The Big Thaw (4 page)

I turned on the lights at the top of the stairs, rechecked my holster strap, and went down slowly. It was one of those basements that’s about three-quarters finished, with the area around the furnace and water heater left in concrete floor, studded walls, and unfinished ceiling. The first thing that caught my eye as I descended the stairs was the top of the water heater. White. Clean. Except for a puddle of what looked like a rusty water stain near the middle. The center of the puddle was reddish, and the outer edges were yellowish to almost clear. The problem was, all the pipes seemed to come out the side of the heater, not the top. So much for a rust stain. I peered over the edge of the railing. It looked like the water had dripped from somewhere up under the stairs. I continued down to the basement floor, and walked back to the heater. The puddled stain was dry but thickish, looking like you could flake off chips from the edges. And there was a similar colored stain on the underside of the basement stairs, right over the heater. I looked a little closer, and saw that this stain, too, was more solid than water stains would be. It had a bit of a convexity at the center, like it had been trying to form into a droplet when it congealed. Stalactite or stalagmite? flickered through my head. I could never remember which was which.

I was virtually certain it was blood. I couldn’t “prove” it, not yet. But that’s what it was. The lighter edges were a dead giveaway. Large stains tend to congeal, leaving the plasma in a ring around the outside, the red cells clumped together in the middle. They begin to clot, while the plasma seems to stay liquid longer, so it spreads a little farther.

Well, so I was sure it was blood. So what?

I was getting really creeped, mostly because the house was so completely quiet. I moved through the partition door and into the finished part of the basement. Nothing remarkable, it was plainly a playroom for the grandkids, with those big plastic tricycles and riding tractors and things parked next to the far wall. Plastic ball, Hula Hoop, and an old couch and a Nintendo on a caterer’s cart. Nice room.

The throw rug at the door was bunched up, right where it would’ve been if the door had been opened and it had been pushed aside. But I’d tested that door from the outside, and it was locked. I snorted to myself. Sure, Carl. But it could be opened from the
inside
, and shut again. Concentrate.

I opened the basement door, and looked out into the blackness of the backyard. I played my flashlight around at the gazebo ice palace. With the light angle, I saw something I hadn’t seen when I was out there. There was a gentle depression, kind of like a filled in furrow, in the snow, leading right from the back door to the gazebo, past it, and on toward the largest of the machine sheds. A virtually straight line, in the old snow. Made before Monday noon, when the new snow was laid down deep.

I glanced down, and the pink drops on the concrete took on a more sinister meaning. Frozen blood on concrete looks for the world like drops of Pepto-Bismol. Pink. I’d thought it was paint. Now I was pretty sure it was blood. If you’d dragged a body down the stairs, and then opened the door, and paused to get your breath, and let the body sit just long enough for blood to drip…

Well.

I was going to have to go to the machine shed, to see what was at the end of the furrow. Had to do that. I was now just about certain that the cousins had argued, and that one had killed the other. Just about. Either that, or somebody had been staying at the house after all, and they had been killed by the cousins. Or, that Fred had killed somebody and was trying to place the blame on two noninvolved cousins. That brought me up short.

As soon as I got out the basement door, I pulled my walkie-talkie from my belt, and contacted the office.

“Comm, Three?”

“Three?”

“Could you get somebody else here? We’d like some ten-seventy-eight out here. We’ll be ten-six for a while. Not ten-thirty-three, but send him.” That meant that I was going to be busy, and it wasn’t an emergency. I sure didn’t want my favorite sheriff sliding into the ditch, running lights and siren, coming to help me look into a shed. Even though he was a good boss, that sort of thing could adversely affect my career.

“What you got, Three?” asked Mike, from his car in the yard.

“Maybe something on the order of a seventy-nine. Not sure. Wait a couple. I’m gonna be walkin’ over to that big machine shed, from the basement back door.” 10-79 was the code for coroner notification. A “79” told Mike I might have a body in here someplace.

“Ten-four,” he said, crisply. Bodies, even if just suspected, tend to get your attention.

I put my walkie-talkie back on my belt, turned up the collar on my quilted down vest, pulled my stocking cap down over my ears, pulled on my gloves, and headed the fifty yards over to the steel machine shed. God, it was cold. I’d left my coat upstairs in the house. Of course. Well, I wasn’t about to go back. I squeaked and crunched through the snow, being very careful to swing widely away from the drag marks. It was remarkable, but looking back toward the house, the different light angle prevented me from seeing the marks at all.

When I got to the machine shed, I found the “walk-in” door stuck with ice. Great. I stepped to the big sliding steel doors, kicked at them a couple of times to break the frost adhesion, and slid it open about five feet. “Never trap a burglar, unless you want a fight.” Training turned to habit.

I went into the gloom of the big building, which was designed to hold a couple of tractors, and a combine. There was hay on the concrete floor, as insulation. One tractor off to the other side. A workbench. Those I could see in the light provided by my flashlight. I needed more light. This was a very large building. I reached over to my right side, feeling for a switch. Not likely I’d find one at the machinery entrance, but there should be one over by the walk-in door. I shined my flashlight to my right, and saw the switch at the end of a length of steel conduit, on the other side of the “people” entrance. I moved toward it, stepping over what I thought was some lumber, covered by a tarp. I glanced down to avoid tripping, and in the shadowed gap between the tarp and the wall, I saw a human hand.

I recoiled, moving back so fast I nearly lost my footing. I caught my breath, and let the effects of the adrenaline rush subside a bit. Okay, Carl. Get it together. This is what you were looking for. Just not quite where you’d expected to find it. Yeah.

Standing there in the large opening at the sliding door, I felt those eyes on me again. Stronger. I turned and looked back toward the house. Nothing. “Just what I need,” I said to myself. “You’re turning into an old lady, Houseman.” But it bothered me.

I fumbled with the microphone for my walkie-talkie with my gloved hand.

“Mike, why don’t you get Nine here, and hand your passenger over to him?”

“Ten-four … I think he’s comin’ over here anyway. So what’s up?”

“I think we’re into a real seventy-nine situation. And … uh … you might want to get alert here.”

“We got company?” He sounded almost happy.

“Not sure, just don’t take a chance. You … uh … might want to hand your passenger over to Nine back up the lane. Out of sight of the residence.” I just couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

“Ten-four.” More serious now. It was sinking in with him, too.

I forced myself back into the shed. I hated to do it, but I stepped over the tarp again, and switched on the big fluorescent overhead lights. They flickered a few times, and then came on, casting a bluish light throughout the shed.

“There,” I said to myself. “Better…”

Cautiously, I shined my flashlight down into the recesses of the mustard-colored tarp. Sure as hell, there was a hand. Pinkish, with the flesh flattened in a way that only the lifeless can manage. And frosted.

I had to know. Hell, I was required to know. Gingerly, I reached down, and pulled at the stiff, frozen tarp. It didn’t want to move. I pulled harder. It resisted, and then, suddenly, came away from the wall.

I stepped back, again. I was looking at what appeared to be a human, with the head in a white garbage bag. There was a tear in the bag, and part of the head was exposed, including the right eye. Lying on the floor of the shed, whoever it was was very, very dead.

The tarp was still clinging to the floor. A light edging of ice. In the back of my mind, that told me that the tarp had been placed there before the cold snap. I reached down, to pull it free. As I did so, I noticed booted feet protruding from underneath the tarp, at the other end.

Three of them.

Two bodies? Two? I walked over, and lifted the stiff edge of the canvas sheet. It was really dark under there, but I could see, side by side, frost-covered and stiff, the lower half of two frozen bodies.

Brothers, I was willing to bet. Both of them, as Fred would say.

They were nearly identically “packaged.” White plastic bags on the heads. I could barely make out some features, like noses and mouths. The bags didn’t appear to have been fastened around the neck. Just placed over the head.

I could see no obvious marks, holes, or bloodstains on the clothes. But, before the medical examiner and the lab got here, it would be most unwise to touch them.

I glanced back around the shed. One tractor. Otherwise, empty. Just a lot of straw-covered concrete floor, and two bodies under a tarp.

“Well, son of a bitch.” I took a deep breath, and dropped the stiff canvas. “Son of a bitch. What’d you get me into, Fred?”

I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me. “Who you talkin’ to?”

It was Mike.

“These two, here…”

He was still just outside the doorway, about eighteen inches behind me. I stepped aside, pointing to my discovery as he stepped over the threshold.

“These dudes,” I said, holding up the same corner of the tarp.

“Holy shit,” he said, quietly.

“Yeah.” I released the corner of the tarp. Being frozen, it very slowly fell back toward its original position. “We better get out of here, before I disturb any more than I have. We’re gonna need the crime lab up here on this one.”

“Yeah.” He stared at the slowly descending tarp. “Any idea what killed ’em?”

“Not the faintest.” I pulled my muffler up about my face. “Nobody’s in the house, far as I know, but there’s some evidence in there. These two might have been done in the house. No idea how. Just remember we don’t let anybody in…”

“Okay.” He looked up toward the house, then back at the shed. “Are these Fred’s two cousins?”

“I dunno,” I sighed. “Don’t let anybody say anything to Fred, yet.”

“Sure,” said Mike.

“I suppose he’s now a murder suspect … but don’t say that.” I doubted that he really was, but we had to be safe.

“Right. Yeah. So, what? Just leave him with John when he gets here?”

“Yeah. For right now. Just don’t talk to him.” Fred was officially in custody, and Mirandized, but I didn’t want anybody talking to him without him having access to an attorney. I wasn’t a raging liberal, it was just that there was absolutely no reason to blow a case at this point. Time to start dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in earnest. I looked around the shed. “I sure as hell hope there aren’t any more in here.”

“Shit, don’t say that…”

Mike and I trudged back up the slope together. I told him I was going to get my camera and do some quick preliminary shots through the door of the shed, and try to get some photos of the tracks in the headlights of our cars. If it was to snow again, or to warm up, all the remaining exterior evidence would be lost.

When I got to my car, I called the office. Radio being so closely listened to on scanners, particularly when everybody was in their homes to escape the terrible cold, I had to be pretty circumspect with my requests, and hope that the dispatcher got the oblique references. I felt secure that my transmissions on the 5 watt walkie-talkie had gone unnoticed, but the 100 watt car radio and the 1,000 watt main base transmitter were a different story. I didn’t want anybody to know we had found bodies. Not yet.

“Comm, Three?”

“Go ahead…”

“Yeah, look, we have a seventy-nine here, and we’re going to need the whole shebang. Ten-four?”

There was a pause. “I, uh, copy the seventy-nine. Could you ten-nine the rest?”

Well, I could repeat it, but I chose instead to try to clarify. “We will need the usual ten-seventy-eight here.”

Silence. 10-78 was the code for assistance. There was no code for crime lab, none for requesting a DCI agent. But, at a homicide, we always needed both. But, cagey soul that I am, 10-78 tends to vary depending upon the situation. Of course. All I had told her was that we needed a coroner, and the usual assistance.

She was new. “Copy you need ten-seventy-eight?” The edge to her voice told me right away that she thought we needed more cops, and fast.

“Negative. Negative, Comm. Look, I’ll ten-twenty-one in a minute.” That meant that I would call her on a phone. That would be best, naturally, and I could explain everything in detail. I hated to do it, though, because it meant that I had to reenter the Borglan residence. Each time you do that, a defense attorney will try to make it sound like you strolled through the scene, scattering bogus evidence like they used to scatter garlands in front of Roman emperors.

Never try to clarify with more obscurity, though. Especially on a radio.

Back in the Borglan household, I found a phone in the kitchen, and called the office. I explained that we would need her to contact a medical examiner, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation for an assisting agent and the mobil crime lab, and that she would have to call our boss, Nation County Sheriff Lamar Ridgeway, and tell him what was happening.

“Uh, Carl, could I call in another dispatcher to help?”

“Sure. Good idea. Just remember to tell me, ‘Ten-sixty-nine’ as you get the items done.” 10-69 stood for “message received,” and would mean that she had completed a call. “Message one will be for the medical examiner, message two will be for DCI, and message three will be Lamar. Got it?”