Free A Long December by Donald Harstad Page A

asked why I was being so nice, and I told him that it wouldn’t be worth my time to charge him with such a small amount. I did make it clear that I could still do it, however, if he preferred it that way. He thanked me, and in a weak moment said that if I ever needed a favor…. That’s how informants are made.
    “Now, I know you can listen, Hector. Just for a second.”
    “Okay,” he sighed.
    “There was a man just killed, out in the country, a couple of hours ago. Pretty close to Battenberg. Whoever did him blew his head off. He seems to be Hispanic. You with me so far?”
    There was a silence, and then a faint, “Yeah, man?”
    “We don’t know who it is, Hector. There wasn’t enough left of his face to even guess. Okay so far?”
    “Holy chit, man. I doan know nothing about this.” He tended to shift into an accent when he was getting stressed.
    “That’s gotta be a good thing. Look, Hector, all I want you to do is just give me a call if you hear who it was, okay?”
    A pause, then, “Sure, man. I will do that.”
    “I appreciate it.”
    “No problem.”
    I caught up to Hester as she was knocking on Granger’s door.
    Most rural mail carriers know their districts like the back of their hands, and Granger was no exception. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the road back to Battenberg, though. Nope. Not a thing.
    It pays not to rush. He offered coffee, and I accepted. Hester looked a little anxious to get going, but I needed a cup.
    As we sat around the living room, coffee in hand, Granger said something that made it all worthwhile.
    “But, you know what? At the old Dodd place, just past the hollow? There was a cream-colored Subaru there earlier today. Parked by the barn. It was gone when I came back by, but I’d never seen that there before. If it helps…”
    “About what time?” I asked. I knew the old Dodd place. The house had been abandoned, but whoever farmed the land still used the sheds and other outbuildings. The fire department had burned the house in a controlled burn for practice about five years back.
    “Oh, it was after lunch… I always take my northern route after I grab a sandwich, so that would be about one-ten or so.”
    Punctuality is a trademark of the rural mail carriers. If he said 1:10, then he was within five minutes.
    “Anybody around it?”
    “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