Small Sacrifices (7 page)

42 ANN RULE

Pond hesitated; the woman's story certainly sounded straight.

"It's a very serious matter," he answered cryptically. "You'll probably find out about it later on today. Do you own any

firearms?" a

"No." 1

The Plourds said they had two children, who were asleep. Pond asked to see them. Puzzled, Heather led the detectives through the trailer and showed them a little boy and girl. The investigators were relieved. It was apparent that nothing violent had happened here. Whoever the Downs family had encountered had come upon them after they left the Plourd's trailer. Pond headed to join Welch, Tracy, and several Springfield officers at the Downses' duplex on Q Street. Diane had given them the key to the unit. She'd carried no purse--just her house and car key on a ring she'd fished out of her jeans pocket.

The apartments were bland, two-storied boxes, built for economy. The double units bulked around a cul-de-sac, and faced the 1-105 freeway. In the dark, they were no-color; in the daylight they were all the same dull brown. There were a few desultory rhododendrons edging the communal lawn. Somewhere in the shadows beyond the porchlights, a dog barked frantically. But the investigators had found no one inside--nothing to indicate someone had been waiting there for Diane to come back, no ground-out cigarette butts or empty beer bottles. The television sets were cold.

Tracy and Welch had surveyed the downstairs first--a livingroom/dining-room and a kitchen. The place was almost empty; it

looked as if someone had moved in only a day or so before, leaving boxes to-be unpacked after a good night's sleep. Tracy shook his head, puzzled. "Didn't she say they moved up here at Eastertime?"

"Yeah," Welch nodded. "Pretty bare bones here, isn't it?" There was no furniture downstairs except for a chair and a console television set. They peered at the cluttered top of the TV. There were four framed photos. Two were of Diane herself, and they could see that she was a beautiful woman in happier circumstances. She smiled at them from both slots of a double eleven-byfourteen-inch frame. One picture was a head shot, and the other a

three-quarter body view of Diane in a blouse and tight jeans, leaning against a wall. There were two smaller pictures of a dark bearded man with a high forehead who grinned at the camera.

"Lew maybe?" Tracy asked, recalling the tattoo.

"Could be."

There were no pictures of the children on the TV. There was box of Kleenex and a cluster of crepe-paper flowers attached to nice cleaners--obviously a school art project--bearing a tag that read "Christie." There was the control panel for the cable television hook-up, and a small orange figure: Garfield the Cat grinning a plastic smile.

But the object that drew the eye was the gleaming brass

statuette, a unicorn pawing the air. The mythical creature was nine inches tall, its mane flaring, its single horn set at phallic angle. Welch and Tracy leaned closer and winced as they read the engraving on its base.

Christie, Cheryl, and Danny

: I love you!

it Mom "I May 13, 1983

"That's only six days ago," Tracy mused. "Rutherford said she kept saying she shouldn't have bought the unicorn. I wonder what she meant ..."

Welch shrugged. "They're some myths about unicorns, but I don't know what they are."

They were searching for tangible evidence, not myths, and they forgot the shiny statuette for the moment.

There was an air of impermanence, as if no one really lived here--no couch, no table or dinette set, no kitchen chairs. Most of the kitchen utensils and staples were still packed.

Welch opened the refrigerator and saw only a few open cans. He picked one up and grimaced; the contents were scummed over ^th mold. All the cans were that way.

"There's not enough here to cook even one meal."

"Maybe they eat out a lot."

"Yeah."

They moved up the beige-carpeted stairs. Here, too, there ^re unpacked cartons. The master bedroom--Diane's room--had a king-sized waterbed with a green-, pink-, and brown-flowered ^read. There were matching pillow shams, and the bed was made "P

neatly.

Tracy reached up to the closet shelf. His hand touched what e ^ught, and he gingerly lifted down a long, sheathed object. It

44 ANN RULE

was a .22 Glenfield rifle in its scabbard, stored just where Diane had said it would be. It was loaded, but it had not been fired recently; its barrel was full of dust and lint.

Tracy pulled back the action and a single live round popped out. He eased the action forward very slowly and took the cap off the tubular magazine. Seven rounds slipped out onto the bed. Carefully, so that his own prints wouldn't be on the bullets, he slipped the rounds into an evidence envelope. He pulled the gun's action back once more and a last round popped out. Nine .22

rounds--some of them silver, some bronzy-copper color. But Tracy's weary eyes had missed one round; a copper-washed cartridge had rolled onto the flowered spread and blended with the protective coloration of the pattern there. Of the eight rounds he'd picked up, six were copper-washed with a "C" stamped on the end (headstamped "C"). The other two were lead bullets and headstamped "U."

They searched the other two bedrooms silently, trying to ignore the empty beds where children should have been safe in dreams.

Diane had given carte blanche permission for the detectives to take away anything that might help them find the shooter. |

Springfield Sergeant Jerry Smith searched for a particular item at Diane Downs's request. She had asked him to bring her her diary, written in an ordinary spiral notebook. He found it, flipped through it, and saw that it was written as a series of letters, letters that had apparently never been mailed. The first entry was dated weeks before in April, and, with one exception, all the salutations were to someone named Lew.

The diary too became evidence. Smith duplicated it before he took it to Diane at the hospital.

At dawn, the search far from completed, the investigators left the Q Street residence cordoned off and under guard. They would be back.

The weary men who worked through that first long night

knew nothing about Diane Downs except her age, her marital status, the fact that she was a letter carrier, new to Oregon from Arizona. They had met her parents, seen her shattered children.

They did not know what it might take to make her break down ^ and cry, or what hopes and dreams might have mattered to her

13 when she woke up only a day earlier. If the shooting had not been a random thing, if Diane had been a preselected target, they

nndered what she could have done to make someone hate her ^ough to attempt to obliterate her and her children. e They planned to find out, and the sooner the better. Any detective knows a murder that doesn't result in arrest in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours often goes unsolved. Chances decrease with each passing day. Now, the detectives were still filled with the flush of the chase, not even twelve hours into the probe.

Diane had not slept at all that first long night; she'd waited wide-eyed in her hospital bed for the first glow of dawn. A deputy was posted outside her room to protect her--just as deputies guarded her two surviving children--in case the gunman should comeback.

At seven, Diane reached for the phone beside her hospital bed and dialed a number she knew by heart. It would be eight o'clock in Arizona. She waited, tense, as the rings br-r-red far away. She could picture the building where the phone was, could see everything in her mind, even feel the heat of the sun reflecting from its rock facade.

"Chandler Post Office, Karen speaking."

"Karen? It's Diane."

They were good friends, and Diane had called often from

Oregon. Karen Batten, who was twenty-five, had taken Diane in to live with her once when Diane's trailer had burned. Karen noted something different in Diane's voice. She didn't sound upset, and she wasn't crying, but she sounded . . . hollow. Their conversation was prosaic though, as always--until Diane suddenly blurted, "Somebody shot my kids! Cheryl's dead ... I'm shot too."

Karen gasped and began to cry. She turned with the phone in her hand and watched the tall, bearded man who stood nearby. rle could hear her conversation, but his face was averted and he ^ntinued to sort mail for his route. He knew she was talking to ^ane, and he had given everybody in the Chandler Post Office explicit orders that he would not talk to Diane. Diane had called w\ fegular as clockwork for weeks--every morning at 7:00 a.m. "t Lew had suddenly stopped accepting her calls. And he'd sniped "Return to sender" on all her letters and packages. rhis news was too shocking not to share. Karen covered the Pnone and whispered urgently.

46 ANN RULE

"Lew, I think this is a call you should take. Please talk to her."

Grimacing, he reached for the phone. He heard her voice

across the miles, the voice he'd heard a hundred times, a thousand times. She sounded just the same.

"Hello, Lew," she said softly. "How's it going? How's everything in Chandler? Are you doing all right? Are you happy babe?"

He mumbled replies, anxious to hang up. Her words had

mesmerized him before, tumbling him around until he no longer knew if his desires were his own or what she wanted. He hadn't heard from her in weeks, and he'd hoped maybe it was really over, that his life had finally settled back to normal. No more hassles. Only his wife and his job. What the hell did she want now?

"What's going on, Diane? What happened? Karen's crying." She hesitated. He could hear her draw in a shuddering breath at the other end of the long wire between Oregon and Arizona.

"What's going on Diane?" he pressed.

She told him.

"What happenedT'

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know? The kids are shot. You're shot. What happened? Who did it?"

"Lew, I don't know. We were on a dirt road about eleven last night . . . out in the country and we left my friend's house

. . . and there was this man standing in the middle of the road waving his arms ... he wanted my car and he just started shooting at the car . . ."

Lew sank back against the wall. What did she expect him to do? What could he do for her now? He began to shake. She wanted too much from him. If he gave her his blood, she'd want his breath. If he gave her the oxygen from his lungs, she'd ask for the marrow from his bones. Nothing was ever enough. She was reaching back for him, trying to draw him to her with her mad stories of murder.

"Give me your room number, and the hospital phone, Diane," he said. "I'm writing it down. I'm giving this to Karen. But Diane--if you're coming to Chandler, any time at all, don't con-ie and see me."

"I love you, Lew," she said softly.

"I have to get back to work, Diane." i

"Can I talk to Karen, then?"

"Karen's already left on the route."

He hung up the phone and turned into the bright sunlight. He spoke to no one in particular: "I don't know what to think. I just don't know what to think."

He shouldered his mailbag and walked slowly out into the heat of the morning.

She had expected that coldness from Lew. He was scared. She knew him as well as—no, better—than anyone. Lew hated kinks, hassles. Maybe that was why she loved him so; he just wanted to live and not have problems, just be happy. Naturally, he would back away from her now; it was too awful for anyone to deal with, at first. But he'd come back and help her get over it. She hoped the police wouldn't bother Lew. He'd consider that a definite kink,

CHAPTER 4 i

Even before Diane called Lew, Fred Hugi had already awakened on that Friday morning, May 20, 1983. He didn't turn on the radio as he dressed, gulped a cup of coffee, and headed down the long private lane from his house to the main road. He didn't turn on his car radio; the Belt Line freeway bypassing Springfield into Eugene was packed with commuters and demanded a driver's full attention.

Passing the Weyerhaeuser plant, its soaring chimneys belching acrid fumes, he held his breath unconsciously for thirty seconds or so. The sky grew blue again as he turned toward downtown Eugene and his office in the courthouse.

It was like a day like any other day--or so it seemed.

Well before eight, Fred Hugi reached his office, the very last cubicle along a corridor flanked by door after door. Like those of the other deputy prosecutors, Hugi's office was eight feet by eight feet. Behind his neat desk, there was a single window next to a translucent rectangle of solid glass blocks. The branches of a huge pine tree, four stories tall, tapped at the window.

Hugi's office was a mixture of whimsy, black humor, and

paperwork--all but the paperwork just there because stuff tended to pile up. A hangman's noose swung from a wooden sconce, but the macabre effect was mitigated by a silly hat with a stuffed white teddy bear sitting on the cap's bill. There was a handful of framed certificates: college degrees, a law degree, and documents certifying that Hugi was an Oregon Guide and Packer and a McKenzie River Guide. Photographs showed a relaxed Hugi. grubby in fishing clothes, holding a three-foot steelhead. There

was an antique photo--a pastoral scene along some now-unidentifiable stretch of the McKenzie River a hundred years ago, and a

hiiee map of Oregon. A lone Wandering Jew--virtually impossible lyll with neglect--hung yellow and limp from a planter.

Other offices were empty, but the corridor was alive with members of DA Pat Horton's staff. There had been a multiple shooting during the night. Hugi paused to listen at the edge of one eroup, catching scraps of detail. There wasn't much information

vet only a great deal of speculation. He heard one of the DA's investigators, Howard Williams, say, "And guess where Mama's bullet wound's going to be?"

Hugi was puzzled. "Where?"

Williams held up his arm and pointed at the lower part.

"Right there--where it won't kill you, and it won't even hurt much."