Eleven Days (7 page)

“Yeah.” I went back upstairs. She was upset, I was upset. As usual. I kept thinking that it wasn’t me she was mad at, just the situation. Unfortunately I was the target. I lay down again and finally slept. Woke at seven-fifteen. I had forgot to set the alarm, and Sue hadn’t remembered to wake me.

Since I started at 20:00 hours, half my shift was on the 23rd and half was on the 24th. It was routine most of the night, which meant that I simply drove through six towns and stared at empty stores, dark residences, and sparsely populated taverns. We always had to do one round right away, to check on the status of the various potential burglary targets, such as convenience stores, implement dealers, etc. Then maybe a break at the office, and a second round. There are very few eating places in the county that are open after 22:00, and those that are happen to be taverns. Nothing wrong with taverns, except I hate to eat with somebody who’s slightly intoxicated trying to explain to me why his second cousin shouldn’t have gotten a ticket for speeding in another county. And especially now, with the sensational case we had, there would be a lot of questions. Always eat either in the car or at the office.

I hit the office at about 00:45, where I met Mike and Dan. We went to the kitchen and opened our sandwiches. Conference time.

It was accepted among the three of us that we were
going to have to try to solve this case in spite of Theo’s efforts. Since we had been the first officers at the McGuire home, we sort of felt that we had a special interest.

I was the only one of the three of us who had been at the Herkaman residence, so I started off by filling them in on what I had seen. We agreed that the Herkaman house victims were probably involved in Satanism. We also agreed that it looked like Satanism had been a motive in the killings. Somehow. But they agreed with me that it seemed a little too obvious and heavy. Something was wrong, but we didn’t know what.

The department was putting on heavy pressure to identify the unknown woman at the Herkaman residence, and all the officers in the county had been contacted, given a physical description, and asked to nose it around. Nothing. Photographs of her face would be available by noon on the 24th, and they would be passed around, too.

Dan, of course, thought he had seen her somewhere. This is a fairly typical police officer’s response, particularly when you haven’t actually seen the victim. What it means is that you are trying to visualize the person, and are comparing him or her to several people you know, to complete your visual picture. In the process, you are subconsciously identifying several people, none of whom are the one in question. So you “think I’ve seen her, but I can’t remember where.”

The Herkaman house was in the zone Mike normally covered, and he was trying to think of any activities in that area that had really caught his attention. He finally scored.

“Wait a minute. Do you remember, oh, six months or so ago, that 10–50 out on C 23? The one where the gal tried to miss a deer and got the cluster of mailboxes?”

We didn’t.

“That was Phyllis Herkaman!”

“Okay.”

“No, no, there was a passenger in the car—a female, with a little cut on the bridge of her nose! She was with
Phyllis. I know she was, and I bet it was the unknown woman.”

We checked. The first step was to go to Sally and have her run Phyllis Herkaman’s driving record. This had already been done, of course, to obtain her date of birth. But the copy had been given to Theo, so we’d probably never see it again. It was a chance to get the date of the accident, to help us find the accident report in the files. We are, thanks to repeated efforts of Lamar Ridgeway, decidedly low-tech. We were going to have to go through a stack of some six hundred accident reports, covering that period, which were rather loosely organized. Which means that they are put in as they are received, but even that order is disturbed when they are sifted by somebody who needs a copy of one of them. We needed a date.

Mike couldn’t remember if there had been more than five hundred dollars’ damage, which meant that if there hadn’t been, the state wouldn’t have gotten a copy of the report, which meant, in turn, that there would be no record of the event in the state computer.

We three had rushed out to Sally, who had caught the excitement. An actual lead, for God’s sake. The adrenaline rush came to an abrupt end.

“The state computer is down.”

A collective “Shit.”

Sally was encouraging, though. “It’ll probably be back up in an hour or so.”

We went to the main office and grabbed all the accident reports, divided them into four nearly equal stacks, gave one to Sally, and started to go through them.

Thirty minutes later, we had nothing.

“Mike, you sure you didn’t give Phyllis a ticket?”

The ticket stack was considerably smaller than the accident stack.

“No, there was a little deer hair on the car. No violation.”

We average about five hundred car vs. deer accidents a
year. Nothing unusual about it, and tickets are never issued, because the deer have a tendency to try to hit the car, not vice versa.

We exchanged stacks and tried again. Still nothing.

Mike was getting even more frustrated than the rest of

us.

“Damn it, I know that it was in November or early December, when the deer are so thick.”

“Well,” said Sally, “I can go back through the telephone logs, to see when it was reported …”

“No,” said Mike, “that won’t be any help. I drove up on it just after it happened. There was no report.” He paused. “You might try the radio logs, though. I had to call it in.”

Sally sighed. “Okay, you have a time?”

“Probably between 23:00 and 01:00.”

“One of you want to watch the radio while I go to the basement—all last year’s logs are down there.”

Being gentlemen, Mike and I went to the basement. The old radio logs were kept in cardboard boxes, most of which were labeled. It took about thirty minutes. The one we wanted was labeled, but the label was facing the wall. Figures.

Sally finally found the correct entry, at 00:19 hours on November 20. Mike called in that he was going to be out of the car at a motorist assist, called back a few minutes later, said it was a car vs. deer, and that he would be 10–6 for a while at the scene. Gave a plate of MKQ339.

The state computer was still down, but we did a manual lookup of Q339 in our own files, and found that it was on a yellow ’82 Dodge, registered to Phyllis Herkaman.

“Well, we got it.”

“Now all we need is the damned report …”

Armed with a date, we went through the reports again. Zero.

“Goddammit! It’s got to be here somewhere.”

It wasn’t.

We sat there in the dispatch center, defeated.

“Well,” I said, “somebody’s got to have it.”

The unstated implication was that Mike might have forgotten to make out a report.

“Was she hurt bad enough to go to the hospital?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, and besides, I remember Phyllis saying that she would take care of it. They won’t have a record.”

“How about her insurance agent?”

“Possible, Dan. I suppose that could be checked out in the morning.” I was getting more disappointed. We wanted to present the day shift with her name, not with more work.

“Just a minute,” said Sally. “Wasn’t that the one where the farmer reported the mailbox vandalism the next morning, because he didn’t realize it was an accident?”

Bingo.

Back to the basement, to find the complaint report of the vandalism. Easy. Then to the case files, and there it was. Theo had apparently taken the accident report from the accident file and included it in the mailbox vandalism case file. Too lazy to make a copy.

Her name was Peggy Keller, and her age was given as thirty-one.

Sally announced that the state computer was back up. We ran Peggy Keller and got a driver’s license. The DL indicated that she was five feet four inches tall and weighed 117 pounds. With blue eyes. I wasn’t sure about the eyes, but she was blond, so that was a fair guess. We had our victim, we were sure. And her address was listed as Iowa City.

I looked at my watch: 01:58. Just about seventy-two hours after the first homicide was reported, we had identified the fourth victim. Not exactly breaking any records. It was tentative, to be sure, but I felt that we were right.

There was an air of mild euphoria in the dispatch center.

“Shit,” said Dan. “Let’s not tell anybody, and see how long it takes the rest of them to ID her.”

We all laughed.

“Sally, be sure to have the next dispatcher call Lamar and tell him we have a tentative ID on the fourth victim.”

“Come on, Carl, shouldn’t I call Theo first?” She was grinning.

“Send Theo a letter.”

After identifying Peggy Keller, tentatively, of course, we all went back out on the road. I went directly to the McGuire residence and drove into the yard. Spooky. It was one of those Mary Shelley kind of nights … a light mist, patchy fog, with the trees still bare and stark. The kind of night that seems to eat your headlights, with everything just a little darker than normal, but with an uninterrupted sight distance—like it was all receding from your plane of reality a little bit.

McGuire’s house was dark, of course, but the yard light was still on.

“Comm, three.”

“Three?”

“I’ll be out of the car at the McGuire residence for a minute or two. I’ll have the walkie.”

“10–4, three’s out of the car, 02:23.”

It’s been my experience that, while it’s the criminal who’s always supposed to return to the scene of the crime, it is a lot more likely that you’ll find an officer going back. There’s a feel to the scene, somehow, that sometimes
helps to focus your thoughts. Not always consciously, of course. Frequently you’re just sort of drawn back to it.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Just sort of wandering around the yard and then up to the porch. It was very quiet, only the muffled sound of my car running in the background. An occasional faint rasping sound from the police radio in the car, which was picking up traffic my walkie-talkie wasn’t.

I shined my flashlight into the machine shed. Mostly rusty farm equipment, with a fairly new tractor. Lots of steel and iron pieces lying around, most of them in pretty sad shape. I went in, knowing that I wouldn’t find anything of substance, as the lab team had already been through it very well. Especially Hester. But I wanted to get a feeling for the type of person McGuire was, and since this was where he worked, it was worth just being there for a few minutes.

I left the machine shed with the impression that McGuire, while a farmer, wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about it.

I went toward the house, walking around the corner toward the door we had entered two nights ago. I saw something reflecting in the beam of my flashlight, something affixed to the door. I stepped closer. An expensive-looking crucifix, wooden with what appeared to be a silver Christ. It had been nailed to the door.

I went back to the car, for my camera, and to call Mike as a witness.

“Comm, have Mike work his way out here, would you? Not urgent, but within the next few minutes, if he can.”

“10–4.”

“And I’ll be out of the car again.”

I rummaged around in my backseat, got out my camera, attached the flash, and went back to the door to photograph the crucifix. I was holding the camera to my eye, with my flashlight tucked under my arm and pointing at the door, to let me see well enough to focus the camera,
when I heard somebody running on the back side of the house. Sounded like they were running on wet carpet.

Well, when the clarion call sounds, you always think you’ll be ready. Here I was with my wife’s camera, fumbling for a good grip on my flashlight, thundering around the corner of the house, not able to draw my gun without dropping the light or letting go of the camera, and totally unprepared to tackle a suspect. But I was there. Just in time to see a figure disappear into the pine trees that formed a windbreak on the west side of the house. Running at an angle, which would bring him or her out either on the road or at the next farm. And running fast.

I ran back to my car.

“Comm, I have, I see, a subject, on foot, running west, get five, up here, I’ll be in pursuit …” I was breathing pretty hard.

“Three, 10–9?”

Repeat. Breathing harder than I thought. I put the camera in the car, got behind the wheel, and picked up the mike again.

“Comm, I have a suspect on foot, running northwest from the residence. Get five here quick.”

“10–4, three.”

I drove back down the lane, almost losing control on the little hill. The lane was greasy. Got out to the gravel, turned left, and went down the road about three hundred yards, to a high point where I would be able to see fairly far. I turned on my spotlight, pointing it back toward the McGuire lane and lighting along the roadside fence line. I pointed the car about forty-five degrees right, shining the headlights into the area the suspect was heading. I got out of the car, locked it up, and went across the barbed-wire fence and into the field. I ran down into the field, out of the light from my car, and then squatted down to listen.

The field was very rough, with the remains of last year’s cornstalks sticking up about a foot or so. Hard to travel through, and I should be able to hear someone running
pretty easily. I was hoping I had got to my vantage point well ahead of the suspect, and he would think I was in my car. I waited.

“Three, five?”

I always keep the mike-speaker of my walkie-talkie clipped on my left shoulder. You can keep the volume down that way and still hear. Unfortunately, in situations like this one, it always startles you.

“Go ahead, five.”

“Three, five?”

Great. With a walkie-talkie, in open terrain, it is not unusual for you to be able to receive far better than you transmit. The case now. He couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t get to the car to use the main radio.