A Long December

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I tried to help without planting anything in his head. “He was the one with the gun? The one who shot him?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of complexion?”

“Well,” said Jacob, “kind of dark, sort of dark… like a good tan would be.”

“Okay. You happen to notice his hair color?”

“If I recollect, I’d have to say very dark, too. Black, maybe? Really dark for certain.”

“What’d he have on? “I was taking notes now.

“Black pants, I think. Maybe navy blue. A dark sweater or something like it. Maybe a sweatshirt, with no sayings on it. Probably a sweater. I think maybe a real dark jacket, too. Maybe.”

“Got it.”

“And, oh… black tennis shoes.” He considered that for a second. “Maybe just black shoes. Might not have been tennis shoes, now that I think about it.”

“About how old? Best guess.”

“I can’t tell with them, the Mexicans. Not until they get really old, like me. Then it’s the wrinkles, you know? But… old enough to know better. No kid.”

“Okay.” I wrote down ADULT. “SO then, how about the other one, the white guy?”

“Well,” said Jacob, “to tell the truth, I wasn’t lookin’ at him too hard, because I was givin’ the one with the gun most of my attention.”

“Understandable,” said Hester.

“But if I had to guess, I’d say… about twenty-five or so.”

“Why do you say that, Jacob?” I asked.

“Well, because he looked like that,” said Jacob. “He wasn’t a kid. I know that. But I’ll tell you one thing. He looked as scared as I was.”

A perfectly reasonable answer, especially if you were Jacob. I didn’t think it was time to press him on just how you know when somebody’s scared. If I needed anything, I needed a physical description. The fear indicators could wait for later. I’d get ‘em, but eventually. Patience is very important in my line of work. “Can you describe him for me? What he looked like, just generally?”

“Oh, you know, pretty tall, a lot taller than the one with the gun. They were kinda like Mutt and Jeff. He had a pale complexion. Maybe blond hair, but it was tough to tell under the ball cap. Green jacket. That’s about all.”

“What did the ball cap look like? “asked Hester.

“A Forrest’s Seed Corn hat. Ed Forrest down in Battenberg hands ‘em out to anybody he thinks might buy seed. You know, yellow with the green lettering.”

Hester didn’t, but I did.

All could be local, then. “Can we go back to their ages? “asked Hester.

“Oh my,” said Jacob, with a sigh. “Everybody seems to be so much younger these days. But I’d guess none of ‘em was more ‘n thirty. If that.” He smiled at her. “I’m sorry, miss. I guess that’s the best I can do.”

“That’s okay.”

“This was a terrible thing,” said Jacob. “To do that. Him bound up that way and all. Didn’t have a chance. No chance at all.”

There was a siren in the distance. Lamar, I was just about sure. I removed my walkie-talkie from my jeans pocket.

“You’ll have to give me a minute here, Jacob,” I said, moving two steps away from him. I keyed the mike. “One, Three… that you?”

“Ten-four, Three. Where you at?”

“Slow way down before the curve; we’re blocking the road. Come in slow.” Lamar was known for his fast driving on gravels.

“Ten-four.”

I’d worked with Lamar for twenty-five years or so. He was going to hate this. Nothing appealed to him more than peace, quiet, and a placid surface to “his” county. “He’s not going to be a happy man,” I said as Hester stepped over.

“True.” Hester knew Lamar pretty well, too.

She regarded the body for a moment. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

I looked at her. “You mean dope?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Could be. It sure looks like what the media calls ‘execution-style.’”

I was rather startled when Gary, the trooper sergeant, said, “I’d say dope, too.” He’d apparently come up behind me while I was on the walkie-talkie, and I’d missed it. “Sure looks like it to me.” He said that with the complete assurance of an officer who wasn’t working dope cases.

“It’s sure as hell possible,” I said. As the investigator who had the case, I didn’t want to establish a mindset by labeling this “dope-related” unless and until I had hard evidence to back it up. I’d been racking my brain to try to come up with an instant suspect, and couldn’t. We had meth labs in the county, and we had good-quality marijuana crops, but I wasn’t currently aware of any really bad blood between local dealers. That didn’t mean much, as a violent relationship in the dope business can spring up overnight. Nonetheless, at this point there was no evidence either way.

I shrugged and said, “All I know now is that he really musta pissed somebody off. Anyhow, you want to walk around the curve there and see if there are any tracks from the suspect vehicle?”

“Sure.”

“Get photos and measurements, if there are any, and let me know, okay?”

Gary grinned. He had been a TI, one of the specially trained accident investigators for the state patrol, before he’d been promoted to sergeant. If anybody on earth knew how to interpret and photograph tire track evidence, it was Gary. “Want me to do plaster casts? I love doin’ plaster casts.”

“Better leave that to the lab team, but if you find something for them to cast, let me take a couple of photos right away, okay? Continuity in the courtroom,” said Hester.

“Okay.” I think Gary had been feeling kind of nonessential, and was anxious to get into his own area of expertise.

“And,” said Hester, “I’d really like it if you could find a shotgun just laying around, you know? Or at least an empty shell.”

Gary chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do, Hester. You don’t want much.”

As soon as Lamar arrived at the scene, I briefed him on what I knew and then trudged back up the hill to my car while Lamar talked to Hester and the Heinman boys. I grabbed the big, padded nylon camera bag out of the backseat, and opened it to make sure everything was there. Other officers sometimes borrow equipment when you’re on days off or vacation, and forget to put it back. They especially like to borrow 35mm film. A quick inventory revealed my 35mm SLR, my zoom lens, my digital camera, some ten rolls of 35mm film, and my short tripod. Mine in every sense, since the department didn’t provide a camera or the supplies. The bag also contained a bag of Girl Scout cookies, a chocolate bar, and a box of latex gloves. Since we were beginning to draw a crowd, I grabbed the half roll of plastic crime scene tape I had left, and put it in my camera bag. I closed the trunk, reached into the backseat, and hauled out my jacket. It was going to get cold in a hurry when the sun went behind the hills. I was set. As I closed the car door, it occurred to me to try to call the department on my cell phone. We’d fought for years to get them, and had finally obtained grudging permission to carry them in the cars. We had to buy them ourselves, of course, even though we had to assure the county supervisors that we wouldn’t be making personal calls. They didn’t want us distracted. But it was a small victory, in spite of that. It had gotten smaller as we realized that they were pretty useless at our worst events. The really bad wrecks tended to be at the bottom of long hills on curvy roads, for instance, and we seemed to frequently find ourselves at crime scenes inside buildings with steel frames—both kinds of locations made it very difficult to reach a tower. I looked at the LCD display panel as I dialed. The little icon that indicated the strength of the nearest tower’s signal was at the minimum. I tried anyway. Nope. I tried once more on the way back down the road. Nothing. Lamar glanced at me, and I knew he’d noticed I couldn’t get a call through. I’d hear about that sooner or later. I made a mental note to tell him that there would be more towers in our area soon.

As I approached the body, Lamar excused himself and came over to me. “Hell of a thing,” he said.

“Sure is.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“Not yet. Not even close.” I produced the black and yellow roll of crime scene tape. “We better get some of this around.” Our tape says SHERIFF’S LINE—Do NOT CROSS, and I knew that Lamar would want that up instead of POLICE. It’s a sheriff thing.

“We better,” he said.

We made a simple square of the stuff by tying one end to the Heinman boys’ mailbox, stringing the tape across the road to a tree, then to a tree south of the body, to the Heinman boys’ fence, and back to the mailbox.

That was a lot of tape, and I tried to placate the cost-conscious Lamar by saying, “That should look good in the photos.” Then I held out my tape measure. “You want to do this, while I take the shots? “We always need a scale in each photo.

“Yep.”

As I attached the flash to my 35mm SLR camera, Lamar knelt down about a yard from the body and extended the yellow steel tape from its chrome case.

“That’s a new tape,” I said, checking my batteries. “Don’t let it snap back and cut you.”

“You gonna use flash?” asked Lamar, ignoring my cautionary words about the tape. He never admitted to mistakes even after he made them, let alone beforehand.

“Yeah, the sun’s going behind the hill here. Think I better.” I looked through the lens and focused on an establishing shot.

“Don’t get me in the damn pictures,” said Lamar. He didn’t want to have to go to court and testify about the photographs.

“Hell, Lamar, you know I won’t even get your shadow.”

I took eleven overall photos of the scene from different angles, with each camera, and then got to the close-ups of the body. Lamar, who was anticipating every shot, sort of duck-walked around the scene, standing and taking a giant step when he got to the area where the shooter had probably stood. It’s hardly likely that you’re going to get a good footprint on a gravel road, but you never know.

I used the digital camera in order to have photos on my computer as soon as I got back to the office. The 35mm was for the court, which didn’t want to allow the digital stuff into evidence because it could be enhanced or manipulated too easily.

Finished with her notes from the Heinman boys, Hester came back over to the body. As we three got a closer look, we began to get an even better understanding of the extent of the damage. It was, as coroners say, massive.

It certainly appeared to have been a contact shotgun wound to the back of the head, just as Jacob Heinman had said. There really wasn’t any entrance or exit wound. What there was was a U-shaped gap that had excised everything between the victim’s ears. The entire top of the head was gone, and from what we could see without moving him, the missing area included most of his face.

“Christ,” said Lamar.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the last shot on the roll and stopping to reload. “Not much left.”

“Where’d it all go?”

“Lots of it’s under Gary’s car,” I said. “He couldn’t get stopped before he realized he was just about on top of the stuff. We thought we’d leave it there until the lab gets here. I hope there’s teeth and stuff under there, so we have some sort of chance of positive identification.” I finished loading the camera and, lying down on the roadway, took three shots of the area under the patrol car. I could see chunks of tissue, and blood. I’d half been hoping to see the other shoe. No such luck.

“Well, we still got his fingerprints,” said Lamar.

“Yeah. That’s about all, unless we have tattoos or birthmarks.” I got back to my feet and dusted myself off as well as possible. Frozen dust is still dust. “We sure can’t tell eye color… unless we get lucky and find part of an eye.”

“It had to be quick,” said Lamar. “I mean, it wouldn’t hurt at all, I think.”

“Yeah. It looks like a lot of his head was just about vaporized.” I thought I heard a siren in the distance. “Ambulance?”

“Should be,” he said. “You two call for the DCI mobile lab yet?”

“I notified them,” said Hester. “Haven’t heard anything back yet.”

“I’ll check and see,” he announced and headed back toward his car. “Radios still work better than those phones.”

Ah, yes. But they weren’t as private.

“You thinking dope on this one? “he asked.

“I’m leaning that way.” I shrugged. “Way too early to say for sure, though.”

Gary appeared around the curve and yelled out. “Hey, one of you?”

I looked up from my camera. “What’s up, Gary?”

“You wanna come on down this way? I think I got some tracks here, where somebody spun as they left.”

Hester and I headed down toward him. On our way, I checked in the right-hand ditch for a black tennis shoe. Nothing.

When I got around the curve to where the tire tracks were, they were pretty good indicators of a very fast turnaround and departure. There was a set of parallel furrows in the gravel and a partial track from one tire in the dust on the edge of the road.

I looked at them and snapped some quick shots. “So, what do you think?”

“Well, it’s front-wheel-drive, from the relative positions of the furrows and the nonspinning tire tracks. Came from the south, and turned around and went back the same way.” He sounded pleased with himself. I looked at the tracks and could see what he meant. I doubted if I’d have been able to decipher them, but once he explained it, it was obvious. “He couldn’t get it turned on the roadway in one motion, so he went forward and to his left, backed around, then forward and cranked the wheel, and that’s when he stepped on the gas and made the furrows.”

I remembered that Lamar had my tape with him, so I laid my pen down alongside the partial track and took a photo of what seemed to be about half the tread-width, well impressed into the soft dust at the very edge of the roadway.

“You think they can get a plaster cast of this? “asked Hester.

“Maybe… if they just spray a mist of water to settle the dust first, it should go all right.” Gary looked thoughtful. “I’ve got a box lid in my trunk, and that ought to preserve it until they get here.”

The approaching siren was getting louder.

“We better stop the ambulance on the south side of these tire tracks,” I said.