Eleven Days (3 page)

“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.

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.

The unidentified male was in what I’ll call the master bedroom, as this house was considerably bigger than the McGuire home. He was on his back, legs secured to the bed with black cord. He had been castrated, and what appeared to be black wax had been poured into his eyes. His tongue was missing, and this time there was blood all over hell. There were also fresh lacerations on his chest and abdomen, one of them being “666” and another being what appeared to be three characters of unknown origin. There was a substance around his mouth which looked like dried superglue.

When we were photographing that, Ms. Gorse said, “You don’t suppose they tried to glue his tongue back on, do you?”

It was then that I knew that I was going to like this woman.

The body of Phyllis Herkaman was in the basement, in what appeared to be the laundry area. She was curled in the southwest corner, with her head pointed, as it turned out, north. She was lying in an enormous pool of blood, which was beginning to clot. There was sort of a skin on top of the pool, which was beginning to wrinkle as it clotted. Serum had separated at the edges of the pool, so what it looked like was a very large lump of pudding surrounded by a yellowish fluid. She was nude, supine, the curl being from left to right. Her right breast had been removed, and the cause of death appeared to be centered around the vaginal area, from which protruded a long, wooden shaft. She had been handcuffed behind her back, and a long red nylon cord was strung between her arms and her back, in a loop, which was secured to a two-inch drainpipe. There was what appeared to be a hatpin thrust
through her left nipple. Again, there was a considerable amount of blood around and on the victim. There were no unusual markings on the body. There was, however, a circumscribed star, the circumscription being in the form of a snake eating its own tail, dangling from an overhead pipe directly over the body.

We also discovered a small silver jewelry box in the basement, in a wooden cabinet. It contained several silver-like items, including a small crucifix. The link for attaching the crucifix to a chain appeared to be on the wrong end.

“I’m going to go out for a smoke, Hester. Feel the need.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I would, too, if I still did. Quit four years ago.”

She went up in my estimation again—at least, she
had
been a smoker. A redeeming trait if there ever was one.

When we got outside, she endeared herself to me again. Reached into her purse and pulled out two Snickers bars.

I remembered not to hurt her as I snatched one and tried not to injure myself as I unwrapped it. Very, very hungry.

We stayed just outside the back basement door, and could see the body inside as we ate and I smoked. Had sort of a picnic with Phyllis. I was too tired and too hungry to be grossed out. And very pleased that Hester had turned out to be an eater, after all.

I turned the film over to her and went outside to go home. Mistake. The media were finally there. They had gotten excited about the McGuire homicide, of course, but the news from the Herkaman house had them in a frenzy. Network newspeople were there.
Des Moines Register
reporters, two of them, and a photographer. TV teams from Waterloo and Dubuque. Some of them had traveled two hundred miles for this. They wanted a story.

There were also about thirty civilians, mostly neighbors,
parked in a harvested cornfield across the highway from the Herkaman place. They stayed well back, except for two or three neighbor ladies who were talking to Norris.

Lamar, by the way, hates the media. Understandable, as we have had several stories screwed up by them over the years, and they have on at least two occasions failed to respect off-the-record remarks. Doesn’t sound like much, but in a small, rural Iowa county, you only have a media event about once every three years. Zapped on the last two, Lamar was understandably leery of them.

By this time, the Herkaman house being located on the main highway, it being daylight, and a total of three bodies being found inside the house, we had also attracted a lot of other attention. There were six state troopers keeping the media back, three troopers securing the house, and a sergeant and a lieutenant in attendance. I was impressed. I walked over to Lamar and a Lieutenant Kainz.

“Howdy … seem to be getting a lot of attention, don’t we?”

Lamar said something about “those sons of bitches,” and Lieutenant Kainz began to laugh. Lamar is sort of cuddly when he’s pissed off. Wouldn’t think of shooting them, or anything effective like that. But he fumes in the background while he tries to think up a news release that will tell them absolutely nothing about what is going on. He’s gotten really good at that over the years.

“Lamar, you talk to the press yet?”

“Yep.”

“What you tell ’em?”

He handed me a sheet torn from a legal tablet. It said, “More than one body was discovered at the Herkaman residence this morning. Identities withheld pending notifying next of kin. Cause of death unknown. Incident under investigation.”

“God, Lamar, that’s a lot for you. Ever think about a journalism career?”

“Fuck ’em!”

I went home and sat at the dining room table, eating about two dozen Oreo cookies and drinking milk. And thinking about the day so far. I am the department intelligence officer and for that reason had a file on Satanism. Not that we’d had a case before, but I was just curious about it, and I knew some officers in the metro areas who had dealt with it before.

There was no doubt that the Satanic overtones were there. Overtones, hell. It was like somebody had used a how-to book for Satanic ritual killings. But this just didn’t make sense, as far as I could tell. Satanists were into ritual sacrifice, on rare occasions, but this was a massacre. Not a ceremony, at least not one that I could match with anything I’d ever heard about. We had everything except a flashing neon sign saying “Satanic Cult Homicide.”