The Big Thaw - Donald Harstad [11]
I was virtually certain it was blood. I couldn’t “prove” it, not yet. But that’s what it was. The lighter edges were a dead giveaway. Large stains tend to congeal, leaving the plasma in a ring around the outside, the red cells clumped together in the middle. They begin to clot, while the plasma seems to stay liquid longer, so it spreads a little farther.
Well, so I was sure it was blood. So what?
I was getting really creeped, mostly because the house was so completely quiet. I moved through the partition door and into the finished part of the basement. Nothing remarkable, it was plainly a playroom for the grandkids, with those big plastic tricycles and riding tractors and things parked next to the far wall. Plastic ball, Hula Hoop, and an old couch and a Nintendo on a caterer’s cart. Nice room.
The throw rug at the door was bunched up, right where it would’ve been if the door had been opened and it had been pushed aside. But I’d tested that door from the outside, and it was locked. I snorted to myself. Sure, Carl. But it could be opened from the inside, and shut again. Concentrate.
I opened the basement door, and looked out into the blackness of the backyard. I played my flashlight around at the gazebo ice palace. With the light angle, I saw something I hadn’t seen when I was out there. There was a gentle depression, kind of like a filled in furrow, in the snow, leading right from the back door to the gazebo, past it, and on toward the largest of the machine sheds. A virtually straight line, in the old snow. Made before Monday noon, when the new snow was laid down deep.
I glanced down, and the pink drops on the concrete took on a more sinister meaning. Frozen blood on concrete looks for the world like drops of Pepto-Bismol. Pink. I’d thought it was paint. Now I was pretty sure it was blood. If you’d dragged a body down the stairs, and then opened the door, and paused to get your breath, and let the body sit just long enough for blood to drip …
Well.
I was going to have to go to the machine shed, to see what was at the end of the furrow. Had to do that. I was now just about certain that the cousins had argued, and that one had killed the other. Just about. Either that, or somebody had been staying at the house after all, and they had been killed by the cousins. Or, that Fred had killed somebody and was trying to place the blame on two noninvolved cousins. That brought me up short.
As soon as I got out the basement door, I pulled my walkie-talkie from my belt, and contacted the office.
“Comm, Three?”
“Three?”
“Could you get somebody else here? We’d like some ten-seventy-eight out here. We’ll be ten-six for a while. Not ten-thirty-three, but send him.” That meant that I was going to be busy, and it wasn’t an emergency. I sure didn’t want my favorite sheriff sliding into the ditch, running lights and siren, coming to help me look into a shed. Even though he was a good boss, that sort of thing could adversely affect my career.
“What you got, Three?” asked Mike, from his car in the yard.
“Maybe something on the order of a seventy-nine. Not sure. Wait a couple. I’m gonna be walkin’ over to that big machine shed, from the basement back door.” 10-79 was the code for coroner notification. A “79” told Mike I might have a body in here someplace.
“Ten-four,” he said, crisply. Bodies, even if just suspected, tend to get your attention.
I put my walkie-talkie back on my belt, turned up the collar on my quilted down vest, pulled my stocking cap down over my ears, pulled on my gloves, and headed the fifty yards over to the steel machine shed. God, it was cold. I’d left my coat upstairs in the house. Of course. Well, I wasn’t about to go back. I squeaked and crunched through the snow, being very careful to swing widely away from the drag marks. It was remarkable, but looking back toward the house, the different light angle prevented