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radio.
    Back in the Borglan household, I found a phone in the kitchen, and called the office. I explained that we would need her to contact a medical examiner, the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation for an assisting agent and the mobil crime lab, and that she would have to call our boss, Nation County Sheriff Lamar Ridgeway, and tell him what was happening.
    “Uh, Carl, could I call in another dispatcher to help?”
    “Sure. Good idea. Just remember to tell me, ‘Ten-sixty-nine’ as you get the items done.” 10-69 stood for “message received,” and would mean that she had completed a call. “Message one will be for the medical examiner, message two will be for DCI, and message three will be Lamar. Got it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Now, I want you to try to get a DL on two subjects… a Dirk and a Royce Colson. Should be about twenty or so. Maybe twenty-five. Not from Nation County, but I think maybe from around Oelwein.”
    “Okay…”
    “Eventually, I’m going to need height and weight, eye color, and that sort of thing. The physical descriptors.”
    “Got it.”
    “Cool. Okay, now I’m gonna be a long way from a phone for a time, taking some photos. Just give me the ten-sixty-nines over the radio. I’ll be on portable. If I don’t acknowledge, Mike will. He’s in his car.”
    “Okay…” She didn’t sound quite sure, but I knew she’d do fine. Especially when the other dispatcher arrived.
    “And don’t give anything, and I mean anything, regarding the Colsons over the radio unless I specifically ask you to do so.”
    I let myself back out, grabbing my coat this time, and went to Mike’s car and told him what had been said. I got my camera out of my car, and crunched my way back down to the shed. I figured I’d better take the photos there first, since the subzero temperature might deplete my camera battery and leave me with no way to take photos.
    As I stood in the doorway of the big steel shed, fumbling with the flash attachment in the cold, the feeling of being watched came rushing back with a vengeance.
    At the Academy, years ago, one of our instructors told us that, if you ever got a spooky feeling, pay close attention to it. You might be reacting to something you’ve picked up subconsciously, that just hasn’t made it all the way up to awareness. I’d always considered it good advice, although it had only worked for me one out of about ten times, when there was a man hiding in the rafters of an implement store we were searching. I thought that once was pretty good, though. He’d had a gun, and we later found he was just waiting for me to pass before he shot me in the back. I’d stopped, and backed up a step, which had put me out of his line of fire. We all figured I’d glimpsed him in my peripheral vision, but that it hadn’t registered. Anyway, it was a distinctive feeling, and that time before it had been very strong. It was back, and this time it was even stronger.
    I stopped after I attached the flash, and paused for a moment. Then I looked around, very slowly. Nothing unusual. But I had the solid feeling that I was being watched. I switched the flash off, and did a slow pirouette, snapping a shot about every ten degrees or so. It was just possible that I might catch something with the camera I was overlooking.
    The feeling persisted.
    I tried to shake it off. “Probably Mike,” I said to myself. Could have been. Could have been the residual effect of that frozen eye. Most likely, I thought, it was the result of being alone with the two bodies. Most people seem to get really self-conscious when they’re alone with the dead. I was no different.
    “Three,” crackled my walkie-talkie, “Ten-sixty-nine on message one!”
    That startled me out of my thoughts about being watched. Just as well.
    “Ten-four” was all I said. All that was necessary. The medical examiner had been notified.
    I went back to the residence and took a few shots of the marks on the sliding door. I tried for a