Code 61 (5 page)

THREE

Saturday, October 7, 2000
07:40

I was brushing my teeth in our upstairs bathroom when I thought I heard the phone ring. I turned off the water, and listened. Nothing. I turned the water back on, glad there hadn't been a call, because my wife, Sue, was asleep. She was a middle-school teacher, and Saturday was about the only day she could sleep past six-thirty.

I was tapping the toothbrush on the side of the sink, and just reaching to turn off the water, when the bathroom door opened a few inches, and Sue's hand and arm came through, holding out the portable phone. “Okay,” she said, her voice throaty with sleep. “He's right here.” It would have been better if she'd said that into the phone, but I didn't think it prudent to bring that up. I was going to hear about this. I took the phone, and the hand disappeared.

“Houseman.”

“Carl?” It was the voice of Norma, one of the newer dispatchers. Well, sure. Who else? “Yep.”

“Uh, we got a call, at, ummm … 06:36 … and I sent Eight up on it. He got there, and thinks we should, uh, probably have you come up and take a look.” Her voice seemed to be about an octave higher than usual. “Eight” referred to Nation County Sheriff's Car Eight, the radio call sign of Tom Borman, a newish deputy with about two years' service. He seemed like a good sort, and pretty serious about his job.

“What's he got?” I asked as I walked down the hall to our bedroom to dress. I was pretty sure he didn't want me to show up in just my boxer shorts.

“The first call said there'd been an accident. That was on 911. Something about a lady in a tub. The caller wasn't really clear, female, just wanted help in a hurry.”

“What's he want, help lifting her?” I asked. That wasn't good enough a reason to call me out early, and it was a hell of a long way from being sufficient reason to wake Sue. I guess I sounded a little exasperated.

“No, no. No, we got a second phone call after the Freiberg ambulance got there. I sent them right away. They said”—and she seemed to be reading right off her dispatch log—“this subject is code blue, and we think there should be a cop up here right away, it looks like a suicide.”

Well, that explained the call to me. Department policy is to treat suicides as if they were homicides, at least until murder had been ruled out. Who do you call to deal with a possible homicide? I was still the investigator, even though I was supposed to be working the noon-to-midnight shift. I couldn't blame Eight. He was new, and working the ten-at-night to ten-in-the-morning shift. The worst possible shift, as far as I was concerned. Even if he was virtually certain sure it was a suicide, he should ask for an experienced investigator. That would be me. And, since he asked for my assistance, I was now stuck with the report. “Right. I'll get dressed and—”

“It's three and a half miles south of Freiberg, off County Road X8G, then the second gravel to—”

I hate to be rude, but I was trying to pull on my blue jeans and still talk on the phone. Writing the directions down was out of the question.

“Just tell me after I get in the car and I'm headed up to Freiberg. I'll take X8G up, okay?”

“Sure,” she said. Her voice got some crispness back into it, and I knew I'd hurt her feelings by implying criticism.

“I'm trying to put on my pants,” I said, and grinned as I said it, to lighten my voice. “Only so many hands.”

“Oh … sure … Just one more thing, maybe, while I have you on the phone. I don't think this should be on the radio.”

Having at least managed to get both legs in the jeans, I sat on the end of the bed, and said, “Sure.”

“Eight called me on the phone, and said that this is a really bad one, but that it's a confirmed suicide.”

“Oh?” I hate pulling on socks with one hand. I also hate junior officers making bald-faced statements like that. I mean, they're probably right most of the time, but all you need in a possible murder case is for some defense attorney to get his hands on a logged statement like that one.
“But doesn't it say, right here, that the first officer on the scene determined this to be a suicide?”
But the log couldn't be changed. Only amended, sort of. “Log it that I say that it's not a suicide until the ME's office says so,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Really bad. And to handle it code sixty-one. That's all he said.”

We used the signal code sixty-one to indicate that all radio communication regarding a particular incident be circumspect, and terse. It meant we had either a sensitive matter, or a very serious one, or both. At any rate, it was designed to prevent those with police scanners from becoming well informed.

“Okay, kid. You call Lamar yet?” Lamar was our sheriff, and he liked to be kept apprised of tragic and disastrous happenings in the county. Mainly because he hated to go to breakfast at Phil's Café and have somebody ask him about a case before he knew we
had
a case. Looked bad. I pushed my stocking feet into my tennis shoes.

“Yes, and he said to send you right up.”

“Well, let's see if we can't arrange that,” I said with a hissing sound as I bent over to tie my shoelaces, the phone pressed tightly between my shoulder and my ear.

“And he said to call him if you needed him to come, too.”

“Fine. I'll call you on the radio.” I pressed the “off” button on the phone and turned to put it back in the charger.

“You need any help?” came Sue's voice from the other side of the bed. “It sure looks like it from here.”

“No.”

“I'm going to try to go back to sleep … ”

I stood, pulled a dark gray polo shirt over my head, and slid my clip-on holster into my belt, on my right hip. I walked over to Sue, bent down, and gave her a kiss.

“Good luck.”

“You, too,” she said, nearly asleep again already.

I grabbed my gun, my walkie-talkie, and my ID case; billfold and car keys from their drawer downstairs in the dining room, and was in my unmarked patrol car and reporting in to the dispatch center at 07:49.

“What time did you call me, Comm?” I asked. Curious.

“07:40.”

“Ten-four.” Nine minutes.
Getting old
, I thought.

I left Maitland, the county seat, where I lived and where the sheriff's office was located, and headed up the state highway to the intersection with X8G. It was a really pretty morning again. It was about fifty degrees, and warming. I love October.

The police radio in my car was ominously quiet. That was standard with the imposition of code sixty-one. Only officers can really know the spooky feeling that comes with that particular brand of silence. You know there's something really bad, you're going to the scene, and it's absolutely quiet because most of the communications traffic is either on the phones, or just not happening at all because you're the designated catalyst for the next phase, and you aren't there yet. Sort of undercurrents, I guess. But you learn to hate silence, sometimes.

I was moving about seventy or so, no lights or siren. They weren't really necessary, because there was absolutely no traffic anywhere. I became aware of intermittent sounds, like the faint patter of raindrops on the car. The sun was still shining brightly. Still no clouds. Then it dawned on me. Ladybugs. There were unusually large flights of ladybugs this year, and I was traveling through mini swarms of the little creatures. Well, that was at least one mystery solved today.

I was bothered again about Borman and the “suicide” statement, as I turned off onto X8G and dipped down into a valley along the Mississippi. He really should have known better, even with just a couple of years under his belt.

I traveled along the Mississippi again, past a stretch of maybe thirty small cabins on the right, or river side, of the road. They were across the railroad tracks that ran the length of the county in the valley of the Mississippi. I drove past a large, abandoned silica sand mine carved into the bluffs on the Iowa side, on my left. Then past a small sign near the railroad tracks that proclaimed “Givens' Switch.” There was nothing there but the sign, which had recently been placed by the county historical society. Commemorating one of those myriad little places that had just disappeared over the years.

I thought some more about Borman. He was taking a class in “Humanizing the Police,” or some such thing, taught by a sociologist via a college extension plan. He was picking up on all these “empathy” techniques, and I strongly suspected that this had somehow influenced him this morning. Or maybe I just was reluctant to acknowledge that he was a younger generation of cop. I chuckled to myself. Maybe, indeed. Fifty-five really isn't that old. Well, not if you're ninety.

About a quarter of a mile later, I turned back west, or inland, onto a gravel road called Willow, slowed to fifty or so, and called in for better directions.

“Comm, Three. Just turned onto the gravel. How 'bout those directions now?”

This sometimes got very interesting, because under code sixty-one rules, it forced a radio transmission that had to be very circumspect. Try that with directions, sometime.

“Ten-four, Three. Take your next right turn to the north. Take the second drive after the curve that sends you back east, toward the river.”

I paused, setting the directions in my mind. It was the great big house on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. It was usually known as “the Mansion,” although some of the local kids called it the Dropout Dorm, because of the people who lived there.

“Comm, M Mary?” I hoped she got it, because I didn't want anybody to know precisely where I was headed. I didn't know if the dispatcher, the ambulance crew, or Borman had specifically referred to the Mansion, but I wasn't going to. If somebody with a scanner had missed the initial traffic, I wasn't going to help them out now.

It took her a few seconds. “Oh, sure. Ten-four, that's the one. Confirm with last three: three five four.”

The 911 address would be 24354, useless to anyone who didn't have the name of the particular road. She asked for the last three digits to make sure I didn't have the wrong place. Nobody listening would know the first two digits unless they knew where I was all along.

I'd always been fascinated by that house. It was huge, of a kind called Victorian or Queen Anne, or something. It was perched at the end of a long lane on top of the bluff, with what had to be one of the finest views of the Mississippi River that was available from privately owned land. I'd never really been in the place before, although I'd been in the yard once. It was far and away the biggest house in Nation County.

“Ten-four, Comm, I know the location. ETA about five.”

If it hadn't been for the 911 address sign 24354, a partially hidden mailbox, and a big, blue plastic refuse bin that was just visible from the road, you wouldn't even have known there was a lane there at all. Located smack in the middle of the Beiderbaum Timber, a wooded area that ran along the west, or Iowa, bank of the Mississippi for about ten miles, the house sat out toward the east end of a long, wide finger of land that pointed right at the Mississippi River. Bordered by two streams, or creeks as they're called locally, the ridge itself was about half a mile wide, with the east end about two miles from the road that ran along its west side. I'd guess that the top of the ridge was about 250 feet above the roadway, covered with trees and low bushes and foliage on the long sides, and ending in a vertical limestone bluff overlooking the river. The gravel drive that extended uphill was nearly a mile and a half long, winding from the valley floor through a heavily wooded area that had littered the road surface with fallen leaves. I crested the rise, onto the top of the finger-shaped ridge, and traveled the last quarter mile on nearly level ground. The trees were just as thick up here, a mixture of brilliant yellow maples and tall, dark green pines. As I drove on to the house, I caught a glimpse of its reddish turreted roof through the trees. I passed through a weathered iron gate set in limestone blocks. They were part of a limestone wall that demarked the area between the woods and the cleared, almost manicured area that displayed the house. My car bumped slightly as I left the gravel and drove onto the wide new blacktop of the circular drive.