Eleven Days Read online

  “Didn’t dispatch say that a female called?”

  “Yeah.” We’d been at death scenes before, but there was something about this one that had us both spooked.

  “Well, let’s look.”

  I hated to go stomping around a crime scene, but we had to see if the woman or the killer was still in the house. We crossed to the bedroom, the only other room on the ground floor. Nobody there. It was a mess, but it looked to me like from being lived in, not from a struggle or burglary. The lights were on and there was a fairly large painting above the bed, not framed. It was a star, point down, in a circle, with red eyes near the center. Not well done. Primitive.

  I looked at Mike. “Let’s do upstairs first, then the basement. Anybody gets out from the basement, twenty-five has a good chance of picking them up as they come out.”

  Mike headed for the stairs. I let him go up about five steps, then followed. The stairwell was only about thirty-six inches across, and the steps were so narrow that I had to put my feet down sideways. They creaked, adding to our tension, which in my case was at critical mass. I figured we’d find the caller, but that she would be dead or dying. I also thought we had a chance of finding the perpetrator, or of him finding us. On those stairs, he could have got both of us with a pellet gun.

  Mike hit the top stair and started moving to his left. “Okay, Carl, we got doors both sides, all open,” he whispered.

  “Right.” I took the right side of the narrow hallway as I topped the stairs—three small rooms, two left, one right. No one in any of them. Each room seemed messier than the one before it. Each one was dusty, dirty, and cold and piled high and deep with boxes of junk. I was amazed at how much garbage this guy held on to.

  Then we carefully moved to the basement, down another set of small, rickety steps. I went first this time, exposing my body to whoever might be waiting. The basement was as dilapidated as the rest of the house, but I noticed a small, partitioned corner with a blanket tacked up that separated it from the rest of the mess. I cautiously pushed the blanket aside with my magnum while Mike covered me.

  Nobody there. But four knives similar to the one stuck in the body upstairs were hanging on the wall. Next to the knives was a painting of Jesus on the cross that was desecrated with a happy-face sticker placed on his face. On the other side was an ink drawing of a small heart that appeared anatomically correct with a dagger in it. Below was a small workbench with several burned-down black candles. There was also a calendar and a rather seedy black robe hanging against the sidewall. We turned to find an inverted cross hung opposite the crucifixion painting.

  “What in the hell is going on, Carl?”

  “I don’t know,” is all I could come up with.

  2

  Saturday, April 20

  01:06 hours

  We left the house, closing the entry door as well as we could on the way out. We would now stay away from the crime scene until the Des Moines Division of Criminal Investigation mobile lab team arrived. It would take them about six hours to make it to Nation County. We would use the time to search the outbuildings and take some photographs through the windows.

  Mike and I both lit cigarettes on the way to the patrol cars. The chief deputy, Art Meyerman, was waiting for us with Dan in the yard.

  “What have you got?”

  I took a deep breath. “One body, male, looks like he’s been stabbed in the chest. His hand has been cut off. Oh, and a dead dog. We had to put him out of his misery. Nobody else.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “No sign of her,” said Mike.

  “You killed a dog?”

  I nodded. “Yep, had to.”

  “How’d you kill it?”

  “I shot him,” I said.

  Art shook his head like he was dealing with a green recruit out of the academy. “We’ll need a report on that. Better give me good reasons, too. You can be suspended if the owner finds out about it and complains.”

  “Unless this guy’s middle name is Lazarus, I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

  Art gave me another smirk, but let it go. He had a tendency to be an asshole under stress. Actually he was an asshole under normal circumstances, too. He stomped back to his car to use the radio and warm up. Mike, Dan, and I stayed in the cold and listened.

  “Comm, tell one to keep coming and tell the ambulance to slow it up a little. It’s not 10–33 for them.”

  “10–4, two. Do you want me to request 10–79?”

  “When I want the coroner, I’ll tell you.”

  Art was also rude. I resented his “I’m in charge here” attitude. Sally had done a fine job, and the notification of the coroner was the next logical step. He was just pissed he hadn’t thought of it first.

  I grinned at Dan. “Someday … you see Art crawling across the floor, and he looks hurt, call me.”

  We were still chuckling and pulling on our cigarettes when Art came back over.

  “Cut the chat and get the buildings searched. Let’s do it now.”

  We flicked our butts and split up. Mike took the machine shed, Dan took the garage, and I had the barn. Art, of course, stayed central and observed. I couldn’t help but give him a dig.

  “Art, don’t you think we could use the DCI lab team? Might as well get them coming.”

  He didn’t say anything. I’d been in the department about four years longer than he had and he was jealous of my record and resented my relationship with the sheriff.

  We found nothing of particular significance in the outbuildings, and the ground was still too hard and icy to have any tracks in the yard. We surveyed the rest of the area, looking at the scattered patches of snow for traces of prints or tire tracks. There was nothing that stood out and nothing that appeared to be fresh.

  One, Sheriff Lamar Ridgeway, came barreling over the knoll in his four-wheel drive, nearly leaving the ground. He slid to a stop and got out. We met him near his vehicle in a tight little clump and gave him a brief rundown—the body, the search, and the dog, of course.

  “You shot it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You had to. Glad you did.”

  I gave Art a look.

  “Can we see the body from the outside?”

  “Yeah, let me get my camera.”

  Lamar and I went up to the front porch, and he held the flashlight while I focused my 35mm through the window. The reality of the scene kicked in when I began clicking the shutter. With the zoom lens, I looked right down into the victim’s mouth and nasal passages. I noticed something brown on his teeth and in his nose.

  “Looks like he was a tobacco chewer.”

  Lamar nodded, bent down, and scooped up the frightened little dog on the porch.

  As I took establishing shots of the kitchen, I noticed that the telephone was on the wall and seemed perfectly normal. Lamar had Art check the line entrance and he confirmed that the phone was in working order. Sally had told me that in the middle of the call the phone went dead, but when she called McGuire’s minutes later, it rang but no one answered. The caller must have been on another extension and her line ripped out of the wall. I didn’t remember seeing any other phone jacks, but I made a mental note to ask the lab to give the house a more thorough look.

  A grinding sound in the distance announced the arrival of the ambulance. They had probably slowed down and were having trouble negotiating the icy lane. I’d learned long ago never to slow down on an Iowa farm lane before summer. The icy gravel was sure to hold you up if you did. They must not have made many trips this deep into the county, especially not in these conditions.

  I was having a hard time holding the camera steady. The temperature had dropped to about twenty degrees and my adrenaline was running thin. I finished up and Lamar and I headed back to the patrol cars, where Dan was filling in the ambulance crew. We still didn’t know anything and he shouldn’t have been wagging his tongue. Being from a city of fifteen hundred, though, makes it hard to keep things to yourself an
d Dan was chatty to begin with. He looked suitably guilty upon our arrival and the paramedics tried to cover for him by shuffling around doing bogus EMT things.

  “Fill ’em in, Dan?” I ribbed him as I helped Lamar clear a space for the dog in the cabin of his car.

  “Oh, Carl, I don’t really know much.”

  I just shook my head and grinned. “Thanks for coming out.”

  “No problem.”

  The radio in Dan’s car blared. “One, comm.”

  Lamar picked up the mike in my car. “Go ahead, comm.”

  “One, I–388 is en route from Albion, ETA about thirty minutes. They want to know if you need the mobile crime lab.”

  “10–4, comm. We will.”

  “What the hell is an I–388?” I asked Lamar.

  “A state special investigator. It’s policy now. If you want the lab, you have to take the suit. I guess good old-fashioned small-town police work doesn’t cut it with homicides anymore. The state doesn’t want a bunch of bumpkins botching murder investigations.” Lamar was pissed, but I knew he wouldn’t take it out on the guy coming in. He’d suck it up and treat him fair and square.

  While the five of us waited for I-388 and eventually the lab, we lit up and went over everything we could think of. We had no sign of the woman. Where was she? Did she leave the scene voluntarily or was she abducted during the call? We had a telephone line that was intact, but had somehow gone dead during the emergency call. I racked my brain trying to remember another extension in the house, but couldn’t think of one. Neither could Mike. And we had a bunch of creepy shit in the basement and that strange painting in the bedroom that indicated that someone had some weird interests, probably the owner. Which brought us to a crucial question that we had stupidly forgotten to even answer.

  “Is the body Francis McGuire?” Lamar asked.

  I looked at him for a second. “Shit, I don’t know. I never saw the man in my life.”

  Mike grinned. “It’s him. I wondered when you’d get around to asking.”

  “Okay, smart-ass,” I said, “anybody else live here?”

  “Nope. No wife, no kids. He was married to a girl from Waterloo, but they split up about five years ago.”

  “How do you know so much about him?” Lamar chimed in.

  “Wife’s third cousin. She didn’t like him. Can’t say I did much, either. Helped him clear some stumps in his fields a couple times. No thanks, no nothin’.” Mike had relatives all over the county and knew something about just about everyone.

  We kicked it around some more. What was the point of the missing right hand? It was too great a wound to be defensive, and even if it had been, it would be lying on the floor. Unless the dog dragged it away. The lab would figure that one out.

  “Not very much blood around, was there?” More of a statement than a question from Mike.

  I agreed. “Especially considering the severed hand.”

  “Somewhere else?” Lamar asked of no one in particular. “Somewhere else in the house?”

  Mike and I shook our heads.

  “Maybe he clots well.” Dan smirked.

  Lamar sighed. “I just wish we could find that woman.”

  “Well,” Art finally broke in, “we’d better get somebody out on the main road so we can guide I-388 in. He’ll never be able to find us.” A real team player, our Art. Maybe we did need I-388.

  3

  Saturday, April 20

  05:47 hours

  After Special Agent Hester Gorse (I-388) arrived, we briefed her. There were a couple of smirks about her being the head of the investigation and Art said, “Just what we need. A female trying to be a cop.” I didn’t say anything. Lamar did.

  “She’ll be okay.” End of discussion. At least for then.

  We left Art to guard the scene until a reserve officer could be contacted, and Lamar with his new mutt, Mike, and I headed to the office to begin the reports. We only have two typewriters, so it was a little hairy at first. After a serious crime, we always try to get everything written down as soon as we can so that the day shift has something to go on, and more important, so that they don’t bother us when we’re home sleeping. I made a special effort to see Sally to tell her she’d done a good job.

  Jane, the next dispatcher on shift, was with her. Sally had called her in early to help with the media calls. Murders are rare around here, and I guess a bunch of cub reporters had their scanners tuned in to the radio traffic. Sally handed me the typed-up radio logs, along with all of the transmission times and the content of the radio messages. They’d be needed for the reports.

  “I-388’s a woman, isn’t she?” Sally had been toying with the idea of applying for a job as a deputy and was very interested in hearing about the life from female officers. I nodded.

  “Got the radio logs done?” Art interrupted.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Got the phone logs?”

  “Not yet. Just the radio logs.”

  “Get with it. Don’t sit on your ass while we have officers on overtime waiting for you to get your work done.” And he stomped out.

  “Asshole,” said Sally with what was nearly a hiss.

  I went around the dispatch console. “I’ll relieve you for a few minutes. You have time to hit the head and have some coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  I got off at 07:45 and went directly home. My wife, a junior high teacher, had left for church, so I had three Oreo cookies, some milk, and went to bed, not much better informed than I had been fifteen minutes after I got to the scene. It took about an hour to go to sleep, and I was still thinking about our little case when I dropped off.

  The phone rang at 11:58.

  I remember saying “Hello,” although I’m not sure Jane could understand me. I didn’t have any trouble understanding her, though.

  “One wants you to come back out. Right away. They’ve just found three other bodies.”

  “How could they, we searched the area really well …”

  “They’re at another farm. Lamar thinks they’re connected.”

  The second scene was at the Phyllis Herkaman residence, a farmhouse but not a farm, located about eight miles southwest of the McGuire house.

  Herkaman worked at the local hospital as an aide, and had been late for work. She had an estranged husband, who was on the violent side, and her coworkers got worried. Called us, but we had no one available. We requested that a state trooper be sent, and one was eventually dispatched to the Herkaman house. He discovered the body of an unidentified female in the front hallway. The other responding officers (we freed everybody up pretty quickly after he told comm about his discovery) located an unidentified male body, and the body of Phyllis Herkaman, both also in the house.

  When I arrived, Lamar and I-388 were there, as well as our office day-shifters, Ed and Norris. Theo, our investigator, was on his way, but had been delayed at the McGuire scene.

  We have eight officers, including the sheriff. Divided between three eight-hour shifts, and at seven days a week, we sometimes only have one or two available. It looked like everybody was going to miss a lot of sleep.

  As it turned out, the lab team had just arrived at the McGuire house, and it would take them about six to eight hours to process the scene. I was being assigned to I-388 to assist in photographing the crime scene at Herkaman’s prior to the arrival of the mobile lab. In an effort to preserve the essence of the scene, Lamar and I-388 made the decision to photograph the bodies before the lab team arrived and tramped everything down. I hoped that wouldn’t come back to haunt us in court, but I kept my mouth shut. The bodies were still in the house, and virtually nothing had been disturbed. We’d have to be very careful.

  There is quite a difference between doing a quick preliminary set of snapshots of a crime scene and doing one for real. We were going to do this one for real, and it was going to take some time. I already wished I hadn’t put on my uniform, and had put on some clothing with lots of pockets. Also, you can’t
smoke at the crime scene, in case you deposit some “evidence” where none existed before. I’m a heavy smoker, and that always exasperates me. And, usually, the other guy at the scene doesn’t smoke at all, so he’s a little reluctant to take a smoke break. You also can’t eat at the scene, for the same reason. I, of course, am also a heavy eater. Same problems. Being short of sleep, there was a good chance I’d get pissy before we were done. It turned out that I-388, Agent Hester Gorse, didn’t smoke. Thin and stringy, it also looked like she didn’t eat, either.

  While I got some establishing shots of the exterior and took a photo of a broken twig that I-388 thought of some significance, we had to send Norris into Maitland to get film. The department usually makes you use your own camera, but at least they buy your film. They pay you by the print. Cheap, but that’s the way it is. I also asked for a second set of gloves. The department issued us one pair, cream-colored latex, one size fits all. Or nobody, depending on your point of view. I couldn’t help noticing that Agent Gorse was putting on a pair of double-thickness green gloves. Which she got from a box of one hundred. Is it any wonder we in the boonies sigh a lot?

  It took us three hours to do the shots, recording camera settings and descriptors, and timing each shot. I taped my comments on a pocket recorder (provided by the department, who also, by God, provided the tapes; you had to buy your own batteries). Agent Gorse wrote descriptors and made sketches. I had never worked with her before, and it turned out that we both had an interest in astronomy. Discovered this when we found a small telescope in the house.

  The significant evidence was as follows:

  The body in the front hall was that of a white female, approximately thirty years of age, blond, about five feet five and 110 pounds. She was partially clothed, with blue jeans and a bra. Cause of death not known at the time, but might have had something to do with the red cord used as a ligature around her neck. Facial features were grossly discolored, and there appeared to be some signs of lividity on the belly, which we could see without turning her over. We were unable to identify her at that time.