A Long December. Donald Harstad
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.
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