Flat Lake in Winter Read online

  It turns out Trooper Manning had met McClure, but only once; when the call came in, he couldn’t quite place the name. Nonetheless, there was something about McClure’s voice that prompted Manning to take the request seriously. It wasn’t a sense of urgency, so much, he’d explain later; it was more an air of authority.

  “Hold on,” Manning said. Then he went into the bunk room and roused the investigator, Deke Stanton.

  Deke Stanton’s real name was Dwight Kirkbride Stanton. The Dwight Kirkbride portion had given way in high school to D.K.; eventually that had yielded to Deke. At thirty-three, Stanton was a rising star in the state police ranks. In a system that prided itself on its paramilitary trappings, he carried himself with the bearing of the former marine he was, from his crew cut to his chiseled facial features, down his lean, athletic build and erect posture, all the way to his spit-shined shoes.

  Stanton came to attention as soon as Manning put a hand on his shoulder and spoke his name. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a fellow named McClure on the horn, sir. Says he needs to speak with the senior investigator. Sounds important.”

  “Bass McClure?” Stanton asked. He knew McClure, having worked a couple of small-time poaching cases with him. Deer out of season, counterfeit fishing licenses, stuff like that.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  The conversation between Bass McClure and Deke Stanton lasted less than two minutes, from 0620 to 0622. It was preserved in its entirety by the automatic recording device that had been installed on the barracks phone, and later became known as “The Call.”

  STANTON: Stanton here.

  MCCLURE: Mornin, Deke. This is Bass McClure. Sorry to bother you so early.

  STANTON: That’s okay. What do you have?

  MCCLURE: Two dead bodies and a mess of blood.

  McClure had never been one to waste words. But in this particular case, his brevity would throw Stanton off for a moment.

  STANTON: What kind of bodies? Deer?

  MCCLURE: Ah, no. Human kind.

  STANTON: Christ. What’s your Ten-twenty?

  MCCLURE: Say what?

  STANTON: Where are you?

  MCCLURE: Up at the old Hamilton estate, north end of Flat Lake.

  STANTON: Do you have an ID on the DOAs?

  MCCLURE: They’re the Hamiltons. Were.

  STANTON: Christ.

  There is a pause in the conversation at this point, as though Stanton is thinking something over. But the pause lasts only four seconds before Stanton continues. It would seem that, even from some fifty-five miles away, he needed no more time than that to decide who the likely killer was.

  STANTON: Who did them? The boy?

  There is no pause at all before McClure answers him. In spite of the fact that Jonathan Hamilton was twenty-eight years old at the time, there apparently was no doubt in McClure’s mind that he was the one to whom Stanton was referring when he used the term “the boy.” Nor did there appear to be any hesitancy in McClure’s own willingness to conclude that Jonathan had indeed been the one who “did them.”

  MCCLURE: Seems so.

  STANTON: Okay, okay. Don’t touch anything. I’m on my [inaudible] way.

  WHEN BASS MCCLURE said, “Show me,” to Jonathan Hamilton, Jonathan nodded once. Then he turned and walked up the steps leading into the greathouse, with McClure following him. As they entered the front hallway, McClure switched on the lights. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, he would explain later; he was only interested in illuminating the interior so as to avoid bumping into things and possibly disturbing or destroying evidence. But as soon as the lights were on, he saw what appeared to be bloodstains on the floor. And the stains told him a story that struck him as almost comical in its obviousness. The largest of them were in the shape of bare feet, large bare feet. From the direction of the footprints and the way in which they gradually faded, it was clear that the person who had left them had come down the stairs, walked to a small table containing a lamp and a telephone, before continuing to and out the same door through which Jonathan and McClure had just entered. In addition to the footprints, there were numerous drops. The pattern of the drops was different from that of the footprints: they came from the stairs, too, but then led directly to the door, without making a detour for the table.

  Upon noticing the stains, McClure grasped Jonathan by the elbow. He did this, he would explain later, not to restrain Jonathan in any way, but simply to steer him clear of the stains, so as to preserve them for future examination. At the same time, he looked down at Jonathan’s feet, making a mental note that they were both bare and large. Then, with McClure guiding Jonathan in front of him by applying gentle pressure to his elbow, they climbed the stairs, hugging the wall to avoid both the stains on the steps and the banister, the polished wood of which McClure instinctively knew would be an ideal surface to test for fingerprints.

  The top of the stairs held no mystery for McClure. The footprints, increasingly clearer, led to - or, more accurately, led from - the second of three doorways off to the left. As they neared the open doorway, McClure felt Jonathan’s body gradually stiffen and resist, and McClure complied with what he took to be Jonathan’s unstated but clear desire to go no farther by steering him past the doorway, where there were no visible stains, and motioning him to stay there. Then McClure stepped through the doorway and into the room, again flicking on the light switch.

  Bass McClure had always thought of himself as a pretty tough guy. In his day, he’d pulled bloated bodies out of lakes, and mangled ones out of car wrecks. He’d gutted deer so freshly killed that their entrails steamed when exposed to the cold air. Once he’d come upon the body of a fallen climber and mistook the man for being alive, until he realized that the twitching movements were actually being caused by the infestation of maggots beneath the skin. But nothing McClure had ever seen - nothing - prepared him for the sight that greeted him in the room he had just entered. He gagged audibly and, he would readily admit later, came dangerously close to vomiting.

  The two bodies lay on the huge bed at right angles to each other, forming a T. Although the enormous amount of blood obscured most of the individual puncture wounds, McClure could see enough to tell that both victims had had their heads nearly severed. The blood was still shiny and sticky-looking where it had pooled most thickly; elsewhere it appeared dried and almost black. Cluster flies had begun to congregate and were buzzing loudly as they competed for choice feasting sites.

  It was only because McClure already knew that the bodies had to be those of Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton, Jonathan’s grandparents, that he was able make a tentative identification and would be able to tell Deke Stanton who they were when he walked Jonathan back downstairs and used the phone on the table to call the state police barracks. By that time, McClure would recall, Jonathan was visibly trembling. McClure took the trembling for shivering and surmised that Jonathan was cold, either from fear or the early morning chill.

  “C’mon, Jonathan,” he said. “Let’s get some shoes on you, warm you up a bit.” And, putting an arm around the young man’s shoulders, he led him out of the house and down the path to the guest cottage, where (as McClure knew) Jonathan lived.

  McClure would eventually come in for a good bit of criticism for his handling of the situation. Yes, he would admit, he probably shouldn’t have used the same phone that Jonathan himself had apparently used earlier that morning. Yes, he shouldn’t have used the same pathway from the greathouse to the cottage, knowing that doing so would make it difficult - if not altogether impossible - to distinguish Jonathan’s second set of barefoot-prints from those he might have made earlier. And yes, he shouldn’t have let Jonathan put shoes and socks on, seeing as the investigators would no doubt be interested in examining the bottoms of Jonathan’s feet before they could be wiped clean.

  But McClure did all of these things. When asked why, he would later shrug and say, “I’m not a
police officer.” And when that explanation didn’t seem to satisfy anybody, he would open up a bit, something Bass McClure didn’t do very often. “As far as I could see, it was a no-brainer. Everything about the scene had the boy’s name written all over it. Way I saw it, in an hour’s time, they were going to come lock him up and take him away, put him in a cage for the rest of his life. Figured the least I could do was to make him warm for that hour.”

  BEFORE LEAVING THE BARRACKS, Deke Stanton roused Hank Carlson, the other trooper who’d been asleep when the call had come in. Leaving Trooper Manning to handle the radio and phones, Stanton and Carlson suited up, grabbed evidence kits, and jumped into their cruiser. They were on the road - according to their own log entry - by 0634, just twelve minutes after the completion of Stanton’s conversation with Bass McClure. As they headed north, with Stanton at the wheel, Carlson radioed back to Manning, instructing him to try to reach their commanding officer, Captain Roger Duquesne, at home, and apprise him of the situation, and to call Mercy Hospital and have them send a bus to the Hamilton place. A “bus” is universal police jargon for ambulance. Carlson - no doubt at Stanton’s direction - also told Manning to notify the Franklin County Medical Examiner’s Office to dispatch an investigator to the scene and expect two cases sometime around mid-afternoon. Ottawa County had no medical examiner of its own: There simply weren’t enough suspicious or unexplained deaths during the course of a year to warrant budgeting for one.

  With Route 30 all but deserted early that Sunday morning, Stanton drove with his headlights on and his roof lights flashing, but without his siren. He kept the speedometer at a pretty level eighty-five on the straightaways, slowing for turns. He would have gone even faster, he explained later, but was on the lookout for the most common, and most dangerous, road hazard likely to be encountered at that hour: the four-legged variety. Hit a deer while you were doing ninety, and your car was history, he knew; hit a moose and you were, too.

  Leaving Route 30 for county roads that became progressively less paved, Stanton had to slow down considerably. As he turned onto Flat Lake Road, the asphalt gave way to hard-packed dirt, and for the last few miles he rode his brake with his left foot while working the accelerator with his right. Even so, he wasn’t able to make as good time as Bass McClure had earlier that morning: Despite an overabundance of horsepower, the low clearance and automatic transmission of the cruiser made it no match for the Renegade.

  By the time Stanton and Carlson arrived, it was somewhere around seven-thirty. There would be some disagreement as to the exact time, with Stanton placing it at 0724, while McClure insisted that he’d looked at his watch at one point and noticed it was seven-forty, and the cruiser was still nowhere in sight. That wouldn’t be the only point of contention to arise between the two men, who had little in common and had always been a bit wary of each other. Stanton’s spit-and-polish military bearing struck McClure as a silly affectation; he saw no reason for a by-the-book approach to every little detail, when common sense and native intuition generally cut to the heart of things much more quickly. Stanton, for his part, regarded McClure as a seat-of-the-pants amateur, with little technical knowledge regarding the preservation of a crime scene. The truth is, that when it came to their criticisms of one another, they were both pretty much on target.

  McClure came out of the guest cottage with Jonathan Hamilton and met Stanton and Carlson on the pathway. As Stanton would learn, this marked at least the second trip Jonathan had been permitted to make on the path since McClure’s arrival: first in bare feet, and now in shoes.

  “Is he in your custody?” Stanton asked McClure, nodding at Jonathan and dispensing with so much as a greeting.

  “Custody?” McClure replied. “It’s not like I caught him takin’ niners.” “Niners,” were bass under ten inches, which had to be released.

  “Where are the DOAs?” Stanton asked.

  McClure pointed in the direction of the path that led to the greathouse. “Main house,” he said. “Second floor.”

  Stanton asked McClure to accompany him, motioning Carlson to stay with Jonathan. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” he instructed the trooper, “and don’t let him touch anything.” In his initial report, Stanton would write that the subject (meaning Jonathan) appeared agitated, nervous, and unwilling to make eye contact with any of the other men.

  Instead of walking on the flagstones of the pathway, Stanton insisted that he and McClure walk alongside them, in the ivy and pachysandra that bordered them. To McClure, this precaution seemed no better than a tradeoff, risking the contamination of one area for that of another. But he said nothing.

  At the greathouse, Stanton took pains to avoid disturbing anything, donning rubber gloves before entering, being careful to avoid stepping on visible bloodstains, and disturbing nothing that might prove to have evidentiary value. When McClure led him to the second-floor doorway, Stanton poked his head in and studied the sight that greeted him. He said nothing, nodding rather nonchalantly. But McClure was certain he saw the investigator swallow hard several times and turn nearly white.

  While McClure waited in the hallway, Stanton entered the room and looked about. It was the first of four visits he would make to the crime scene that morning, returning to take blood samples, photographs, and measurements; to dust for latent fingerprints; and to take an inventory of every item in the room. To McClure’s way of thinking, all of those things could have been accomplished on a single visit. He suspected that Stanton was having some difficulty remaining in the room, but again he said nothing.

  By the time Stanton was finished, an ambulance from Mercy Hospital had arrived. Stanton let the EMTs observe the bodies from the doorway, but wouldn’t let them into the room itself until the medical examiner’s investigator had arrived, which took another half hour. When she did arrive (“she” being a rather striking redhead who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five by McClure’s guess), she needed less than ten minutes to do whatever it was she needed to - or perhaps she, too, wanted to be out of the room as soon as possible. She moved the bodies gingerly, bagged the hands with plastic and tape, and took rectal temperatures with separate thermometers. She reported Carter Hamilton’s as 92.6°, and Mary Alice Hamilton’s as 92.2°. She told Stanton that, given the room temperature and the fact that the bodies were pretty much uncovered, the numbers suggested that the deaths had occurred some six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between one and three in the morning.

  “What was the weapon?” Stanton asked her.

  “The weapon - or weapons,” she said pointedly, “will probably turn out to be some kind of hunting knife or knives. You’ll have to wait for the post.”

  Finally, Stanton let the EMTs come into the room. Although by law they didn’t have the authority to pronounce the victims dead, no one raised an objection when they placed them in body bags. There may have been some disagreement about time of occurrence, contamination of evidence, and number of weapons, but nobody had any doubts about the fact that Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton were good and dead.

  ONLY AFTER THE bodies had been transported off in the ambulance, and the ME’s investigator had driven her own car back down the dirt road, did Deke Stanton turn his attention back to Jonathan Hamilton. Instructing Trooper Carlson to secure the crime scene - including the greathouse, the guest cottage, and the pathway that connected them - with yellow plastic tape, he addressed Jonathan for the very first time. By then it had been roughly an hour and a half since Stanton’s arrival.

  “Come on over here, son,” he said.

  Jonathan, who had been sitting on a tree stump under Trooper Carlson’s watchful gaze until that time, looked up uncertainly.

  “Yes, you,” Stanton said.

  As McClure watched from perhaps ten feet away, Jonathan rose slowly and walked toward Stanton. When he got within arm’s length, Stanton stopped him by holding up a hand. To McClure, it seemed as though Stanton, who was about five-ten, was a bit put off by Jonathan’s height.
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  “What happened here, son?” Stanton asked.

  Jonathan shrugged and said, “I d-don’t know.”

  The sun was up by this time, and Stanton was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, the kind with mirrored lenses. He kept them on as he spoke. “I think you do,” he said. “Your granddaddy and grandma are upstairs in the main house. They say you cut them. All I want to know is why you did it. I know there must have been a good reason.”

  McClure was surprised at the transparency of Stanton’s ploy. If Jonathan had indeed committed the crime - and McClure had little doubt that he had - surely he knew that the victims were in no condition to tell Stanton anything. But then again, maybe nothing was transparent to Jonathan.

  When Jonathan said nothing, Stanton repeated himself. “Tell me why you did it,” he said.

  Both McClure and Stanton would later agree that those were the investigator’s words: “Tell me why you did it.” It was their recollections of Jonathan’s response that would differ. McClure would recall that Jonathan replied, “I don’t know what happened.” Stanton would write in his report that all Jonathan said was, “I don’t know.”

  The two men would also disagree on precisely what happened next. According to Stanton’s report, the investigator asked Jonathan if he’d be willing to take a ride with him down to his office to answer a few questions, and Jonathan said he would. As McClure would remember it, Stanton simply took Jonathan by the upper arm, led him down the pathway to the cruiser, and placed him in the backseat. Both men would agree that Jonathan was not handcuffed at that point.

  It is unclear exactly what Stanton had in mind next. He’d closed the back door of the cruiser and walked around to the driver’s-side door. It appeared to McClure that the investigator was about to get behind the wheel and drive off with Jonathan, leaving Trooper Carlson behind to safeguard the crime scene. But doing so - driving off alone with an unhandcuffed suspect - would have been in direct violation of state police regulations, notwithstanding the fact that the cruiser was outfitted with a wire partition that divided the front seat from the back. And Stanton certainly considered Jonathan to be a suspect, or more precisely the suspect, particularly given his later version of Jonathan’s statement to the effect that he didn’t know why he’d killed his grandparents.