Fred Limberg - First Murder

“Whoa! Shit!” Tony held his hands up shoulder high. His face was set, serious and frowning. “Gary, put that god-damned thing down. NOW!”

Gary Hewes looked worse than he had that morning. He was grayer and tired looking, even more wretched and wasted than before. He looked confused and uncertain. He held the rifle, a scoped Remington it looked like to Tony, at port arms. He didn’t look like he had the strength left to shoulder the weapon.

“What’s going on? Karen?” Tony walked over to him and gently took the gun from his hands. Gary relinquished it willingly, as if it had been a burden too heavy to carry in his weakened condition. “What the hell’s going on?” She went over to help him, propped him up, and guided him to a chair.

“There was someone in the back yard, sneaking around.”

“Did he try the door?” Ray moved closer. The pistol had disappeared, exchanged for his notepad.

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Did you recognize him?” Ray worked hard to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

“No.”

“Sometimes the neighbor kids will cut through the yard,” Gary offered blearily. “After school. Saves ’em a block or two.”

“It wasn’t a neighbor kid!” Karen barked.

“Did you get a good look at him? Can you describe him?” Ray had his pen poised, waiting while Karen wrung her hands some more and looked toward the window.

“He was maybe five ten or eleven. Jeans. Hooded sweatshirt. Gray or tannish colored. The hood was up.”

“Anything else?”

“He was white, I could tell that, but I didn’t get a good look at his face. And he had a scraggly sort of beard.” Ray made the notation, wondering how she could identify his race but not his face.

Karen looked up hopefully at the two detectives. Ray assured her she did fine, that it was a good description and excused himself and Tony for a minute. He said they needed to talk to the officers outside. They left Karen and Gary anxiously huddled together at the big oak table.

“Pretty good description.” Tony had a skeptical look on his face, a mirror of Ray’s.

“Yeah…of Sean Stuckey.”

“What the hell is going on here, Ray?”

Standing at the side of the house Bankston could see two squad cars in front and two in the alley. He had some bodies to work with, and a big black German shepherd.

“I’m going to get these guys working the neighborhood. I want you to go back inside and gently…gently, get her to give you another description. Find out how long before she saw this dude before she triggered the alarm. Find out if Typhoid Gary saw anything or heard anything, but I doubt he did. And make him lock up that damn rifle.”

Ray turned and headed for the cops in front first. He wanted that dog to start working. Maybe Stuckey had been in the yard. The guy was going to need another alibi in any case. Ray hoped that for once it would be a good one.

Sean Stuckey was out of passes and there were no get-out-of-jail cards on the table.

“The funeral’s day after tomorrow.”

Carol Offord was driving. Ray shared the front seat with her. Tony and Jonny Kumpula were lounging in the back as they sped south on I-35. They were headed toward Austin, Minnesota, the home of Spam.

Kumpula loved Spam. By the time they passed the massive Cabelas complex outside Faribault he had told them much more than they ever wanted to know about the ubiquitous lunch meat and given them a half dozen recipes that none would ever dare try.

Carol was trying to get their heads into the case. They were heading for a house in the farmlands outside of the small city to meet with Darcy DuPree. She filled them in on the guy and her history with him.

Darcy didn’t like people much. Darcy liked pornography. Carol knew Darcy from a case she had been involved with nearly five years previous. DuPree was famous for trading porn on the internet. He collected still and video images from all over the world. While tracing the recipients of a particularly nasty and illegal kiddie porn broker, Carol ran across Darcy’s computer address and eventually Darcy himself.

Darcy was deathly afraid of child pornography. He had nearly been convicted of trafficking twice. He beat the rap both times by handing over both the images and the distributors, helping the Sex Crimes Unit in setting up a sting.

Dupree might have presided over a warped and disgusting Smithsonian-worthy porn collection, but when the cops came calling he turned into a very cooperative snitch. Carol told them she had contacted him seeking episodes of the ‘ Ur MoM is so Hott’ series while Ray and Tony were working the leads.

He had them…all but one. He repeatedly made a point of telling her he didn’t have the last episode, the one where the underage boys were involved, but he seemed to know a hell of a lot about it.

Carol was surprised that any of that last episode’s footage was available, that it even existed. The set had been raided. The whole operation had been shut down. Darcy assured her it was out there but he didn’t have it. She proposed buying copies. Darcy laughed. He said he wanted ‘tit for tat’, and giggled when he said ‘tit’. Darcy disgusted Carol Offord.

This was where Kumpula entered the picture. Carol was crying in her beer, at The Red Door, having a drink with Kump and a few others the night before. She was complaining that this Darcy character had some clips she desperately needed and would only trade for something he didn’t have yet. Kumpula looked sheepish when he told her he might be able to help.

She got Darcy on the phone with Kump and a tentative deal was struck. Darcy wouldn’t hand over the ‘ Ur MoM’ episodes until the senior evidence tech proved he had what he said he did. When she quizzed Kumpula about what he was trading he just smiled and said, “You don’t want to know.”

“Are you going?” Carol asked Ray, back in the moment now, referring to the funeral. He nodded.

“I wonder if our pal Stuckey will be there.” Tony said. He was planning to go too.

Kumpula fiddled with an electronic device in his hands. “Turn left on 46.” It was a GPS unit. They were driving through flat vast oceans of brown corn. Some had been harvested but much remained. Combines and pickers plodded through many of the fields, stopping now and then to blow bushels of yellow gold into ramshackle trucks. The stake trucks with peeling faded paint jobs, many with round ancient fenders, were testaments to the thriftiness and the mechanical skills of the farmers that kept the relics running.

“Let’s hope so. You never did run him down last night.” Ray still wanted to hear what Stuckey’s alibi was for yesterday afternoon at around 4:00, when Karen Hewes saw a mysterious man in her back yard.

“Stop the car.” Tony tapped Carol on the shoulder and made her jump. The scenery had changed and as she slowed and finally stopped the car on the narrow two-lane blacktop everyone looked around. Tony climbed out first. The others followed.

They were in the middle of a sprawling wind farm, surrounded by immense electricity generating windmills. Each gigantic structure pointed obediently in the same direction. Three bladed propellers, each easily ninety feet long, spun at the same speed-not in sync with each other, the machines weren’t aligned, but at the identical loping patient gait. It was as if the earth was whispering. It was hypnotic.

“Cool, huh?” Tony was grinning. He slowly turned around as he looked at the machines and said, “I don’t know why, but every time I see a herd of these things it makes me think of dinosaurs.”

“You know what? You’re right,” Kumpula said and slapped him on the back.