A Long December

CHAPTER 24

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 22:08

My car was down at the HEINMAN BOYS’ Farm, just the first of several complications that were to crop up in the next hour or so. I called the office on my cell phone and asked for a ride.

The Maitland officer was at a domestic call, and their other car was down at the old Dodd place, where all the action was. I asked Dispatch to make sure that somebody drove my car back, and decided to walk up to the office. It was about fifteen degrees by now, and the fresh air would wake me up. I also wanted time to think. Things had started happening too damned fast after the ambulances got into the yard, and I need some time to try to figure stuff out.

My biggest question had to do with what the hell all those terrorists had been doing there in the first place. It looked like they’d sure been there when we arrived, and just didn’t see us until we were standing around in the farmyard. What the hell could they have been up to that they didn’t even have a lookout posted?

My house was only a half-block out of my way to the sheriff’s department. I figured the county could afford the extra overtime if I stopped and saw Sue.

She was really glad to see me. We talked for about five minutes, mostly about how I was safe now, and how frightened she’d been when she’d seen the explosion on TV. One of the reporters had kept saying that the barn had blown up.

I told her that I had to go to the office for a while, but that I’d be very safe.

“You said that last time.”

“Well, now I’m a witness,” I told her. “We always take better care of witnesses.”

It was about three-quarters of a mile to the office, almost all residential, with the last third being up a rather steep hill with cracked and tumbled sidewalk. I took my time in the dark, not wanting to break my ankle at this late date.

I passed a house with a dog in the yard. I was just about under a streetlight, and the porch light was on, but he didn’t notice me because he had his head in the bare branches of some bushes, hot on the scent of a rabbit. It was kind of cute, because from my angle he was mostly wagging tail. I even stopped for a second, but thought better of whistling. I didn’t want him to start barking.

I knew what was distracting the dog. Not because I could smell the rabbit, too, but because I knew about dogs. What did I know about terrorists? Not much. But I knew a lot about criminals, and people of that mind-set. Most of the people we were dealing with down at the old Dodd place, I reminded myself, were not terrorists in the strictest sense. They seemed to be criminal types recruited to fill gaps. Second-stringers, but controlled by a terrorist “boss.”

If I assumed the “boss” was not present, I was left with a bunch of second-rate criminals doing their thing. I remembered one bunch we had busted years back, after the only member of the little gang with a brain and a personality had been hurt in a car wreck. The original four had broken into a toy store in Dubuque and stolen a whole consignment of those remote-controlled toy cars. After their car wreck, the other three were a piece of cake, and we got ‘em when they were actually racing several of the little cars up and down the only street in a little town. One of our marked cars had come through on routine patrol and damned near ran over some of them.

So what did I know about second-rate criminals? They were not only pretty stupid, but they tended to hang around the stuff involved in their crimes because it was fun. It made them feel good. It gave them a sense of importance.

The parking lot, and the street immediately adjacent to the office, looked strangely empty. Not one single media vehicle present. Not one. They must have all gone down around the old Dodd place. I shook my head. It had to be really crowded on that gravel road.

Once in the office, I called Lamar.

“How you doin’?” he asked.

“Just speak up a bit, and I’m fine,” I said.

“How’s Hester?”

“Pretty well sedated, I think, but they say she’ll be fine after some surgery tomorrow.”

“Good. Good.”

“So, how’s it going down there? “I asked.

“Well, there was a bunch of shooting, but that FBI team went through ‘em like a knife through butter. Hasn’t been a shot fired in quite a while. FBI’s going through the area, seein’ what they got. You want,” he asked, in a rare moment of insight, “to talk to Volont about this? He’s right here…”

Volont came on the line. “How are you?”

I told him, and also about Hester. He seemed pleased. “How’d we come out down there?”

“This isn’t a secure line,” he said. “If you’re up to it, come on down. We have some questions, and George isn’t sure about everything.”

“No car,” I said. “It’s down there where you are.”

“You don’t have a spare vehicle in the lot?”

“We don’t have a single vehicle in the lot, as a matter of fact. The media must have you surrounded.”

“We got all of that stuff way back out at the highway, except for one rig. Let me get back to you. You don’t have to come back down unless you feel up to it.”

“I’m fine.”

I sat down at Dispatch and sipped a cup of coffee.

“Did they really blow up the ambulance?” asked Pam.

“Yeah.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe no particular reason,” I said. “I don’t know.” I took another sip of coffee as Big Ears wandered in, looked at me and wagged his tail, and disappeared behind the dispatch desk. It dawned on me that there should have been a reason for the bomb. There damned well had to be a reason, in fact. Even if you had access to somebody delusional enough to blow themselves up for the cause, you didn’t spend those people too lightly. I mean, how many could you convince to do that in any given week?

My slowly focusing train of thought was broken by a phone call from Volont.

“Houseman,” I said.

“Your chariot awaits,” said Volont.

“What?”

“Just step outside. Your ride should be just about in the lot.”

Just then a voice crackled on the radio: “918, Nation County Comm?”

Pam told them to go ahead. It was the Cedar Rapids police helicopter. Volont had sent it up for me.

It was an ex-military OH-58, and I just fit in the backseat, behind the pilot and the observer /crew chief.

“You Houseman?”

“You bet!”

“You were one of the guys in the barn?”

“Yep!”

I. fastened the minimal military seatbelt, the crew chief handed me a headset with a long cord and a switch that he clipped into my belt. “Just press the switch to talk,” he said.

I put the headset on, and the noise level dropped right off.

“On the way,” said a voice in the earphones, and the machine very slowly lifted up, above the tops of the trees and the surrounding buildings. Then we began to move south.

“FBI,” said voice in my ear, “wants us to fly you over the scene. If you lean forward, you can see the FLIR screen here…”

The back of the seat in front of me was pressed firmly against my knees, so to look at the screen, I had to unfasten my belt and lean to the side. Encumbered with my winter parka, I found I couldn’t lean very far in any direction. Since I kept the mike button firmly in my hand, just so I wouldn’t lose it, it took a minute to adjust my position.

“Got it,” I said finally. I peered into the screen. “Holy shit, we’re there already!”

“The joys of powered flight,” said the voice in my headset. “Okay, now we’ll start with the barn…”

We flew in, hovered, and then slowly moved west, covering the entire area in one short sweep.

I could see people moving through the area, with blinking lights on their shoulders. “Those are ours?”

“Yep. The HRT guys have little infrared strobes.”

As we banked, I looked down and saw nothing but darkness. Not even the blinking lights. I glanced back at the screen, and there everybody was. Magic.

“No bad guys left on the ground?”

“That’s what they’re looking for now. Once the sweep is complete, they’ll bring in floodlights and start processing the scene.”

As we made another pass over the area of the barn, I saw a glow. George’s Mr. Heater. Still working.

The glow from the shattered ambulance was still pretty intense. The oxygen from the storage bottle had long since expired, but the intense heat had really cooked that aluminum. It was an ugly sight.

“Let me show you the shed again,” said the pilot, and we moved slowly over the farmyard to the furthest shed. “See the outline?”

Sure enough. They’d shut the engine off, but the faint outline of a car was still visible through the thin steel of the shed roof.

“I’m surprised you can see that well through a steel roof,” I said.

“We are, too,” said the pilot. “We think it might be a new roof, one of fiberglass, you know the kind that lets some light in?”

Ah. “Bet you’re right.”

“You see, though,” he said. “You can tell it’s a car.”

I could. So where was the van Hector had told me about?

“Could we swing around on the perimeter for a little way? “I asked. “I got a tip that a van was bringing some of the assholes up this way, and I can’t account for so many of ‘em with just one vehicle.”

“Could be two trips,” said the pilot, “but our time is yours.”

We banked again, and the pilot began to follow the gravel roads around the farm. There were at least fifty cars parked all along the two or three miles of roadway that could be used to access the farm. No figures moved in the wooded area, or in the fields. Just cars.

“All cop cars? “I asked.

“We think so,” said the pilot. “They always leave their engines running, so they look hot from here.”

That was true. Probably not a single cop car would be sitting in this cold weather with its engine off. Why freeze?

We were inbound on the southern leg when the crew chief said, “What’s that?”

“Where? “asked the pilot.

“Go right, about a hundred yards off the road, at the very edge of the monitor…see that smudge?”

We banked and swung abruptly, and I found my unbelted self pressed against the flimsy little aluminum door. I hoped like hell the latch held.

In a moment, we were hovering over a dim shape.

“Looks like it could be a van,” said the pilot.

The shape seemed covered by black cobwebs. Tree branches, very cold tree branches.

“Let’s get somebody down there,” I said.

“Nation County One,” said the pilot. “We’d like some people about a mile west of your position, on the gravel road, we have what might be a van parked in a stand of trees, about a hundred yards off the road…”

I keyed my mike after Lamar acknowledged. From my time in marijuana-hunting helicopters, I knew I was able to hear all the pilot’s frequencies, but was only able to be heard on the intercom. “Tell him we think it’s red,” I said.

“What?”

“Tell him it’s green. Trust me. They’re gonna think you guys are magic.”

We landed near our year-old mobile command post, which had been set up on the road about a quarter mile from the old Dodd place. Well, it was actually a trailer with a sixteen-channel dispatch radio setup, a TV, walkie-talkie and flashlight rechargers, and a refrigerator. It had sheriff’s department decals on it, and it was Lamar’s pride and joy. We used it at the annual drownings in the Mississippi, and it gave us a place to use to coordinate the dragging teams. It was generally referred to within the department as “the Lemonade Stand.”

Tonight, the FBI, the state, and Lamar were using it.

I left the helicopter and made my way over to the Lemonade Stand, and was instantly greeted by Volont and George. I glanced inside, and saw Sally sitting on a folding chair near the dispatch desk, trying to explain to Martha how to do something with the radios. We were nearly back to normal.

“We got just one little problem,” said Volont, after saying how lucky we were to have survived the barn. “We’ve been viewing the tape made by the chopper.”

The CRPD helicopter was equipped with a videotaping unit attached to the FLIR, and had made a complete video record of its passes over the old Dodd place.

“We picked up eight terrorists on the first pass,” Volont said. “That’s not counting the two dead ones that barely show up.”

“Okay.”

“One for sure went up with the ambulance. Three of them over by the silo shot at the HRT troops and died for their trouble. We took two prisoners. The area seems clean. The HRT just finished its sweep and didn’t find any survivors.”

“You’re two short.”

“Great math skills,” he said. “At least two. We think they went to ground under something pretty thick, like a building or a fruit cellar, maybe. So there’re at least two still at large. We’re getting a dog or two. Brings me to the next point. What’s with the van you were talking about?”

I explained about Hector’s call, and the four people supposed to be in the van.

“I’ll bet they walked in after you got stuck in the barn,” said Volont. “That’s why the originals hung in and shot it out. They were waiting for somebody who absolutely had to get in there.”

Well, it was a better explanation than I’d been able to come up with.

“I’ll bet it was Odeh himself,” he said. “I hope it was. If so, we should have him.”

“Why would Odeh come here? “I asked.

I don’t know how long Gwen had been standing behind me, but she piped up with, “They didn’t have the spray cans of ricin up north yet. We talked to one suspect earlier, and he said that for some reason, the delivery had been delayed.”

“At the farm? “I found that difficult to believe.

“Sure,” said Volont. “While you were stuck down here,” and he nodded, “at our request, good old Dirty Harriet got us a subpoena for some UPS records. Your girl Linda got eleven packages in two days. The individual weights are about what four cans of that stuff would weigh. That’s forty-four cans, Carl.”

“Shit.”

“You bet. We think Rudy and Hassan brought ‘em out to the farm and stashed ‘em someplace. We haven’t found ‘em yet, and we don’t want the hazmat people in until we can be positive that every last one of those bastards is in our custody.”

“Then,” I said, “it could have been Hassan in the van?”

“Well,” said Volont heartily, “it sure as hell could have. Let’s go ask the little shit tomorrow. He’s one of the two prisoners we grabbed.”

“What? You’re kidding?!” The size of the grin said he wasn’t. “Hassan’s the one who shot Rudy Cueva!”

“You bet,” he said. “He’s a little worse for wear, he shot at the HRT guys who approached him. Took six 9mm rounds in the legs. He’s been Air Care’d out to La Crosse Lutheran.”

“He’ll make it?”

“Oh, sure. He’s damned lucky we’re better trained than he is.”

Well, that made my whole day. Even if he wouldn’t talk, we had him in custody. That would mean prints, photos, a lineup… I felt that I was back on track with the murder. Finally.

“We need to talk to you about what happened in the barn,” said Volont. “We better do it now, while it’s fresh.”

I knew what he meant. I’d killed two men. It hadn’t sunk in yet, and I wondered when it would. But we were going to have to get my information down. A lawsuit was just about automatic for these things, and I had the good fortune to be working in one of about three states where, even if exonerated in a criminal court, an officer could still be successfully sued in a civil case. It was for my own good. But, my Lord, I was getting tired.

“First, though, let’s set up that van you found for us. You’ve been doin’ a great job. Hell, you people here got better ‘n half our evidence!” He actually reached out and punched me in the shoulder. I was astounded.

“We got six men from the HRT setting up around the van up the road,” he said. “Two of ‘em are snipers. They’ll stay by it until Odeh comes for it, or we get him somewhere else. He won’t get by them.”

I was certain of that. Day or night.