Known Dead_ A Novel - Donald Harstad [149]
The police radio in my car was ominously quiet. Only officers can really know the spooky feeling that comes with that particular brand of silence. You know there’s something really bad, you’re going to the scene, and it’s absolutely quiet because most of the communications traffic is either on the phones, or just not happening at all because you’re the designated catalyst for the next phase, and you aren’t there yet. Sort of undercurrents, I guess. But you learn to hate silence, sometimes.
I was moving about 70 or so, no lights or siren. Not really necessary, because there was absolutely no traffic anywhere. I became aware of intermittent sounds, like the faint patter of raindrops on the car. The sun was shining brightly. No clouds. Ah, it struck me. Ladybugs. There were unusually large flights of ladybugs this year. At least one mystery solved, today.
I was bothered again about Borman and the “suicide” statement, as I turned off onto X8G, and dipped down into a valley along the Mississippi. He really should have known better, even with just a couple of years under his belt.
I went by an old boat landing on my right, then between a stretch of very small weekend cabins on the right, and a silica sand mine cut into the high limestone bluff on my left.
Borman was taking a class in “Humanizing the Police,” or some such thing, taught by a counselor via a college extension plan. He was picking up on all these “empathy” techniques, and I strongly suspected that this had somehow influenced him this morning. Or, maybe, I just was reluctant to acknowledge that he was of a younger generation of cops. I chuckled to myself. Maybe, indeed. Fifty-five really isn’t that old. Well, not if you’re ninety.
About a quarter of a mile, I turned back west, or inland, onto a gravel road called Willow, slowed to fifty or so, and called in.
“Comm, Three. Just turned onto Willow Road. How ’bout those directions now?”
“10-4, Three. Take your next right turn to the north onto Beau View drive. Take the second drive after the curve that sends you back east, toward the river.”
I paused, setting the directions in my mind. It was the great big house on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The Mansion, as it was usually known, although the local kids called it the Dropout Dorm, because of the people who lived there.
“Comm, the ‘M’ word?” I hoped she got it, because I didn’t want anybody to know precisely where I was headed. I didn’t know if the Dispatcher, the Ambulance crew or Borman had specifically referred to the Mansion, but I wasn’t going to. If somebody with a scanner had missed the initial traffic, I wasn’t going to help them out.
“10-4, that’s the one. 911 locator should be 24354. 24354.”
I’d always been fascinated by the Mansion: it was huge, of a kind called Victorian or Queen Anne, or something. It was perched at the end of a long lane on top of the bluff, with what had to be one of the finest views of the Mississippi River that was available from privately owned land. I’d never really been in the place before, although I’d been in the yard once. It was far and away the biggest house in Nation County.
“10-4, Comm, I know the location. ETA about five.”
If it hadn’t been for the 911 address sign 24354, and a big, blue plastic refuse bin that was just visible from the road, you wouldn’t even have known there was a lane there at all. Located smack in the middle of the “Beiderbaum Timber,” a wooded area that ran along the west, or Iowa, bank of the Mississippi for about ten miles, the house sat out toward the east end of a long, wide finger of land that pointed right at the Mississippi River. Bordered by two streams, or creeks as they’re called locally, the