We all looked at each other and ate just a little faster. One of the men announced that there were ‘‘Feds’’ everywhere and that they’d better be careful what they said. But they just kept on talking. I thought George would choke.
When we left, I wrote down the license plates of several of the cars in the lot. They were from northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, for the most part. Not local.
We got back to the Sheriff’s Department, and discovered that the Stritch family had demanded to be represented by ‘‘common law’’ lawyers, which request had been quite rightly refused by the judge. He’d appointed three local attorneys to represent the family, individually. The family didn’t want them. So we had three prisoners who were pissed off, three attorneys in the reception area trying to figure out how to represent clients who refused to talk to them, three cops who wanted to talk to those same clients…
As one of the attorneys said to me: ‘‘Look, Carl, if I let you talk to them and advise them as to how to answer, they’ll just sue me. If I don’t let you talk to them, they’ll sue me. And any way you cut it, they’ll try to get me censured by the court for not properly representing them in the first place. I’ll just have to get back to you on that…’’
One of the others, who had a sense of humor, said, ‘‘If I let you talk to my client, will you give him my bill?’’
We weren’t getting very far. Hester, George, and I moved to the back office to regroup.
A phone call came in. Dispatch said it was from somebody who wanted to ‘‘speak with the cop in charge of the killings in the woods.’’ I took it.
‘‘Houseman.’’
‘‘You the cop doin’ the killin’ of the cop and the little snitch in the woods?’’ It was a male voice, fairly deep, matter-of-fact. I frantically waved my free hand at Hester and George. This sounded real.
‘‘One of ’em.’’
‘‘We just want you to know, for what it’s worth, that we got the guy who did it.’’
‘‘You do?’’
‘‘No, man. We did.’’
Hester had picked up the second phone, and was listening.
‘‘Where’s he at? Where can I meet with him?’’ The ‘‘we did’’ sounded ominous, and I hoped I was misunderstanding him on that.
‘‘You can find him at an abandoned farm. Two miles out of Jollietville, just off Highway 433. Address is 23224 Willow Lane. The old Harris place.’’ With that, he hung up.
Jollietville was in Wisconsin. Just across the river from us. We called the Conception County Sheriff’s Department and gave them the message. We told them to hurry, just in case.
We talked about the call. We agreed that the use of the term ‘‘little snitch’’ made it sound like it might be dope-related. But ‘‘the guy who did it’’ couldn’t be correct. There absolutely had been more than one shooter.
A callback came from Conception County within fifteen minutes. Cell phone from their chief investigator, a Harry Ullman. I’d known him for years.
‘‘Houseman?’’
‘‘Yeah. What you got, Harry?’’
‘‘We got kind of a dangling corpse on a farm. I think it’s related to your guys getting ambushed in the woods. If you hurry, you can get here before we cut him down.’’
We went in George’s car. The FBI can go across state lines with comparative ease. Well, so could we, actually, but George could do it with his siren and red grille lights working. Our insurance wouldn’t let us do that out of state. Thing was, it had to be George driving. I’ve never met a really good FBI driver yet. They think they are, but they sure can’t keep up with us in the rural areas. George wasn’t their best driver. It took fifteen minutes, and all the way even Hester was quieter than normal in the back seat. I was in front because of my size, but would have traded places with her in a heartbeat.
To take our minds off the driving, we sort of speculated as to who it might be, with the bets running on its being the man who was with Gabe when he left the Stritch farm. The one with the white tee shirt. Or it could have been one of the Stritch family friends who had been in the woods when the whole thing went down. It was going to be interesting to see.
We also talked a little about who the hell had called. Purest speculation, for sure. The upshot of the whole thing was that we had absolutely no idea.
The other topic was related; what Harry had meant when he said ‘‘cut him down.’’ I thought it meant that he was hanged, and that also raised the possibility of a suicide. People had claimed ‘‘credit’’ for suicides before, just to try to impress somebody. It was possible that remorse or despair had overcome one of the participants. Being hanged also raised the specter of a possible ‘‘legal’’ execution within a group. That’s what I thought it was going to be. All interspersed with things like ‘‘Uh, I wouldn’t pass here, George, you’re gonna want to turn right in just a few seconds anyway…’’ and ‘‘There are only two lanes of traffic on the bridge, George, you might want to shut everything down until we get across the Mississippi here, because the other cars have nowhere to go…’’
The directions got us to a farm lane, with tall grass and weeds growing down the middle. The old ruts were about a foot deep, but very narrow and close together. Even George could keep only one set of tires in a rut at a time. Long lane, with grasshoppers jumping onto the hood and windshield as we bumped and rolled toward the gray wood barn with a collapsed roof. We stopped behind an ambulance, and got out. There were three cars in front of us, one belonging to the sheriff himself. A small cluster of people were standing around the foundation of what appeared by its size to have been a house many years ago. Harry waved.
‘‘Come on over here, Houseman. You’re gonna love this one.’’
We waded through the knee-high grass, which seemed to be hosting about a million grasshoppers. It was hot, very hot, and extremely humid. We got to the group, and I looked down into the old basement. There, standing propped against what had been an interior limestone wall, was a large timber, about ten feet long, with a very large stone bracing its foot. Stuck to it was a body. Naked. Male. There was a sign dangling around the neck, with the word RAT in capital letters, and something I couldn’t make out underneath. There was what appeared to be a railroad spike protruding about three inches out of the chest of the corpse, apparently having been driven through the rib cage and into the old timber. It looked like that was all that was holding the body on the plank. The face was deep waxy purple, and either very contorted or just really well worked over. The tongue was swollen, bluish, and protruding, so I guessed he’d been strangled before being nailed up. A little closer look at the neck confirmed that. The ligature mark was even with the ear line, back to front. You could have encircled his neck at the ligature point with one hand. Easily. Probably a wide band or rope. If it had been sharp, the neck would have been severed.
‘‘Shit, Harry…’’
He grinned. ‘‘Not one of your everyday corpses, is it? You know him?’’
‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘I don’t.’’
I was balancing myself with one hand on some old slats, as I moved out on the six-inch-wide top of the old masonry wall, toward the body. ‘‘Mind if I walk here?’’
‘‘Just about two more steps… then there’s some stuff on the top of the wall we might want.’’
I looked where he pointed. There was a piece of material draped over the wall, where it could be seen fairly easily, secured there by placing a good-sized piece of limestone block on top of it. Looked like blue cloth, maybe denim. Small. Maybe with a pattern or something on it. The closer I looked, the more it looked like the back of a jacket with a logo.