of you know the whereabouts of a Dan or Daniel Peel?”

  You could almost hear their mouths clamp shut. They tried as hard as they could to communicate with one another without speaking, and I think they were remarkably successful. Even I could read the looks that selected Holly Finn, or Huck, as their spokesperson. Not bad at all.

  “Certainly,” she said. Her mind was racing, I could tell by the clipped tones and her eyes darting upward, left, then right, then back to me. All in a split second, she appeared to have considered what she wanted me to know, what Toby might have said, Toby's precipitate flight, and the death of Edie. I know by what she said next.

  “Dan comes here once in a while, just like other people do. I don't know where he lives, and I'm not even sure what he does for a living.” She glanced around, having given her instructions to the crew. She continued, “He's okay, he seems to be harmless.” She looked me straight in the eye. “I assume Toby told you he thinks he's a vampire?” She grinned, and it looked genuine.

  “Peel thinks he's a vampire, or Toby thinks Peel's a vampire?” I wasn't quite clear.

  “Oh,” she said, “Toby thinks he's one, all right.”

  “Why's that?”

  “In case you hadn't noticed,” she said, with mock confidentiality, “Toby is a little bit dorky.”

  “So, you're saying that Dan Peel doesn't think he's a vampire?”

  “He might,” she said. “It's hard to tell what somebody thinks.”

  “Sometimes it's easier than you think.” I stared at her for a second. “You know where this Dan Peel is now?”

  “I wouldn't even guess,” she said.

  Huck had just established herself as leader, and written Toby off as an idiot. And, incidentally, dodged the Dan Peel question for the moment. I filed it away, and got on with the search warrant application.

  I called Lamar, and he came through with the authorization for housing the displaced residents of the Mansion. Hester and I went directly to our office in Maitland. I did the search warrant application, while Hester interviewed Toby, and various reserve and off-duty officers were called out to get ready to transport the house residents to the two motels that would take the county's payment vouchers. Two of them would stay at the house, to secure it from any interference. They went north, waiting for word from us.

  Hester and I went to the judge, search warrant application in hand, arriving at 01:44 on the eighth. Judge Winterman was the chief judge of the district, and was an exceptionally thorough man, with very high standards. If you got a search warrant from Winterman, you'd done a good application. Hester and I'd been absolutely accurate, naturally, and even Judge Winterman had to smile when he got to the “vampire” part. Didn't say anything, though. Didn't even guffaw. Bless him.

  He did say, “Good luck to you.”

  As soon as we got back in the car, we radioed the others, and set things in motion. We headed back, as well.

  At 02:28, Hester and I took the lab crew into the sitting room of the now deserted house. The plan was this: They were to complete photography, and then reseal Edie's bedroom and closet for tonight, then go to a motel and get some well-deserved sleep. This would establish the true beginning of the search, for the record. Two sheriff's deputies would guard the premises, and at the same time search the music room and the main dining room, photographing thoroughly everything of interest, and recording anything of evidentiary value they discovered. Which meant nothing, we hoped, and why we'd picked two areas where we least expected to discover anything interesting.

  The search warrant generally permitted us to search for “materials relevant to a criminal investigation,” but the more specific section delineated “blood, in any form, or any substance appearing to be blood, on any implement, interior or exterior surface of the house, upon any object or item within the house, or in any device that may have been used to transport blood away from the residence; or any device or instrument that may have been used to remove, or eradicate, or conceal any blood or bloodstains, whether within the principal structure or at any point in the contiguous yard,” as well as “any knife, or other cutting instrument that may have been used to inflict the wound to the person of the deceased.” Not too likely they'd find that in the music room or dining room.

  We also had the office make every effort to contact Jessica Hunley, the owner of the house, and try to have her present as soon as we could. We didn't want to bre
ak the locks on the doors to the third floor if we didn't have to, for one thing.

  Hester and I had a fast conference in my office, way in the back of the building. Privacy was pretty well assured. Toby had told Hester that this Dan Peel subject had visited Edie several times in the past, and that they'd sometimes gone up to the “private” third floor. Private, because it was the area of the house especially reserved for Jessica Hunley when she was visiting. Toby thought Edie had been in possession of a key to one of the two doors to Jessica Hunley's private apartment.

  “No shit?” I said. I was very glad we hadn't let Toby back into the house.

  Hester had also asked Toby if he knew if Edie and this Peel had been upstairs on the third floor the night before. He said he didn't know, that the Mansion was really a quiet place, and it was hard to tell where anybody was at any given time, unless you saw them.

  Hester and I had both noticed how quiet it was in the Mansion, and I suspected it was the fact that many of the older homes in our area had insulated interior walls, as well as exterior ones. Especially places built before 1900. Frequently sawdust-filled, the walls were usually left intact unless there was extensive remodeling. So, Toby was probably telling the truth.

  Well, at least about the quiet.

  When asked if he had a key for the third floor, Toby had said “no.” When asked if he'd ever been to the third floor, he'd replied, emphatically, “No way.” Hester had asked him what he thought Edie and this Peel did up there. “Really private stuff,” he'd answered, but said he couldn't elaborate. She'd pressed, and all she'd been able to elicit was “Well, you know, intimate stuff, sex stuff and things.” Hester asked if Edie and Peel had done that sort of thing elsewhere in the house, and Toby had said that they hadn't.

  That made sense, at least to me. Edie was, or had been, the building super, more or less. There was every reason to believe she'd had access to the third floor. That would mean she had her own key. With the prohibition on visiting the third floor, it would guarantee privacy for her and her lover. We had to get to the third floor, where I fully expected we'd find the murder scene. But we had to do it methodically, so unlocking it could wait until the full lab crew was ready some time tomorrow.