Known Dead_ A Novel - Donald Harstad [50]
Anyway, another day lost.
Monday, the 22nd, Hester was back, and I ran the chemical burglary by her.
‘‘You’re early this year, Houseman.’’ Great minds, I guess, think alike.
We got back to the real case. For all the good it did us. We sure as hell didn’t have any suspects that Nichols hadn’t been able to turn up. We spent most of the day going over the physical evidence one more time.
We did get a call from Dr. Peters. He knew, it seems, a man near London, who had been in the SAS. He’d faxed him, and he’d been right. Minimum of three men in an L ambush, and the SAS fellow said he’d bet on four. Also said to wish us good luck. He said that if there were four, there’d be no real way of knowing, because they wouldn’t bury their trash all in the same place anyway. Could have been many, many more. Dividing the number of meals by four wasn’t going to help.
Four. Well, if that was the case, our people really hadn’t had a chance. It surely wouldn’t have been hard to conceal four in the terrain up there. Eight, for that matter.
We did get a call from the narc boys. They’d heard that the people who were dealing with Johnny Marks for the harvested dope were really mad. They just weren’t sure who they were.
I was a little depressed when I got home.
Thirteen
ON JULY 23rd, I shuffled into the office at about 0930. It was going to be a hot day, with high humidity and forecast thunderstorms. I was in my usual blue jeans and polo shirt, with a fairly good pair of tennis shoes. I’d talked to Hester the evening before, and we had decided that the interviews of the farmers in the area surrounding the crime scene should be redone. By us. Just in case one of the other officers who had done the initial interviews had missed some small thing. That can happen if you’re not fully versed on all the details of a case. What we had done, in our efforts to move things along quickly, was use officers from outside our area to do many of the interviews we considered to be less than likely to turn a suspect. They’d talked to every farmer, or nearly so, for eight miles around the scene. Sixty-one farmers, or their family members. Pretty much anybody on the farm who was available. In the early summer, most farmers are in the fields, so many of the interviewees had been wives or children. None had been productive. None probably would be. But we were desperate, and we needed something to convince ourselves that we were doing all we could.
I went back to my office, coffee cup in hand, and got out the file. I was going over the list of named interviewees, trying to come up with a schedule, when Lamar stuck his head in the door.
‘‘What’s up?’’
I told him.
‘‘Bud and I are goin’ up to serve papers on Herman Stritch, you want us to talk to him for you?’’
Stritch was on the list. His wife had been interviewed; he hadn’t. Their farm was about two miles southwest of the crime scene, nearly half a mile off the nearest county road. If I remembered correctly, the lane was a mess. Lots of big, big holes. Full of water if somebody spit within half a mile.
‘‘Sure. If you want.’’
‘‘Might as well.’’ He grinned. ‘‘You just wash your car?’’
‘‘Last couple of weeks.’’ We had to pay for that out of our own pockets too.
‘‘You could always walk in.’’
‘‘You both going up?’’ Stritch was a little to the right of Hitler, had his land posted saying he would shoot uninvited officers on sight. He was in debt over his head, and didn’t believe in any form of government except himself. We usually didn’t have any real problem with him, or those like