The Big Thaw - Donald Harstad [4]
The other problem was that, out of the three possible rural residence burglary targets in the area where Mike had made the first contact with the horn-blowing Fred, there were no tracks in the farm drives. The snow had come down a couple of days ago, and any movement into those drives would have been immediately noticeable. After we saw the tools in Goober’s car, Mike had driven back up the course of the chase and had checked himself. No tracks. No evidence of any crime. Well, not yet, anyway.
“So, Fred,” I said. “What were you doin’ out on a night like this?”
“De, de, deer,” he said, still shaking.
“Deer?” I asked. “What deer?”
“The ones I was honkin’ at,” he replied. “I was hon, hon, honkin’ at deer.”
“Honkin’ at deer …”
“Well,” he said in a whiny voice, “… yeah. I heh-heh hit one a year ago, and I stop and honk at ’em nuh, nuh, now. That’s all.” He looked so serious and honest in such a studied way, it was almost painfully obvious he was lying through his teeth.
“Fred … you really expect me to believe that?”
There was a long pause. Then he said the most honest thing he’d said all night. “Well, it’d bu, bu, bu, be nice if you di, di, di, did …”
We had nothing, we couldn’t hold him much longer than the time it would take to do an accident report and get his car out of the ditch, and I was very, very tired. “Tell you what, Fred … You think about it, and we’ll talk again in a minute or two.” I looked at him for a long moment. “Just don’t lie to me, Fred. You know how I hate that.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
I picked up my mike. “Comm, Three. I’ll be bringing the driver into the department as soon as the wrecker gets here. Any idea on an ETA for that?”
“Just a few minutes,” she replied. “I called him about fifteen minutes ago, and he said he’d go right out.”
“Ten-four,” I said. I felt sorry for the wrecker driver. Bundling up, going out to an ice cold garage and getting into an ice cold wrecker, just to come out here and pull out some idiot’s car that shouldn’t have been here in the first place …
“No!”
I looked at Goober. “What?”
“No, no, don’t take me in there. We can’t go in to Maitland.”
“We can’t?” I looked at him over the top of my reading glasses. “And just why would that be?”
Suddenly, he looked as if he were about to cry. “They, they, they need me there …”
“‘They’ Fred? Who are ‘they’?”
I’d known Fred for about five years, since the time I’d busted him for DWI when he was sixteen. We’d always gotten along fairly well, really, and had met officially three or four times since his DWI. Minor stuff, a small theft, a couple of vandalism charges. Fred wasn’t exactly what you’d call a career criminal. Just a bored kid in a very small Iowa town, who honked his horn at deer.
He opened his mouth, and made a tiny choking sound. He didn’t look directly at me.
“You know, Mr. Houseman, those break-ins you beh, beh, been having around the county, in the farmhouses?”
“Yeah,” I said, being noncommittal. I knew them, all right. Eleven burglaries at rural residences in the last sixteen days. That was just as far as we knew. One of the problems was that the burglaries were at a select number of farmhouses that were empty for the winter, the owners being elsewhere. Elsewhere as in warmer. Most of the burglaries were reported by whoever was looking after the place, when they showed up to check the furnace and the water pipes. Usually once a week or so. The main problem was, we had no idea if, or how many, more would be discovered. Neither did we have much of an idea of when they’d been done, except after the date the owners had left. We only knew the date when they’d been found.
“Well, uh, do you have a, a, a list, like, of the places that have been robbed?”
“Yeah.” We had two lists, actually. The first was a simple listing of the known burglaries, in chronological order. The other was a list of residence check requests, filed with the department by the owners before they left, and giving information like the dates they’d be gone, who was going to check on their property for them, and asking us to have a car drive by every