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
'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?'
'Yes.'
'Now, I want you to try to get a DL on two subjects… a Dirk and a Royce Colson. Should be about twenty or so. Maybe twenty-five. Not from Nation County, but I think maybe from around Oelwein.'
'Okay…'
'Eventually, I'm going to need height and weight, eye color, and that sort of thing. The physical descriptors.'
'Got it.'
'Cool. Okay, now I'm gonna be a long way from a phone for a time, taking some photos. Just give me the ten- sixty-nines over the radio. I'll be on portable. If I don't acknowledge, Mike will. He's in his car.'
'Okay…' She didn't sound quite sure, but I knew she'd do fine. Especially when the other dispatcher arrived.
'And don't give anything, and I mean anything, regarding the Colsons over the radio unless I specifically ask you to do so.'
I let myself back out, grabbing my coat this time, and went to Mike's car and told him what had been said. I got my camera out of my car, and crunched my way back down to the shed. I figured I'd better take the photos there first, since the subzero temperature might deplete my camera battery and leave me with no way to take photos.
As I stood in the doorway of the big steel shed, fumbling with the flash attachment in the cold, the feeling of being watched came rushing back with a vengeance.
At the Academy, years ago, one of our instructors told us that, if you ever got a spooky feeling, pay close attention to it. You might be reacting to something you've picked up subconsciously, that just hasn't made it all the way up to awareness. I'd always considered it good advice, although it had only worked for me one out of about ten times, when there was a man hiding in the rafters of an implement store we were searching. I thought that once was pretty good, though. He'd had a gun, and we later found he was just waiting for me to pass before he shot me in the back. I'd stopped, and backed up a step, which had put me out of his line of fire. We all figured I'd glimpsed him in my peripheral vision, but that it hadn't registered. Anyway, it was a distinctive feeling, and that time before it had been very strong. It was back, and this time it was even stronger.
I stopped after I attached the flash, and paused for a moment. Then I looked around, very slowly. Nothing unusual. But I had the solid feeling that I was being watched. I switched the flash off, and did a slow pirouette, snapping a shot about every ten degrees or so. It was just possible that I might catch something with the camera I was overlooking.
The feeling persisted.
I tried to shake it off. 'Probably Mike,' I said to myself. Could have been. Could have been the residual effect of that frozen eye. Most likely, I thought, it was the result of being alone with the two bodies. Most people seem to get really self-conscious when they're alone with the dead. I was no different.
