Known Dead_ A Novel - Donald Harstad [36]
Anyway, what it did was pretty well shut Hester and me down for a good week. We had to restrict ourselves to reexamination of the physical evidence and rereading initial interviews. I don’t know if it cost us much or not. But it sure as hell frustrated both of us.
Then, on Thursday, I got assigned a child-neglect case from one of the smaller towns in our county. Fewer than a hundred people, in fact. With three of them involved; one a victim, one sort of a victim, and one a perpetrator, I was dealing with a crime that involved a little over 3 percent of the population. It gives you an interesting perspective when you look at it that way. It helps rationalize the prying attitude of the rest of the community as well. I mean, in Los Angeles, if you had a crime that involved 3 percent of the population at the same time, the uproar would be incredible. Just a matter of scale.
In this case, a man who earned minimum wage, Hank Boedeker, insisted that his wife, Kerri, work as well. She’d hired out to clean chickens for a farm woman who sold them two days a week in Maitland. She worked four to five hours a day. Her husband, with considerable mathematical precision, told her that because of the payments on their satellite receiver they couldn’t afford a babysitter for their eight-month-old daughter. Consequently, she would leave the kid in the trailer when she and her husband were both gone. After about two weeks of that, we got a call.
When I got there, Kerri was just home. She looked to be about twenty or so, very thin, with long, straggly brown hair. It was about a hundred degrees in the trailer, but it would have been whether or not she was there. No air conditioning. The kid had a hell of a heat rash, the place smelled like a combination gym/nursery, and the kid was totally quiet. That bothered me. I called for Human Services, opened what windows I could, rearranged the two fans to get real ventilation, and waited with the mom. She was terrified, afraid for her daughter and afraid her husband would beat her when he came home and found that the cops had been there. It seemed he’d been in an especially bad mood lately, since his friend had been killed, and his dope source had dried up. No shit?
Was Turd his friend? Sure was. Who was his local dealer? She didn’t want to say. Wasn’t sure. Didn’t really remember. Between the heat, the guilt, and me, she was just about a goner. I didn’t press too hard. The kid came first.
I found out where Hank worked: Russell & Company, a small-time pork processor, family-owned. His job was cleaning up the floors after they were done eviscerating the pigs. After Human Services arrived at the mobile home, I went to Russell & Co. to talk with Dad.
If the trailer had smelled bad, this place was olfactory hell. Just as hot, much more humid, as he cleaned the floors with high-pressure water, and the smell of guts was so thick you almost had to use a swimming motion to breathe. I asked him to come outside. I explained to him that the money he spent on the satellite dish would likely have been better put toward a window air conditioner; that he could not have his child unattended; and that if I heard he’d ever struck his wife, I’d be on him like stink on his job. His only real question was regarding who had ratted him off. I left him with the thought that whoever it was would probably be able to tell me if he ever hit his wife.
I got back to the office, and before I could call Hester and discuss an approach, I had a request from Human Services for a complete report on the incident. Great. It would take them three weeks to do theirs, and it likely wouldn’t be any more thorough than mine. But they wanted mine now. Probably to copy.
I went up to Maitland General Hospital, where the baby was being examined by my good friend