A Long December (6 page)

I walked over to Lamar. “You hear my radio traffic about Battenberg?”

“Yep. That dumb sonofabitch.” He said it as one word. Calmly, though. “I told him he ought to loosen up on his damned budget and hire some of our reserves.”

“I’ll get with him as soon as I can,” I said. “He still may be able to help.”

“It ain’t like he has before,” said Lamar. “But go ahead. We gotta work with him.”

I had a bit higher opinion of Norm Vincent than Lamar did, but I just let it ride. We
all
had to work together.

As it happened, both the DCI lab team and Dr. Henry Zimmer arrived at the same time. Both had been equally lost, as it turned out, and had actually met when the lab team flagged Henry down to ask directions. Henry got quite a kick out of that one.

Once there, though, it turned out to be like old home week. Henry and I were longtime friends. Hester and Henry had worked together off and on for years, and were glad to see each other. Like all our rural medical examiners, Henry was a general practitioner, and had a large private practice. Apparently he was the doctor for the Heinman boys, and they exchanged waves. He was also my doctor, and greeted me with “Still got the cookies in your camera bag?”

I got him some.

Hester introduced her lab crew to us, a youngish sort named Bob Ulrich and an older man named Dave Franks. Introductions over, she looked down the road toward the body of the still-unidentified victim.

“Well, let’s get started.”

We’ve found that, over the years, it’s best if the investigators don’t get too involved with the initial stuff the lab crew does. We want them to find things for themselves and not be distracted by us as we focus on some particular items of evidence. We proceeded together but separately, so to speak. That is, until it came time to move Gary’s car back from the human debris field. At that point, we formed a little crowd.

Gary was told to back up very slowly and to stop when Bob signaled him. He did, and had backed up not more than fifteen feet when he was told to stop.

“Now, better call a wrecker, Sergeant,” said Dave, the senior lab man. “We’re going to have to have those tires.”

“What?”

“We need your tires. They’ve been in our, uh, evidence. There may be small fragments and tissues adhering to them.”

“You have to be shitting me.” Gary was astonished.

“I assume you have to get permission,” said Dave.

Dave was right. The tires had been in the blood and bone fragments, and some of that material was now transferred to them. The lab crew was going to take all four, as it turned out, and Gary was pretty disgusted. He’d have to get permission from high up, get the wrecker and four new tires ordered out to the scene. It was probably going to affect the maintenance budget for his entire post, and would reflect on his personal stats, as well. All just because he stopped a
few
feet closer to the body, in a well-intentioned effort to protect the scene.

“Don’t let it bother you,” said Lamar. “We’ll get a receipt for the tires to you. And you ought to get ‘em back in, oh, what you think, Carl? Three-four years?”

“Not any longer than that,” I said.

I don’t think it took any of the sting out.

“Look at that,” said Lamar, pointing to the mobile crime lab truck. “I wonder when they got that?”

The lab crew had set up a portable generator with halogen lights attached to an extendable aluminum tripod, so we had truly exceptional lighting for our first real look at the extended debris field.

“Wow,” I said. “Cool.”

“Those halogens set somebody back,” grumbled Lamar as he moved closer to take advantage of the brilliant lighting.

The debris field, if you could call it that, was roughly fan-shaped, with the small end closest to the body. There was blood, naturally, but a lot of it had been distributed in the form of a reddish haze by the blast, and we were confronted by mostly large droplets as opposed to pools of the stuff. It was a lot like spatter painting. There were two relatively large sections of skull, with the attached skin and hair. That would be a big help. The hair appeared to be either black or very dark brown. At that point, I appreciated any identifiers at all. There were a couple of chunks of bony tissue that would eventually be identified as parts of the maxilla. Most of the teeth were still attached, but some appeared to have been sheared off by the blast. They eventually salvaged four good upper teeth. “Good” in the sense that a dentist could use them to attempt to identify the former owner. There really wasn’t an identifiable clump of brain tissue, except for one section about four inches by three that was near the far end of the debris field.

“This piece carried further, because it had more mass than the smaller fragments,” said Bob, the younger lab member.

“Um hum,” said Hester. She knew that, of course. It was just a matter of basic ballistics.

“That’s the cerebellum, there,” said Doc Zimmer. He got a quizzical look from Bob. “I’m no expert, but if it was a contact shotgun wound to the back of the head, we’d see the blast effect distributing the majority of the brain tissue.” He peered more closely at the yellowish gray matter. “Whereas this bit was probably sucked out by the vacuum caused by the gases from the bore, and wasn’t damaged all that much.” He shrugged. “The brain divides pretty naturally into sections, with enough trauma.”

“I’ve got some teeth and fragments of teeth scattered up here,” said Dave, the older lab man. “Some still in pretty good shape, at least the tops.”

“Maybe another fragment of jaw?” asked Bob, pointing to a light grayish item that was speckled with blood.

My turn. “Nope. That’s the plastic wadding from the shotgun shell,” I said. The plastic wadding holds the shot pellets and butterflies out as soon as it leaves the barrel. That was a good find, as it would enable us to nail down the exact caliber or gauge of the shotgun.

Our luck held, as we found about half an eyeball, mostly the retina.

“Looks like he had brown eyes,” said Bob.

“Well, one, anyway,” I said. It was an attempt at a bit of humor, to ease the stress.

We stepped back again and regarded the entirety of the scene.

“Mostly bits and pieces,” I said. “That’s only good if you like puzzles.”

“It’s not a lot,” said Hester, “but we at least have someplace to start.”

She was right about it not being a lot. Just some hair, partial dentition, and hopefully an eye color. The only concrete ID materials we had were his fingerprints, and we could only hope they turned up something concrete. In the meantime, we’d have to circulate a pretty basic description and see if anybody resembling it turned up missing. I was sort of praying that he was local. If not, we could be looking at the remains of somebody from just about anywhere.

Lamar and I pulled on some latex gloves and helped Henry turn the body over, so he could feel the abdomen and get a guess as to the core temperature of the deceased.

The absence of a face was a lot more pronounced when he was rolled over. What bothers me the most in the recently dead is usually the face. No problem here.

“Ugh,” said Henry. “What a mess.”

I noticed that there was a gold chain around the dead man’s neck. Anything in the way of an identifier was good, although it looked like a perfectly ordinary chain from where I stood.

“Still some warmth in there,” said Henry, mostly to himself. “Let me check his pockets to see if he has any ID.”

“Watch for needles,” warned Hester.

“Sure,” said Henry. He went through the jeans pockets, and came up with a quarter and two dimes.

“That’s it,” he said. “No billfold, nothing else.” He smiled at Hester. “And no needles.”

Henry, as county medical examiner, authorized the remains to be taken to Maitland Hospital, where they’d be examined by one of the state forensic pathologists as soon as one was available.

“Are one of you,” he asked Hester and me, “going to want to attend the autopsy?”

“Yes,” said Hester. “If you could let us know when it’s scheduled…”

“Sure,” said Henry. “Shouldn’t think it’d be too very hard to determine the mechanism of death in this one.”

“God,” said Hester, “I should hope.” She motioned to Lamar. “Could you have an officer meet the body at the hospital and stay with it until the pathologist gets there?”

He could and would.

“Great. Either I’ll be at the autopsy or Carl will,” said Hester. “Bob, be sure to get case prints as soon as you can. That means you have to be at the hospital, because we leave the wrists bound until the pathologist cuts the cuffs. Okay?”

The senior lab technician agreed, a bit reluctantly. Case prints are “fingerprints” that encompass the entire hand, past the crease of the wrist. That way, even if the person being identified has just left a partial palm print on some surface, you can at least get a fair comparison. It was also for normal ID purposes, since our victim was without his face.

“And AFIS as soon as possible,” she said. AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Its computerized database is composed of links to FBI, state, local, and independent databases. If a set of prints has been recorded, AFIS can retrieve it, identify the owner, automatically link with the Computerized Criminal History system, and get any criminal record from CCH within seconds. It was a great system. They also make a portable print scanner, but Iowa hadn’t chosen to provide one of those to its lab crews. Therefore, they had to do an old-fashioned ink and roll job, and then take the prints to a regional console. It was still a tremendous improvement over the old method where you had to have a suspect, and then the records were searched on that name. Those old manual searches made it impossible to obtain an ID from prints alone, simply because of the manpower required to search the millions of records.

“I wish this was happening about four years from now,” said Bob. “The Iowa Laboratories facility ought to be up and running by then.” He said it in a dreamy sort of voice.

The new facility was scheduled to have the DCI labs, the University of Iowa Hygienic Lab, the state medical examiner’s lab, and the Department of Agriculture labs all under one roof, in Ankeny, Iowa. As opposed to today, where items that needed the attention of more than one lab could take hours just to transfer from one location to another. He was right; it would have been nice.

At this stage of the crime scene investigation, standard procedure was to allow the DCI lab team to do their thing with the collection and inventory of the evidence. It’s the most effective way, and they do it much better if we don’t interfere. So, since we were effectively done at the crime scene, Hester and I walked up to my car to discuss things. We didn’t want to be overheard.

“If it’s dope-related, or gang-related,” she said, “we might get a tumble pretty quick. They do things like this to get a message out. We should hear pretty fast if that’s what’s going on.”

“As long as they want to get the message out around here,” I said. “If they’re trying to send a message to this guy’s cousin in Cincinnati, we’re sort of out of the loop.”

“Well, yes.” She was making an entry in her Palm Pilot. Something else I was going to have to get.

“You like those?”

“Ummm… you bet,” she said, closing the little cover. “Downloads right into my PC. Wonderful thing.” She slipped it in the pocket of her slacks. “Just get a rechargeable one, not the AAA-battery kind. Much more convenient.”

“You know of any DNE undercover stuff under way up here that I don’t?”

“Nope. Just Harlan and Feinberg working the meth buys.”

I thought for a second. “It sure looks dope-related, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not quite convinced yet, though.” I looked at her. “How about you?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I’m at least open to suggestions.”

We decided to head on in to Battenberg, and have a chat with Hank Granger, the rural mail carrier the ambulance crew had met on their way to the crime scene. He probably wasn’t going to be a gold mine of information, but he seemed like a good place to start.

“Hey, you know, Hester,” I said, “in all the time we’ve worked together, this is the first time you’ve actually been in our office when we got one of these calls.”

“And it was truly exciting, Houseman.” She grinned. “I just love driving in dust clouds.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.”

“I’ll get even, sooner or later,” she said.

At that point, Jacob Heinman came over to us. “Deputy?”

“Yeah, Jacob. You remember something else? “I always hope.

He gave us that shy smile of his, and said, “Nope. But me and Norris just wanted you to know… that ticket at the accident.”

“Yes?”

“Well, we don’t hold it against you. I mean we know you were just doing your job.”

“Well, thanks, Jacob. I appreciate that.”

“We still think,” he added hastily, “that that bus was in the wrong. But it’s okay with us, anyway. You did what you
thought
was right.”

“I always try,” I said. “Thanks.” I thought his concession was sort of Nation County’s legacy from the 9/11 attack. I was touched.

“What was that about? “asked Hester, when he’d moved back down the road toward Lamar.

I told her about the accident, and his statement.

“I think he’s right,” she said. “How on earth could you give a sweetheart like that a ticket?”

“Don’t go there, Hester. I’ve had a long day.”

“You old grump.”

IT WAS TIME TO RETHINK OUR OPTIONS
.

Now that the people who were shooting at us were fairly sure that we were in the barn, the main problem with our position was this: Both of our exits were covered from the area of the shed and chicken coop, where the bad guys were positioned, and the whole area from the barn to the road could be covered by somebody up in the old concrete silo. The barn’s main door faced directly at the shed. Anybody trying to leave by that door stood a very good chance of being shot before they even got out of the damned barn. The second door, the old one with the daylight showing at all edges, would allow one or two of us to get out of the barn itself without being seen. Well, assuming that the people who were trying to kill us remained in the shed or the chicken coop. With that door option, it was subsequent movement that would get you killed. If you went right, you’d be visible from the shed in about five feet. If you went left, you could be clearly seen from the chicken coop after about forty feet. So, as long as you didn’t want to go anywhere, you
could get
out.