The Big Thaw - Donald Harstad [3]
“Uh, Three’s got him stopped at the intersection!” I said into my walkie-talkie, as I walked quickly toward the suspect’s car. Through the snow piled up on the roof and the snow stuck to the windows, I could just barely see someone inside trying to get the door open. The depth of the snow was making that pretty difficult, as it was piled up nearly window high in the furrow he’d made through the drifts.
I stopped at the edge of the ditch, and watched the driver’s door being opened, closed, slammed open an inch farther into the snow, closed … After five or six repetitions, I just pointed my shotgun at the struggling driver, and yelled, “Hold it right there!”
The door stopped moving instantly. Then, after banging on it a couple of times to loosen the ice, the suspect rolled the window down. “I surrender!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot! I surrender!”
I got my first good look at him. “Fred?” I looked at the thin, frightened face. “Is that you, Fred?”
“Mr. Houseman?”
Two
Tuesday, January 13, 1998, 0004
I was sitting in my patrol car with Fred Grothler, a.k.a. Goober; the driver of the car that now sat comfortably in the ditch. I had Fred in the front passenger seat. He was no threat, and seemed sober. I was filling out the officer’s section of a state motor vehicle accident report. I had to do it instead of Five, Mike Connors, as Mike had been involved in a chase with the vehicle in the ditch. He would be assumed to be biased, and unable to be objective in his assessment of the cause of the accident. I, on the other hand, the proximate cause of the accident, was assumed to be emotionally uninvolved. Attorneys. But having to fill out the accident report was just another reason I hated assisting with chases. I had unzipped my down vest, and had donned my gold-rimmed reading glasses. I turned to Fred/Goober.
“You wanna tell me what the hell you were doin’?”
Goober just sat there, shivering. Nerves, I thought. It was cold, and he was a bit damp, but it was warm enough in my car. He shouldn’t have been shaking from the cold. “I, I, I dddon’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know if you want to tell me, or you don’t know what you were doing?”
Goober looked at me. “I ddon’t kn, kn, know.”
I’d talked with Deputy Mike, and he’d told me that he’d been doing routine patrol in the area where we’d been having some residential burglaries, and he’d seen a car sitting on the side of the road, honking its horn. He turned on his top lights, and was just getting out of his patrol car to see if the occupant needed help, when the suspect vehicle had turned on its lights and taken off, scattering snow clogs all over him.
He’d very reasonably gotten back into his patrol car and started the pursuit.
Mike and Nine, John Willis, were still across the road, sitting in Mike’s car, and waiting for a wrecker. When we’d taken Fred out of his car, I’d noticed several tools on the floor of the front seat. Whether they were carpenter’s tools, or auto repair tools, or burglar’s tools was open to question. That was the trouble with tools… they were pretty much described by whatever you wanted them for. We did have several area burglaries that had used a half-inch pry, and that could be just about any screwdriver. On the other hand, just looking at Fred’s car led me to believe that most of the tools on the floor could easily have been used just to get the ugly thing started. Mike leaned toward charging Goober with Possession of Burglary Tools. I disagreed, but we’d left it kind of dangling, ready to be used if we could prove Goober had been about to go into a place. But any way you cut it, all we had was traffic on him at this point… and minor traffic at that.
We couldn’t even get him for “eluding pursuit,” because in Iowa you had to be doing at least 15 mph over the posted limit for that to come into effect. The limit on gravel roads was 55, just like rural highways. None of us thought we could prove 70 mph, because Mike was pretty well keeping up with him at 60. And 70 on those roads was just about out of the question.