A Long December (8 page)

It really wasn’t that we weren’t willing to try to adapt. It was more to do with our budgets being very restricted. We were having a tough time replacing our tires, let alone budgeting for language courses. There was also a matter of instructing all three shifts. Our attempt at Spanish, for example, had the instructor trying to teach three classes of three or four officers each. One class at 07:00 for the night shift as they came off duty, one at 13:00 for the day crew, and one at 18:30 for the evening shift. It was pretty tough on the high school teacher who was doing it for some extra pay, it consumed our entire “continuing education” budget for the year, and at the end we were not much further ahead than before.

All of which made it a very interesting place to be a cop. Hell, it made it downright fascinating at times. More than once the chief, Norm, had made references to resigning and turning his job over to the U.N. We got a lot of mileage out of that, and even went so far as to get him a pale blue beret. But I could understand his frustration.

Which brings me right back to the current case. Jacob Heinman had said that one of the shooters had spoken Spanish. Wonderful. Or something that sounded to Jacob vaguely like Italian. Okay. The other had been “Norwegian”-looking. Ya. You betcha. Around here, that could be just about anybody.

Not a lot to go on.

The upshot was it was pretty damned hard to get informants, like I said. Hard, but not altogether impossible.

As we were getting out of our cars at Mail Carrier Granger’s place, I stood outside for a minute, dialing the cell phone of one Hector Gonzalez, a twenty-two-year-old packing plant laborer whose acquaintance I’d made at a domestic call about a year ago.

“Bueno?”

“Hector, hey, this is Houseman.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. Really, it is.” I liked Hector. I made him nervous.

“Not now, man. I cannot talk now…”

When I’d gotten to that domestic call, I’d found a young Latino who turned out to be Hector defending his sister Selena from her boyfriend. The boyfriend was trying to beat Selena because she wouldn’t give him her savings that she kept in a jar in the kitchen cupboard. It turned out to be all of sixty dollars. Hector was winning, but it had been a near thing. Both young men had black eyes and multiple abrasions. So did Selena. The Battenberg cop and I had hauled all three of them in, since they were all yelling at us and each other in Spanish, and we couldn’t tell at the time just who had done what. Since none of them were speaking any English, even when addressed by us, we assumed they were illegal aliens. As we shook them down prior to putting them in the cars, I found a small bag of what we euphemistically call a “green, leafy substance” in Hector’s pocket. After we’d sorted things out at the police station, and everybody had calmed down enough to communicate, we found that Hector and his sister spoke English very well, indeed. It turned out that both of them had been born and raised in Los Angeles. The boyfriend spoke no English at all, and Hector and Selena offered to translate for him. Right. I thought something a bit more unbiased might be needed, but I have to admit it would have been fun to hear what Selena would have come up with. While we waited for an interpreter, I’d taken Hector aside and told him that we were both going to stand in the rest room and watch the “green, leafy substance” go down the toilet. We did. I told him I appreciated what he’d done for his sister, that all three of them were likely to be charged with a minimum of disturbing the peace, and that I didn’t think it was going to be in the interests of justice to hang an additional charge on him for the small bit of grass he had in his pocket. He’d asked why I was being so nice, and I told him that it wouldn’t be worth my time to charge him with such a small amount. I did make it clear that I could still do it, however, if he preferred it that way. He thanked me, and in a weak moment said that if I ever needed a favor…. That’s how informants are made.

“Now, I know you can listen, Hector. Just for a second.”

“Okay,” he sighed.

“There was a man just killed, out in the country, a couple of hours ago. Pretty close to Battenberg. Whoever did him blew his head off. He seems to be Hispanic. You with me so far?”

There was a silence, and then a faint, “Yeah, man?”

“We don’t know who it is, Hector. There wasn’t enough left of his face to even guess. Okay so far?”

“Holy chit, man. I doan know nothing about this.” He tended to shift into an accent when he was getting stressed.

“That’s gotta be a good thing. Look, Hector, all I want you to do is just give me a call if you hear who it was, okay?”

A pause, then, “Sure, man. I will do that.”

“I appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

I caught up to Hester as she was knocking on Granger’s door.

Most rural mail carriers know their districts like the back of their hands, and Granger was no exception. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the road back to Battenberg, though. Nope. Not a thing.

It pays not to rush. He offered coffee, and I accepted. Hester looked a little anxious to get going, but I needed a cup.

As we sat around the living room, coffee in hand, Granger said something that made it all worthwhile.

“But, you know what? At the old Dodd place, just past the hollow? There was a cream-colored Subaru there earlier today. Parked by the barn. It was gone when I came back by, but I’d never seen that there before. If it helps…”

“About what time?” I asked. I knew the old Dodd place. The house had been abandoned, but whoever farmed the land still used the sheds and other outbuildings. The fire department had burned the house in a controlled burn for practice about five years back.

“Oh, it was after lunch… I always take my northern route after I grab a sandwich, so that would be about one-ten or so.”

Punctuality is a trademark of the rural mail carriers. If he said 1:10, then he was within five minutes.

“Anybody around it?”

“Yes… couldn’t see who, but three, four people. They looked like they were headed to one of the sheds or for the barn. I was by before they got there, if that was where they were going.”

Cool. And there was still coffee left.

“You might want to check with Elmo Hazlett,” he said. “The milk hauler. He drives route out that way.”

“Thanks.”

Granger chuckled. “He’s got his head up his butt most of the time, though, so if he didn’t run over ‘em, he probably didn’t notice.”

   When we got back in our cars, I checked in with the office on my radio. There was nothing new, the troops were still assisting the lab team at the crime scene, and Norm Vincent was waiting for us in his office.

Norm Vincent was really apologetic. The Battenberg chief was a decent guy, and like I said, was under quite a bit of strain with all the hours he’d been putting in. He’d seen and heard nothing of any use at all. The word was out in Battenberg that there had been some sort of murder just north of them. That wasn’t unusual, since there were dozens of people in town with police scanners. But nothing had struck a chord, apparently, because none of his “informants” had contacted him. Well, he called them “informants.” To put it nicely, Norm wasn’t a really active sort of officer, and I don’t think he had more than three or four “informants,” total, and I suspected they were all high school kids who were lying to him about half the time. But he was trying, and I knew that he’d try even harder after having fallen back asleep on us that afternoon. Good enough. We gave him only one detail, and that was the nature of the wound. We wanted him to know the type of person he could be dealing with if he turned a suspect up.

“Christ,” he said with some feeling.

“We’ll have more for you, Chief,” said Hester, “as soon as we get our evidence all sorted out.”

“Thanks.”

“Until then,” I said, “just let us know if anything surfaces. Don’t try to take somebody yourself. Get backup.”

“Sure. You bet.”

“I’m really serious. Don’t take anybody alone, and I wouldn’t try it with just a couple of cops, either. Whoever did this isn’t gonna blink at the thought of killing somebody else.”

“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?”