A Long December

by Donald Harstad

  “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.

  15 :37

  THE DUMB ONE LET LOOSE WITH A BUNCH OF ROUNDS. They hit the dirt about ten yards from the barn, and then he squeezed off some more that smacked through the barn boards just above the limestone foundation line, filling the air with wood fragments and an amazing amount of dust. George’s admonition to get down had come a split second too late, but I managed to duck down an instant after the slugs started hitting the building. The rounds punched through the boards six feet to my left, but that was way too close for somebody as slow as I am. I stayed pressed up against the cold limestone for a few seconds after the firing stopped, my head down to protect my eyes from all the crud; then I very cautiously made my way to the holes to my left, took a deep breath, and looked through. The dumb one was gone, presumably back into the shed.

  “Everybody all right?” asked George.

  We all responded more or less affirmatively.

  “Next time,” I said, trying to slow my breathing, “we shoot first.”

  “You bet,” said George.

  I was getting a very bad feeling and stated the obvious, voicing what the rest of them probably already thought. “Hey. We lose sight of’em every time.” I put my face a bit closer to a hole to widen my field of view. Any closer, and I’d lose the cover of the interior shadow, and I sure didn’t want that. “We just think they go to ground in the same place. They could be anywhere out there. And they could be getting closer.” We needed a better view of the surrounding area. Unfortunately, it was not to be had from our location in the basement.

  “I could go up into the loft,” said Sally from behind George and me, where she was tending to Hester. “Great view from up there. I’m small. Harder to see me.”

  “Not with that red hair,” said George. “I’ll go up.”

  Being about six inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier than George, I simply said, “I’ll cover you from the steps.” He was a lot faster than I was.

  The open stairs from the basement came through the first floor about ten feet inside the open barn doors, on the side that faced our shooters. George was going to have to emerge from the basement, run across the main floor about thirty feet to the right, and climb a vertical wooden ladder that went to the hayloft.

  “How’re you going to do that? Cover me, I mean.” George tends to get right to the point. With the main barn doors standing open, he’d be in full view from the shed for the entire distance.

  I looked up toward the main floor. “Why don’t you let me get about halfway up the steps. Then you go by, and I go, too. Just stick my head out of the opening. I should be able to fire at floor level at the same time you get upstairs.”

  He looked skeptical. “Sure.”

  “Trust me,” I said with a grin. “And rules or not, I’m gonna fire as soon as I get a shot at somebody. And screw it. If I don’t see the shooter, I’ll aim for where I think he is.” We weren’t allowed to fire unless we could see our target. A target that we could “demonstrate and elucidate” as a threat. An old machine shed that I just thought was occupied certainly wouldn’t qualify. Well, not on a normal day.

  “You got more than one magazine for that thing? “he asked, indicating my AR-15. He pointedly didn’t say anything about my intention to lay down some fire. His department’s rules were much stricter than mine.

  “Three. Plus the one that’s in it. That’s about a hundred and eight rounds.” I always carry twenty-seven or twenty-eight rounds in the thirty-round-capacity magazines. Easier on their springs.

  “Save some for later,” he advised. “Why does everybody always seem to leave those big barn doors open?” he asked. It was rhetorical. He took a deep breath, and as he exhaled I could see his breath against the sunlight upstairs. “Well, we might as well get started.”

  “You got a walkie?”

  “Not one you can hear me on,” he
said. The feds use different frequencies than we do.

  “Sally, you better give him yours,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, but I could tell she was reluctant. She was, after all, a dispatcher first and foremost.

  “Okay, never mind, I’ll give him mine,” I said, unclipping it and handing it to him. “This way,” I said to George, “you’ll have Sally on the other end instead of me.”

  “And it’s a good thing, too. Let me get to the wall,” said Sally. “I’ll look over left. Do I get to shoot, too?”

  “Nope. Just me,” I said. “No shots from the basement until they know we’re really here.”

  She nodded and ducked over to the broken window. She patted Hester as she left her.

  “Ready, Carl?” asked George.

  “Yep,” I said, and moved up the stairs. “Let me call it.”

  “Okay.”

  I eased into a position where I thought I could get through the opening in the floor above me without taking more than one full step, and could do it with my rifle just about leveled. I checked to make sure I’d left enough room for George to get by me. It looked about right.

  “Okay, go,” I said.

  As my head emerged at main floor level, I felt George scramble by me and head for the ladder. I brought my rifle up, and aimed at the old machine shed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw George trip on a bad board, then hit the old ladder about three rungs off the floor and nearly fly up and into the loft. It was over so fast, I found myself covering somebody who wasn’t there anymore.

  I ducked back down into the basement. There had been no movement anywhere in my field of view. Not a shot had been fired. Either they’d not seen him, or they hadn’t had time to react. Excellent.

  Sally and Hester were both looking at me. “He’s up,” I told them. “He’s really fast.”

  Sally immediately put her walkie-talkie to her mouth. “George, you hear me?”