for sure. That always meant, to my mildly paranoid mind, that we were talking a minimum of two. Okay. Well, there was Hester, 216, and me. Fair odds, as 216 was new state trooper sergeant named Gary Beckman, who’d transferred into our area about six months ago. He was about forty and really knew his stuff.
“I’ll direct him,” I said, so she could forget the directions for him and concentrate on getting an ambulance and notifying our sheriff. “Two sixteen from Nation County Three, what’s your ten-twenty?” I needed to know his location before I could give him directions. I also needed to find out where he was because we were both going to be in a hurry, and it would be extremely embarrassing if we were to find ourselves trying to occupy the same piece of roadway at the same time.
“I’m four south of Maitland on Highway Fourteen, Three.” I could hear the roar of his engine over his siren noise. He was moving right along. Hester and I pulled out onto the main highway and headed south. The trooper was four miles closer than we were.
“Ten-four, two sixteen. We’re just leaving Maitland now. Okay, uh, if you turn right at the big dairy farm with the three blue silos, take the next right, and, uh, continue on down a long, winding road into the valley. That’s the right road, and the farm you’re going to is the second one.”
“Ten-four, Three.” His siren was making a racket in the background. My siren was making a racket under my hood. Hester’s siren was making a racket behind me. I reached down and turned the volume way up on my radio.
“Okay, and the, uh, subject is right in the roadway, so…” The last thing I wanted was for a car to run over the victim. “And Comm confirms two suspects.”
“Understood.”
I hoped so. After 216 and I shut up, I heard Sally talking to our sheriff, Lamar Ridgeway, whose call sign was Nation County One. From listening to their radio traffic, I could tell he was a good ten miles north of me. Since he drove the department’s four-wheel-drive pickup, he wasn’t going to be able to make more than eighty or so. Which begged a question.
I called Sally. “Comm, Three?”
“Three, go.”
“Subject say whether or not the bad guys are still there?”
“Negative, not there. Repeating, the caller says the suspects have fled the immediate scene. He thinks they went southbound from near his residence, but he didn’t get a vehicle description, just heard it leave, as it apparently was around the curve from his place, and out of his line of sight.”
Great. “Give what you got to Battenberg PD.” The small town of Battenberg was about five miles south of the Heinman boys’ farm, and their officer could at least say who came into town from the north. Assuming that the suspects continued that way.
“He’s already on the phone.” She sounded a bit irritated. I wisely decided to stop interfering and let her do her job.
It had taken us about three minutes to cover the four miles to the cluster of three blue silos, and I braked hard to slow enough to make the right turn onto the gravel. I had anticipated the turn because I knew the road. Hester, who didn’t, just about ended up in my trunk.
“Could we use our turn signals? “came crackling over the radio.
“Ten-four, I 388,” I said to her. “Sorry ‘bout that.”
We were having a pretty mild winter so far, and there was no snow at all on the roadway. Just loose gravel. Almost as bad as ice and snow, if you oversped it. Without snow cover, though, there was much better traction. There was also a lot of dust from 216. Another reason I was unhappy he was ahead of me. Hester, behind both of us, had to back off quite a distance just to be able to see.
At that point, I heard “Two sixteen is ten-twenty-three” come calmly over the radio as the sergeant told Comm that he had arrived at the scene. After a beat, he said, “The scene is secure.”
That meant that there was no suspect at the scene who was not in custody. Good to know, and it tended to affect how you got out of your car. Hester and I both shut down the sirens as soon as he said that.
I almost missed the next right due to the dust. It was just over the crest of a hill, and judging from the deep parallel furrows in the gravel, 216 had almost missed it, too. I was in an increasingly thick dust cloud for almost a minute, and when it tapered off I knew I was at the point where 216 had slowed. In a few seconds, I rounded a downhill curve and saw his car about fifty yards ahead, parked in the center of the roadway, top lights flashing. Excellent choice, as he was completely protecting the scene. Nobody could get by him on an eighteen-foot road with a bluff on one side and a deep ditch on the other. I stopped near the ditch and waited until I saw Hester in my rearview mirror.
“You go on up,” I said on the radio. “I’ll make sure nobody hits us.” I carefully backed up around the curve until I was sure somebody cresting the hill could see the flashing lights in my rear window before they got into the curve. This was no time to get run over by an ambulance. Or the sheriff.
“Comm, Three, and I 388 are ten-twenty-three.” I hung up the mike, grabbed my walkie-talkie, and opened my car door.
Sally’s acknowledging “Ten-four, Three” just about blew me out of the car. I’d forgotten about cranking up the volume in order to hear over the sirens. I took a second to turn it way down, and then got out of the car, locked it up, and headed toward the scene. You always leave the engine running in the winter, so radio traffic doesn’t run down your battery. It’s also a good idea to have at least three sets of keys.
The Heinman farm sat well below road level, about fifty yards to my left. On my right, a steeply sloped, heavily wooded hill rose maybe a hundred feet above the roadbed. The farm lane came uphill toward the mailbox at a slant, with bare-limbed maple trees between it and the road. As an added measure, between the road and those trees was an old woven-wire fence covered with a thick tangle of brush and weeds. Put up, I was sure, to keep the larger debris from the roadway out of the Heinman property. There was an old, rusty Ford tractor from the fifties, quietly decomposing within ten feet of the galvanized mailbox that was perched on top of a wooden fencepost. That old tractor had been there the very first time I’d seen the farm, nearly twenty-five years ago. By now it and its rotting tires had become part of the landscape.
I saw 216 talking to the two elderly Heinman brothers. They were near the mailbox, looking toward the area ahead of the patrol car. As I approached, a body came slowly into my view in front of 216’s car. It was lying kind of on its left side, parallel with the direction of the road, with its feet pointing away and downhill from me. I started making mental notes as I walked. Faded blue plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, one black tennis shoe…and hands bound behind its back with yellow plastic binders. Damn. We call them Flex Cuffs, and use them when we run out of handcuffs. They’re like the bindings for electrical wiring: once they’re on, they have to be cut off. What we had here was an execution.
Two more steps, and I saw the head. More accurately, I saw the remains of the head. You often hear the phrase “blow their head off,” but it’s rare to actually see it.
Hester and 216 stepped over and joined me at the body.
“Hi Carl,” said Trooper 216.
“Gary. Glad you could come.”
“Notice the hands?”
“Right away. And the one shoe.
