“Okay, Carl. Okay. I get the point.”
“Good. I’d hate to lose anybody over this one.” I decided to trust him with another bit of evidence. “You think you can get hold of Elmo Hazlett for us?”
“He’s probably asleep by now.”
That was likely true, because Elmo would have to be up by about three A.M. in order to get started on his milk route in time. I didn’t think it would be worth waking him up and aggravating him. We didn’t know that he’d even seen anything. There was just a chance that he might have. It was one of those decisions you have to make, and just hope it’s the right one.
“You out till three or four? “I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you see Elmo, tell him we’d like to chat with him for a few minutes. Whenever it’s convenient for him, but sometime tomorrow.”
The old Dodd place was kind of spooky, nestled between two large hills where the wind sort of hummed through the bare trees. Hester and I stopped at the mailbox and examined the powdery dust at the end of the lane, checking for tire tracks. Sure enough, there was one beauty about eighteen inches long, where somebody had come from the lane and turned north, toward the crime scene.
We did photos of it and called for the lab team to see if they could make a cast. Bob Ulrich hitched a ride down to our location with one of our reserves who we called Old Knockle. He was old, nearly seventy. He was also feisty, and knew the county very well.
We waited for them, pointed out the track, and then took my car up the lane to the buildings. One car was best, mainly because it would damage about half as much evidence as two.
There were four old wooden buildings, pretty dilapidated, on the left side of the gaping foundation that had been the Dodd residence. On the other side was an old concrete-block silo with rusty iron straps encircling it at about five-foot intervals. The rusted steel dome reminded me of an observatory. About fifty feet from it was an old platform for a windmill. It was really getting dark by now, especially down in the valley, and we had to use my headlights, spotlight, and flashlights to snoop about.
The paint was flaking from the weathered gray boards of the buildings, but you could still tell they’d been red, once upon a time. The floors were wood, as well—weathered pale and with the sunken grain that’s peculiar to old wood. We’d go in the doorway of each one, stand there for a minute as we shone our flashlights around, and then enter carefully, making sure we didn’t step on anything that was obviously evidence. With fortune typical of searchers, it was in the fourth and last building that we hit pay dirt.
“Hey, Houseman?”
“Yeah?”
“Look over here, in the corner.” Hester pointed with her light.
“Well, no shit,” I said. “Our missing shoe.”
I went back to my car, got my cameras, took an establishing shot of the building, and then went inside and took six shots of the black tennis shoe, on its side, the laces still tied.
“I move we don’t go any closer, and let the lab do the whole area,” said Hester.
“Fine by me.”
“When your flash went off,” she said, “see over here…. Does that look like a bloodstain to you?”
Near the shoe, there was an old toolbox. At the base of the box, there was a large, fresh stain that did look like blood.
“You bet,” I said, and started taking shots of that, as well.
“Try a couple of high-low angles, Carl. It looks from here like the dust has been wiped off the box and the floor near it. See if you can get that.” Hester laid her flashlight on the floor, the low angle of the beam making the swipe marks in the dust pop out.
I took four shots using only the light cast by her flashlight. They’d be pretty stark, but they’d turn out fine.
“It looks,” she said, “like somebody maybe was sitting on the box?”
“Yep.” I squatted down to give myself a low-angle view. “And from down here, I think I get a couple of shoe prints over here, too, when the light’s just right.” I laid my flashlight on the floor like she had, and sure as hell, footprints just seemed to pop out in relief.
“Several,” she said.
“Way cool.”
“Lab team stuff for sure,” said Hester, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “I think we’ve got ourselves a clue or two.”
We sat in my car, waiting for Bob from the lab to finish his tire castings and come down the short lane to the outbuildings.
“So,” I said, “why’s the shoe here?”
“Beats me, Houseman. I just assist you guys.” She laughed. “That means you get to guess first,” she said.
“Okay… the easiest and least likely one first. How about they take him to the building to kill him, and he gets away?”
“Perfect. How far is it to the crime scene from here? Half a mile”Pretty close, but a little more, I think.”
“Long way to run, Houseman.” She took out her Palm Pilot and started writing.
“Especially with one shoe on and your hands behind your back.” I glanced at her two-by-two-inch screen. “You might want to make a note of that. I did say it was the least likely.”
“Just a sec,” she said, sounding distracted. “Okay, then. So he lost the shoe here, but he didn’t run from here? I think that’s right.”
“Keep going.”
“Right. So, they had a struggle here, though, don’t you think?”
“Okay. Hell, if I thought they were going to kill me, I’d struggle.”
She was really cooking. “But then, they put him in the car to take him somewhere else, and he got out…”
“Not with his hands behind his back,” I objected. “Unless they had him in the backseat all by himself. And not if the car was moving. No abrasions on his clothes, for one thing.”
“They took him up the road to kill him,” she said. “He was in the back, they stopped, he made a break for it then. As they were getting him out of the car.”
That sounded feasible.
She thought again and so did I. I got there first. Well, I think I did.
“Know what, Hester? If you’re right, it would have been so damned much easier to kill him right here. They made an effort to take him someplace else to do it. So, they didn’t want this place connected with him. You agree?”
“You bet. Now all we have to do is figure out why. And why, if they go to the trouble of taking him away from here, they go less than a mile. Why don’t they take him way far away?”
That question had us both. Well, when you get to a place where you draw a blank, back up to the place just before it, and see what else you can pull from it.
“Well,” I said, “let’s go for what we know. First, let’s assume they aren’t completely familiar with the area. The rural mail carrier drove by and saw some people here after lunchtime. They may have seen him, too. Figured it was not a good idea to do what they were going to do after being seen?”
“Nope.” She sounded pretty certain.
“Why?”
“Too much of a time lapse between then and the killing. But I think we’re still on the right track. They want to get away from this place.”
“So that means that the decision to kill him, regardless of when it was made, also took into consideration the fact that they didn’t want a body discovered on this abandoned farmstead. We think we know that. So that means… what the hell else connects the suspect to this place, over and above the mail carrier?”
“Yep.”
I sighed. “And you want to walk around the area, in the dark, looking for that particular ‘something,’ don’t you?”
“I can wait until you finish a cookie,” she said. “If you give me one, too.”
I fished the Girl Scout cookies out of my camera bag. Fortified, we got out of the car and began to walk around each of the buildings in turn.
In a rural area, especially in a narrow valley, it gets very, very dark. The place did have a yard light, but it was one of the old ones that
threw kind of a greenish cast over the area and created more shadows that anything else.
“Why keep the yard light hooked up,” said Hester, “when nobody lives here?”
“Most do. Keep the vandals and kids out, as much as anything.”
“It just makes it seem that much darker in the shadows,” she said.
The scrub- and rock-strewn gully that ran near the back of the barn and shed kept us out of that area, but we did a fair job on the rest of the place. We didn’t find anything of interest whatsoever.
Bob finished the tracks and came down the lane. We showed him the shoe. He said they’d do the area in the immediate vicinity of the shoe and then call it a day, returning early in the morning to finish up. We told him our theory about the suspects not wanting to connect the abandoned farm to the body for some reason.
“Why?”
It always went back to that.
“We don’t know,” said Hester. “Maybe you can come up with something when you get back here in the morning.”
Bob grinned. “What’s it worth?”
I didn’t hesitate a second. “Lunch.”
“For lunch,” said Bob, pointing at the shed, “I can locate the remains of Jimmy Hoffa right over there…”
At that point, there really wasn’t much for us to do until we had more information. We left instructions with the reserves that they were to protect the scene at all times, but especially while the lab crew got some sleep.
I figured that left the office and the preliminary report as all that stood in the way of a good night’s sleep.
The media didn’t agree.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001
THE NATION COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and County Jail sits on a hillside at the edge of the town of Maitland. I imagine the parking lot is about twenty or so feet higher than the approaching roadway. That being the case, the first hint I had of the presence of the media was as I glimpsed a four-wheel-drive with a conspicuous KNUG/TV on its side. Another hint, and one that boded no good for me, was the glimpse of Lamar’s four-wheel-drive parked to the rear of the building. If he was there, and he was, then he was reluctant to come out of the building because he’d have to talk with the media. Lamar hated the media. So I knew who was going to be the spokesperson for the department. I just didn’t know how he was going to order me to do it, since I had all that typing to do.
As we came up the steps to the main office entrance, I saw three reporters and their cameramen, and heard Lamar’s voice saying, “Here’s the man I was telling you to wait for. Just ask him anything, and if he can answer it, he will. He’s been there, and he’s seen it.” This was followed by a big, hearty “Hello, Carl,” as I reached the counter. “Glad you’re back so soon.”
I could tell by the look on his face that he had had just about as much media attention as he was going to allow for the rest of the year. I just smiled, turned to say something to Hester, and discovered that she’d disappeared. She’d probably ducked down the hall and into Dispatch. I was on my own.
“Hi, Boss.”
“He’s all yours, folks,” said Lamar, and headed for his office in the back of the building. He didn’t quite run.
I’d pretty much managed to avoid all media attention over the years, mainly because I was afraid that if they got me talking I’d say too much. Especially the TV reporters. Not that I’m all that chatty, but I tend to get very enthusiastic about my work.
“Detective Houseman?” asked a young, pretty TV reporter I saw on the tube just about every night. “I’m Judy Mercer, KNUG, and I’d like to ask a few questions…”
“Bill Nylant here, and I’m with KYYQ…”
“—Handy, with KK.NN…”
I thought that maybe if we went outside in the cold, it would be shorter. “Come on out here, and I’ll be glad to answer some questions if I can.”
Once on the front steps, I remembered that I was on closed-circuit TV at the dispatch center from out there. With sound. As if the media weren’t bad enough, our own people were now taping me, as well. Something for the Christmas party.
The cameramen had the tripods set up, cameras attached, and the lights came on, right in my eyes.
“Hey, do we need to do the cameras?”
Judy Mercer answered first. “Well, detective, I’m sure you’ve noticed that this isn’t radio. We really like to have something to show.” She paused and then said, “If you’d like to take us to the scene, we could shoot footage of that, and leave you as a voice-over.”
No way in hell, and she knew it.
“Okay, just don’t get reflections off the top of my head. And I’m not a ‘detective,’ I’m an investigator.”
They asked standard questions before they rolled tape. Just so I wouldn’t clutch on camera and cost them their footage.
“We need at least fifteen seconds of clear voice from you on camera,” said Barbara Handy of KKNN. “We can do the parking lot and the jail for fill, and do our own narrative.”
“Good. Okay, whenever you’re ready, we might as well get it over with,” I said.
“So, and we’re rolling now,” said Judy Mercer. “Deputy Houseman, can you just give us an idea what happened here today?”
I inhaled, held it for a second, and then said, “We received a call from the public that a body was on the roadway in the southern part of our county. The caller said that it appeared the victim was deceased, and that it appeared the victim had been shot.”
“And what did you find when you responded?”
“The report was quite accurate. The victim was dead, and the initial evidence suggested a gunshot wound.” Boy, I thought, did it ever.
“Have you identified the victim yet?”
“I won’t be able to tell you who the victim is until after the relatives have been notified.” I wasn’t going to be able to notify relatives until I knew who in the hell the victim was, either, but I couldn’t exactly say that.
“Do you have any suspects yet?”
“We’re investigating now. I can’t discuss that any further at this time.”
“Has it been ruled a murder?”
“No,” I said. “The autopsy results won’t be in for at least twenty-four hours.”
“Thank you.”
That was it for Judy Mercer. Each of the other two, in turn, asked about the same questions. Then they were done. It occurred to me, during the first interview with Mercer, that they didn’t care who or why so much as they needed the information to get to the stations. The tough questions could wait until later. That was all right with me.
The media types sort of milled about for a few minutes, taping themselves with the jail and cop cars in the background. I beat a hasty retreat and went directly to Dispatch. Just as I suspected, the duty dispatcher, Martha Behrens, along with Sally, Hester, and Lamar, were all sitting there, watching the external monitor.
“No popcorn?” I asked.
“Nice job,” said Lamar. “I knew you could do it.”
“The reflections off your bald top were pretty bad,” said Sally.
“I’m surprised your nose isn’t growing,” came from Hester.
Martha, who hadn’t been around us all that long, wisely said nothing. Her lack of tenure obviously didn’t interfere with her enjoyment of the comments made at my expense, though.
“Being on TV doesn’t seem to bother you,” said Hester.
“Naw.- Piece of cake,” I said.
I made for the back room and my office, as if to take off my jacket and get started on my report. As soon as I got there, I picked up my phone and started to dial my home number to call my wife, Sue. I’d never been on TV before and sure didn’t want her to miss this. As I did so, I happened to glance at my watch. Ten twenty-six.
The TV people were from either Cedar Rapids/Iowa City or Waterloo. Both were a good seventy miles from us. It was already too late to make the ten o’clock news.
Decorum forgotten, I hung up the phone, hustled back out the main
door, and almost knocked Judy Mercer over.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, sorry, but could you tell me if my bit will be on tonight?”
She laughed. “No way. We haven’t got a link. We have to go back to the studio and uplink from there. We’ll send it in, but you won’t see it until tomorrow morning at six.”
“Oh. Well, thanks anyway.”
I hustled back into my office and called Sue.
“Hello?”
“Hi! Hey, guess who’s gonna be on TV?”
“You?”
“Absolutely!”
“What’s happened?” She sounded as much concerned as anything else.
I told her we’d had a homicide, and that I’d be late, but that I was going to be on TV as spokesman for the department. I also included the information that it would be aired at six A.M. Since she was a teacher, and just getting up at that hour, she might get a chance to see it.
“Things are all right, though? “she asked.
“Sure. Just a murder case.” I chuckled. “Nobody barricaded, or anything like that. Just have to use our heads and figure it out.”
“Not one of my students, is it? “By that she meant any that she’d had for the last twenty years of teaching middle school English.
“To be completely honest, I couldn’t tell, dear. Probably not, though.”
She said she’d watch for me on the tube, and then told me there was some cold macaroni and cheese in the refrigerator. Being married over thirty years gives people a certain perspective.
“Got it.”
“Good night. I’ll miss you, but I’m really looking forward to seeing you on TV. If I knew anybody else up at that hour, I’d call them!”
“It ain’t exactly prime time, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Oh, it sure is. Did you ask for a copy of the tape?”
I hadn’t, but I made a note to do so as soon as I could next morning.
I went back through Dispatch on my way to the kitchen for some coffee, and was stopped by Martha, who was waving furiously at me from behind her console with one hand as she tried to write with the other and hold the phone to her ear with her shoulder.
A Long December Page 7
