Eleven Days (2 page)

I stood to the side of the front door, put my flashlight in my belt, and knocked as hard as I could.

“Police officer! Is anybody home?”

Again, no answer and then headlights coming down the lane. Twenty-five. I had to turn my portable back on and use my left hand to key the mike.

“Twenty-five, that you?”

“10–4.”

“Okay, I’m on the porch. Park behind my car, and stay back until I can get in the house.”

“10–4.”

Dan Smith was an experienced officer. I felt a lot better. A few seconds later, I heard him jack a round into his shotgun and I didn’t feel quite as confident. I hoped he kept the safety on.

I navigated across the porch and tried the kitchen door. It opened about an inch and then hung up. I pushed it harder and it gave a little with a gentle scraping sound from inside, and then a fairly loud thump, like it was blocked by a hundred-pound sack of potatoes. I pushed a little harder, and it opened about two feet to reveal the open mouth and staring eyes of a man who was obviously dead. I stepped back.

“Twenty-five, I’m going to have to try another entrance—this one is blocked by a body.”

“10–9?”

10–9 means you should repeat your traffic, as the message was not understood. Or, in this case, believed.

“I’ve got a body blocking this door. I’m gonna work my way around the house to the left, here.”

“10–4.”

“Three? Five.”

“Five, go.”

Mike was close. Even better.

“Wanna wait till I get there? Only a minute or so.”

It was tempting, but I was too exposed to stand still.

“No, just cover the right side of the house when you get here. I’ll be around the left and coming right unless I can find a way in.”

I gingerly backed down the steps and went to the left, toward the back of the house, to what appeared to be the back porch. The dog still hadn’t stirred. Keeping my head below window level, I made my way to find that the back porch was actually an addition to the house with a separate entrance. The upper half of the door was glass.

The door was locked, but I could see through to the body in the kitchen. There was something sticking out of his chest or abdomen, but I couldn’t make out what it was. The broken table was obstructing the full view. Then a noise.

“Three has movement inside!”

No reply. I heard running footsteps coming up from my right. Mike ran past me to the other side of the door-well and put his back against the wall. We were both very quiet for a moment and heard the sound again. Like something dragging and then a bump. We looked at each other and nodded at the same time.

I kicked the door. It didn’t move. I kicked again and the panel cracked. The third kick slammed the door back where it hit the interior wall and broke the glass, causing one hell of a racket. Mike flew by me into the house and stopped just as he hit the entrance to the living room. I moved behind him, but he was frozen, so I nudged him and stuck my gun around the corner of the door frame and pointed it to where he was looking.

“Jesus.”

There was a German shepherd crawling across the floor toward us, dragging his hind legs. His mouth was bleeding, and he had a bloody wound on his head. His eyes were glazed. To the left, the TV was on, but no sound, playing a rerun of
Ensign O’Toole
. There were, as they say, signs of a struggle—magazines all over, overturned
lamps, one stereo speaker knocked over, a houseplant in a broken pot lying on the floor.

“I don’t want to kill him.” Mike said what I was thinking.

“We have to.”

“Who would leave an innocent animal like that?” Mike mumbled.

“Twenty-five,” I said over my portable. “There will be a shot fired. We have to shoot a dog.”

“A dog?”

“Yeah.”

I aimed as carefully as I could, cocked the hammer back, and very gently squeezed the trigger. We waited a few seconds, our ears ringing, stunned by the shot and the strangeness of the situation. Then we slowly made our way to the kitchen.

“Twenty-five?”

“Go.”

“We’re in.”

“Copy you in the house?”

“Yeah. Both of us.”

“Okay. Two’s on the way.”

“Good.” Two was the county’s chief deputy. Although he was in charge of the night shift, he’d had the evening off, Sally must have called him in when Dan reported the body. I had my portable on single-channel mode and wasn’t able to hear the other radio traffic, but Dan was still by his car and would relay our reports to those on the way.

We looked carefully around the kitchen. The body by the door was supine, his legs bent at not quite right angles. The object in his chest was a knife with an ornate handle, made of silver or stainless steel. His right hand was gone, the stump pointing toward the tilted refrigerator. But there was very little blood. He was nude, except for a pair of white socks with yellow toes. They were half on, half off his feet, and dirty. I turned to Mike.

“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.

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 and 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.