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“No place else to go down there,” Orregon said. “That 190th is a dead end. Nothin’ but a couple of farm fields and the boat ramp. If he wasn’t pulling out, or puttin’ in, I don’t know what the hell he must’ve been doing.”
“All right, I’ll take a look,” Craft said.
The location was just north of the Treasure Island Resort and Casino, and Craft thought it was most likely that a drunken gambler had taken a wrong turn down the gravel road.
He called in, told his dispatcher where he was going. Driving through a swirling snow flurry, he headed south toward the Prairie Island Indian Reservation, took 200th Street, which turned into County Road 18 Boulevard, then off on 190th. He was kicking up a storm of gravel under his fenders: Craft was a fast driver and the car was owned by the state, so he didn’t care about gravel dings.
He parked at the boat launch, zipped up his coat, put on his gloves, and walked down to the water. Nothing. He shook his head, turned his face into a stinging north wind, and started back up the dirt ramp. Halfway up, he noticed what appeared to be freshly crushed weeds leading off toward some trees. He followed the trail, stepping carefully, because he halfway thought he knew what he’d find at the end of it: the spot where a fisherman had taken a dump.
That’s not what he found. What he found was a square of disturbed black earth, probably three by four feet, now speckled with snowflakes. He exhaled in exasperation, but at the same time, felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. He could deal with a bloody road accident, had seen way more than his share of dead people, but digging up the dead? Not in his psychological wheelhouse.
Besides, it might just be a bunch of deer guts or something.
Craft carried a short spade in the back of his patrol car. He went over to the car, popped the trunk, got the spade and started digging, but not for long.
About eighteen inches down, he struck a lump, soft, but resistant. The ground was wet and he didn’t want to use his hands, so he scraped away a layer of muck and found himself looking at the pocket of a pair of blue jeans, and after a minute of further exploration, determined that there was a buttock under the pocket.
—
By the timeLucas and Virgil got to the scene, there was a crowd, including Gary Durey from the BCA, three Goodhue County sheriff’s deputies, two highway patrolmen—Craft was one of them, telling people how he’d done it—a field investigator for the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner’s Office, a BCA crime scene crew, three officials from the Prairie Island Community, and a guy with a canoe who hadn’t been allowed to launch into the lake, but stayed around out of curiosity, and was expertly and surreptitiously making a video with his iPhone. The video would wind up, later, on theJonesing for Newsshow.
They’d learned the night before that Coffman had vacated the search warrant. In the morning, when Durey called about thediscovery of the body, he was told the U.S. Attorney might ask that the warrant be reinstated if the body was Hinton’s.
“Coffman said it was a close call, but... he was not amused by Russo pulling the wool over the FBI’s eyes,” Durey told Virgil. “This might change his mind.”
—
The crime sceneteam was busily excavating the body which was butt up, head down, folded like a greeting card. The second jean pocket they uncovered contained a wallet with a Bob Dahl driver’s license.
“I can never figure out whether you’re a genius or the luckiest guy in the world,” Durey said to Lucas, as they watched the diggers.
“With what happened last winter, it’s probably not luck,” Lucas said. “I’d go with ‘genius.’ ”
“If this hadn’t turned up, with thatJonesingstunt, we would have looked like a couple of dopes,” Virgil said.
“That’s never held you back,” Durey said. “Either one of you.”
—
The crime scenecrew took two full hours to get the body out of the ground. Hinton’s body was covered and penetrated with muck, but they could all see the plastic bag tied around his head. Virgil prodded the medical examiner’s investigator, who he knew because they covered the same southern Minnesota territory, to give them an opinion on the exact cause of death.
“The bag, right?”
“Can’t tell you,” the investigator said. “His hands aren’t tied, noligature marks, no tape, so they don’t look like they were tied or cuffed, but he didn’t try to get the bag off. He’s got a skull fracture, I think, there’s a pretty good groove across frontal bone. Might have been hit by something with an edge... then the bag was pulled on because he was still breathing.”
Lucas: “Wonder why there was a blood spot in the truck if he’s got a bag around his head?”
“Bag leaked,” the investigator said, pointing. “You can see where blood was running down his neck under the bag.”
“Need to know how he was killed, as fast as you can do it,” Durey said. “We’re going back to the federal magistrate for a search warrant, and he’s already pissed off at us.”
“I’ll call the doc on the way in,” the investigator said. “Tell him the problem.”
“We don’t need the chemistry right away, but we do need to know what kind of object he might have been hit with,” Virgil said. “What we can look for, if we get the warrant.”
“I will tell him.”
“And DNA,” Virgil said. “Anything that might have foreign DNA from the killer.”
