Eleven Days (38 page)

“Whadda ya think? Take him out?” I asked George. So far, we hadn’t returned fire since the first exchange about ten minutes back. We hadn’t because they had pretty much been shooting the upper floor of the barn, and into the loft, and were down in the stone foundations. They were far enough off-target, we’d been reluctant to reveal our actual position by shooting back. They had a lot more firepower than we did. But now Hester had been hurt. They were getting closer.

“Not yet, I think,” said George. “Wait and see what he does.”

The dumb one started waving his assault rifle in the air, screaming something at us.

“Gotta be stoned,” I said. “Gotta be.”

“Any idea what he’s saying?” asked George.

“No,” I said. “Don’t even know what fucking language. But I don’t think he’s trying to surrender.”

The dumb one took the hint, I guess. He lowered the assault rifle to hip level, and pointed it right at us.

“Down!” yelled George.

My name is Carl Houseman, and I’m a Deputy Sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I’m also the Department’s Senior Investigator, which is a title that probably has about as much to do with my being fifty-five as it does with my investigative abilities. It’s also a title that can get me involved in some really neat stuff, even in a rural county with only 20,000 residents. That’s why I like it.

I was about halfway through my usual noon-to-eight shift. Hester Gorse, my favorite Iowa DCI agent, and I had just finished interviewing Clyde and Dirk Osterhaus, brothers, antiques burglars, and new jail inmates, regarding seventeen residential burglaries that had been committed in Nation County over the last two months. The interviews had been conducted in the presence of their respective attorneys, who were both in their late
twenties. The brothers, both also under thirty, had thrown us a curve when they’d readily confessed to only fourteen of the break-ins. Why just those fourteen, when we all knew they’d done the whole seventeen? Some sort of strategy? A bargaining chip? It beat both Hester and me.

Anyway, the attorneys had left and the brothers were back in the jail cells, arguing with the other prisoners over whether or not they were all going to watch
Antiques Road Show
at 7:00
P.M
. We only had one TV in the cell block. I was pretty sure the Osterhaus boys were going to win. Research comes first.

Hester and I were in Dispatch, having a leisurely cup of coffee. We were talking to the duty Dispatcher, Sally Wells, about whether she should take her niece to see
Harry Potter
or
Lord of the Rings
when she got off duty. The phone rang, and our conversation stopped.

Sally answered with a simple “Nation County Sheriff’s Department …,” which told me it wasn’t a 911 call. They answer those with “911, what’s your emergency.” I relaxed a bit, and had just brought my coffee cup to my lips when Sally reached over and snapped on the speaker phone.

“… best get the Sheriff down here … there’s this dead man in the road just down from our mailbox
 …” came crackling from the speaker.

“And your name and location, please?”

“I’m Jacob, Jacob Heinman
,” replied the brittle voice.
“Me and my brother live down here in Frog Hollow … you know, just over from the Welsh place about a mile.”

“I’ll be paging the ambulance now,” replied Sally, very calmly, “but keep talking because I can hear you at the same time.”

“We don’t think he needs a ambulance, ma’am,”
said Jacob, politely,
“I saw ’em shoot him just about right smack in front of me. We went back up there. He’s
still laying there just like they left him. He’s awful dead, we’re pretty sure.”

I suspect, even in departments where they have two or three hundred homicides a year, the adrenaline still flows with a call like that. In our case, with maybe one or two a year, the rush is remarkable. Hester and I headed out the door.

As we left, I said, “On the way. Backup, please.”

Sally waved absently. She knew her job, and would have everything she could drum up out to help as soon as possible. You just like to remind even the best Dispatchers, in case something slips their mind.

The Heinman brothers were known throughout the area as the “Heinman boys.” Confirmed bachelors, neither of the so-called boys was a day under eighty, and you couldn’t excite either of them if you set his foot on fire. Or, apparently, if you shot somebody right in front of him. As I got in my unmarked patrol car, started the engine, and strapped on the seat belt, I could hear Sally telling a State Trooper whose call numbers I missed that she was looking the directions up in her plat book. Frog Hollow was an old place-name for a very remote stretch of road about two miles long that wound down through a deep, mile-long valley where there were just two farms. I don’t think anybody except the rural mail carrier and the milk truck went there in the daytime, and just kids parking and drinking beer ended up there at night. Sally probably had a general idea where it was, but considering there were more than 2,000 farms in Nation County, this would be ho time to guess and end up giving the Trooper bad directions. Hester, behind me in her own unmarked car, couldn’t possibly know where we were going and was going to have to follow me to the scene. Her call sign was I-388, so I waited until the radio traffic between Sally and the Trooper paused, and picked up my mike.

“Three and I-388 are 10–76,” I said. That meant we were heading to the scene, and was meant as much for
the case record as anything else. You always need times. “Which Trooper you sending?”

“216 is south of you, I’m working on the directions …”
There was no stress in her voice, but I could tell she was really concentrating.
“Be aware I’ve confirmed there at least two suspects. Repeating, at least two suspects.”

Two for sure. That always meant, to my mildly paranoid mind, that we were talking a
minimum
of two. Okay. Well, there was Hester, me, and 216. Fair odds, as 216 was a new State Trooper sergeant named Gary Beckman, who’d transferred into our area about six months ago. He was about forty, and really knew his stuff.

“I’ll direct him,” I said so she could forget the directions for him and concentrate on getting an ambulance and our Sheriff notified. “216 from Nation County Three, what’s your 10–20?” I needed to know Gary’s location before I could give him directions. I also needed to find out where he was because we were both going to be in a hurry, and it would be extremely embarrassing if we were to find ourselves trying to occupy the same piece of roadway at the same time.

“I’m four south of Maitland on Highway 14, Three.”
I could hear the roar of his engine over his siren noise. He was moving right along. Hester and I pulled out onto the main highway and headed south. The Trooper was four miles closer than we were. There was no way I’d be able to have him just follow me and skip the directions over the radio.

“10–4, 216. We’re just leaving Maitland now. Okay, uh, if you turn right at the big dairy farm with the three blue silos, take the next right, and, uh, continue on down a long, winding road into the valley. That’s the right road, and the farm you’re going to is the second one.”

“10–4,
Three.”
His siren was making a racket in the background. My siren was making a racket under my hood. Hester’s siren was making a racket behind me. I
reached down and turned the volume way up on my radio.

“Okay, and the, uh, subject is right in the roadway, so …” The last thing I wanted was for a car to run over the victim. “And Comm confirms two suspects.”

“Understood.”

I hoped so. After 216 and I shut up, I heard Sally talking to our Sheriff, Lamar Ridgeway, whose call sign was Nation County One. From listening to their radio traffic, I could tell Lamar was a good ten miles north of me. Since he drove the Department’s four-wheel-drive pickup, he wasn’t going to be able to make more than eighty or so. Which begged a question …

I called Sally. “Comm, Three?”

“Three, go.”

“Subject say whether or not the bad guys were still there?”

“Negative, not there. Repeating, the caller says the suspects have fled the immediate scene. He thinks they went southbound from near his residence, but he didn’t get a vehicle description … just heard it leave, as it apparently was around the curve from his place, and out of his line of sight.”

Great. “Give what you got to Battenberg PD …” The town of Battenberg was about five miles south of the Heinman boys’ farm, and their officer could at least say who came into town from the north. Assuming that the suspects continued that way.

“He’s already on the phone
.” Sally sounded a bit irritated. I wisely decided to stop interfering and let her do her job.

It had taken us about three minutes to cover the four miles to the cluster of three blue silos, and I braked hard to slow enough to make the right turn onto the gravel. I anticipated because I knew the road. Hester, who didn’t, just about ended up in my trunk.

“Could we use our turn signals?”
came crackling over the radio.

“10–4, I-388,” I said to her. “Sorry ’bout that.”

We were having a pretty mild winter so far, and there was no snow at all on the roadway. Just loose gravel. Almost as bad as ice and snow, if you oversped it. Without snow cover, though, there was much better traction. There was also a lot of dust from 216. Another reason I was unhappy he was ahead of me. Hester, behind both of us, had to back off quite a distance just to be able to see.

At that point, I heard “
216 is 10–23
” come calmly over the radio as the sergeant told Comm that he had arrived at the scene. After a beat, he said, “
The scene is secure.”

That meant that there was no suspect at the scene who was not in custody. Good to know, as it tended to affect how you got out of your car. Hester and I both shut down the sirens as soon as he said that.

I almost missed the next right due to the dust. It was just over the crest of a hill, and judging from the deep parallel furrows in the gravel, 216 had almost missed it, too. I was in an increasingly thick dust cloud for almost a minute, and when it tapered off suddenly I knew I was at the point where 216 had slowed. Seconds later, I rounded a downhill curve and saw the Trooper’s car about fifty yards ahead, parked in the center of the roadway, top lights flashing. Excellent choice, as he was completely protecting the scene. Nobody could get by him on an eighteen-foot road with a bluff on one side and a deep ditch on the other. I stopped near the right-hand ditch, and waited until I saw Hester in my rearview mirror.

“You go on up,” I said on the radio, “I’ll make sure nobody hits us,” and then carefully backed up around the curve until I was sure somebody cresting the hill could see the flashing lights in my rear window before they got into the curve. This was no time to get run over by an ambulance. Or the Sheriff. “Comm, Three and
I-388 are 10–23.” I hung up the mike, grabbed my walkie-talkie, and opened my car door.

Sally’s acknowledging “10–4,
Three
” just about blew me out of the car. I’d forgotten about cranking up the volume in order to hear over the sirens. I took a second to turn it way down, and then got out of the car, locked it up, and headed toward the scene. You always leave the engine running in the winter so radio traffic doesn’t run down your battery. It’s also a good idea to have at least three sets of keys.

The Heinman farm sat well below road level, about fifty yards to my left. On my right, a steeply sloped, heavily wooded hill rose maybe a hundred feet above the roadbed. The farm lane came uphill toward the mailbox at a slant, with bare-limbed maple trees between it and the road. As an added measure, between the road and those trees was an old woven wire fence, covered with thick, entangled brush and weeds. Done, I was sure, to keep the larger debris from the roadway out of the Heinman property. There was a Ford tractor from the 50s quietly decomposing within ten feet of the galvanized mailbox that was perched on top of a wooden fencepost. That old tractor had been there the very first time I’d seen the farm, nearly twenty-five years ago. By now it and its rotting tires had become part of the landscape.