Small Sacrifices (2 page)

heavy, polished, wing-tipped shoes. He rarely smiled.

Hugi's strategy in this trial was to be a teacher. He was going to show the jury exactly what had happened, presenting some —

extremely technical evidence and testimony. Would the jurors •

understand it? Would they even try to understand it—or would it strike them as repetitive and boring? And one of his witnesses was very fragile, in danger of being broken beyond repair. The trial would be like walking on the cutting edge of a knife. •

With it all, he was as ready as he would ever be. He would i|

demonstrate what he believed devoutly to be the truth. That was •

what justice was about. The truth. No frills. No high jinks. No pratfalls. I

Hugi expected that he would have to play catch-up after voir dire. He assumed he wasn't likeable, so why should the jurors warm to him? He knew some people—particularly the cops—delighted in calling him an asshole. Hell, sometimes his own

jinvestigators called him worse. When he was working on a case, he could be a juggernaut—and Lord help anyone who got in the

way or failed to complete an assignment. But he never asked anyone to do more than he himself did.

TheJ&oil-dys^ hadn't been as bad as Hugi expected. He'd used all his challenges, and he still had some reservations about the final twelve, but basically it was a crapshoot. He would have been just as happy to pick the first twelve people who came out of the jury pool. Same difference.

All he asked were a dozen intelligent human beings with

common sense, salt-of-the-earth people who couldn't be flimflammed. He knew that most people are frightened of making a

decision. Americans have become so used to "seeing" the crime committed on television that anything else--including real life-becomes fraught with "reasonable doubt." He looked at his jury now, sitting up there, getting used to their new roles. How many of them had guts enough to look someone in the eye and say straight out, You're a-murderer! All he needed was one bozo who had already made up his mind and four to six weeks of trial would be down the tubes.

Fred Hugi was asking for a conviction on murder. He needed all twelve of those jurors. He couldn't afford to lose even one of them.

The defendant only needed one to beat the murder charge. Everybody on the West Coast had heard the story by now, and half seemed to suspect a "railroad." Hugi thought of the stacks of letters in his files, calling him and the cops everything from cruel fascists to crooked grandstanders. Was one of those fifty percent sitting up there at this very moment, smiling guilelessly down at him? If someone wanted on a jury bad enough, it wasn't that hard to come up with the right answers on voir dire.

Fred Hugi bit down hard, unconsciously grinding his teeth. The weeks ahead were so important to him. This was more than Just a trial. For him, it was as simple as good against evil; the ^rdict waiting down the road might help him allay his growing feeling that the system wasn't working. He rose to make his opening statement. The accused listened,

°ored at first, and then with an incredulous expression. For the wst time, Fred Hugi was a recognizable enemy. A dangerous enemy. The defendant bent over a yellow legal pad, furiously brawling huge letters, and then holding it up for Hugi to see. He ead it without missing a beat in his presentation to the jury.

10 ANN RULE

The tablet read, LIE!

Jim Jagger reached for the pad and shook his head slightly. The pad hit the oak table with a slap; the defendant was seething. Someone was lying. Maybe when they emerged from this

courtroom a month or two down the road, the question of who it was would be put to rest forever. . . .

a

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May 19, 1983.

It had been, if not a quiet night, at least a normal night for the Springfield Police Department. Cops know that hot weather encourages impromptu parties and triggers family beefs. The SPD

log for that twenty-four-hour period lists the expected ration of trouble between a quarter after ten and twenty minutes to eleven Thursday night.

An anonymous caller complained at 10:16 p.m. about a party on North First Street. "RP [reporting party] called to report a loud party in the above area. Unit dispatched. Responsibles contacted. Noise abated. Subjects to depart the area."

"Suspicious conditions" were reported--again anonymously

--at 10:22 p.m. "RP reported hearing a small child crying. Unit dispatched. Involved parties contacted, found to be a dispute between children. No crime involved."

At 10:32 the call was a bit more serious. "RP called to report a male/female verbal dispute in the apartment complex on North Seventeenth. Male half reported to be carrying rifle. Units dispatched. Charged with menacing. Lodged Lane County Jail."

At the headquarters of the Lane County Sheriffs Office in ^ugene. Sheriff Dave Burks's officers were also pulling a fairly Viet shift. Rob Rutherford was the graveyard shift sergeant;

^elective Lieutenant Louis Hince would be on call for anything ^at might require his detectives; thirty-one-year-old Doug Welch as at home in Springfield with his wife, Tamara, and two young ^s. Richard Blaine Tracy (of course, "Dick Tracy") was a year Way from retirement after twenty-six years as a cop, and he

°uld be just as happy if nothing heavy came down before he left. Forced, Tracy was getting ready for bed alone in his Eugene

12 ANN RULE

apartment. Kurt Wuest was away at a training seminar that Thursday night. Roy Pond was working days.

Assistant DA Fred Hugi, radio and television turned off, was reveling in the quiet of a perfect spring evening at his lodgelike home set far back in the forest along the McKenzie River. It was a different life out there in the woods, and he was a different man. He wore frayed jeans and battered logging boots as he planted seedlings to thicken even more the forest outside his windows. Joanne Hugi, co-director of the computer center at the University of Oregon, was lost in concentration in her computer

room. It made her husband smile; he, who had degrees in forestry, finance, and law, had been baffled by the single computer course he'd attempted, and he'd challenged Joanne to try it. She had proved to be a natural, understanding terms and concepts that eluded him. Hugi gave up on computers, but Joanne flew with them, higher and higher. He was extremely proud of her. She'd worked her way up at the university from an entrance level job to the top.

The sun set long before 10 p.m., and Hugi paused to look at the filigree of tree branches silhouetted against the last bit of sky before he took his dirt-caked boots off and went inside. The Hugis' two cats sat on the deck, alert, staring at the glowing eyes of something--probably a deer or raccoon--out there in the woods. The Hugis had come to this perfect spot along the McKenzie after years of living in the kind of apartments students could afford in the city. It was well worth the half-hour commute into Eugene. Sometimes, they could hear logging trucks zooming by far away on the road, but usually they heard only the wind in the trees, or rain, or the cry of a nighthawk. |

The bad call came into the Springfield Police Department at 10:40

p.m.: "Employee of McKenzie-Willamette Hospital advises of gunshot victims at that location. Officers dispatched. Arrived 10:48

P.M." w

Rosie Martin, RN; Shelby Day, LPN; Judy Patterson, the

night receptionist; and Dr. John Mackey, physician in charge, comprised the evening shift in the emergency room at the McKenzie-Willamette Hospital in Springfield.

The McKenzie-Willamette ER as it existed in the late spring of 1983 was a little cramped, a little out of date. Paint on walls and baseboards had been scrubbed dull and drab; the waiting room furniture was chrome and peeling vinyl.

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Facing the two sets of doors that led to the circular driveway ff Mohawk Boulevard, the three treatment rooms were to the

right: Day Surgery nearest the street, Minor Treatment in the middle, and the Trauma Room at the back. On the left, Judy patterson's desk was just behind a small waiting area near the street doors. Five feet or so behind her desk there was a small bathroom and beyond that a larger waiting room.

The floors were hospital-waxed shiny--the forest-green-andwhite-swirl asphalt tile popular in the 1950s, patched here and

there with odd squares. The rooms smelled old. Old wax, old dust, old disinfectant. Old sorrows, it would seem, with the sharpness of immediate grief dulled by time. The old ER had known

decades of pain.

That velvet black spring night Dr. Mackey and his staff, working in an almost obsolete ER, would be the first to encounter what was unthinkable for Springfield, what would be unthinkable for even a big city. None of them would have much time to think during the hours they fought to save the injured, their white shoes sliding on floors slick with fresh blood. Only later would terrible musings rush in to destroy all hope of sleep.

SBelby Day is a slender, soft-spoken woman near forty, with six years' experience in the McKenzie-Willamette ER. She wears white slacks and pastel, patterned smocks. When she remembers the night of May 19, 1983, tears well unbidden in her eyes.

"We were working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. We had the usual kind of 'nice day' injuries--lacerations, bumped heads, sprains, and broken bones. We were busy steadily, but there were no real emergencies. Dr. Mackey was finishing up with a patient ^ a quarter after ten, and Rosie and I were in that little back

room doing paperwork. There's always paperwork to catch up ^th. Judy was out at her desk in the corridor ..."

Judy Patterson, a smiling strawberry blonde, works two jobs 10 support her son Brandon, who was nine in 1983. She is the ^ceptionist in Pediatrics at Eugene's Sacred Heart Hospital on

ne day shift; after five, she puts in another five or six hours as he ER receptionist at McKenzieWillamette.

Rosie Martin was pregnant in the spring of 1983, into her econd trimester. Already her belly had begun to get in her way diri^ moved swiftly to care for patients. She was tired, but she un l ^mplain to her co-workers. She and Shelby worked to-oether quietly in the back room.

14 ANN RULE

When Dr. John Austin Mackey had a full beard, his nurses wondered if he ever smiled. When he shaved it off, they saw that he had been smiling all along behind his hirsute facade. Tall, balding, and broad-shouldered, a bear of a man, Mackey inspires confidence. The perfect emergency room doctor; his assessment of patients' needs is deft. In his late thirties, married, and the father of young children, he had worked full-time in the ER for eight years.

Because they were winding down, the others told Judy she could go home a few minutes early. She was scheduled to leave anyway at 10:30, but she grinned gratefully and grabbed her sweater and purse. As she walked toward the ambulance doors, a woman in the hall, a relative waiting for a patient, called to her.

"There's someone out there honking their horn and yelling for help. You'd better check."

Judy whirled and walked back to where Shelby Day and

Rosie Martin were shuffling paperwork.

"Someone needs help out there. They're laying on the horn." Judy ran back then to the ambulance entrance. Rapidly, she propped open both sets of doors to the drive-through.

Rosie Martin grabbed an air-way and an oxygen mask and

headed toward the drive-through. Their most common crisis was cardiac arrest; that's what she and Shelby Day expected to find. It was strange, though, that they had had no prior warning. Invariably, paramedics and police called to warn that they were coming in with a critical case so that the ER crew could gear up. The two nurses hurried through the double entry doors into the emergency drive-through. A shiny red foreign car was parked under the rain roof. The fluorescent lighting bounced off the car's glittering paint, casting eerie elongated shadows. It was almost impossible for them to see inside the car.

"What's going on here?" Rosie Martin asked.

"Somebody just shot my kids!"

A slender blonde woman in jeans and a plaid shirt stood next to the car. She was pale, but she was in control. She wasn't crying and she didn't appear to be hysterical. Desperately she implored them to do something. The two nurses and the young woman gazed at each other for a fraction of a second, and then llic emergency personnel went into action.

Kosie Martin had reached the car just ahead of Shelby DayShe ducked through the passenger door; she'd seen a child lying

across the right rear seat. Rosie emerged, carrying a girl with long _________________SMALL SACRIFICES 15

hrown hair. The child had to be heavy. Dead weight, Shelby Day thought, and then bit her lip. Rosie carried the little girl in maroon corduroy slacks and a bloody multicolored T-shirt as if she had no weight at all, draping the child carefully around her pregnant abdomen.

As Rosie rushed past Judy Patterson's desk, she turned her head slightly. "Judy! Call a code! It's bad!"

A "code" meant Code 4, a page to summon all available personnel to the ER. Judy Patterson called the hospital operator and told her to activate a code.

Back in the drive-through, Shelby Day saw there was another child on the back seat, behind the driver's seat—a yellow-haired little boy, hardly more than a toddler. She ran around the front of the car and leaned over to release the back of the driver's seat. Her fingers numb with shock, she couldn't find the right lever. She heard Dr. Mackey's voice behind her. %yS

"What's going on, Shelby?" he asked.

"These kids have been shot," she said softly.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," the doctor murmured.

It was not an oath; it was a prayer. Only two words had

registered in Mackey's mind: "kids" and "shot." He could see over Shelby's shoulder to the tiny child who was gasping for air and crying weakly.

The blonde woman murmured that the seat lever was on the side. Shelby's hand reached the right spot, clicked the catch free. Before she could straighten up, Dr. Mackey had reached past her, scooped the little boy up in powerful arms, and disappeared into the hospital. He had seen what the nurses hadn't noticed yet. When he leaned in to get the little boy, he'd glimpsed yet another figure crumpled on the floor in front, and thought, My God!