As soon as I got out the basement door, I pulled my walkie-talkie from my belt, and contacted the office.

"Comm, Three?"

"Three?"

"Could you get somebody else here? We'd like some ten-seventy-eight out here. We'll be ten-six for a while. Not ten-thirty-three, but send him." That meant that I was going to be busy, and it wasn't an emergency. I sure didn't want my favorite sheriff sliding into the ditch, running lights and siren, coming to help me look into a shed. Even though he was a good boss, that sort of thing could adversely affect my career.

"What you got, Three?" asked Mike, from his car in the yard.

"Maybe something on the order of a seventy-nine. Not sure. Wait a couple. I'm gonna be walkin' over to that big machine shed, from the basement back door." 10-79 was the code for coroner notification. A "79" told Mike I might have a body in here someplace.

"Ten-four," he said, crisply. Bodies, even if just suspected, tend to get your attention.

I put my walkie-talkie back on my belt, turned up the collar on my quilted down vest, pulled my stocking cap down over my ears, pulled on my gloves, and headed the fifty yards over to the steel machine shed. God, it was cold. I'd left my coat upstairs in the house. Of course. Well, I wasn't about to go back. I squeaked and crunched through the snow, being very careful to swing widely away from the drag marks. It was remarkable, but looking back toward the house, the different light angle prevented me from seeing the marks at all.

When I got to the machine shed, I found the "walk-in" door stuck with ice. Great. I stepped to the big sliding steel doors, kicked at them a couple of times to break the frost adhesion, and slid it open about five feet. "Never trap a burglar, unless you want a fight." Training turned to habit.