“Yes… couldn’t see who, but three, four people. They looked like they were headed to one of the sheds or for the barn. I was by before they got there, if that was where they were going.”
Cool. And there was still coffee left.
“You might want to check with Elmo Hazlett,” he said. “The milk hauler. He drives route out that way.”
“Thanks.”
Granger chuckled. “He’s got his head up his butt most of the time, though, so if he didn’t run over ‘em, he probably didn’t notice.”
When we got back in our cars, I checked in with the office on my radio. There was nothing new, the troops were still assisting the lab team at the crime scene, and Norm Vincent was waiting for us in his office.
Norm Vincent was really apologetic. The Battenberg chief was a decent guy, and like I said, was under quite a bit of strain with all the hours he’d been putting in. He’d seen and heard nothing of any use at all. The word was out in Battenberg that there had been some sort of murder just north of them. That wasn’t unusual, since there were dozens of people in town with police scanners. But nothing had struck a chord, apparently, because none of his “informants” had contacted him. Well, he called them “informants.” To put it nicely, Norm wasn’t a really active sort of officer, and I don’t think he had more than three or four “informants,” total, and I suspected they were all high school kids who were lying to him about half the time. But he was trying, and I knew that he’d try even harder after having fallen back asleep on us that afternoon. Good enough. We gave him only one detail, and that was the nature of the wound. We wanted him to know the type of person he could be dealing with if he turned a suspect up.
“Christ,” he said with some feeling.
“We’ll have more for you, Chief,” said Hester, “as soon as we get our evidence all sorted out.”
“Thanks.”
“Until then,” I said, “just let us know if anything surfaces. Don’t try to take somebody yourself. Get backup.”
“Sure. You bet.”
“I’m really serious. Don’t take anybody alone, and I wouldn’t try it with just a couple of cops, either. Whoever did this isn’t gonna blink at the thought of killing somebody else.”
“Okay, Carl. Okay. I get the point.”
“Good. I’d hate to lose anybody over this one.” I decided to trust him with another bit of evidence. “You think you can get hold of Elmo Hazlett for us?”
“He’s probably asleep by now.”
That was likely true, because Elmo would have to be up by about three A.M. in order to get started on his milk route in time. I didn’t think it would be worth waking him up and aggravating him. We didn’t know that he’d even seen anything. There was just a chance that he might have. It was one of those decisions you have to make, and just hope it’s the right one.
“You out till three or four? “I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you see Elmo, tell him we’d like to chat with him for a few minutes. Whenever it’s convenient for him, but sometime tomorrow.”
The old Dodd place was kind of spooky, nestled between two large hills where the wind sort of hummed through the bare trees. Hester and I stopped at the mailbox and examined the powdery dust at the end of the lane, checking for tire tracks. Sure enough, there was one beauty about eighteen inches long, where somebody had come from the lane and turned north, toward the crime scene.
We did photos of it and called for the lab team to see if they could make a cast. Bob Ulrich hitched a ride down to our location with one of our reserves who we called Old Knockle. He was old, nearly seventy. He was also feisty, and knew the county very well.
We waited for them, pointed out the track, and then took my car up the lane to the buildings. One car was best, mainly because it would damage about half as much evidence as two.
There were four old wooden buildings, pretty dilapidated, on the left side of the gaping foundation that had been the Dodd residence. On the other side was an old concrete-block silo with rusty iron straps encircling it at about five-foot intervals. The rusted steel dome reminded me of an observatory. About fifty feet from it was an old platform for a windmill. It was really getting dark by now, especially down in the valley, and we had to use my headlights, spotlight, and flashlights to snoop about.
The paint was flaking from the weathered gray boards of the buildings, but you could still tell they’d been red, once upon a time. The floors were wood, as well-weathered pale and with the sunken grain that’s peculiar to old wood. We’d go in the doorway of each one, stand there for a minute as we shone our flashlights around, and then enter carefully, making sure we didn’t step on anything that was obviously evidence. With fortune typical of searchers, it was in the fourth and last building that we hit pay dirt.
“Hey, Houseman?”
“Yeah?”
“Look over here, in the corner.” Hester pointed with her light.
“Well, no shit,” I said. “Our missing shoe.”
I went back to my car, got my cameras, took an establishing shot of the building, and then went inside and took six shots of the black tennis shoe, on its side, the laces still tied.
“I move we don’t go any closer, and let the lab do the whole area,” said Hester.
“Fine by me.”
“When your flash went off,” she said, “see over here… Does that look like a bloodstain to you?”
Near the shoe, there was an old toolbox. At the base of the box, there was a large, fresh stain that did look like blood.
“You bet,” I said, and started taking shots of that, as well.
“Try a couple of high-low angles, Carl. It looks from here like the dust has been wiped off the box and the floor near it. See if you can get that.” Hester laid her flashlight on the floor, the low angle of the beam making the swipe marks in the dust pop out.
I took four shots using only the light cast by her flashlight. They’d be pretty stark, but they’d turn out fine.
“It looks,” she said, “like somebody maybe was sitting on the box?”
“Yep.” I squatted down to give myself a low-angle view. “And from down here, I think I get a couple of shoe prints over here, too, when the light’s just right.” I laid my flashlight on the floor like she had, and sure as hell, footprints just seemed to pop out in relief.
“Several,” she said.
“Way cool.”
“Lab team stuff for sure,” said Hester, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “I think we’ve got ourselves a clue or two.”
We sat in my car, waiting for Bob from the lab to finish his tire castings and come down the short lane to the outbuildings.
“So,” I said, “why’s the shoe here?”
“Beats me, Houseman. I just assist you guys.” She laughed. “That means you get to guess first,” she said.
“Okay… the easiest and least likely one first. How about they take him to the building to kill him, and he gets away?”
“Perfect. How far is it to the crime scene from here? Half a mile”Pretty close, but a little more, I think.”
“Long way to run, Houseman.” She took out her Palm Pilot and started writing.
“Especially with one shoe on and your hands behind your back.” I glanced at her two-by-two-inch screen. “You might want to make a note of that. I did say it was the least likely.”
“Just a sec,” she said, sounding distracted. “Okay, then. So he lost the shoe here, but he didn’t run from here? I think that’s right.”
“Keep going.”
“Right. So, they had a struggle here, though, don’t you think?”
“Okay. Hell, if I thought they were going to kill me, I’d struggle.”
