Donald Harstad: Code 61

“Sally, here you go,” I said.

A moment later, I felt her take the forceps from me. The primary mission was accomplished.

I drew my gun, and took one more step away from the falling sand. Then I turned, abruptly, and shined my flashlight straight up into the darkness above the level of the fluorescent lights.

There he was. About twenty feet up, in the clear area between the pillar and the drop-cloth ceiling support, clinging to God knows what with his hands and feet.

“Hey, Dan!” I hollered.

He looked down. Those damned fangs glistened, pressing into his lower lip. He was gripping tightly with both hands, with one foot parallel to the pillar's face and braced against a small bump in the surface. The other foot was nearly perpendicular, with the toes wedged into a crack. I could see a dark spot on his lower left side, toward his back. There was a trickle of blood running down from there into his shorts. It looked like I'd hit him.

“You need any help gettin' down?” I yelled, unable to resist.

Two things happened at once. Byng and Borman came flying around the far end of the cubicles, looked up, and Byng said, “Damn!”

At the same time, Dan Peale just pushed himself away from the wall. For the life of me, I thought he hung up there, suspended in space, for an instant. I think in that moment, we were both wondering if he could really fly. Then he plummeted twenty feet to the sandy floor. I guess he was prepared to fly, because he did absolutely nothing to break his fall, or roll with it. He hit feet first, arms outstretched to his sides, with a jarring thump that seemed to send a visible ripple upward from his ankles to his neck. His legs went all weird between the ankle and hip, and he collapsed onto the floor of the mine.

I sent Borman up the elevator to get help. Byng and I tended to Dan Peale. Along with a gunshot wound in his back, he had a compound fracture of his lower right leg, an obviously broken or very badly sprained left ankle, and I feared some internal injuries as well. He was silent, never uttering a word of pain or complaint. Meth combined with ecstasy, they tell me, will do that sometimes. I met his gaze a couple of times as we put toweling over his fracture. He never blinked. I really think he would have tried to escape by crawling, if we hadn't both been there.

We kept clear of his teeth.

Borman returned, with a paramedic, who was being followed by two more. He told me that Lamar and the others had finally gotten in the main mine entrance, and should be up our way very soon. They could easily drive an ambulance up to us, as soon as they figured out which chamber we were in.

I left them, and went back to Huck. She was asleep, and Sally was just standing there, staring at her and adjusting a trauma blanket to try to keep the younger woman warm.

“She's wiped out,” she said.

“Yeah. Who wouldn't be? The last ten or fifteen years have been long ones for her.”

“Peale alive?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but pretty well busted up.”

“Did you hit him with that shot?”

“No doubt.”

“Attaboy,” she said.

There was a commotion in the outer chamber, followed by Lamar and our reinforcements arriving. They'd brought an ambulance with them.

“Sorry we're late,” said Lamar, after hearing my verbal report. He looked around the area where Huck was lying, and saw the tubing and the basin and the straps and everything.

“Is this where Edie…?” He couldn't ffnish.

“Yeah. I believe so.”

“Aw, hell,” he said with his sore throat. “It's cold here. Damn. Edie hated the cold.” He turned away, and went back through the hanging carpet.

“I've never seen him like that before,” said Sally.

“Yeah.”

She looked around. “This really is a lonely place.”

Harry and Hester showed up just as we were taking Dan Peale out to the ambulance. Harry, in particular, was very disappointed to have missed the excitement. Hester told me that she and Harry thought Tatiana had snitched Huck off.

“I believe,” she said, “that she wanted to make sure Dan did something terrible. So he'd get out of Jessica's life, permanently.”

Considering that we thought Jessica had damned near invented Dan Peale, and would probably create another one, it had been a waste of time.

After countless examinations and three separate hearings, Dan Peale was eventually declared insane, and placed in a secure mental health facility. God only knows what he'll do there. He is scheduled to stand trial in Wisconsin, for the murder of Randy Baumhagen, but is currently fighting extradition on the grounds that he's been already declared legally insane. What really bothers me is that, since he wasn't tried, we haven't been able to get a determination on exactly what happened with Edie. Hester and I talked about that at some length, and what we came up with was this:

Dan and Toby had Edie in that “crypt” of his. Dan seems to have planned to bleed Edie for a while in advance, and while he intended to bring Edie very close to death, we couldn't prove he intended for her to die. That would have been enough for second-degree murder, though, and we were fairly certain he would have been convicted. That left us with the question as to just what happened after she died. We found that out at Toby's trial.

Toby said that Dan didn't want people snooping around, doing a search for a missing woman. He was afraid they might stumble across the elevator, or just go looking for her in the mine. He decided to make it look like a suicide, to prevent a search. Dan was the one who made the cut in Edie's neck, to cover the needle entry point. Toby insisted it was post mortem.

Then they had to carry her back to the Mansion, and put her in the tub. They'd used the elevator, and that explained the wood stain on the body bag. They carried her to the house, and had to set the body down while Toby was sent to get Kevin. Since they didn't want to be seen, Dan had unlocked the back stair door to the third floor, and they'd placed her in the stairwell. That fit nicely with that bloodstain.

While Toby was up with Kevin, Huck had awakened, and was moving about. Toby thought she was taking a shower. He hustled down to Dan, and they took Edie right up the main staircase, so they didn't have to pass Huck's room. The stain on the carpet came from setting her down, just as we figured. Our only mistake on the direction was in thinking the stain at the bottom of the back stair meant that they'd brought her down from the third floor.

The weird part was, Toby was the only one who actually did any prison time for the whole thing. He got five years for helping Dan kill Edie. When he'd told us that he hadn't been able to kill her in the so-called crypt, he'd told the truth. But he'd held on to her while Dan did it. But, I mean, is that ironic or what? Here he was, the only one nuts enough to really believe the officially insane Dan Peale was a vampire, and he was the one judged sane enough to stand trial. “The fool? or the fool who follows him?” I think it goes.

Hanna and Melissa continued rooming together, around the general area. Huck, after a brief stay in the hospital, moved to Dubuque, and got a job dealing on the gaming boat down there. She came back to testify at Dan's hearing, but seemed distant to us.

Kevin turned up in Freiberg. He'd split as soon as he became aware that Dan was back in the house. The county attorney said we didn't have much on him, and subpoenaed him as a hostile witness in one of Dan's hearings.

Jessica and Tatiana both testified that Dan had flagged them down, and taken them hostage at gunpoint, and forced them to take him back to Lake Geneva. They got away with it. Hester, Harry, and I approached the prosecutor's office, with a request to prosecute Jessica as the principal orchestrator of the entire business. They told us that they'd never be able to convince a jury of that, especially in the light of the defense team she could afford to retain.