A Long December. Donald Harstad
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.