TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 15:34

My name is Carl Houseman, and I’m a deputy sheriff in Nation County, Iowa. I’m also the department’s senior investigator, which is a title that probably has as much to do with my being fifty-five as it does with my investigative abilities. It’s also a title that can get me involved in some really neat stuff, even in a rural county with only twenty thousand residents. That’s why I like it.

On that pleasant, twenty-degree December day, we were just beginning one of the mildest winters on record, the one that we’d later call “the winter that wasn’t.” I had some of my Christmas shopping done, was nearly caught up on my case files, and intended to take a few days off over Christmas for the first time in twenty-some years. On the down side, it was beginning to look as if it wouldn’t be a White Christmas. Snow or not, I was already about halfway through my usual noon to eight shift, and it looked like I’d be able to coast through the rest of it. Hester Gorse, my favorite Iowa DCI agent, and I had just finished interviewing Clyde and Dirk Osterhaus-brothers, antiques burglars, and new jail inmates-regarding seventeen residential burglaries that had been committed in Nation County over the previous two months. The interviews had been conducted in the presence of their respective attorneys, who were both in their late twenties. The young brothers had thrown us a curve when they’d readily confessed to only fourteen of the break-ins. Why just those fourteen, when we all knew they’d done the whole seventeen? Some sort of strategy? A bargaining chip? It beat both Hester and me. Maybe it was just the principle of the thing.