A Long December

by Donald Harstad

  “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. A
n 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 h
air 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.”