Donald Harstad: A Long December

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.

15: 37 THE DUMB ONE LET LOOSE WITH A BUNCH OF ROUNDS. They hit the dirt about ten yards from the barn, and then he squeezed off some more that smacked through the barn boards just above the limestone foundation line, filling the air with wood fragments and an amazing amount of dust. George’s admonition to get down had come a split second too late, but I managed to duck down an instant after the slugs started hitting the building. The rounds punched through the boards six feet to my left, but that was way too close for somebody as slow as I am. I stayed pressed up against the cold limestone for a few seconds after the firing stopped, my head down to protect my eyes from all the crud; then I very cautiously made my way to the holes to my left, took a deep breath, and looked through. The dumb one was gone, presumably back into the shed.

“Everybody all right?” asked George.

We all responded more or less affirmatively.

“Next time,” I said, trying to slow my breathing, “we shoot first.”

“You bet,” said George.

I was getting a very bad feeling and stated the obvious, voicing what the rest of them probably already thought. “Hey. We lose sight of’em every time.” I put my face a bit closer to a hole to widen my field of view. Any closer, and I’d lose the cover of the interior shadow, and I sure didn’t want that. “We just think they go to ground in the same place. They could be anywhere out there. And they could be getting closer.” We needed a better view of the surrounding area. Unfortunately, it was not to be had from our location in the basement.