The Big Thaw

by Donald Harstad

  10-2 Good Signal, usually used to mean simply “good”

  10-4 Acknowledged, frequently used to indicate agreement

  10-5 Relay

  10-6 Busy (as in doing cop work), often used as a “do not disturb” sign on the radio

  10-7 Temporarily Out of Service (as in lunch)

  10-8 Back in Service

  10-9 Repeat

  10-10 Fight

  10-13 Weather and Road Conditions

  10-16 Domestic Case

  10-20 Location

  10-21 Telephone, as in “ten-twenty-one the office”

  10-22 Disregard

  10-23 Arrived at Scene

  10-24 Assignment Completed

  10-25 Report in Person to Meet, usually used simply as “meet”

  10-27 Operator’s License Information

  10-28 Vehicle Registration Information

  10-29 Check Records for Stolen, modern usage also means “warrant” or “wanted”

  10-32 Suspect with Gun, also used in reference to knives and other devices

  10-33 Emergency

  10-46 Disabled Vehicle

  10-50 Motor Vehicle Crash

  10-51 Wrecker

  10-52 Ambulance

  10-55 DWI

  10-56 Intoxicated Pedestrian

  10-61 Personnel in Area, frequently used to indicate that a civilian can hear the radio

  10-70 Fire

  10-76 En Route

  10-78 Need Assistance

  10-79 Notify Medical Examiner, also used to indicate a deceased subject

  10-80 High-Speed Pursuit

  10-96 Mentally Disturbed Subject

  As an example, if you as an officer were to suddenly encounter an armed suspect, shots were fired, you needed help, and thought somebody had been injured, you might transmit:

  “ten-thirty-three, ten-thirty-two, need ten-seventy-eight, and get me a ten-fifty-two, this is ten-thirty-three!” (Note the use of 10-33 twice, which officers tend to do when emphasizing dire straits.) An excellent dispatcher will get the whole picture, and may merely try to discover your position by saying “ten-four, ten-twenty?” As with any system, the clarity and usefulness depends entirely on the quality of the personnel involved. An excited officer may be merely garbled, and the transmissions result in a “ten-nine?” An inattentive dispatcher may “tune in” halfway through the message, and receive incomplete data. This, too, can lead to additional risk and hazard.

  This is only one example of why the retention of your top-notch people is so important.

  About the Author

  DONALD HARSTAD is a twenty-six-year veteran of the Clayton County Sheriff’s Department in northeastern Iowa, and the author of the acclaimed Eleven Days. A former deputy sheriff, Harstad lives with his wife, Mary, in Elkader, Iowa.

  If you enjoyed Donald Harstad’s THE BIG THAW, you won’t want to miss any of his suspense novels! Look for ELEVEN DAYS and KNOWN DEAD in paperback from Bantam Books at your favorite bookseller.

  And turn the page for a sneak peek at his next suspense novel featuring Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman, coming soon in hardcover from Doubleday.

  Prologue

  My name is Carl Houseman, and I’m a deputy sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now; long enough to be the Department’s Investigator, and senior officer, as well. Senior in every sense of the term, unfortunately. Somehow, when you pass fifty and realize a twenty-five-year-old fellow officer was born about the same time you took the oath, you start to wonder if you might not begin to feel old pretty soon. I mean, maybe in another ten years or so.

  The case I’m going to tell about has to be about the most bizarre of all the cases in our files. I think you’ll see what I mean.

  One

  Saturday, October 7, 2000 0740

  I was brushing my teeth in our upstairs bathroom when I thought I heard the phone ring. I turned off the water, and listened. Nothing. I turned the water back on, glad there hadn’t been a call, because my wife, Sue, was asleep. She is a middle-school teacher, and Saturday is about the only day she could sleep past six-thirty.

  I was tapping the toothbrush on the side of the sink, and just reaching to turn off the water, when the bathroom door opened a few inches, and Sue’s hand and arm came through, holding out the portable phone. “Okay,” she said, her voice throaty with sleep, “he’s right here.” It would have been better if she’d said that into the phone, but I didn’t think it prudent to bring that up. I was going to hear about this. I took the phone, and the hand disappeared.

  “Houseman …”

  “Carl?” It was the voice of Norma, one of the newer dispatchers. Well, sure. Who else? “Yep.”

  “Uh, we got a call, at, ummm … 0636 … and I sent Eight up on it. He got there, and thinks we should, uh, probably have you come up and take a look.” Her voice seemed to be about an octave higher than usual. Eight referred to Nation County Sheriff’s Car Eight, the radio call sign of Tom Borman, a newish deputy with about two years’ service. He seemed like a good sort, and pretty serious about his job.

  “What’s he got?” I asked, as I walked down the hall to our bedroom, to dress. I was pretty sure Tom didn’t want me to show up in just my boxer shorts.

  “The first call said there’d been an accident. That was on 911. Something about a lady in a tub. The caller wasn’t really clear, female, just wanted help in a hurry.”

  “What’s he want, help lifting her?” I asked. That wasn’t a good enough reason to call me out early, and it was a hell of a long way from being sufficient reason to wake Sue. I guess I sounded a little exasperated.

  “No, no. No, we got a second call after the Frieberg Ambulance got there. I sent them right away. They said”—and she seemed to be reading right off her Dispatch log—“‘this subject is code blue, and we think there should be a cop up here right away, it looks like a suicide.’”

  Well, that explained the call to me. Department policy is to treat suicides as if they were homicides, at least until murder had been ruled out. Who do you call to deal with a possible homicide? The Investigator. Even if you were sure it was a suicide, the Investigator was now stuck with the report. “Right. I’ll get dressed and …”

  “It’s three-and-a-half miles south of Frieberg, off County Road X8G, then the second gravel to …”

  I hate to be rude, but I was trying to pull on my blue jeans and still talk on the phone. Writing the directions down was out of the question.

  “Just tell me after I get in the car and headed up to Frieberg. I’ll take X8G up, okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. Her voice got some crisp back into it, and I knew I’d hurt her feelings by implying criticism.

  “I’m trying to put on my pants,” I said, and grinned as I said it, to lighten my voice. “Only so many hands.”

  “Oh … sure … just one more thing, maybe, while I have you on the phone. I don’t think this should be on the radio.”

  Having at least managed to get both legs in the jeans, I sat on the end of the bed, and said, “Sure.”

  “Eight called me on the phone, and said that this is a really bad one, but that it’s a confirmed suicide.”

  “Oh?” I hate pulling on socks with one hand. I also hate junior officers making bald-faced statements like that. I mean, they’re probably right most of the time, but all you need in a possible murder case is for some defense attorney to get his hands on a logged statement like that one. “But doesn’t it say, right here, that the first officer on the scene determined this to be a suicide?” But the log couldn’t be changed. Only amended, sort of. “Log it that I say that it’s not a suicide until the ME’s office says so,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Really bad. That’s all he said.”

  “Okay, kid. You call Lamar yet?” Lamar was our sheriff, and he liked to be kept well informed of tragic and disastrous happenings in the county. Mainly because he hated to go to breakfast at Phil’s Café and have somebody ask him
about a case before he knew we had a case. Looked bad. I pushed my stocking feet into my tennis shoes.

  “Yes, and he said to send you right up.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can’t arrange that,” I said with a hissing sound as I bent over to tie my shoe laces, the phone pressed tightly between my shoulder and my ear.

  “And he said to call him if you needed him to come, too.”

  “Fine. I’ll call you on the radio….” I pressed the “off” button on the phone and turned to put it back in the charger.

  “You need any help?” came Sue’s voice from the other side of the bed. “It sure looks like it from here.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to try to go back to sleep …”

  I stood, pulled a dark gray polo shirt over my head, and slid my clip-on holster into my belt, on my right hip. I walked over to Sue, bent down, and gave her a kiss.

  “Good luck.”

  “You, too,” she said, nearly asleep again already.

  I grabbed my gun, my walkie-talkie, my ID case, billfold, and car keys from their drawer downstairs in the dining room, and was in my unmarked patrol car and reporting in to the Dispatch Center at 0749.

  “What time did you call me, Comm?” I asked. Curious.

  “0740.”

  “10-4.” Nine minutes. Getting old, I thought.

  I left Maitland, the County Seat, where I lived and the Sheriff’s Office was located, and headed up the state highway to the intersection with X8G. It was a really pretty morning, the leaves were turning, and the hillsides were bright yellows and reds, and the cornfields were a yellowish-tan that seemed to almost flow in the valleys and up the slopes of some of the hills. The sky was a brilliant blue, absolutely no clouds anywhere. It was about 50 degrees, and warming. I love October.

  The police radio in my car was ominously quiet. Only officers can really know the spooky feeling that comes with that particular brand of silence. You know there’s something really bad, you’re going to the scene, and it’s absolutely quiet because most of the communications traffic is either on the phones, or just not happening at all because you’re the designated catalyst for the next phase, and you aren’t there yet. Sort of undercurrents, I guess. But you learn to hate silence, sometimes.

  I was moving about 70 or so, no lights or siren. Not really necessary, because there was absolutely no traffic anywhere. I became aware of intermittent sounds, like the faint patter of raindrops on the car. The sun was shining brightly. No clouds. Ah, it struck me. Ladybugs. There were unusually large flights of ladybugs this year. At least one mystery solved, today.

  I was bothered again about Borman and the “suicide” statement, as I turned off onto X8G, and dipped down into a valley along the Mississippi. He really should have known better, even with just a couple of years under his belt.

  I went by an old boat landing on my right, then between a stretch of very small weekend cabins on the right, and a silica sand mine cut into the high limestone bluff on my left.

  Borman was taking a class in “Humanizing the Police,” or some such thing, taught by a counselor via a college extension plan. He was picking up on all these “empathy” techniques, and I strongly suspected that this had somehow influenced him this morning. Or, maybe, I just was reluctant to acknowledge that he was of a younger generation of cops. I chuckled to myself. Maybe, indeed. Fifty-five really isn’t that old. Well, not if you’re ninety.

  About a quarter of a mile, I turned back west, or inland, onto a gravel road called Willow, slowed to fifty or so, and called in.

  “Comm, Three. Just turned onto Willow Road. How ’bout those directions now?”

  “10-4, Three. Take your next right turn to the north onto Beau View drive. Take the second drive after the curve that sends you back east, toward the river.”

  I paused, setting the directions in my mind. It was the great big house on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The Mansion, as it was usually known, although the local kids called it the Dropout Dorm, because of the people who lived there.

  “Comm, the ‘M’ word?” I hoped she got it, because I didn’t want anybody to know precisely where I was headed. I didn’t know if the Dispatcher, the Ambulance crew or Borman had specifically referred to the Mansion, but I wasn’t going to. If somebody with a scanner had missed the initial traffic, I wasn’t going to help them out.

  “10-4, that’s the one. 911 locator should be 24354. 24354.”

  I’d always been fascinated by the Mansion: it was huge, of a kind called Victorian or Queen Anne, or something. It was perched at the end of a long lane on top of the bluff, with what had to be one of the finest views of the Mississippi River that was available from privately owned land. I’d never really been in the place before, although I’d been in the yard once. It was far and away the biggest house in Nation County.

  “10-4, Comm, I know the location. ETA about five.”

  If it hadn’t been for the 911 address sign 24354, and a big, blue plastic refuse bin that was just visible from the road, you wouldn’t even have known there was a lane there at all. Located smack in the middle of the “Beiderbaum Timber,” a wooded area that ran along the west, or Iowa, bank of the Mississippi for about ten miles, the house sat out toward the east end of a long, wide finger of land that pointed right at the Mississippi River. Bordered by two streams, or creeks as they’re called locally, the ridge itself was about half a mile wide, with the east end about two miles from the road that ran along its west side. I’d guess that the top of the ridge was about two hundred fifty feet above the roadway, covered with trees and low bushes and foliage on the long sides, and ending in a vertical limestone bluff overlooking the river. The gravel drive that extended uphill was nearly a mile and a half long, winding from the valley floor, through a heavily wooded area that had littered the road surface with fallen leaves. I kept it at about 30 mph, just in case I met someone headed in the opposite direction. The lane didn’t seem to be quite wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic. I crested the rise, onto the top of the finger-shaped ridge, and traveled the last quarter mile on nearly level ground. The trees were just as thick up here, a mixture of brilliant yellow maples and tall, dark green pines. As I drove on to the house, I caught a glimpse of its reddish, turreted roof through the trees. I passed through a weathered iron gate set in limestone blocks, part of a limestone wall that marked the area between the woods and the cleared and almost manicured area that surrounded the house. My car bumped slightly as I left the gravel and drove onto the wide, new blacktop of the circular drive.

  The large house was three stories, two turrets, an enormous wrap-around porch, all in a dark blue-gray wood frame with maroon trim. Actually, enormous was a better word for it, I thought. It stood on a little hill above the drive, and there was a flight of limestone steps, very wide, that led up through the little berm to a double door, with tall, oval glass panels that were flanked by very tall, oval windows.

  Both the ambulance and car Eight, Borman’s fully marked squad, were parked near the front door. No flashing lights or anything. No reason for them. Both vehicles were running, though. There were two other vehicles in the yard, a ’90 Buick four-door, and an ’87 Ford pickup. Both looked to be well maintained.

  “Comm, Three, I’m 10-23. Be out of the car.” I didn’t have to say where, as she already knew that. And it concealed my whereabouts from the folks with the scanners. Always a good idea. I swung my legs out of my car.

  She acknowledged, and then Eight came upon his walkie-talkie. “Three,” he said, sounding sort of brittle, “I’m up on the second floor. First room on the left, come in there, and one of the EMT’s will show you just where we are.”

  I headed for the house, and saw a young male subject, about twenty years old, sitting on the bottom step. Ear-length black hair, parted in the middle. A double silver stud through the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. Dark blue sweatshirt, black jeans. I’d missed him because he was almost completely hidden by the
ambulance.

  “Hi.” Not the best opener, under the circumstances, but you have to start somewhere. “I’m Deputy Houseman.”

  He just looked at me. He had a lit cigarette in his right hand.

  “And you’d be?” I knew I’d seen him before, mainly because of the stud in his nose, but I didn’t remember arresting him or anything. The instant data base in my head had him filed under “decent kid.”

  “Oh.” Like I’d startled him. Hard to see how…. “I’m Toby. Toby Gottchalk. I live here.”

  Oh, sure. Toby. “What’s happened, Toby?”

  “Ah, it … oh, you know, Edie’s done herself.” He looked sort of unaffected by the whole thing. One of the effects of an emotional shock in some people. He took a drag from his cigarette.

  “Did you see her do it?” The name Edie rang a bell, but, again, no placement.

  “No.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. No, I just heard Hanna holler, and then she came running down the hall, to use the phone. That’s how I found out.”

  You hate to belabor a point, but it can be important. “Hanna found Edie, then?”

  “Well, yeah.” A little exasperated. And why not.

  “Thanks, Toby. I’ll probably have to talk with you, a little more, when I’m done in the house.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay.” Pretty calm and self-possessed. Good, as far as I was concerned. Much easier to interview. I hated to see him smoke. Not for some sort of altruistic reason concerning his health. That was his problem. No, for the simple fact that I’d quit about five years before, and still had a bit of a problem when I was in the presence of a smoker.