A Long December Read Online Free PDF Page A

car door, it occurred to me to try to call the department on my cell phone. We’d fought for years to get them, and had finally obtained grudging permission to carry them in the cars. We had to buy them ourselves, of course, even though we had to assure the county supervisors that we wouldn’t be making personal calls. They didn’t want us distracted. But it was a small victory, in spite of that. It had gotten smaller as we realized that they were pretty useless at our worst events. The really bad wrecks tended to be at the bottom of long hills on curvy roads, for instance, and we seemed to frequently find ourselves at crime scenes inside buildings with steel frames—both kinds of locations made it very difficult to reach a tower. I looked at the LCD display panel as I dialed. The little icon that indicated the strength of the nearest tower’s signal was at the minimum. I tried anyway. Nope. I tried once more on the way back down the road. Nothing. Lamar glanced at me, and I knew he’d noticed I couldn’t get a call through. I’d hear about that sooner or later. I made a mental note to tell him that there would be more towers in our area soon.
    As I approached the body, Lamar excused himself and came over to me. “Hell of a thing,” he said.
    “Sure is.”
    “Any idea who did it?”
    “Not yet. Not even close.” I produced the black and yellow roll of crime scene tape. “We better get some of this around.” Our tape says SHERIFF’S LINE —Do NOT CROSS, and I knew that Lamar would want that up instead of POLICE. It’s a sheriff thing.
    “We better,” he said.
    We made a simple square of the stuff by tying one end to the Heinman boys’ mailbox, stringing the tape across the road to a tree, then to a tree south of the body, to the Heinman boys’ fence, and back to the mailbox.
    That was a lot of tape, and I tried to placate the cost-conscious Lamar by saying, “That should look good in the photos.” Then I held out my tape measure. “You want to do this, while I take the shots? “We always need a scale in each photo.
    “Yep.”
    As I attached the flash to my 35mm SLR camera, Lamar knelt down about a yard from the body and extended the yellow steel tape from its chrome case.
    “That’s a new tape,” I said, checking my batteries. “Don’t let it snap back and cut you.”
    “You gonna use flash?” asked Lamar, ignoring my cautionary words about the tape. He never admitted to mistakes even after he made them, let alone beforehand.
    “Yeah, the sun’s going behind the hill here. Think I better.” I looked through the lens and focused on an establishing shot.
    “Don’t get me in the damn pictures,” said Lamar. He didn’t want to have to go to court and testify about the photographs.
    “Hell, Lamar, you know I won’t even get your shadow.”
    I took eleven overall photos of the scene from different angles, with each camera, and then got to the close-ups of the body. Lamar, who was anticipating every shot, sort of duck-walked around the scene, standing and taking a giant step when he got to the area where the shooter had probably stood. It’s hardly likely that you’re going to get a good footprint on a gravel road, but you never know.
    I used the digital camera in order to have photos on my computer as soon as I got back to the office. The 35mm was for the court, which didn’t want to allow the digital stuff into evidence because it could be enhanced or manipulated too easily.
    Finished with her notes from the Heinman boys, Hester came back over to the body. As we three got a closer look, we began to get an even better understanding of the extent of the damage. It was, as coroners say, massive.
    It certainly appeared to have been a contact shotgun wound to the back of the head, just as Jacob Heinman had said. There really wasn’t any entrance or exit wound. What there was was a U-shaped gap that had excised everything between the victim’s ears. The entire top of the head was gone, and