Small Sacrifices (9 page)

how infinitesimal)--has not changed in seventy-five years; the

| tools of the criminalist have simply become more sophisticated. With a resume pages thick, Jim Pex posed only one problem asa ^"ess: his skills are so esoteric that jurors sometimes have uhculty understanding him. Few laymen can decipher his language

without a crash course in forensic science. One of Pex's Icicles appeared in the Journal of Forensic Science: "Phenotyping "osphoglucose Isomerase in West Coast Cervids for Species ^ntification and Individualization." Translated for the man on

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the street: "How to classify deer out west through factors in their blood."

Jim Pex can determine the time of death in certain animal species. From animals to humans is not that long a jump. Forensic science has become the backbone of a solid homicide case and Fred Hugi suspected Pex might come up with answers to questions just beginning to form.

A drop of blood may look like any other drop of blood, and one strand of hair may seem indistinguishable from another. A stain may be saliva or semen or egg white. Threads and tool marks and dried leaves and pebbles and broken buttons seem alike. But not to Jim Pex. He is particularly adept in analyzing firearms and tool marks, and in serology (the study of body fluids). He can discern many things from blood--both from its serological components and from the way it has been shed. Pooled blood is different from dripped blood. Victims who have been shot will lose blood in a "high velocity" manner. There is, indeed, a subscience of forensics that listens to the silent testimony of our life's fluid--bloodspatter pattern interpretation. Not only does Jim Pex understand blood spatter; he teaches the art to lawmen and other criminalists.

Pex reviewed what he had found during the past several hours with Fred Hugi. Pex and Jon Peckels had processed the Downs car at the Lane County shops, looking for tangible evidence that the killer had left.

The Arizona plates read BJY-787; the odometer had only

5,948 miles on it. First, they had observed the exterior. Peckels pointed out the casings he and Tracy had spotted earlier. They found no gunpowder particles visible on or around the doors or windows. There was no damage to the car.

The interior was upholstered in scarlet plush; it was hard to differentiate the blood from the rich shade of the fabric. The hollow in the console was filled with pennies and nickels; the top of the dash and the carpet was sprinkled with beach sand and seashells.

There was a large semiliquid pool of blood on the floor below the passenger seat. Cheryl had lain there, covered with the postal ^. | :, sweater. A tube of Avon cuticle conditioner and an empty paper

Pepsi cup were retained from the floor near the blood.

Pex had gently loosened the red carpet under the glove compartment. When he reached beneath it, he'd found a chunk of

metal--a .22 caliber lead bullet, which would prove to weigh .39

grains.

Blood smears and large drops were visible on the inside of the door next to the passenger, probably left--Pex speculated-when medical personnel lifted a child out of the car.

"How about the driver's side?" Hugi asked.

Pex shook his head. "No blood at all on the driver's side, no smears on the steering wheel."

When a gun is fired, some of the smokeless powder fails to ignite, but is blown out the end of the barrel. The criminalists found gunpowder particles on each quadrant of the car, save the driver's seat.

Photographs taken of the back seat showed a blue nylon

postal-issue jacket with a few bloodstains, a pair of rubber thongs beneath it, and a single .22 rimfire cartridge casing, headstamped U.

Each item had been bagged and initialed by Jon Peckels.

The chain of evidence from the car to some courtroom someday could not be broken. Peckels would have to swear he had the evidence in his possession--or knew exactly where it was--from the moment he took it out of the red Nissan.

One picture showed a pair of children's athletic shoes with polka-dotted pink laces and an oxygen mask left behind, incongruously juxtaposed on the floor of the back seat.

The rear bench seat where Christie and Danny had lain bore mute testimony. Pex had found pooled fresh blood and vomitus on the seat where Christie had been, and blood on the seat back too. Two .22 casings, headstamped U, lay in the blood.

Blood had also sprayed onto the headliner over the rear seat, the rear side windows, the side panel, the rear window. Early assessment of the blood patterns suggested that the shooter had leaned into the car at the driver's seat, just as Diane had described. Pex and Peckels had checked the trunk. No blood there at au-A U.S. postal cap, a Eugene-Springfield phone book, a tennis ^ket, a tape recorder, and a gaily wrapped box filled--oddly--^th dead flowers.

"We found a gun . . ."

Hugi looked up sharply. But Pex shook his head.

"It wasn't a .22. It was a Rohm model 63 revolver--a .38 ^ith and Wesson Special. Mass produced, in poor shape, and ^sted. We found a box of .38 Smith and Wesson Special ammo in

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the trunk too, but that gun hasn't been fired for a long, long time." Pex and Peckels had photographed everything inside the car as they worked through it. Then they shot pictures of its exterior. They'd vacuumed the car and retained all the debris in special bags. They had no way of knowing which--if any--of the evidence they'd gleaned might be important to the investigation. The rule of thumb was to take it all; better too much than too little. The scene of a crime can blow away in the wind.

There had been more prosaic items in the glove box. A

half-dollar, minted in 1949, a note on pink memo paper with directions for an engraving to be done on a brass unicorn. Another note reading: "Welcome Home Cheryl, Daniel, Christie . . . Aunt Kathy and Israel." A grocery list: "TV Guide, Nox [Noxema?], Fish Sticks, Tater Tots, Catsup." Manuals for the vehicle and its air-conditioner. They removed a Duran Duran cassette ("Rio") from the tape deck.

The Nissan had been secured in the county shops at 5:15 a.m. and Pex had headed out to Old Mohawk Road as daylight broke through.

Later, Jim Pex observed Dr. Ed Wilson's postmortem examination of Cheryl Lynn Downs. It was necessary to find answers to questions that might seem moot. How close had the gun been to Cheryl's flesh when it was fired? Had Cheryl lived at all after the first shot?

Clad in her little green shorts, Cheryl looked as if she had fallen asleep after a hard day of tumbling play. Except for the blood. She had been a pretty little girl.

Wilson found that Cheryl had been shot twice; both wounds were fatal. The first shot had been near-contact and had entered just below the left shoulder blade, damaging a rib, her left lung, her aorta, her trachea. The second entrance wound was also close

up, just over the right shoulder blade. The bullet had gone through a rib, her right lung, her aorta, her trachea and still rested just beneath the skin of her left shoulder.

After the first shot, Cheryl wouldn't have lived long enough to react in anything more than a reflexive manner. She might have had time to fling her arms out instinctively, perhaps even hit the door handle, in her futile flight from death--so close behind her that it could whisper in her ear.

Cheryl's body had been released to a local funeral home1

Maior-Frederickson's. Jim Pex and Detective Kurt Wuest retained the spent bullet (.22 caliber lead, weighing 38 grains); two , sealed paperfblds containing gunpowder debris; three paper packets

containing swabbings for the presence of semen from Cheryl's mouth, vagina, and rectum (all would prove negative); and a ,1

yellow envelope which held the gold chain with a solid heart ;is entwined in an open heart, the locket they had gentle untangled

from Cheryl's long thick hair.

At McKenzie-Willamette Hospital, Diane and her surviving children remained under tight guard. They had been shot for a reason-albeit a reason that no one had yet discerned--and there was a chance the shooter might return to try again.

While Fred Hugi had been with Christie and Danny much of the day, Doug Welch spent most of Friday outside Diane's hospital room. He had been up all night, and it would be another dozen hours before he could think about sleep. He propped his chair against the corridor wall and propped his eyes open by will power. No one would enter Diane's room without his scrutiny. Heather Plourd, who knew now why the detectives had come to her trailer, was one of Diane's first visitors. The pretty brunette's face was drained of color and she had obviously been

crying. Welch passed her into the room.

A few minutes later, Diane called to Welch to ask him a

question.

"We've been sitting here trying to figure out how on earth it happened," she said. "And where the gun could be."

"Put yourself in the suspect's place, Diane," Welch suggested.

"What would you have done with the gun?"

She was silent for a moment, concentrating.

"I would have taken it to the top of the hill and buried it. Or I would have thrown it in the river."

Her guess was as good as theirs. Divers were in the Little Mohawk already. Doug Welch met the children's father the afternoon after the shooting. Steve Downs was ashen faced, exhausted, thoroughly shaken. Doug Welch knew little about Steve Downs; he had heard

a great deal more about the guy named Lew, and Downs seemed to _be history.

B^ Steve Downs said he still lived in Chandler, and that he owned his own electrical contracting business--DOWCO--there.

"You talk to your ex-wife lately?"

K "Since Diane moved to Oregon--about two months ago--we probably talked to her on the phone seven or eight times.

he's called me at home a coupla times and I've called her at her folks' house five or six times."

"What did you talk about?"

Downs shrugged. "Nothing special. The kids. General con^versation."

^ Downs described his current relationship with Diane as

"stable--we're still friends." He knew all about Lew--"Lew" Lewiston. His ex-wife had fallen hard for Lew. Downs said that Lewiston was a married man and that, in his opinion. Lew had ^been leading Diane on.

"They had an on-again/off-again relationship for the past six months. She flew down to see him a while back, and she told me that they had all their problems worked out." B "You saw her then?" Welch asked, a little startled by the

Downses' civilized attitude in what might still be a classic triangle.

"Sure. She stayed at my place that night."

Downs discussed the men in his ex-wife's life with some'

degree of equanimity. "She's slept with six or seven different guys, but she's not loose or anything; she would never go to bed with a guy unless she really cared for him--or at least thought she

| did."

"Did you and Diane own any guns--or do you know if she presently owns any?"

"Diane's got three guns: a .22 rifle, a .38 revolver, and a .22

Ruger Mark IV nine-shot semi-automatic pistol."

Welch carefully kept his face bland, but he felt his muscles tense. Diane had listed the first two guns when she'd talked to ""him and Tracy the night before, but she had failed to mention

having owned a .22 pistol. Steve Downs had mentioned this .22 to Paul Alton too, and Alton had suggested that Welch try to find

°ut more about it.

Welch waited, afraid his fatigue might make him falter and ^y the wrong thing. A fly buzzed over a vase of flowers some-"ody had put in the ICU waiting room; footsteps padded down "ie hallway; the elevator bell dinged.

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"OK," Welch began. "If we could start from the top. Where did she obtain those guns?"

"Let's see ... Diane bought the rifle and the .38 for me for Christmas. I got the .22 Ruger about a year and a half ago in exchange for some work I did for a customer."

"When did you see the Ruger last?"

"Maybe six months ago, in my bedroom. See, Diane's borrowed it from me before, and I just figure she has it now, because it's gone. She doesn't know a lot about guns, but I showed her how to operate those three."

"She can shoot the .22 pistol?"

"Oh yeah. I showed her how to chamber a round by pulling the slide back, and I told her that she should be certain the clip is sticking halfway down to keep a round from being accidentally chambered."

Welch took a deep breath. The next question was one that had to be asked diplomatically. It was such a far-out supposition.

"Would your wife--ex-wife--Diane . . . would she . . . might she ever put Lew Lewiston before her children?"

Downs was dumbfounded at the suggestion. "No way. She loves those kids. She'd never put Lew before them!" |

Physically, Diane was doing well. Danny was critical but stable. He lay with drainage tubes in his chest, nasal prongs in place for oxygen, a Foley catheter in his penis. He would not--perhaps could not--talk to the nurses who attended him. His toes curled back when the nurses tickled the bottom of his feet. That was a hopeful sign. That might mean that he wouldn't be paralyzed. Christie had quite literally come back from the dead. But she was alive. Pediatrician David Miller had been gratified to see that when he hurried into the Intensive Care Unit on Friday. Christie still had the tube in her throat to help her breathe, but her eyes followed him alertly and he was sure she understood what he said.

After checking off a number of items on his "THINGS TO

DO" list, Fred Hugi hurried back to the ICU at McKenzieWillamette Friday afternoon. It was hard to believe that the case was less than twenty-four hours old. Hugi's tension eased when he saw both Christie and Danny in their beds, still surrounded by monitoring equipment. But a nurse motioned him aside. Christie had had a critical complication.

Dr. Bruce Becker was on duty. He'd kept a close watch over IT

Christie. Becker said he'd noted an alarming change in Christie's condition. She was having clonic movements on the right side of her body and face. It was some manner of seizure, small spasms and twitches that signaled trouble inside the brain itself. As far as they knew, Christie had suffered no head injuries. But she had