Small Sacrifices (5 page)

^|]|iii|||i| They walked past Diane's red Nissan, guarded by Rich Jljlll Charboneau. She looked it over. "I hope my car's OK. Does it have any bullet holes in it?"

"I don't know," Charboneau said. "Nobody's checked it over yet."

thj l!111!! Sergeant Rutherford headed away from Springfield, along nu [ I ||j Mohawk Boulevard, following Diane's directions. At the intersec-ie; |;| tion of Nineteenth and Marcola Road, he turned right. They^ le j || moved away from the sprinkling of city lights, past empty houses ^ Hill with lawns that had long since become do-it-yourself junkyards,

past the man-made mountain of sawdust that loomed through the night at the Kingsford Charcoal Briquet plant. Beyond the grubby

northeast outskirts of Springfield, the innate beauty of the land took over, although it was shrouded now in the black of night. The squad car rumbled across Hayden Bridge. Beneath them.

the McKenzie River narrowed itself into a chute of turbulent froth as it raced by the power plant.

"This is where Christie stopped choking," Diane remembered.

"Right here on the bridge ..."

Rutherford shivered involuntarily.

They came off the bridge to a crossroads of sorts. To the right, Camp Creek Road, barricaded for resurfacing, meandered off, forking again and again into a series of dead ends; to the left, two-laned Old Mohawk Road cut away from the main road to attach itself again to Marcola Road a few miles north. It was only a local access road, well off the regular route between Springfield and Marcola.

Rutherford looked questioningly at Diane and she nodded. Old Mohawk was the road where it had happened. She had driven across the railroad tracks and then over Hayden Bridge as she raced to the hospital with her children.

"I never should have bought the unicorn," she murmured softly, almost to herself.

"What did you say?" Rutherford asked.

"The unicorn," she answered. "I bought the kids a beautiful brass unicorn, and I had their names engraved on it--just a couple of days ago. It was . . . you know ... It meant we had a new life. I shouldn't have bought it."

They passed by the patrol units that were stopping all cars entering or leaving Old Mohawk--not a busy job, since the road was sparsely traveled late at night. Rutherford drove slowly past darkened homes. It was very quiet; the Little Mohawk flowed more gently than her big sisters. Occasionally there was the sound , of a dog barking, or the soft whinny of horses behind the barbed-I

^re fences along the road. The air smelled sweet--cottonwood ^ees just budding out. Old Mohawk seemed the most peaceful of

country roads. It was hard to believe that four people had been wot here less than two hours earlier.

As they approached the far end of Old Mohawk just before it reconnected with Marcola Road, the road narrowed, with no 'shoulders or turning-off places. Every so often, a thin white '""epost protruded through the black beside the road. ,,, "Here," Diane said. "We're getting close. It happened just

about here."

ba i111^ were hard ^ the river-The current had nibbled at the wk so hungrily that it fell away only a few feet beyond the

s-hne at the edge of the road. The underbrush was thick, clotted 30 ANN RULE

Iwith blackberry vines; firs and bulky dark maples loomed over the road.

What a lonely place it was, Rutherford thought, and how

frightening it must have been for a young woman and her three children to come upon a maniac with a gun out here. It was the most isolated spot along Old Mohawk. The river pushed by in the dark on one side; on the other, a field of wild phlox trembled in the wind as if the blossoms were woven into a solid sheet of white. |

Diane and Wes Frederickson stared out of the squad car's windows, and Rutherford followed their gaze. He saw nobody human out there in the darkness.

Of course there wouldn't be. The gunman had had ample

time to get away by now, and good reason to be long gone. Still, the trio peered into the night, searching for some quick movement in the fields, some separation of shadows within a clump of evergreens as a figure moved to break and run.

No one. The

river gurgled and tumbled, heedless of the watchers on

her banks. Rutherford felt a cop's familiar tightening of the muscles at the base of his neck. Was the gunman waiting somewhere out in the black? He cut the lights on his vehicle.

Officers from the Springfield Police Department were already working the road and the fields with a search dog. More men were on the way from Lane County, from Springfield, and from the Oregon State Police. |

Diane asked why there was only one tracking dog.

"That's the only dog available now," Rutherford explained.

"But these fields are full of horses. If there was a stranger out there in the dark, the horses would let us know." w-3 -"Oh," she said, "I didn't know that." ie I

"They're almost as good as dogs when something alien gets into their fields." - j

That sounded reasonable; Diane had always loved horses, j and she had great respect for their sensitivity. *

Suddenly, she remembered something she'd forgotten in all the panic at the hospital. The yellow car. She could see it in her mind, she told Rutherford. An "icky yellow car" parked somewhere along this road. It hadn't seemed important before. They looked

for it, but the yellow car was gone.

As the squad car cruised slowly back toward the south end of Old Mohawk Road, they passed a huge old farmhouse. Diane sa^

lieht on upstairs and nudged her father. They peered up at the doming structure. Wes saw the light; then it went out. Rutherford

too, saw the light but doubted that anyone waited high up in the dark window of a farmhouse, taking a careful bead on them. That made little sense; why would a gunman choose to draw further attention to himself when the area was alive with cops?

Diane's injured arm was beginning to throb, and she complained to Rutherford. She was frightened too, she said.

The sheriffs sergeant picked up his radio mike and asked for someone to meet them and transport Diane and Wes back to the hospital. He would remain at the scene to help man the roadblocks. One of the most massive criminal investigations in the state of Oregon had begun.

It was a quarter after eleven on that Thursday night when Lane County Detectives Dick Tracy, Doug Welch, and Roy Pond were called at home and told to report to the McKenzieWillamette Hospital. That was procedure: the cops were called first, then the DA's office if they needed a search warrant or other legal backup. Unaware, Fred Hugi slept the last good night's sleep he

would have for a long time. As the crow flies, the site of the shooting was no more than six miles away on the other side of the forest land behind his house, much too far for him to hear the shots.

From the brief information the sheriff s detectives got from It Louis Hince, they expected to find kids with minor injuries,

children caught in the cross fire of a family fight escalated out of control. Photographs would be required, close-ups of the kids' |

wounds, something to hand to the District Attorney's office. It ^as a chore Pond and Welch dreaded--directing hurt kids to sit

frozen under bright lights at midnight so that the lurid topography 01 the damage done to them could be preserved for legal posterity.

Welch checked on his own two sons before he left the house. He tried not to identify, but child abuse got to him. Some kids "rew the short straw in life, and it wasn't fair. Doug Welch, oldest son of a Detroit Tigers catcher-turned"^ntanaLevi-jeans salesman, sometimes wondered how he'd ended lie a cop' "^ never thought of being a cop. A ballplayer maybe,

ki^ ^ ^ac*' ^e P^y^ P1'0 ^au' anc^tnen semi-pro when I was a th reInember going to the games. I always fell asleep before fj^.^^nth inning; even so, ball players were my heroes. Or 16lller pilots. Not cops. No way."

32 ANN RULE

Welch had been about to graduate from the University of

Oregon, six months away from a second lieutenant's commission and pilots' training, when the government ordered a reduction in force. They had enough pilots. "I had a wife, and a baby on the way. I looked on law enforcement as an interim career at best. I'd always been a little intimidated by cops, and I sure couldn't imagine myself actually arresting anyone."

But Welch did make arrests and they soon became routine. The sandy-haired, freckled, would-be pilot turned out to be a sensitive, intuitive cop. After several years in patrol, Doug Welch had become a detective less than three months before Diane Downs and her children were shot.

Welch reached the ER parking area in five minutes. He

nodded to Rich Charboneau standing guard over a red Nissan Pulsar and walked to the trauma room. Three children lay on treatment tables, hardly what he'd expected. One child had been dead for at least an hour, her skin mottling with the purplish striations of lividity—blood reacting to gravity when the heart no longer pumps. Welch noted a gunshot wound in her left shoulder. Someone murmured that there was a similar wound in the other shoulder. He nodded; there was a roaring in his head.

Sergeant Jon Peckels photographed the body. Welch focused on the other side of the room. Doctors were working feverishly over a second little girl; he could barely see her beyond them. i Within a minute or two, she was rushed—table and all—out of the 1

room. He had no idea where they were taking her.

The little boy was crying. The three detectives watched as the doctors rolled the toddler over onto his side so they could treat his back. Welch recognized the single bullet hole, located almost dead center down his spine. He saw the black sprinklingpowder and debris from the gun barrel—stippling./ «

Contact wound. Or almost. I

The doctors closed in again around the little boy. The ER

crew had domain here.

Jon Peckels was in charge of physical evidence for the county. He moved around the gurney where the dead child lay, taking more photographs. She looked so exposed that Welch had the impulse to tug the blanket over her so she wouldn't get cold. He |

looked away. I

Roy Pond gathered the blood-stained clothing and the purplish'

orange towel from the baskets at the end of the gumeys and bagged them for evidence. Labels with names, dates, locations. A

->'» clue was still caught in one of the shirts. Pond slipped it into a

// siu&

dear envelope.

n'ck Tracy had almost two decades on the other detectives in

--County. "Silver Fox" attractive--white hair, ice-blue eyes-Tracv could be dapper and shrewd or play the country hick to perfection. A long time back, when he played football in Warwood,

West Virginia, Tracy was All-City, All-State, All-Ohio-Valley. He won a scholarship to the University of Iowa, but with the Korean War he joined the Marines. Like everyone else on this case he hadn't planned on being a policeman either. He hadn't even liked cops. But here he was, with a quarter century of law enforcement behind him.

Dick Tracy had cleared every homicide he'd ever worked;

Welch had never worked a homicide as a detective. Off-duty, Doug Welch researched the stock market; Tracy was an avid student of metaphysics. Fellow cops tormented Welch by telling him he looked like Howdy Doody. Tracy had his name to contend with. They would be only the first of a number of "odd couple" partners in a case just beginning to unfold. Dick Tracy turned into the emergency drive-through. Louis Hince waved him down, leaned into the car window. "The family's waiting for you to pick them up at the E-Z Mart. The mother's evidently been shot too and she needs treatment. Bring them back here."

"How about the children?" Tracy asked.

Hince shook his head. "One little girl is gone. The others are critical."

Tracy sighed and turned his car northeasterly. He expected ^to find an hysterical mother waiting for him in Rutherford's police cruiser. Instead, he encountered a woman still in control: "very

"atlonal, considering what she had undergone." Tracy had seen in "manner of emotional responses to disaster. He didn't know the ^oman or her father, who seemed as stoic as she was; he wouldn't resume to predict how they might react when the numbness

°re off. Anxious to get his passengers back to the hospital, he _ fessed down on the accelerator.

. Back at McKenzie-Willamette Hince motioned to Doug Welch. Ihi10 s ^"""g m with the mother now. I want you to work with "lm in questioning her." fath was tw0 mmutes to midnight when Diane Downs and her food^ ^nce again entered the McKenzie-Willamette emergency In-Dr. Mackey leaned protectively toward Diane, quietly tell

34 ANN RULE

ing her that Cheryl Lynn had died, that she had been dead on arrival. Welch watched Diane's face as she heard the news. Her expression was impossible to read, a faint flickering of emotion, and then a closing in. Stoic.

Diane followed Tracy into a small treatment room. Welch

joined them. The woman was young, slender and quite pretty. Her face was a papier-mache mask.

Welch found Diane's demeanor flat, almost brittle. She laughed inappropriately; her mind didn't appear to be tracking. It seemed to him that she simply would not accept that her little girl had died.

Tracy and Welch accompanied Diane into the X-ray room.

Dr. Mackey came to tell Diane that Christie was critical and in surgery. She thanked him for letting her know. I

Dr. Miller came to treatment room number eight and told her that they were cautiously optimistic about Danny. He described the bullet's pathway in Danny's body.

"You mean it missed his heart?" Diane asked.

"Yes."

There was too much for the family to absorb that night. Diane was confused over which of her daughters had died. Wes made the final identification. Shelby Day remembers him as he stood, impassive, in the center of the trauma room, gazing at the body of his younger granddaughter, nodding slightly as he said, Yes, that is Cheryl.

While the doctors worked over Christie and Danny, Diane