Small Sacrifices (29 page)

The search for the moldering porcupine took Paul Alton and Doug Welch farther into the desert than they had any desire to go—way out to the 96 Ranch near Florence, Arizona. With Chan-

dier officers they headed southeast in a four-wheel-drive rig. The roads grew narrower and more rutted, and, finally, there was no road. They drove on for miles over the desert itself. The heat was relentless. The Chandler detectives were well dressed for desert prowling in tough boots and snake leggings. Alton and Welch wore jeans and light running shoes. They had sunglasses, but no hats. When they could drive no further, they got out and walked. Mike Hickle walked in front of the pick-up as a scout. Suddenly, he shouted "Snake!"

It was a rattlesnake--close to six feet long. Welch, who is pathologically afraid of snakes, had just crawled down out of the rig. "I jumped straight up. They told me I didn't even bend my knees."

The Arizona cops guffawed. Stan Post pegged the rattler with the .45 he was carrying, and it flopped, decapitated, in the sand, its blood already turning dark in the heat.

They hiked past more snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas,

through stinging cactus under unforgiving skies until they could no longer see the truck. They found no porcupine.

On two trips to Arizona, Oregon detectives would scour the desert. They never found the bullet-riddled porcupine, not even from the bird's eye view of a helicopter. There was nothing but hard-scrabble sand, rock, vegetation apparently growing without moisture, and lean herds of range cattle.

Stan Post said he'd shot the .22 in other areas around Chandler, in a gravel pit, at other unofficial shooting ranges, "and there might be some empty shell casings in my old pick-up truck. I fired the Ruger a lot while I was standing alongside it with the door open. That gun ejected to the right, and I'm positive I saw a bunch of casings in the truck before I sold it."

"You sold it?" Welch's voice reflected his disappointment. A bunch of casings as precious as diamonds to the investigation

^ght still be nestling somewhere inside a truck that had been sold.

. "Yeah. I sold it in October, 1981. A black Ford Ranger Pick-up, three-quarter ton."

Computer checks showed that the vehicle had been purchased by a Mexican national who lived in Phoenix. He had sold * to a Jesse Pinon who resided on Phoenix's Gila Indian Reserva'°n.

Chandler detectives went up to Phoenix to see if they could ^ce the truck. But two years had passed. The truck had been

794 ANN RULE

sold, resold; the last owner of record had taken it with him to Mexico. Nobody knew for sure where he was.

That news wasn't nearly as disappointing to Fred Hugi as it might have been. Chuck Vaughn had just called him with astoundingly good news. Vaughn had discovered a most curious match during ballistics tests. Hugi excitedly marked his notes of the

conversation with seven red stars and heavy underlining, ending

"No doubt!"

Vaughn and Jim Pex had discovered that some of the cartridges Dick Tracy had removed from the .22 Glenfield rifle in

Diane's bedroom closet had, at one time, been worked through the action of the very gun that fired the bullets into Christie, Cheryl, and Danny!

^The tool marks left by the extractor were microscopically identical--the same marks on cartridges in Diane's possession as those on the casings found next to the river! The .22 rifle wasn't the death weapon, but the cartridges inside had once been in the clip of the missing Ruger! j

Hugi was elated. This ballistics finding ruled out the possibility of a random shooting; it would take great suspension of disbelief to think a stranger could have gained access to both Diane's rifle and the Ruger pistol. What was she going to say? That somebody had sneaked into her apartment and put those cartridges in her rifle--cartridges that had been worked through the action of the death gun?

The .22 rounds fit both weapons. The tool marks showed that the cartridges had been mechanically manipulated through the receiver of the same weapon. Not fired--only loaded, unloaded. Had someone changed his--or her--mind and returned the cartridges to the chamber where they'd been originally? Or had it

been an aimless thing? Someone sitting on a couch--indecisive maybe--or only bored--playing with a gun, unaware that minute tool marks were being stamped into the unfired cartridges?

Fred Hugi felt he had a breakthrough in physical evidence, enough to more than make up for the disappointing news from Arizona. But Vaughn cautioned the assistant DA that explaining the findings to a jury would be difficult because photographs wouldn't really show the three dimensional aspects of the marks left by the extractor and ejector of the Ruger. Pex and Vaughn and Hugi might see those marks as clear as neon, but would a lay jury? Even so Hugi was still up. The case had begun, finally, to unfold in an orderly way.

As for locating an actual slug fired from the Downs .22

Ruger, the calls coming up nightly from Chandler weren't optimistic. There was one other chance to find a slug or casing from the elusive gun: the bullet Diane had fired through the bathroom flpor of her trailer in her hysteria the previous September.

Alton called Hugi to report that all the trailer movers and crews had laid off for the long Memorial Day weekend. "The soonest they can move the trailer is Tuesday--and it's going to cost a thousand dollars ... or we can have the trailer jacked up three feet off the sand by another company for four or five hundred dollars, but they won't work until Tuesday either. Either way, somebody has to crawl under it to disconnect plumbing and other pipes in thirty or forty spots, and that would disturb what might be under there."

Hugi assured him that DA Horton had OK'd the funds to

move Diane's trailer. "He said, 'Go for it!' "

"We may just crawl under--if we can find somebody to spray bugkiller under there," Alton said. "The bugs down here can kill you."

As it turned out, they crawled under without benefit of an insect spraying. Waiting until it was safe would have delayed them into the next week too; freshly sprayed, the stuff was potent enough to kill them as well as the bugs.

On May 28, Welch and Alton, accompanied by Chandler

officers Bobby Harris, Ed Sweitzer, and Reed Honea, picked up Steve Downs and headed for Diane's deserted trailer. A few miles outside of town the grandly constructed gateway of the Sunshine Valley Mobile Home Park appeared. Beyond it, an oasis of fenced land with each space occupied.

18250 Arizona Avenue--Sunshine Valley--was meticulously

maintained. The detectives drove along the promenade of towering palm trees, past the club house and pool. Park residents gazed curiously at the two-car convoy of police units.

Each handkerchief-sized yard was a segment of a giant mo-^ic; the grassless lawns with their raked rock chips--rose, purPle,

gray, magenta. Every yard had its own orange tree; bougainvillea spilled crimson over the fences. Terra cotta planters shaped "he burros and wheelbarrows and Mexican sombreros abounded--^ough to stock a roadside stand. Diane's mobile home was in the very last row of the park: Pace 363. Here the tiny yards were more utilitarian; children's nkes snd wagons lay wherever they'd been dropped. The trailers

796 ANN RULE

were nice enough, but they hadn't been fancied up with awnings and patio furniture.

The mobile home no longer belonged to Diane; when she'd

defaulted on the payments, the manufacturers had repossessed the unit, much the worse for fire damage and neglect. They had yet to repair it.

There was an eerie quiet inside. Walls and floors bore scars left by firefighters' axes, shards of melted insulation hung down from the gutted ceiling, the Naugahyde arms of the living-room furniture oozed charred stuffing. A thick layer of desert dust and ash clung to everything. The gutted back wall was protected by heavy plastic which hung limply in the no-wind-at-all of a baking afternoon.

Doug Welch gazed along the blackened hallway, his imagination catching him unaware. Danny, who probably would never

run again, had raced through this hall and bounced off the waterbed. This was the trailer where Diane said the Four Musketeers had enjoyed a fun-filled summer only last year. There was no sense of fun here now, only bleakness.

The temperature was well over a hundred degrees.

Welch glanced down at a book that lay where someone had

dropped it, its pages sooty: Understanding Emotions.

Steve Downs led them to the bathroom and pointed out the single hole barely discernible in the patterned vinyl floor. Welch got down on his hands and knees to look for the slug's casing.

"Don't bother," Downs said. "That wall between the bathroom and master bedroom is new. The old one was torn out after the fire."

Welch felt his skin crawl. That meant they had to go for the bullet underneath the trailer, and it might not even be here at all. Being out in the desert in the sunshine had been bad enough, but at least he could see snakes and crawlie things out there. They pulled away the metal skirting beneath the mobile home, exposing the area beneath the flooring. Something alive scuttled away from the sudden blast of sunlight. Welch shrugged on coveralls before he crawled beneath the trailer, another layer to trap the heat--but hopefully block snakes. His face and hands were exposed as he slid, belly up, toward the spot beneath the bathroom floor.

Paul Alton poked a white wire coat hanger through the hole in the floor. Welch guided the metal probe through a layer of

insulation until it touched the ground. With any kind of luck, that slug would still be in the sand where the coat hanger pointed. Nothing.

There was a layer of debris under the trailer--nuts and bolts, nails, staples, charred wood, and insulation. The Chandler cops scraped it out tenderly; Welch sifted all of it through a screen on the chance a .22 slug might appear.

It did not. ';Just

before six, they gave up. Five hours of digging, sifting, probing, with no luck at all. Alton and Welch returned to the Holiday Inn. They ventured out to the pool to cool off and immediately felt curious stares. Their faces, necks and hands were sunburned--the rest of them was white as sowbelly. Welch's fair, freckled complexion had begun to blister. The next day was Memorial Day, but they had no plans for the holiday beyond digging in the dusky space beneath #363.

They began again at 7:00 a.m.

It was 115 degrees outside the trailer; beneath it, the heat telescoped in on itself and then expanded--five, ten, more degrees. Perspiration made mud of the dust on their faces, and each breath was agonizing. Cobwebs drifted down and covered their noses, eyes, mouths. Something skittered across Welch's face, something with many feet. He shuddered, but stayed put.

"Sifting through the sand in the dark down there, I remembered the rattler in the desert. I had goosebumps underneath my sunburn blisters." Welch grins. "For some damned reason, I think of being under that trailer whenever I watch Miami Vice. The trouble with real police work is there's no music.

"I figured we'd try one more angle. I twisted the white coat hanger until it formed a perfectly straight probe, and I let it find its own direction through the floor--like a Ouiji board--through lhat particle board until it touched the sand. It was only two

inches away from where we'd been the day before. Paul held it there.

"We'd been taking turns outside where we could stand up-"ght and pour water over our heads. The air tasted like hot

straw."

Alton eased one more chunk of clay from the shadowed ground. It felt too heavy to be pure clay. Hell, it was probably ^me old trailer part they'd missed when they'd scraped. Sliding ""t on his stomach, Alton cradled the heavy chunk of dirt carenilly against his chest.

198 ANN RULE

They poured water from a thermos over the lump of soil. A glint of metal appeared. They passed a metal detector over it; it was metal. l'ig Lead.

("The .22 slug Diane had fired in a fit of hysterical rage eight months before lay in the palm of Paul Alton's hand. They jumped up and down like crazy desert prospectors, hooting and hollering. It was a copper-jacketed slug like some of the bullets in Oregon. But this bullet had gone through the particle board trailer floor, impacting with the hard sand beneath. It was mashed and distorted. The pH factor of the desert--acid--had eroded the copper and eaten even into the signature lands and grooves, the striations that Jim Pex needed for a match.

Alton wrapped the .22 slug in blue tissue paper and carried it with him constantly. If enough markings remained on the bullet that had lain in the hot darkness under Diane's trailer, and if they should prove to be identical to those on the bullets removed from her children's bodies, it would be irrefutable proof that the same gun had fired all the slugs.

He called Hugi immediately. "We've got it! The slug under the trailer. I'm holding it in my hand right now!"

Alton explained it was still covered with about five layers of crystalline clay. He would leave it undisturbed, treat it like a precious gem until he could get it back to Oregon.

If it matched, Fred Hugi knew they would have their probable cause to arrest Diane. Alone, the extractor markings on the bullets from her closet might be iffy--too difficult to explain to a jury. But combine what they already knew with the right bullet from Chandler and they were home free!

Their mood was good, but to be safe, Welch and Alton kept searching for little .22 casings, and they found hundreds of various shooting ranges around Chandler. They bagged everything to carry back to the Oregon State Police Crime Lab. Literally clinking and clanking as they walked, they had to explain themselves to security guards at the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix. They showed all of the voluminous metal would-be evidence to the security chief at Sky Harbor and were passed through. Louis Hince met them at the Eugene Airport. The slugs and casings were driven immediately to the Oregon State Police Crime Lab. The "trailer slug" was very damaged. The other slugs and