“Because of that incident last fall, we’ve
had an on-going conversation with Mr. Bennett,” says Burkholder. “And Mrs.
Bennett,” he adds. “Over the past several weeks. They’ve agreed to help.”
“Help?”
If I remember the events of last fall
correctly—“that incident,” in Burkholder’s words—Elizabeth ended up in custody
as a result of finding that body, her car was towed to the city lot and
probably dissected for whatever local police thought might be of value in an
investigation, and in the middle of a storm that shut down travel over half the
state for a full day, Joe ended up driving his tractor to town to rescue his
wife. The “rescue,” of course, didn’t happen until after some fairly extensive
interrogation and the attachment of an ankle monitor. I found out some time
later that Elizabeth also underwent counseling as a result of her experiences
that early morning and the events that followed discovery of Stitcher’s body on
the tracks.
Elizabeth Bennett is the last person on
Earth that I would have thought needed counseling for anything. After all, she
is a farm wife that’s helped rear two sons, now grown, and been a partner to
Joe, doing her share of both the physical and mental labor required to stay in
the production agriculture business. I will say, however, that if you own
enough land in Iowa, and manage it correctly, you’re going to do just fine.
It’s the “manage it correctly” part that’s the challenge. As you drive across
our state, every well-kept, painted, clean farmstead you see, those
quintessential pastoral scenes reminiscent of landscape paintings, are
screaming “managed correctly.” They might as well have billboards proclaiming
that fact.
“How are they able to help?” Now I’m
actually curious.
“In a number of ways,” replies Burkholder,
although I can tell he’s not all that eager to share the full list. “We told
them we might have to train some local people and needed some fairly secluded
location to do it. They volunteered their property.”
If Broderick Burkholder honestly believes
that you can conduct any kind of criminal investigation training on a piece of
Iowa farm land, and do it in any kind of seclusion, that means he’s pretty
clueless about social interactions in our part of the Great Plains. Make that
former Great Plains. It’s still plains, but it’s mostly all corn nowadays.
“So, officer Burkholder,” asks my wife;
“when do we get to go out there to Joe’s farm and learn how to kill someone?”
Burkholder is either patient by nature, or
he’s heard so much of this smart-ass tone of voice that it no longer affects
him. Or, maybe, he doesn’t listen to tones of voices—“paralanguage,” they call
it, in the anthropological literature, the meaning of some utterance that has
nothing to do with the words involved. If you’re curious about the
communication power of paralanguage, consider how many different ways an actor
could say “I love you,” or “go to Hell;” or, if you’re sitting in the Marshall
living room: “when do we get to go out there to Joe’s farm and learn how to
kill someone?”
“I’m ready whenever you are. Mr. Bennett
knows we’re coming.”
Mr. Bennett knows we’re coming?
“Like now?” I ask.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he repeats. “You
may want to put on some appropriate clothes.”
Broderick Burkholder does not look like he
has on appropriate clothes. My mind imagines him in all kinds of situations
where he may not have on appropriate clothes, or, alternatively, he dresses
like this all the time and just deals with the diversity of tasks typical of a
detective in the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
“We’ll be out in the field?”
“I can drive up pretty close to the
ravine, but ideally, you might want to put on some jeans. It’s probably still a
little wet out there.”
“You have this all worked out? You’ve
actually been to this so-called ravine?”
“Yes,” he answers, his patience showing;
“and I talked to Mr. Bennett earlier this morning.”
“Detective Burkholder,” I ask, simply out
of the blue; “are any of those samples from the Bennett farm?”
“I can’t say where they are from,” he
answers, verbally, but his eyes tell me “yes.”
“Are we taking two cars?” Ah, the old
married couple whose kids have left home question.
“I’m driving,” say Burkholder; “we can
drive right up to the site.”
He looks at his watch; he’s ready to go
shooting with a couple of folks who have never handled a pistol, and he’s
probably going to “expedite the permit process” afterwards. As I walk back to
the bedroom closet, looking for some “appropriate clothes,” I’m wondering what
detective Burkholder knows that Mykala and I don’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment