I suspect that even in departments where they have two or three hundred homicides a year, the adrenaline still flows with a call like that. In our case, with maybe one or two a year, the rush is remarkable. Hester and I headed out the door.

As we left, I said, “On the way. Backup, please.”

Sally waved absently. She knew her job, and would have everything she could drum up out to help as soon as possible. But you like to remind even the best dispatchers, just in case something slips their mind.

The Heinman brothers were known throughout the area as the “Heinman boys.” Confirmed bachelors, neither of the so-called “boys” were a day under eighty, and you couldn’t excite either of them if you set his foot on fire. Or, apparently, if you shot somebody right in front of them. As I got into my unmarked patrol car, started the engine, and strapped on the seatbelt, I could hear Sally over the radio, telling a state trooper that she was looking the directions up in her plat book. Frog Hollow was an old name for a very remote stretch of road, about two miles long, that wound down through a deep, milelong valley where there were just two farms. I don’t think anybody except the rural mail carrier and the milk truck went there in the daytime, and only kids parking and drinking beer ended up there at night. Sally probably had a general idea where it was, but considering there were more than two thousand farms in Nation County, this would be no time to guess and end up giving the trooper bad directions. Hester, behind me in her own unmarked car, couldn’t possibly know where we were going and was going to have to follow me to the scene. Her call sign was I 388, so I waited until the radio traffic between Sally and the trooper paused, and picked up my mike.

“Three and I 388 are ten-seventy-six,” I said. That meant we were heading to the scene, and was meant as much for the case record as anything else. You always need times. “Which trooper you sending?”