Known Dead by Donald Harstad

Author:Donald Harstad
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418173
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

LET ME TELL YOU . . . By Thursday, the 25th of July, it seemed like everybody wanted a piece of Herman. The DNE, as soon as they found out that he was involved somehow in the killing of their officer in the woods, wanted exclusive rights to interrogate him. They thought it was a narcotics-based conspiracy and just closed their minds to the possibility that it wasn’t. It didn’t help that they weren’t the state’s homicide investigators. The DCI did that, and they seemed to think that the DNE officer was more important than any Nation County deputy that had just happened to get in the way and get himself killed. Or any Nation County sheriff who happened to get himself shot, for that matter. Their reasoning was pretty good, though; the DNE officer was the central figure because he was first, and established the chain of events leading to subsequent shootings. It really wasn’t their logic, I guess. It was just the way they stated it.

The Attorney General’s office sent two of their best, along with two gofers, just to oversee the interrogations. Our county attorney was at his best, underpaid and overwhelmed. And, to top it all off, now that the hostage aspect of the business was over, the FBI was taking official notice of the whole situation. Melissa and her daughter, you see, were now being considered ‘‘hostages’’ and ‘‘possible kidnap victims.’’ The upshot was, if the individual officers hadn’t been used to cooperating and working together, the whole case would have fallen apart right there. As it was, we at least understood that we were all in this together.

The first thing we did was have an informal meeting, just the working officers, as we like to call ourselves. It happened in the kitchen of the jail, as usual, and involved Hester, George, Agent Bob Dahl, Hester’s boss Al Hummel, and our dispatcher Sally Wells, who was to coordinate communications for the investigative team. No attorneys. We didn’t need the complications. I’d invited Art, but he was ‘‘too busy.’’ Doing what, I didn’t know.

Since the crimes happened in our county, I chaired the meeting. I do that well. I stopped at the bakery, picked up a large box of pastries, made the coffee myself, and called the meeting to order.

‘‘Well?’’ I asked. ‘‘What do we want to do?’’ Like I said, I do that well.

As it turned out, what we wanted to do was this: Hester and I were to do the Rumsford murder, with our first priority being to discover just who in hell had shot him. Bob Dahl was to continue working the narcotics connections, but from a slightly different perspective, in light of what we now knew. He was to go back on the street and find out who had known about the dope patch and might have been connected to Herman et al. Al Hummel and the DCI would do the murder of Bud and the shooting of Lamar, which they would normally have done anyway.

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