Free A Long December by Donald Harstad Page B

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,”